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5. The Accardo Case: Taking on the Big Tuna
- Southern Illinois University Press
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FIVE The Accardo Case: Taking on the Big Tuna T hroughout his eighty-six years of life, Tony (Big Tuna) Accardo boasted that he never spent a night in prison. The blame for this could not be placed on Richard Ogilvie. On November II, 1960, Accardo, a onetime associate of Al Capone, was convicted of income tax fraud in United States District Courtin Chicago. One week he was sentenced to serve six years for the crime in a federal penitentiary. However, onJanuary 5, I962, the conviction was reversed by the United States Court of Appeals on a ground that the notorious Accardo was the victim of "prejudicial error" during his nine-week trial before Judge Julius J. Hoffman. A new trial for the wealthy gangster was ordered by the appellate tribunal, provoking sharp criticism from others in the federal judiciary, from the operating director of the Chicago Crime Commission, and from Ogilvie, the special federal attorney who successfully prosecuted the mob leader. Ogilvie voiced deep disappointment at the reversal, which was understandable . Ogilvie was the leader of a special team of federal lawyers and agents that labored for a nearly two-year period that seemed like an eternity to put together the case against Accardo. Once in court, Ogilvie could not have been a more unflappable prosecutor in convincing a jury of six men and six women that Accardo was guilty of making phony deductions on his income tax forms from 1956 through I958. Ogilvie was propelled into public view by the prosecution of Accardo. More than that, though, he came to the attention of people in the best possible as a person taking on the nefarious underworld of Chicago. Ogilvie certainly had lived up to that tough-guy picture of him in Life in I959. The pursuit of Accardo by Ogilvie captured national interest for clear reasons . Accardo was the undisputed boss of the old Capone crime syndicate for twelve or thirteen years, starting in the middle 1940s. In 1956 or 1957, according to Chicagoans who chronicle such occurrences, Accardo voluntarily surrendered his role to Sam Giancana but stayed around as the consiglieri to organized crime in the city, meaning a highly respected counselor or adviser. It was diffi59 60 . THE ACCARDO CASE cult, though, to convince gangland buffs around the country that Accardo was not still the czar or mastermind of crime in the Midwest. He well may have been. Without question, in tackling BigTuna, Ogilvie was going after a big fish. The targeting of Accardo by the Ogilvie squad coincided, and not by accident, with one of those times in Chicago when "the outfit," as the crime syndicate in Chicago was known, was riding high, an era in which gangsterism's influence was detectable in countless aspects of the city's life. The rampage of terror in Chicago three decades earlier, when the murderous Capone was at his peak as the nation's biggest bootleggel; was no more insidious, many persons were convinced. The end of the 1950swas a heyday for racketeering across the land, from the Florida gambling controlled by Meyer Lansky to the vice empire in the Northeast of the enduring Genovese family. But the pervasiveness of the mob in Chicago was uppermost on the mind of United States Attorney General William Rogers when he and his Justice Department set up a special nationwide group of mostly young lawyers to pursue the prosecution of major figures in organized crime. Placed in charge of this squad's all-important effort in the Midwest in I958 was Ogilvie, who had practiced with the Chicago law firm of Lord, Bissell & Brook after getting his degree from Chicago-Kent College of Law in 1949. (From 1954 to 1955, Ogilvie interrupted his private practice of law in Chicago to serve a year as an assistant to the United States attorney.) When he joined the Justice Department's express crime-fighting legal unit, Ogilvie was thirtyfive years old and in the process of laying what some of his law associates believed to be a solid foundation for a lucrative practice. This was a pleasing thought to those acquaintances of Dick and Dorothy Ogilvie who knew the couple had strived hard to get ahead financially in the early years of their marriage . Like many other young marrieds, the Ogilvies realized they were maldng progress when they found they could live off his earnings at the law firm, where he put in the long and grinding hours common for an aspiring young attorney, and...