From The Archives - September 2014

The Chicago Tribune regarded Frank Nitti the ablest business man of the Chicago underground for more than a decade and a half. He was so clever that he evaded death thru the prohibition era and later was able to shift from the outworn liquor racket and cut in on the more lucrative gambling and labor fields. He was generally credited with being the heir to Al Capone’s financial interests.

Frank Nitti was a nature of Italy. He came to the United States at an early age and started his career in crime in Brooklyn, where he was a member of the notorious Five Points gang. Nitti whose real name was Nitto, differed from his hoodlum companions in that he had a flair for things academic, especially accounting. He followed Capone to Chicago and shared in his rise. His title of ‘Enforcer’ came when it was learned that it was he who ordered the execution of double-crossers. In 1923 he became collector and bookkeeper of the Capone syndicate and began receiving a payoff of about $250,000 a year. Despite his fondness for accounting, the government found a discrepancy in it, and in 1931 he was caught in the income-tax web which had snared his boss, Capone. Nitti was convicted and spent 18 months in Leavenworth. Severely claustrophic, Nitti served his time in extreme discomfort, an experience that would mark him until the day he died. When Nitti was released in 1932, the media dubbed him the new boss of Capone’s gang, although it has since been revealed that Nitti was the face and perhaps brains, of the outfit, while another man, Paul “The Waiter” Ricca was its true leader. Aiming to take down the outfit’s presumed head, in December 1932, Chicago policemen raided Nitti’s office shooting him in the back and neck. Nitti survived, and during the trial it was revealed that one of the officers had been paid $15,000 to kill Nitti. Needing to reinvent the Outfit after the end of Prohibition, Nitti turned the outfit’s attention to the labor unions and ever more, Hollywood. But in 1943, Nitti and many top members of the Chicago Outfit were indicted for extorting money from some of the largest movie studios in Hollywood, including MGM, Paramount, and 20^th century Fox, and they faced stiff sentences if convicted. Because of his claustrophobia enhanced during his first prison term, Nitti feared the idea of long-term confinement. So, faced with life in prison or perhaps murder by fellow Outfit members to keep him quiet, Nitti shot himself in the head on March 19, 1943.  

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