Tony Accardo's Chicago: The Boss Who 'Never Spent a Night in Jail'

In January 1978, while Tony Accardo was on vacation in California, someone broke into his house in River Forest, just west of Chicago. Nobody called the police. Within months, men the government described as known burglars began turning up dead. A federal appeals court later summed up the Accardo family's response in five words: "Their silence is almost deafening." This is a documentary history of Tony Accardo, the Chicago Outfit leader who boasted that he never spent a night in jail, and of the quiet western suburbs where Capone's heirs went to live like everybody else. It covers the shoemaker's son from Chicago and the Capone years; Paul Ricca's "good buy" in River Forest; the Kefauver hearings of 1951 ("not to the Nation"); the Franklin Avenue mansion and Robert Kennedy's questions in 1958; Sam Giancana on Wenonah Avenue in Oak Park, the FBI on the golf course and the Church Committee; the 1960 tax case thrown out over a "Capone echo" headline; the 1978 break-in, the search of the house and the $275,000 the court ordered returned; and Operation Family Secrets, which listed three of the 1978 killings in a federal indictment in 2005. We name the men who died after the break-in, because they are the reason this story matters: John Mendell, Bernard Ryan, Steve Garcia, Vincent Moretti, Donald Renno and John McDonald. Michael Volpe, the Accardos' handyman, disappeared in 1978. Tony Accardo was never charged with any of those deaths. Most of the people who lived in River Forest, Oak Park, Elmwood Park and Melrose Park had nothing to do with any of this. In the 2000 census, more than half a million people in the Chicago region said their families came from Italy, and the men in this film were a handful of them. If your family lived in these villages in those years, tell us what people said, or didn't say, in the comments. Chapters 0:00 The break-in nobody reported, January 1978 2:16 The shoemaker's son 5:39 A good buy 9:35 Not to the Nation 13:00 The mansion on Franklin Avenue 16:45 The Capone echo 20:00 The boss on Wenonah Avenue 23:46 Nobody called the police 25:45 Their silence is almost deafening 27:35 Family Secrets 31:06 What's left Sources include: United States v. One Residence and Attached Garage of Anthony J. Accardo, 603 F.2d 1231 (7th Cir. 1979); United States v. Accardo, 298 F.2d 133 (7th Cir. 1962); Giancana v. Johnson, 335 F.2d 366 (7th Cir. 1964); In re Grand Jury Investigation (Giancana), 352 F.2d 921 (7th Cir. 1965); United States v. De Lucia (7th Cir. 1958); United States v. Compagna (2d Cir. 1944); United States v. Schiro, 679 F.3d 521 (7th Cir. 2012); U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce (Kefauver), hearings and Third Interim Report (1950–51); U.S. Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field (McClellan), hearings (1958–59); Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (Church), Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (1975); U.S. Department of Justice, Operation Family Secrets indictment release (2005); FBI (2007); FBI FOIA files; UPI (1992); TIME (1978); AP (2007); Encyclopedia of Chicago; Wednesday Journal of Oak Park; WBEZ; The Mob Museum. Archive images are public domain: U.S. Senate hearing records (via the Internet Archive), U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Court of Appeals documents, FBI FOIA releases, the Library of Congress (Harris & Ewing; U.S. News & World Report photographs by Warren K. Leffler and Marion S. Trikosko; Historic American Buildings Survey photographs by Richard Nickel; FSA/OWI photograph by Jack Delano), the National Archives, the New York World-Telegram & Sun collection, the Newberry Library, the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Census Bureau, and Sanborn Map Company insurance maps of Oak Park (1908), via Wikimedia Commons. Modern photo credits (cropped/animated), all via Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons licences: Edgewood Place, River Forest, 2023 · w_lemay · CC BY-SA 2.0 Former Marshall Field and Co. store, Lake and Harlem, Oak Park, 2023 · w_lemay · CC BY-SA 2.0 River Forest Tennis Club, 2024 · w_lemay · CC BY-SA 2.0 Houses on Lathrop Avenue, River Forest, 2024 · w_lemay · CC BY-SA 2.0 Elmwood Park Metra station, 2016 · Adam Moss · CC BY-SA 2.0 Downtown Melrose Park, 2016 · Dennisyerger84 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Scenes marked ILLUSTRATION are AI-generated reconstructions of empty places; they do not show any real person or any of the real houses. All other images are archival or credited photographs. Narration is AI-generated. The houses mentioned in this film are private homes today, and the people who live in them have no connection to this history. Please respect their privacy and do not visit them. #Chicago #ChicagoHistory #TonyAccardo #ChicagoOutfit #RiverForest