the Big Tuna: Tony Accardo and Chicago Outfit

For more than half a century, Tony Accardo stood near the center of the Chicago Outfit-and survived.Al Capone became one of the most famous gangsters in American history. Frank Nitti died rather than return to prison. Sam Giancana became a national spectacle and was eventually murdered. Paul Ricca spent years battling prosecution, imprisonment, and deportation.Accardo outlasted them all.The Big Tuna: Tony Accardo and the Chicago Outfit traces Accardo's rise from the streets of Chicago through the Capone organization and into one of the longest periods of influence in the history of American organized crime. It follows the transformation of the Outfit from a Prohibition-era street empire into a layered criminal organization built around gambling, labor racketeering, policy, legitimate businesses, political influence, and hidden interests stretching from Chicago to Las Vegas.At the center of the story is Accardo's extraordinary partnership with Paul "The Waiter" Ricca, the rise and fall of Sam Giancana, the Hollywood labor-extortion scandal, the takeover of Chicago's policy rackets, federal tax investigations, congressional hearings, casino skimming, the 1978 burglary of Accardo's River Forest home and its deadly aftermath, and the government investigations that culminated decades later in the Family Secrets prosecutions.But this is also a study of how criminal power changed.Rather than repeat underworld legends as fact, The Big Tuna separates court-established evidence, government records, credible historical inference, contested allegations, and mob folklore-including the enduring claim that Accardo participated in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.Accardo's lasting significance was not simply that he became powerful. It was that he helped perfect a system in which the most powerful man did not always have to appear to be the boss.A documented history of Tony Accardo, Paul Ricca, Sam Giancana, and the Chicago Outfit-and of the strategy that allowed one of America's most consequential organized-crime figures to remain influential for decades while so many around him fell.