Sam Giancana Was His Closest Ally — So Accardo Had Him Killed

The sausages [music] were still on the stove when they found him. That detail, the food on the burner, the kitchen still warm, the small domestic evidence of a life that had been interrupted mid-sentence, is the detail that stays with you after everything else about Sam Gianana’s murder has been cataloged and argued over and debated for 50 years.

Because it tells you something about what the last hour of his life looked like. He hadn’t been afraid. He had opened his door. He had gone back to his kitchen. He had been cooking for a guest. The guest put seven bullets into him. One in the back of the head, one under the chin, and then five more in a tight circle around his mouth.

 That last part, the five shots arranged with deliberate, almost careful precision around the mouth of a man already dying on his kitchen floor, was not rage. It was not panic. It was a message. In the language spoken by the world Sam Gianana had lived in for 67 years, five bullets fired in a circle around a man’s lips means one thing.

 It means this is what happens to men who talk. The date was June 19th, 1975. The location was Gian Kana’s basement apartment in Oak Park, Illinois. He was scheduled to appear before the United States Senate Intelligence Committee in less than 24 hours. He never made it. The murder of Sam Gianana has never been officially solved.

 No one has ever been charged, tried, or convicted. The case remains technically open, but the 50 years since that night have not been kind to the mystery. FBI documents obtained through federal litigation, testimony from mob insiders at the landmark 2007 family secrets trial, and the accounts of four senior federal investigators who worked the case have produced something very close to an answer.

 An answer that circles back always to one man. The man who had given Sam Gianana everything he had. Tony Aardo. To understand what happened in that Oak Park kitchen in June 1975, you have to go back to the beginning. Not to the beginning of the crime, to the beginning of the relationship. Because what happened between Tony Aardo and Sam Gian Kana over the course of nearly 40 years is one of the most consequential alliances and one of the most consequential betrayals in the entire history of American organized crime. Sam Gianana was born Salvatore

Gianana in 1908, 2 years after Ricardo, in the same hard scrabble streets of Chicago’s near west side, where immigrant families from Sicily built their lives between the competing pressures of poverty and the criminal organizations that promised a faster path out. He was smaller than Iardo, darker in temperament, the kind of boy who seemed to vibrate at a frequency that made people simultaneously want to follow him and keep their distance.

 By his teens, he was running with the 42 gang, a juvenile crew whose name was a reference to Alibaba and the 40 thieves because they considered themselves one better. They were not wrong about their capabilities. The 42 gang was a killing school for the Chicago outfit. A place where young men with talent for violence and deception were identified and recruited. Sam Gianana was recruited.

And the man who noticed him, who saw something in the sharp-faced kid from the near west side that was worth investing in was Tony Aardo. This matters. It matters because in the world of the Chicago outfit, the relationship between a senior figure and the young man he brings up is not merely organizational. It is personal.

 It carries obligations on both sides that run deeper than any formal agreement. Akardo had seen Gian Kana’s capacity for violence, yes, but more importantly for loyalty, for earning, for understanding the subtle mechanics of how power actually functions. He brought Gianana along, gave him crews to run, allowed him to prove himself.

 When Gian Kana proposed in the early 1940s a bold takeover of the African-American lottery operations on Chicago’s south side, it was Aardo who approved the plan, backed it, and let Gian Kana executed. The policy game takeover made millions for the outfit. It made Sam Gian Kana. By the early 1950s, Gian Kana was one of the most feared and effective figures in the Chicago criminal organization.

 He had ordered murders, managed territories, built the kind of reputation that caused men to choose their words very carefully in his presence. And through all of it, the relationship with Aardo had held. Not friendship exactly. The men were too different for friendship, too aware of each other’s capacity for cold calculation, but something real.

 a working partnership between two men who understood each other completely, who had stood in the same rooms through the same wars, who had built something together that neither could have built alone. In 1957, Aardo made the decision that would define both of their destinies. The IRS was closing in. Aardo had been maintaining the fiction that he was a beer salesman, and the fiction was wearing thin.

 Federal scrutiny of his finances was intensifying. For a man who had spent three decades constructing layers of insulation between himself and any prosecutable act, the heat from the tax authorities was the kind of pressure that demanded a strategic response. Aardo’s response was characteristically elegant.

 He stepped back from the official position of boss. He became formally the organization’s considle, an adviser, a counselor, a man whose role was consultative rather than executive. and he elevated Sam Gianana to the position of operational boss of the Chicago outfit. This was on paper a demotion for Aardo and a promotion for Gianana.

In reality, it was neither. Accart retained ultimate authority. Every significant decision, every major business move, every sanction of violence, every negotiation with other crime families required his approval. Gian Kana was the face of the organization. Aardo was its mind. This arrangement in the tradition of the organization going back to Capone was understood by everyone in the outfit.

You dealt with Gianana for day-to-day matters. You sought Aardo’s sanction for anything that mattered. For a few years, the arrangement functioned. Gianana was an effective operational boss. He expanded the outfit’s reach into Las Vegas, where the casino skimming operations generated rivers of money. He built connections in Latin America, in Cuba, in the corridors of celebrity and political power that his predecessor had only begun to access.

 He was by any measure of criminal success performing the role Aardo had given him. But Sam Gianana had a problem that Tony Aardo had never had and never would have. He loved the spotlight. where Aicardo had spent decades constructing an architecture of invisibility, declining public positions, living modestly, refusing to be photographed, maintaining the fiction of the beer salesman, even as his actual wealth and power grew to extraordinary dimensions.

 Gianana moved in the opposite direction. He dated Phyllis Maguire, the glamorous singer of the Maguire sisters, and appeared publicly with her at a time when the FBI was cataloging every inch of his life. He was photographed. He was quoted. He frequented posh nightclubs and made no visible effort to avoid the cameras and the reporters who had made him in a way that a Cardo found somewhere between baffling and intolerable. A celebrity.

Aardo had a particular phrase for men like this. Men who confused visibility with power, who mistook fame for strength. He believed with the conviction of someone who had never been wrong about it that the man who could be seen could eventually be caught and the man who could be caught was a liability. The FBI agreed with Aicardo’s assessment though from the opposite direction.

 They were following Gian Kana with an intensity that was even by the standards of the era remarkable. Agents trailed his car through Chicago suburbs, documented his movements, built files on his connections, and every hour the FBI spent watching Gianana was an hour that was in some sense spent watching the organization Aardo had built.

 Every photograph was a threat. Every wire tap was a window. Aardo began to communicate through the careful channels the outfit used for internal communication. his displeasure. Gian Kana needed to lower his profile. Gian Kana needed to be more careful. Gianana needed to understand that the organization’s security was not separable from his own behavior.

 Gianana heard these messages and then he went to dinner with Phyllis Maguire somewhere that a photographer was waiting and Aardo read about it in the newspaper the next morning. The break that formalized this tension came in 1965 when Giano was called before a federal grand jury. He had been granted immunity, meaning he couldn’t invoke the fifth amendment’s protection against self-inccrimination.

He had to answer. Gianana’s response was to simply refuse. He sat before the grand jury and said nothing again and again until he was cited for contempt and sent to prison for a year. The federal strategy was to keep him jailed for the duration of the grand jury, essentially removing him from the operational picture for 12 months.

 It worked perfectly. While Gianana was in prison, Aardo and his longtime associate Paul Ra moved quickly and without sentimentality. They removed Gianana from the position of operational boss. They replaced him with Joseph Aupa, a veteran outfit figure whose primary virtue from Aardo’s perspective was that he understood the concept of a low profile.

The transition was communicated to Gianana while he was still in custody. There was no discussion. There was no appeal. When Gian Kana was released in 1966, the situation was stark. He was no longer boss. He was no longer in Aardo’s good graces. He was in the architecture of the outfits hierarchy, a former figure, still owed a certain respect based on his history, but no longer part of the organization’s operational center, and the FBI was still watching him constantly, which meant that anyone who associated with him was also being

watched. Gianana made the only reasonable decision available to him. He left. He fled to Cornovaka, Mexico, where he established himself in a comfortable villa and quietly built a portfolio of gambling operations in Mexico, Iran, and Central America. For 7 years, he lived in this exile that was simultaneously luxurious and humiliating.

 A man who had once run the most powerful criminal organization in America, now managing offshore casinos from a position of effective banishment. But the money was good. Very good. And here in the mathematics of that Mexican exile, the seed of the final confrontation was planted. Aardo had sent Gian Kana to Mexico to run the outfits interests there.

 Gian Kana ran them efficiently, profitably, and then over time he began to make a distinction in his own mind between the operations he was managing for the outfit and the operations that he personally controlled, that he had personally built through his own connections and his own labor. The profits from the latter, he decided, were his, not the outfits. His.

This distinction between outfit money and Gian Kana’s money was not a distinction that Tony Aardo recognized. In the world Aiccardo had constructed over five decades, there was no such thing as money earned by a made member of the Chicago outfit that did not flow in appropriate percentages back to the organization.

 This was not a philosophical position. It was the foundational operating principle of the entire enterprise. Everyone paid. The street level thief paid his percentage to the neighborhood crew boss. The crew boss paid up. It went all the way to the top. Without that flow, the organization did not function.

 Without that flow, the hierarchy that protected everyone, including Sam Gianana in his comfortable Mexican villa, ceased to exist. Akardo sent word to Gianana. Return a share of the offshore profits to the outfit. Gianana said no. He said no once. He said no twice. He developed arguments. The money was outside the outfit’s territory, therefore outside its jurisdiction.

 He had built these operations himself from his own contacts using his own judgment. The outfit had no claim. These were arguments that Aardo heard and dismissed with the efficiency of a man who has no patience for reasoning that contradicts his authority. The arguments didn’t matter. The money mattered and Gian Kana’s refusal to send it mattered not just financially but as a statement about power.

 If Sami and Kana could refuse, what did that mean for every other figure in the organization who might look at his example and decide that the rules didn’t fully apply to them either? In 1974, the Mexican government resolved the question of Gianana’s exile by making it moot. He was arrested by Mexican authorities on July 19th and deported back to the United States.

 He arrived in Chicago on July 21st, moving back into his brick bungalow in Oak Park. Almost immediately there was a sitdown. The senior outfit figures gathered in the careful way these meetings were conducted. And the agenda was the same agenda it had been for years. Gian Kana’s offshore profits. Gian Kana’s obligation to the organization. The money.

 Gian Kana sat across from the men who had once been his peers in a room where the power dynamics had shifted entirely against him. And he said no again. He would not share the money. It was his. He had built it. The men in that room looked at each other and in the language of their world, that exchange of looks was a conversation that didn’t require words.

There was also another problem, one that had emerged during Jianana’s final years, and that was in some ways even more dangerous than the question of the casino profits. Sam Jianana knew things. He had been inside the organization at the highest level for decades. He knew about murders and corruptions and business arrangements that stretched from Chicago to Las Vegas to Cuba to the White House.

 And the United States Senate in the mid 1970s was intensely interested in exactly that kind of knowledge. The Church Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee convened to investigate the CIA and its domestic and international activities had developed a specific interest in the relationship between American intelligence agencies and organized crime.

 Specifically, in the CIA’s attempts in the early 1960s to recruit mob figures to assassinate Fidel Castro, Sam Gian Kana had been one of the central figures in those plots. He had worked directly and knowingly with CIA handlers at a time when the official position of the United States government was that no such relationship existed.

The Senate committee subpoenaed him. He was scheduled to testify on June 20th, 1975. Tony Aardo understood what that testimony represented. Not just the exposure of the CIA connection. That was the government’s problem. What it represented was the possibility of Sam Gian and Kana sitting in a Senate hearing room answering questions about the Chicago outfit under the protection of whatever immunity agreements he might negotiate.

 A man who knew everything with every incentive to make his cooperation as valuable as possible, as comprehensive as possible in order to protect himself from the many things the government might otherwise use against him. The police had been assigned to guard Gianana’s Oak Park home. On the evening of June 19th, 1975, the night before his scheduled testimony, the police detail was quietly recalled, withdrawn without explanation.

Gian Kana’s home was left unguarded. Shortly after the police left, someone arrived. Someone Gian Kana knew well enough to open his door. Someone he trusted enough to go back to his kitchen and continue cooking. sausages and peppers and white beans. The smell of an Italian American kitchen of Sunday evenings of a certain kind of ordinary life that Sam Gianana had never quite managed to actually live.

 The gun was a 22 caliber highstandard model M 101 pistol with a homemade silencer. One shot to the back of the head delivered while Jian Kana was at the stove or turning away. He went down and then his killer stood over him and fired six more times. One under the chin and five in a precise circle around his mouth. The weapon was found 2 months later in a Cook County Forest Preserve on Thatcher Avenue in River Forest.

 River Forest, Illinois, the suburb where Tony Aardo kept his home. For 50 years, the question of who killed Sam Jian Kana remained officially unanswered. But the trail of evidence assembled piece by piece over decades of investigation and litigation leads somewhere specific. FBI surveillance records from 1975 document the comingings and goings from Aardo’s River Forest home on the night of June 19th.

 One of Aardo’s cars left before Gianana was killed. It returned afterward. This was noted in contemporary FBI reports. Nick Calibrizz, a made member of the Chicago Outfit who became the first official Outfit member ever to cooperate with federal prosecutors, testifying at the 2007 family secrets trial, told the FBI directly that a Cardo was involved in the Gian Kana homicide.

 His FBI interview report states it plainly. Aardo, nicknamed JB, was involved in the homicide of Gian Kana. Calibris’s nephew, Frank Calibris Jr., speaking publicly, was even more specific. His father had told him, as a matter of the family’s internal knowledge, that Tony Aardo personally killed Sam Gianana, that Aardo had done it himself, not delegating to an underling, because this was not the kind of job he could trust to anyone else.

 because the stakes were too high for errors, for leaks, for the possibility that whoever pulled the trigger might one day be in a position to share what he knew. The theory offered by investigators and crime historians who have spent careers analyzing the evidence is coherent and in its own terrible way, elegant. Aardo had built Gian Kana.

 He had elevated him, used him, then discarded him when he became a liability. He had demanded the return of the casino profits and been refused twice. He had watched as the man he’d once mentored became through his obstinacy and his vanity and his refusal to accept the logic of the organization’s rules a danger not just to the outfit’s finances but to Aardo personally.

 Because if Gian Kana testified, if Sam Gian Kana sat before a Senate committee and began answering questions about the inner workings of the Chicago outfit, about the decisions made over four decades, about the men who had made those decisions, then the man with the most to lose was the man at the top. The man who had been there longest, the man who knew where everything was buried because he had often been the one to bury it.

 Tony Aardo, at 69, was not the kind of man who delegated existential risks. The detail about the five shots around the mouth is the part that lingers because it was not just a method of killing. It was a statement of authorship in a murder designed to be officially unsolvable. No witnesses. The police conveniently absent.

 The gun disposed of blocks from Aardo’s home. Those five shots were the only signature, the only thing that communicated to anyone who understood the language that this had not been random. This had been deliberate. This had been specific. This had been, in the cold vocabulary of men who communicate in consequences rather than words, a point being made.

 In the language of that world, five bullets arranged in a circle around a man’s mouth says, “You were going to talk. Now you can’t.” None of the top outfit figures attended Gianana’s funeral. Not Aardo. Not any of the senior figures who had known him for decades. Law enforcement observers noted the absence carefully.

 in the culture of the Chicago outfit. You attended funerals. You paid respects. You showed the solidarity of the organization even for men you had opposed in life. The conspicuous absence of the entire senior leadership at Sam Gianana’s funeral was itself a message. A final public acknowledgement that the distance between them had been complete.

A 100 people came. Phyllis Maguire came. Jian Kana<unk>s daughters came. The reporters came in force, documenting the absence of the world their father had inhabited for his entire adult life. Aardo went on living. He went on running the outfit from the shadows, attending to the organization’s affairs with the patience and methodical intelligence that had always defined him.

 He was 69 when Gian Kana died. He lived another 17 years, dying peacefully at 86 in 1992. In those 17 years, he was never charged with anything connected to June 19th, 1975. The FBI knew, the federal prosecutors knew, the investigators who had spent careers watching Aardo knew, but knowing in the world of Tony Iardo had never been the same thing as proving.

 Federal prosecutors eventually concluded that the Gian Conor murder would never be prosecuted because the primary suspect was dead. The case was in the most technical sense closed. What remains is this. Somewhere in the architecture of everything Tony Aardo built and protected over 60 years of criminal life.

 Sam Gian and Kana’s murder is the clearest demonstration of the principle that animated everything he did. The principle was not loyalty. It was not honor. It was not the romantic mythology of the mob that fills movies and television shows. The principle was simpler and colder than any of that. Power does not tolerate vulnerabilities. And if a vulnerability cannot be managed, it must be removed.

 Gian Kana had been many things over the course of their relationship. A student, an asset, a boss, a problem, and finally a threat. Each transformation had produced a corresponding response from a cardo mentorship, elevation, demotion, exile, pressure. The final transformation from threat to corpse produced the response that all the others had been building toward.

 Tony Aardo had given Sam Gianana everything he had. His career, his position, his wealth, his power. He had invested in him for 20 years, built him into the public face of the most powerful criminal organization in America. And when the investment turned, when the man he had built became the greatest single danger to everything Aardo had constructed and protected, criminal, he took it all back.

 In one night with a gun, he had driven across river forest and a silencer built by one of his own people in the kitchen of a man who had opened his door without hesitation because he could not imagine that the person standing there had come to end him. The sausages burned on the stove.

 The police found them hours later charred in the pan, the kitchen full of smoke. A small accidental monument to the moment when Sam Gianana stopped being Tony Cardardo’s greatest achievement and became his most necessary problem. Antonio Cardo drove back to River Forest, went inside and slept.