Accardo: The Genuine Godfather [Mass Market Paperback]

William F. Roemer Jr. (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1996

"A STORY THAT NO OTHER AUTHOR COULD HAVE PUT
TOGETHER . . . Roemer [is] America's most decorated FBI agent."
--Chicago Tribune
For forty years Tony Accardo was America's most dangerous criminal. He cut his teeth on the Chicago mob wars of Capone and Elliot Ness. He got his nickname "Joe Batters" for killing two men with a baseball bat. As the bodies piled up, Capone's youngest capo murdered and schemed his way to the top.
William Roemer was the first FBI agent to face Tony "The Big Tuna" Accardo. Now, Roemer tells the story that only he could tell: the deals, the hits, the double-crosses, and the power plays that reached from the Windy City to Hollywood and to New York. Drawing on secret wiretaps and inside information, ACCARDO chronicles bloodshed and mayhem for more than six decades--as Roemer duels against the most powerful don of them all. . . .
"Roemer brings the reality of organized crime home to us."
--Boston Herald
"A big, sprawled out account that serves as anecdotal history of organized crime."
--Kirkus Reviews

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Nicknamed "Joe Batters" by Al Capone because he beat two thugs to death with a baseball bat, Tony Accardo (1906-1992) would go on to impress his mob superiors by using "Chicago Choppers"?Thompson submachine guns?at the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929. After the demise of Capone, Accardo quickly moved to the forefront of the mob hierarchy, becoming a capo under Capone's successor, Frank Nitti, and concentrating on gambling operations. Roemer, who exhibits a grudging respect for Accardo, alleges without documentation that the mob under Accardo bought off U.S. Attorney General Tom Clark with an appointment to the Supreme Court. Also covered are Accardo's appearance before the Kefauver Committee in 1951, where he was cited for contempt of Congress; his Chicago mob's late move into Las Vegas; his "retirement" to consiglieri in 1957; how J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were finally forced to join the battle against organized crime after the infamous Apalachin, N.Y., mob meeting in 1957; Accardo's prohibition on selling narcotics; and his ordered "hit" on Sam Giancana. Roemer (The Enforcer), former senior agent on the organized crime squads of the Chicago FBI, has written a colorful biography rich in fact, anecdote and speculation. Photos. Major ad/promo.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Retired FBI agent Roemer (The Enforcer, LJ 6/15/94) profiles Chicago mobster Anthony Accardo (1906-92), a.k.a. Joe Batters, a.k.a. The Big Tuna. Starting out in the Capone gang, Accardo quickly rose to the top of the organization, wielding absolute control and inspiring fear in others. Despite damaging evidence against him, Accardo in his 70 years as a gangster never spent a day in jail. Using a wealth of inside information gathered from eavesdropping on mob meeting places, Roemer presents an excellent story of a ruthless mob leader blended in with the history of the period. Often Roemer goes overboard in congratulating agents involved, and he uses Accardo's aliases interchangeably, which can confuse readers. Nevertheless, he has written an interesting book on the history of gangsters and provides another chapter of Chicago's social history. Recommended for true-crime collections.
Michael Sawyer, Clinton P.L., Ia.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Ivy Books (September 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0804114641
• ISBN-13: 978-0804114646
• Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 1.1 x 6.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #296,275 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #3 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Reference & Collections
  • #4 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Nonfiction > Social Sciences > Sociology > Urban
  • #30 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Nonfiction > Crime & Criminals > Criminology

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An epitaph for an honorable enemy, August 13, 2000

By 

Mr Mondo - See all my reviews

This review is from: Accardo: The Genuine Godfather (Mass Market Paperback)

William F. Roemer, Jr., may have known Chicago mob boss Anthony Accardo better than anyone outside the Outfit. That's because Roemer spent much of his career as an FBI agent trying to put Accardo in prison. He never succeeded, but over the years he developed a grudging respect for the head of Chicago's organized crime family. And in this memoir of the mob during Accardo's reign, Roemer pays just tribute to his old adversary on the strange terms that inevitably govern relationships between career criminals and the cops who try to put them away for good. Roemer acknowledges Accardo's genius, his love for his family and willingness to run the Chicago Outfit with as little bloodshed as necessary (still a veritable river, though). At the same time, Roemer makes sure we know how ruthless and merciless Accardo was and how he never blinked at torture and murder as management tools to keep his organization under control.

Tony Accardo deserves much closer historical scrutiny than he has received heretofore. He started his career in organized crime as a protege of Jack McGurn, one of the Outfit's top enforcers. McGurn is credited both by historians and mob legend as the man who planned and executed the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929, a multiple killing that finished off Al Capone's last real challenge to underworld dominance in the Chicago area. Roemer speculates that Accardo may have been one of the gunmen who carried out the hit. If nothing else, Accardo proved to be a very proficient enforcer himself and this, combined with his obvious intelligence, paved the way for his rapid rise through the ranks. By the mid 1940s, Accardo was the head of the former Capone organization, a position of power he would only relinquish upon his death in the 1990s.

Accardo may have been the most dangerous mobster of them all. He had a genius for every aspect of organized crime life and he molded the Outfit in his image. Under "Joe Batters" the Outfit took a much lower public profile than it had during Capone's flamboyant reign. It also diversified its operations and expanded its turf to include most of the U.S. west of the Mississippi River. Accardo constantly shifted strategies and resources to cope with changing conditions in the underworld and, after the mid-1950s, the increasing pressure of federal law enforcement to dismantle the Outfit for good.

Roemer had a front seat to most of this. A good intelligence officer, he came to know Accardo and many of his lieutenants on a personal basis. I think it is a tribute to Roemer's own sense of fairness that he acknowledges the good he found in some of these men at the same time he remorselessly exposes the evil they committed. Roemer also goes out of his way to make sure we understand that many of the Outfit's members made sure their own children never followed them into the life. A man who obviously loves his own family, Roemer recognizes that instinct in the men he hunted and honors it. It may strike us as odd or even perverse, but in the small world of the Outfit and those honest lawmen trying to break it, it's a stand-up behavior.

Roemer has been called onto the carpet by other reviewers of this book for injecting himself too much into the narrative. I understand the limitations this imposes on the book's narrative, limitations which ultimately undermine it as a close account of Accardo's career and the history of the Chicago mob between the end of the Capone era and today. But someone without a vested personal interest in that history will someday provide us with the narrative account we really want.

I say take Roemer's book on its own terms -- an autobiography viewed through the lens of the life of Chicago's greatest criminal ever. You'll come away with a vivid impression of both men and a feel for how the terms of adversarial engagement between mobsters and lawmen create their own strange set of ethics and morals over time. In that sense, Roemer has presented us with a very important sociological source document.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Roemer Strikes Out, September 15, 2005

By 

Rick "Mad Dog" Mattix (Iowa) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Accardo: The Genuine Godfather (Mass Market Paperback)

I find it amusing that every gangster biographer wants to elevate his subject to the level of being the most important figure ever in the history or organized crime. But one would expect a certain level of objectivity from a former FBI agent, even one who self-promoted himself for years as Chicago's number one Mob-buster. Roemer's admiration for adversary Tony "Joe Batters" Accardo is understandable in a way. Clearly one of the most untouchable mobsters of all time (though it is not true that he never spent a night in jail), Accardo's seventy year criminal career with no standing convictions shows he was no dumb hood. All the same, Roemer goes out of his way to inject Accardo into everything that ever happened in Chicago. His account of the Prohibition years is so far off the mark it's hilarious. He has Tony Accardo saving Capone from Hymie Weiss in the Hawthorne attack, which contemporary accounts credit to Frank Rio. He places Tony in New York with Jack McGurn, Anselmi and Scalise, and "a guy named Rio Burke" as the hitters of Frankie Yale in that city's first Tommygun killing. Strange, as I met the late Rio Burke and SHE never once mentioned handling a machine gun though she was a friend of Al Capone. Tony, McGurn, Anselmi and Scalise and "possibly Fred Burke" (in whose Michigan hideout the machine guns were found) are claimed to have been the St. Valentine's Day Massacre gunmen, on the basis of some bugged conversations Roemer claims to have heard years later and vaguely alludes to. More credible suspects, such as Gus Winkeler, who later ran Moran's former North Side territory for Capone and was highly publicized in the early Thirties, and Raymond "Crane-Neck" Nugent, who was once arrested at Capone's Miami estate, are dismissed as insignificant nobodies on the bare fringe of the Capone mob. Roemer goes on to have Accardo accompany Capone to the famous Atlantic City Mob convention, again at the expense of number one bodyguard Frank Rio, and conveniently oversteps the Philadelphia arrest and conviction of Capone and RIO by moving the meeting ahead one year to 1930. I find it amazing that a guy like Roemer could spend all that time investigating the Chicago Mob and display such little knowledge of its early years. No wonder the FBI took so long in catching up with organized crime! Roemer should have either stuck with the Fifties/Sixties time-frame he knew firsthand or else done some competent research on the pre-World War II era. As for the claim that Accardo had "more brains before breakfast than Al Capone had all day," well, like I said earlier, Tony's successful life in crime is impressive, and owes much to his low-key style but one doesn't need to distort history to emphasize this. And, when it all comes down to it, Capone was the guy who built the Chicago Mob and the guy who brought Accardo up through the ranks as well. Successful as he was, Tony was only following in Al's footsteps like so many others.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A few errors, March 12, 2004

By 

Ryan Artis (Baltimore, Maryland United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Accardo: The Genuine Godfather (Mass Market Paperback)

I think the main problem I had with this book was the numerous factual errors in it. I could forgive his overstating Accardo's importance to Chicago organized crime (Its a well known fact among most real crime historians that Accardo spent most of his time as the Waiters front boss) because all biographers tend to do that. But when he states things like Joe Profaci and Joe Columbo being bosses on the commission and showing up at a 1961 wedding when Columbo was an eventual herir to Profaci's family can't be forgiven. Things like that make you wonder if the author knew anything at all.