Paul Ricca: The Chicago Mob Boss Who Ruled From Prison – ht
In October 1972, hundreds of mourners gathered at a Chicago funeral home to pay respects to a 74year-old man described in the obituary as a retired real estate investor. But FBI agents watching from unmarked cars knew the truth. The man in the casket was Paul the Waiter RA, the most powerful mob boss in American history.
a man who ruled the Chicago outfit for 40 years without ever officially holding the title. The waiter. He was born Felista Lucia on November 14th, 1897 in Naples, Italy in a neighborhood where poverty and violence were the only constants. His father worked as a laborer. His mother died when Felite was young.
By the time he was 17, Ducia had already learned the most important lesson of his life. Kill or be killed. In 1913, according to Italian police records, 16-year-old Felit Deucia murdered Alio Parilio during a fight in the streets of Naples. The details of the killing were never fully established, but witnesses said it was over money.
Maybe a woman, maybe just pride. Whatever the reason, Deluchia fled Italy before he could be arrested. He worked his way across Europe, staying ahead of the law before boarding a ship to America in 1920. When he arrived at Ellis Island, he gave immigration officials a new name, Paul Maglo. Later he would change it again to Paul Ducia and finally Paul Ra the waiter, the name he would carry to his grave.
Ra settled on the west side of Chicago in the early 1920s right in the heart of Little Italy. He worked as a waiter at the Bella Napoli Cafe, a legitimate restaurant that also served as a meeting place for Italian gangsters. He was quiet, polite, spoke softly, and watched everything.
At the Bellanopoly, Ra met a man named Diamond Joe Espazito, a political boss and bootleger who controlled the West Side. Espacito saw something in the young waiter, something cold and calculating. He brought RA into his organization as a collector and enforcer. Ra was good at the work. He did not drink. He did not gamble.
He did not chase women. He just earned. [clears throat] And when Espacito was gunned down in March 1928, Ra was smart enough to align himself with the one man in Chicago who mattered. Al Capone. By 1929, Ra was no longer a waiter. He was a maid member of the Chicago outfit, a trusted adviser to Capone, and a man who understood that the real power in organized crime was not about being the loudest or the toughest.
It was about being the smartest. And Paul Ra was very, very smart. Capone’s shadow. When Al Capone went to prison for tax evasion in 1932, the Chicago outfit was thrown into chaos. Capone had been the undisputed boss, the public face of organized crime in America. With him gone, a dozen different men thought they could take his place.
Capone’s official successor was his cousin Frank Niti, a brutal enforcer known as the enforcer. Niti became the public boss, the man the FBI and the newspapers focused on. But according to federal investigators and mob insiders, the real boss was Paul Ra. Ra never wanted the spotlight. He understood that men like Capone and John Gotti ended up in prison or dead because they couldn’t resist the attention.
Ra had watched Capone’s downfall and learned the lesson. Stay quiet, stay hidden, and let someone else take the heat. Under Ra’s leadership, the Chicago outfit became more sophisticated. The days of street wars and machine gun massacres were over. RA pushed the organization into legitimate businesses, labor unions, and political corruption.
The outfit controlled the Teamsters, the hotel and restaurant workers union, the stage hands union. They owned judges, alderman, cops, and politicians. Ra was also a diplomat. He maintained good relationships with the other major crime families in New York, Kansas City, and Los Angeles. He understood that cooperation was more profitable than competition.
When disputes arose, Ra was often the mediator, the voice of reason in a world of violence. One FBI agent who tracked RA for years later described him this way. Ra was the brains of the Chicago mob. He was calm, intelligent, and ruthless when he needed to be. He didn’t look like a gangster. He looked like a banker.
And in a lot of ways, that’s exactly what he was. By the late 1930s, Ra had consolidated his power. He had Frank Niti as his front man, Tony Aardo as his enforcer, and a network of capos and soldiers who answered to him. The outfit was bringing in millions of dollars a year from gambling, prostitution, lone sharking, and labor racketeering.
But Ra’s greatest scheme, the one that would make him millions and ultimately send him to prison, was just beginning. And it involved the most glamorous industry in America, Hollywood. The Hollywood extortion scheme. In the late 1930s, the Chicago Outfit controlled the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees known as IATSE, the union that represented stage hands, projectionists, and technicians in the movie industry.
Control of IATSE meant control over every major Hollywood studio. Ra installed two men to run the shakedown. Willie Boff, a former pimp and street thug, and George Brown, the president of a local stage hands union in Chicago. In 1934, with outfit backing, Brown was elected international president of IATSAE. The plan was simple and brilliant.
By off and Brown would threaten to call strikes at movie theaters across the country unless the studios paid up. In the middle of the Great Depression, with millions of Americans relying on movies as cheap entertainment, the studios could not afford a shutdown. They paid. According to federal prosecutors, between 1936 and 1941, the Chicago outfit extorted over $2.
5 million from Hollywood studios, including MGM, Paramount, Warner Brothers, and 20th Century Fox. RA’s personal cut was estimated at over $1 million. The studios paid in cash, delivered in suitcases to hotel rooms in Chicago and Los Angeles. The money was then funneled back to RA and the other outfit bosses through a complex series of intermediaries.
On paper, Ra was just a used car salesman. In reality, he was one of the richest gangsters in America. But Willie Boff could not stay quiet. He lived large, bought expensive suits, drove Cadillacs, and bragged about his Hollywood connections. In 1939, a newspaper reporter began investigating Boff’s background and discovered his criminal record. The FBI took notice.
By 1941, federal agents were building a case. They flipped George Brown first, then Willie Boff. Both men agreed to testify in exchange for reduced sentences. They told prosecutors everything. The shakedowns, the payoffs, the names of every Chicago mobster involved. In March 1943, Paul Ra, Frank Niti, and six other outfit leaders were indicted on federal extortion charges.
Niti, who had taken the public role as boss for over a decade, could not face another prison sentence. On March 19th, 1943, Niti walked to a railroad yard in North Riverside, Illinois, put a gun to his head, and pulled the trigger. He was 57 years old. Ra showed no emotion at Niti’s funeral. He knew what was coming.
The trial began in October 1943 in federal court in New York. Willie Boff took the stand and described the entire operation in detail. Jurors heard about the payoffs, the threats, the millions of dollars extorted from Hollywood. On December 22nd, 1943, the jury returned guilty verdicts against all defendants. Ra was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison.
He was 46 years old and according to the FBI, still the most powerful mob boss in Chicago. But prison, it turned out, would not stop Paul Ra at all. Prison without walls. RA was sent to the federal penitentiary in Levvenworth, Kansas in January 1944. The FBI and federal prosecutors believed that with RA behind bars, the Chicago outfit would finally be weakened.
They were wrong. From the moment Ra entered Levvenworth, he continued to run the outfit. Messages were smuggled in and out through corrupt guards, visiting attorneys, and other inmates. Orders were relayed through Tony Accardo, whom Ra had appointed as the street boss. According to FBI surveillance reports, Aardo visited RA regularly at Levvenworth, sometimes twice a month.
They would sit in the visiting room and discuss outfit business, who needed to be promoted, who needed to be killed, which politicians needed to be paid off, and which businesses needed to be taken over. One federal agent later testified that Ra’s cell at Levvenworth was more like an office than a prison cell.
He had special privileges, access to phones, and regular meetings with his attorneys. The warden, it was later discovered, had been bribed, but RA did not plan on serving his full 10-year sentence. He had powerful friends on the outside, friends who owed him favors. And in August 1947, just three years and four months into his sentence, Paul Ra was granted parole.
The parole was approved by Attorney General Tom Clark, who later became a Supreme Court Justice. According to the parole board, RA had been a model prisoner, had cooperated with authorities, and posed no threat to society. It was a lie. Everyone knew it. Newspapers across the country exploded with outrage.
Columnists called it the biggest miscarriage of justice in American history. Congress launched an investigation. The FBI reopened its files on RA and began surveilling him 24 hours a day. But the damage was done. Ra was free. And according to federal investigators, he walked out of prison more powerful than when he went in.
The outfit had grown during his incarceration. They controlled more unions, more politicians, more territory, and RA controlled the outfit. One Chicago reporter wrote that Paul Ra went to prison for extorting Hollywood, and he came out owning Chicago. The parole scandal haunted Attorney General Tom Clark for years.
During his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1949, senators grilled him about the RA decision. Clark claimed he had no involvement, that the parole board acted independently. No one believed him. For Ra, it did not matter. He was out. He was home. And he had no intention of ever going back to prison. The deported citizen.
Ra’s freedom came with conditions. He was on parole, which meant regular check-ins with federal agents, restrictions on who he could associate with, and constant surveillance. The Federal Bureau of Investigation watched his house, followed his car, and photographed everyone he met. Ra had learned to live with it.
He was patient. He was careful. In 1957, the federal government filed dennaturalization proceedings against RA in US District Court in Chicago. The government’s argument was simple. RA had lied on his citizenship application in 1940 by failing to disclose his murder charge in Italy.
He had entered the country illegally, lived under false names, and committed perjury to become a citizen. If the government succeeded, Ra would be stripped of his citizenship and deported back to Italy. For most immigrants facing deportation, the case would have been over quickly. But RA had the best lawyers money could buy and he had time.
His attorneys argued that the murder charge in Naples was 40 years old, that the Italian government had no records, that RA had acted in self-defense. They argued that the statute of limitations had expired and that the government was persecuting RA because of his alleged mob connections, not because of the citizenship application.
They filed motion after motion, appeal after appeal. The case dragged on for years. Ra appeared in court dozens of times. Always dressed in an expensive suit, always calm, always respectful to the judge. He played the role of a retired businessman being harassed by overzealous federal agents.
But in 1961, US District Judge Michael Ego ruled against him. The judge found that RA had indeed lied on his citizenship application, that he had concealed his criminal past and that his naturalization had been obtained through fraud. Paul Ra’s citizenship was revoked. He was now stateless, a man without a country, subject to immediate deportation. The FBI was ecstatic.
After decades of surveillance, wiretaps, and investigations that never resulted in serious charges, they finally had a way to remove RA from America permanently. Deportation proceedings began immediately. There was only one problem. Italy refused to take him. US immigration officials contacted the Italian government and asked them to issue a passport for Feliz Ducia, also known as Paul Ra, so he could be deported. Italy said no.
They knew exactly who RA was. They knew he was a fugitive from a 1913 murder charge. They knew he was a powerful American mobster with connections to the Sicilian mafia, and they wanted nothing to do with him. Italian officials told American diplomats that RA was America’s problem now.
He had lived in the United States for 40 years. He had built his criminal empire in Chicago, not Naples. Italy had its own organized crime problems. They did not need to import Paul Ra. So RA remained in Chicago. Technically deportable, but with nowhere to go. The US government could not force Italy to accept him. They could not deport him to a country that refused to issue him a passport.
He was trapped in legal limbo, a stateless person living in America illegally, but unable to be removed. It was the perfect outcome for RA. He had to register as an alien with immigration officials every year. He could not travel outside the United States, but he was free to live in his home in River Grove, free to meet with outfit members, free to continue running the Chicago mob from his living room.
Federal agents were furious. One Justice Department official later told reporters that the department had spent millions of dollars and decades of effort to denaturalize and deport Paul Ra. And in the end, he was still living in the same house, still running the same criminal organization, and there was nothing they could do about it.
The FBI never stopped watching him. Agents followed RA to restaurants, to the barber shop, to the homes of Tony Aardo, Joey Aayupa, and other highranking outfit members. They photographed everyone he met with. They tapped his phones. Though Ra never said anything incriminating on a phone call. He was too smart for that. One FBI surveillance report from 1964 noted that subject RA continues to exercise considerable influence over the Chicago criminal organization despite his dnaturalization and deportation status. He maintains regular contact
with Anthony Aardo and other leaders. Subject appears unconcerned about his legal status and continues to live openly in the Chicago area. Ra didn’t just appear unconcerned. He was unconcerned. He had beaten the system again, stripped of his citizenship, ordered deported, and yet still free, still in charge, still untouchable.
For the next 11 years until his death in 1972, Paul Ra lived as a man without a country. But he never needed a country. He had Chicago, and Chicago was all he ever wanted. The real boss, Tony Aarta, was the public boss of the Chicago outfit from 1943 until the 1970s. His name appeared in every FBI report, every newspaper article, every congressional hearing on organized crime.
But according to mob insiders and federal investigators, Aardo answered to one man, Paul Ra. The relationship between RA and Aardo was unique in the history of organized crime. Aardo had the title, the power, the street respect. He had been Capone’s enforcer, had personally carried out murders, and had built a reputation as one of the toughest men in Chicago.
But he deferred to RA on every major decision. When promotions needed to be made, RA decided. When a hit needed to be approved, RA gave the order. When territorial disputes arose with other families, RA negotiated the peace. Aardo executed the decisions, but Ra made them. Former FBI agent Bill Ror later said Tony Aardo was the boss in name only. Paul Ra was the real boss.
Everyone in the outfit knew it. Everyone in law enforcement knew it. But RA was so careful, so insulated that we could never build a case against him. The arrangement worked because both men understood their roles. Aardo took the heat, dealt with the day-to-day violence and problems, and met with the Capos and soldiers.
Ra stayed in the background, quiet, invisible, thinking three moves ahead. In November 1957, RA briefly emerged from the shadows when he attended a meeting of mob bosses from across the country at the estate of Joseph Barbara in Appalachin, New York. Over 60 mobsters from crime families in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and other cities gathered to discuss territory, narcotics policy, and the future of organized crime in America.
Local police raided the meeting. Dozens of mobsters fled into the woods. State troopers set up roadblocks and caught many of them trying to escape. Ra managed to avoid arrest that day, but his presence at Appalachin confirmed what the FBI had long suspected. He was one of the most powerful figures in the American mafia, respected by every family, consulted on every major decision.
One federal prosecutor later testified before Congress that the Appalachin meeting proved that there was a national crime syndicate and Paul Ra’s attendance proved that Chicago was at the very center of it. In the early 1960s, Ra made a decision that would nearly destroy everything he’d built. He promoted Sam Jan Kana to be the day-to-day boss of the outfit, the public face who would handle operations.
While Aardo moved into semi-retirement, and Ra remained hidden. Gianana was everything Ra was not. He was flashy, arrogant, violent, and reckless. He drove Cadillacs, wore expensive suits, dated celebrities, and courted publicity. He allegedly became involved with the CIA in plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. He had an affair with singer Phyllis Maguire and was friends with Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack.
But Gian Kana was also a money maker. He expanded the outfits control of Las Vegas casinos. He ran illegal gambling operations across Chicago and the suburbs. He brought in millions of dollars a year. And for a while, RA believed he could control him. He was wrong. By the mid 1960s, Gian Kana had become a massive liability. The FBI was following him everywhere, 24 hours a day.
He was subpoenaed to testify before federal grand juries investigating organized crime. His relationship with Phyllis Maguire was national news. He was making the outfit vulnerable with every public appearance, every headline, every mistake. According to mob historians, it was Ra who made the final decision in 1965. Gian Kana had to go.
Not killed, not yet, but removed from power and sent into exile. Gianana fled to Mexico where he lived for nearly 8 years. When he finally returned to Chicago in 1974, 2 years after Ra’s death, he was murdered in his basement, shot seven times in the head and mouth while cooking sausages. The killer was never found, but FBI agents believe the order came from the outfit’s new leadership.
One FBI report noted that the Gian Kana murder demonstrates that even after Ra’s death, his philosophy of discipline and secrecy continued to govern the Chicago organization. Gianana violated those principles and paid the ultimate price. Paul Ra had learned from Capone’s mistakes. He’d watched Capone chase fame and fortune and end up destroyed. Ra chose a different path.
Invisible power, patient planning, and absolute discipline. For 40 years, that strategy kept him alive, free, and in control of one of America’s most powerful criminal organizations. The final act. On the morning of October 11th, 1972, Paul Rico woke up in his modest two-story home at 1515 Bonnie Bray Avenue in River Grove, a quiet suburb 20 minutes west of downtown Chicago.
He had breakfast with his wife Nan. He had been married to her since 1927. He read the Chicago Tribune. He made a phone call to his attorney. And then just before noon, he collapsed in his living room. By the time the ambulance arrived, Paul Ra was dead. The cause was listed as a massive heart attack. He was 74 years old.
He had been under FBI surveillance for 45 years. And he died in his own bed, a free man surrounded by family with millions of dollars hidden in accounts the government would never find. The obituary in the Chicago Tribune described him as a retired real estate investor. It mentioned his wife, his daughter, and his grandchildren.
It did not mention that he had ruled the Chicago outfit for four decades, that he had ordered dozens of murders, that he had corrupted politicians and judges across the country, or that he was one of the most powerful gangsters in American history. But the FBI knew, and so did every mobster in America.
Ra’s funeral was held 3 days later at the Montlair Lucania funeral home on West Grand Avenue in Chicago. The same funeral home that had buried Frank Niti, Sam Gian Kana, and dozens of other outfit members over the years. The viewing was limited to family and close friends, but over 300 people showed up anyway. FBI agents set up surveillance across the street with cameras and telephoto lenses.
They photographed everyone who entered the building. Tony Accardo arrived first, dressed in a black suit, his face showing no emotion. Joey Aayupa came next along with Jackie Cerrone, Gus Alex, and a procession of capos, soldiers, and associates from across the city.
According to one Fabi report filed that day, subject RA’s funeral was attended by virtually every significant member of the Chicago Lacosa Nostra organization. The turnout demonstrates the level of respect and fear that RA commanded even in death. Inside the funeral home, RA lay in an expensive bronze casket, dressed in a dark suit, his hands folded across his chest.
Flowers surrounded the casket sent by legitimate businessmen, union officials, and politicians who owed him favors. None of the cards bore their real names. Tony Aardo stood beside the casket for nearly an hour, greeting mourners, accepting condolences, and quietly assuring everyone that the outfit would continue as it always had.
Because that is what RA would have wanted, stability, continuity, no wars, no chaos, no attention. One morning, a former outfit bookmaker who later cooperated with authorities described the scene. It was like a wake for a president or a king. Everybody who was anybody in Chicago was there. People were crying, not because they loved Paul, but because they understood what he represented.
He was the last of the old guard, the last boss who understood how to run things the right way. Ra was buried at Mount Carmel Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois. the same cemetery where Al Capone, Frank Niti, and dozens of other Chicago mobsters were buried. His grave marker was simple, just his name and dates.
No mention of power, no mention of crime, just another Italian immigrant who came to America looking for a better life. But Ra’s real legacy was not in the ground. It was in the millions of dollars he’d hidden over five decades of criminal enterprise. This was his hidden fortune. When federal agents and IRS investigators examined Ra’s estate after his death, they found assets totaling just over $200,000.
A house worth $60,000, a car, some furniture, a small bank account. For a man who had controlled one of the largest criminal organizations in America, it was absurd. Prosecutors knew Ra had made millions from the Hollywood extortion scheme alone. They knew he had taken cuts from every major outfit operation for 40 years.
Gambling, lone sharking, labor racketeering, prostitution, stolen goods. They estimated his real wealth at somewhere between 10 and 20 million, an enormous fortune in 1972, but they could not find it. Ra had been too careful. He had stashed money in Swiss bank accounts under false names.
He had purchased real estate through shell corporations. He had invested in legitimate businesses using frontmen. He had buried cash in safe deposit boxes that investigators would never locate. One IRS agent who spent years trying to track Ra’s money later said, “Paul Ra was the most sophisticated financial criminal I ever encountered.
He understood tax law better than most accountants. He knew how to hide money better than most bankers. We knew he had millions, but we could never prove it.” Ra’s family, his wife, his daughter, his grandchildren, inherited the $200,000 estate and nothing more. Or at least that is what they told the government. Decades later, mob historians and federal investigators still believe that Ra’s hidden fortune was quietly transferred to his heirs through intermediaries and offshore accounts, but nothing was ever proven. What made
Paul Ra different from every other mob boss of his era was his discipline. Al Capone could not resist the spotlight and ended up in Alcatraz, broke and brain damaged from syphilis. Lucky Luciano was deported to Italy and died in exile. Veto Genevves died in a federal prison in Atlanta. Sam Janana was murdered in his own kitchen.
John Gotti died in a federal supermax prison abandoned by his own family. Paul Ra died at home surrounded by loved ones with his wealth intact and his reputation untarnished by cooperation or betrayal. He never testified. He never cooperated. He never broke Omera. And he was never defeated.
Former FBI agent William Ror, who had tracked RA since the 1950s, attended the funeral surveillance operation. Years later, in his memoir, Ror wrote, “Paul Ra was the most dangerous man I ever investigated. Not because he was violent. He rarely was. Not because he was flashy. He never was, but because he was patient, intelligent, and utterly ruthless when necessary.
He understood that the best way to beat the law was to never give the law anything to use against you. And for 50 years, he did exactly that. After Ra’s death, Tony Aardo continued as the outfit’s elder statesman, but he was 76 years old and in declining health. Joey Aayupa took over day-to-day operations as the new boss.
The outfit remained powerful through the 1970s and the 1980s, but it was never quite the same. The generation that had built the Chicago outfit, Capone, Niti, Ra, Aardo, was gone. What remained were their successors, men who had learned the business but not the discipline. By the 1990s, federal RICO prosecutions had decimated the outfit’s leadership. Bosses went to prison.
Soldiers flipped and became cooperators. The golden age of the Chicago mob was over. But for 40 years, from 1932 until 1972, Paul Ra had ruled the most powerful criminal organization in America. He did it quietly. He did it carefully and he did it from everywhere. From a prison cell in Levvenworth, from a courtroom fighting deportation, from a modest house in River Grove, from the back room of a restaurant, and from a funeral home paying respects to fallen comrades.
Paul the waiter never wanted to be famous. He wanted to be rich, powerful, and free. And unlike almost every other mob boss in history, he died having achieved all three.