Any critique of the two-part NBC 5 expose, “Who Killed Momo?” must come with a caveat.
The criminal case into the murder of deposed Chicago mob leader Sam “Momo” Giancana is technically an open case. So both Oak Park and federal law enforcement will not officially release any documentation related to it.
But for years there has been a slowly growing body of public facing documentation released through official and unofficial channels. Veteran investigative reporter Chuck Goudie took all that and added a small cache of documentation he gleaned from outside sources and interviews with mob insiders, to reach a strong, if not legally definitive conclusion on the murder.
The two-part special was a mixed bag, with Wednesday’s offering largely re-plated leftovers. Thursday night, however, Goudie served up a genuine market special for the entree.
Like any good reporter — or criminal investigator — Goudie went where the facts led, and when he had pieced all the documentation and interviews together, he concluded those facts led not to decades long prime suspect Dominic “Butch” Blasi, Giancana’s chauffeur and gopher, but to none other than the Boss of Bosses, Anthony “Big Tuna” Accardo.
Accardo, a River Forest resident who routinely had people killed with a nod or wave of his hand, apparently had decided he wanted to handle the recalcitrant and unstable Giancana himself. Though 69 years old then, Accardo was just two years older than Giancana, who was recovering from a blood clot after gall bladder removal surgery. He was also one of the few people Giancana would allow inside his home.
Giancana was brutally murdered in the basement of his southwest Oak Park home. He was shot seven times in the head.
Goudie’s presentation wasn’t proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but it was proof by a preponderance of the evidence. On Bob Sirott’s WGN Radio show Wednesday, Goudie acknowledged as much, saying the planned segment was originally intended to be a “review” of the Giancana case on the 50th anniversary of his murder.
But he quickly realized that the feds had “buried the lead,” as the journalistic term goes — or more likely, intentionally hid it — when they announced 20 years ago during the watershed Family Secrets trials that they’d solved 18 mob murders.
“What they didn’t say is that they’d actually solved many more murders … and one of them was the Giancana murder,” Goudie told Sirott.
Goudie’s reporting is an important reminder of what organized crime is really about. The history of organized crime, which benefitted a tiny minority of people of whatever race and ethnicity, was and still is, underneath all the glitz (“bling” in modern terminology) a dreary tale of greed and cruelty. It is the story of people willing to kill and corrupt to maintain the power to generate massive profits.
“There’s nobody to prosecute,” Goudie said of Giancana’s killer. But the criminal behavior shown and often glorified in film and song lyrics persists to this day.
From the roaring twenties that saw Italian, Irish and Jewish thugs battle viciously for control of bootleg booze, gambling and labor unions, through the rise of African American street gangs in the 1960s that controlled the urban retail distribution of deadly drugs, to the equally violent and greedy Hispanic gangs that continue to make urban streets their battle ground for control of lucrative robbery, theft, burglary, extortion and drug trafficking, the core reality has always been that money is all that matters, and might makes right.
Goudie’s reporting makes it reasonably clear, if not beyond a reasonable doubt, that 50 years after he started making his street reputation as a violent and merciless teenage killer, Tony Accardo, wealthy, well dressed and polished, was still, under it all, like every other gangster, a thug willing to kill anyone who displeased him or threatened his interests.