Outside of a few FBI agents and federal prosecutors, few people know more about Chicago organized crime and its cast of characters than River Forest’s John Binder.
Binder’s latest book, “The Chicago Outfit During the 1960s,” offers a photographic and narrative look at the Chicago mob during its most powerful period.
What captured the public’s fascination was the dark allure of people who did whatever they pleased, whenever they pleased, to whomever they decided deserved it.
Binder shows how the glory is inseparable from the gory, with graphic photos and long narrative captions that capture the ugliness of the Chicago outfit beneath the public fascination.
The book offers both an array of photos from Binder’s personal collection, many never seen before by the general public. And an organization chart from a 1962 FBI internal memo which shows clearly the outfit’s organizational hierarchy.
“It makes for a nice mix of images,” said Binder, who said the book includes arrest photos, surveillance photos and candid shots from personal collections. But if photos were all Binder brought to his latest project, it would be just another picture book.
It’s Binder’s deep and extensive knowledge of mob history that make the book a must read. “I wanted to get into the facts of what organized crime is,” he said. “So much is lost by glamorizing it. Reality is much more interesting than glamorizing.”
The book’s time frame starts just over two years after the infamous mob confab in Apalachin, New York in November 1957, when an alert local cop noticed the parade of gangsters headed toward Joseph “Joe the Barber” Barbara’s house.
It ultimately proved to be a disaster for the Mafia. The news coverage shook J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI chief, out of his stubborn denial of the existence of organized crime, and led to a series of Congressional hearings, many televised to a rapt national audience.
The klieg light of publicity proved to be the beginning of the long, slow decline of organized crime’s chokehold on the American economy.
Still, the 1960s were the zenith of organized crime’s operations in Chicago. “This organization was at its absolute height at the start of the sixties,” Binder said.
“The federal government hadn’t quite gotten going yet,” Binder said. “It took (them) a while to figure out who they were fighting.”
Binder said most people will not have seen most of the book’s photos before, saying, “a lot of them are ones I hadn’t seen before.”
Binder said he wanted the book to be both entertaining and informative, without glamorizing the criminals while providing answers to the questions of “Who were they? Who were their leadership?”
Readers meet both the important players who directed the Chicago Outfit and the run of the mill mobsters who did their bidding. For all the public fascination and cinematic glamorization, members of Chicago organized crime were just that, criminals, motivated by greed and kept in line through violence.
Many average citizens happily partook in what the mob offered. If there was an appetite for something not allowed under the law, the mob fed it. If there was a weakness, the mob exploited it. And if any of their interests were threatened, the mob defended them with violence.
As with liquor in the 1920s, the outfit provided access to gambling, prostitution, pornography and narcotics, considered by many to be victimless crimes.
“A lot of it has been consensual over the years,” Binder said. But, he added, the mob also corrupted labor unions, extorted legitimate businesses, hijacked trucks, committed burglaries and ran usurious loan sharking rackets.
“For years, society accepted the trade off,” said Binder. “Society looked the other way, including the authorities.”
For some 60 years, the Chicago mob was impressively stable under Paul “The Waiter” Ricca and Anthony “Big Tuna” Accardo, who operated “sub rosa,” out of the spotlight, exercising the final say on policy and strategy, while letting others be the public face of the mob.
Two high profile mobsters who refused to conduct their affairs more discretely and made frequent headlines, Sam “Momo” Giancana and Anthony “The Ant” Spilotro, both suffered violent deaths.
Binder noted that Hoover wasn’t the only person who wasn’t interested in organized crime back in the 60s. Mario Puzo’s epic book, “The Godfather” was met with utter indifference by publishers before finally getting into print in 1969.
“That book was rejected 58 times by publishers,” said Binder, who characterized the prevailing attitude as, “Who wants to read a book about f’ed up mobsters and their f’ed up families?”
The answer, it turned out, was “Lots and lots of people.” An unfortunate byproduct of the subsequent massive success of The Godfather and other movies, however good they were, was the glamorization of organized crime in some people’s minds.
Binder said his ultimate goal with his book was to show “…exactly who these guys were.” And no photo conveys the sense of wanton brutality rampant in organized crime more than a photo on page 91.
The photo shows two small time hoods, Ronnie and Phillip Scavo laying shot to death in a car crashed against an Elmwood Park bungalow.
But what immediately captures the viewer’s eye is 30-year-old Lydia Abshire, her face covered in her own blood, her open eyes staring lifelessly.
Peter Rice, Elmwood Park’s police chief at that time, said Abshire, who was Ronnie Scavo’s girlfriend, “was shot from no more than six inches away.” She had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It was Omerta, the Mafia’s code of silence, practiced by ordinary people that torpedoed the police investigation. “We’ve had virtually no cooperation from relatives and friends of the victims,” Rice testified at a May 1962 coroner’s inquest.
But mob leaders knew who did it and were incensed at such unsanctioned violence committed in their own backyard. They sent two of their most vicious enforcers — sociopathic killer Sam “Mad Sam” DeStefano and his protege, street thug and up and coming mob enforcer Tony Spilotro — to hunt down the killers.
What ensued became known as the M&M murders of burglars Billy McCarthy and James “Rocco” Miraglia. McCarthy’s medieval interrogation is memorialized in the 1995 Martin Scorcese movie “Casino,” starring Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci and Sharon Stone.
The ugly and decidedly unglamorous reality is captured in the pages of The Chicago Outfit During the 1960s for all who care to see it for what it was.
From the Roaring 20s into the 90’s, numerous Chicago Outfit leaders and their top lieutenants lived in Oak Park and River Forest and in adjacent towns like Elmwood Park.
John Binder’s tour of the former homes of some dozen Chicago gangsters, “There Goes the Neighbor Hood,” has five 2026 tour dates: June 21, July 26, Sept. 20, Sept. 27, and October 11, at 11 am and 2 pm. Tickets are $40 per person, $36 for seniors and active military.