Boosting the Big Tuna

WHEN JOHN MENDELL FIGURED THE DAYS OF THE CHICAGO OUTFIT WERE OVER, HE MADE A FATAL MISCALCULATION

Nothing was as it appeared at 1407 Ashland Avenue in River Forest, an affluent suburb west of Chicago. From the street, the ranch-style home—clad in buff-colored fieldstone—looked smaller and more subdued than the houses around it. By the first week of the new year the elderly owners were already ensconced in their warm-weather second residence and had a caretaker periodically drop by to make sure the furnace still worked and no pipes had burst. On the morning of January 7, 1978 the caretaker pulled into the semicircular driveway just as he had the day before. Michael Volpe was 75, white-haired and slight in stat­ure but still spry. After opening the sculpted double doors, he was prepared to work the buttons just inside to disarm the elaborate security system. But instead he stood transfixed in

the mirrored foyer. Something was wrong. Although there was no sign that the burglar alarm had been tripped, the house was in disarray. As he would later testify, he saw his boss's pants turned inside out and strewn about the hallway, a viola­tion that seemed to disturb him even more than the opened drawers and overturned furniture.

Almost every burglary is shocking, especially for the per­son who discovers it. But this was not your typical suburban break-in nor was the owner your typical victim. Volpe didn't pick up the phone to dial the police. In fact, he never reported the crime. The home's owner and Volpe's longtime employer,

Anthony Accardo, wasn't one to leave his troubles to the local authorities. For decades Tony "Big Tuna" Accardo had been leader of the Outfit, Chicago's Mafia, and some considered him to be the most powerful man in the history of organized crime. His long reign was due in good part to his willing­ness—even eagerness—to delegate authority to a coterie of able underbosses. But that day, at the age of 71, he hopped onto the next plane out of Palm Springs, prepared to take matters into his own hands.

Meanwhile, in the working-class suburb of Lincolnwood on the North Side of Chicago, there was another home in which nothing was as it appeared. This house, a sturdy two-story brick Georgian, was much bigger than the modest wood-frames on the rest of the block. As far as the neighbors were concerned, the homeowner, 31-year-old John Mendell, was a hardworking young man who ran the machine shop his father-in-law had established a few blocks away. He was

agents their best shot yet at busting Accardo, who despite his long criminal career had never spent a night in prison.

But no charges would ever come from the intensive inves­tigations that followed the burglar killings, and over the years the Accardo boost became another much-debated yarn in Outfit lore. When FBI agent turned crime writer Bill Roemer used the tale to open his book Accardo: The Genuine Godfa­ther, some journalists and police investigators scoffed. They argued the cascade of hits was just a heavy-handed Outfit campaign to collect street taxes from independent burglars and had little or nothing to do with the break-in.

This year, nearly three decades later, some of the mystery surrounding Mendell's death will lift, as a major racketeering trial gets under way in Chicago. The case, dubbed Opera­tion Family Secrets, pits U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald (of Valerie Plame fame) against some of the remaining leaders and enforcers of the Outfit, now but a shadow of its former

tall with shaggy dark hair and a full mustache, but such was the fashion of the day. No one questioned the source of the furs and jewels his older, redheaded wife wore. Nor did anyone appear to notice the late hours he kept—until he went missing and was found dead, on February 20, 1978, trussed and slashed in the trunk of his car. In newspaper accounts of the murder, he was described not as the enter­prising small-business man his neighbors knew but as a burglar, one of Chicago's top wire men, capable of defeating the most sophisticated alarm systems. In an equally bizarre turn, the media linked him to both the Accardo break-in, which took place 10 days before his disappearance, and a million-dollar jewel heist of the previous month.

Mendell was not the only one swept into the vortex of Accardo's fury. In just two weeks, four of Mendell's fellow boosters had been found dead in cars parked around Chi­cago. To cover the tracks of their killers, as many as four others would die in the coming months. Even caretaker Volpe would disappear. All in all it was a murderous spree unparalleled in the Outfit's modern era, and it gave FBI

self in the heyday under Accardo. The government charges that the Mob furthered its criminal enterprise by using an elite team of hit men to commit 18 murders. One of the killers, Nicholas Calabrese, will be a key witness. The most notable victim on the indictment's list is Tony Spilotro, the Outfit's incendiary Vegas enforcer and the basis for Joe Pesci's character in Martin Scorsese's Casino. According to prosecutors, Spilotro was killed in a Bensenville, Illinois basement and not in the Indiana cornfield where he was buried, as vividly depicted in the film.

Mendell is also on that murder list, along with two of his associates. According to the indictment, Nicholas Cal-abrese's older brother, Frank—the Outfit's most reliably vicious hit man—was among those dispatched to kill the burglars. Although the killings have received hardly any attention from the Chicago press, they remain the most fascinating of family secrets for Mob aficionados.

Questions will always remain about the break-in, but recent interviews with investigators and others involved with the crimes and the criminals offer new (continued on page 80)

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perspectives on why Mendell's crew would attempt the risky caper and why Accardo responded so ferociously. They also indicate how close the G came to put­ting Big Tuna in the can.

Gangster murders were nothing new to Chicago, but there was something out of the ordinary about the five bodies that turned up beginning in the early weeks of 1978: They were all left in cars in suburban parking lots on the edge of Chicago; the victims were all known burglars, some already targets of the FBI's Top Thief program, which put particular burglars under surveillance. But these bodies were also meant to be found, and the men were killed in ways that sent a message to other criminals.

First discovered was Bernard Ryan, 34, who was slumped behind the wheel of his brother's snow-encrusted Lincoln Continental with a trusty police scan­ner at his side. A renowned jewel thief and three-time convicted burglar, Ryan looked ready to go out on another job— until he was dispatched with a few bul­lets to the back of his head.

The next body to turn up belonged to one of Ryan's frequent boost partners, 29-year-old Steven Garcia. He didn't go so gently. His chest had been punc­tured five times with an ice pick, one of the Outfit's preferred means of torture, and his throat cut from ear to ear—Mob code for betrayal. When Garcia's kill­ers shoved his body into the trunk of a rented car, they left a gold chain around his neck so there would be no mistaking that he hadn't died in a robbery.

A few days later small-time crook Vin­cent Moretti, 51, and burglar Donald Renno, 31, were found in the backseat of Renno's Cadillac, parked behind a neigh­borhood bar. Both had been stabbed in the neck and head, but Renno may just have picked the wrong day to take his friend to breakfast. Moretti, a barrel-chested ex-cop, had been shown special attention before he died. He was stomped—the ul­timate Outfit sign of contempt—until his ribs broke and his kidneys ruptured.

Once it was clear the killings were linked, FBI agents were assigned to each victim to assist local homicide de­partments with the investigation. Bob Pecoraro had just been transferred to Chicago from New York City, where he had worked on some of the same tough guys portrayed in Nicholas Pileggi's book Wiseguy and its movie version, GoodFellas,

but he was still unprepared for Second City-style violence. "When I hear peo­ple start to glamorize these Mob types in movies and things," he says, "I just want to show them the body of Vincent Moretti so they can see how vicious and merciless these people can be."

But even Moretti did not prepare Pec-oraro for the corpse of Mendell, who had been the first to disappear and the last to be found, in the trunk of a used Oldsmo-bile. The car was parked by a meter in a rundown South Side neighborhood. A parking ticket, plastered among others on the windshield, indicated the car had sat, with Mendell in it, for more than a month in the Windy City cold. Pecoraro was there when they pulled Mendell out, his body folded and frozen like an iceman's in a glacier. "I had never seen anything like it," he says. "He had icicles in his eyes." Mendell's throat had been cut and his chest punctured like Garcia's, but a noose had been wrapped around his neck and then threaded behind him to bind his hands and ankles. The medi­cal examiner told Pecoraro that Mendell must have died an agonizing death. "As he was writhing in pain," he said, "he was tightening the noose, but it made him bleed that much more slowly."

Pecoraro found something else about the corpse especially curious. It was clad in only a brown velour sweater, a gold chain necklace and underwear. The ho­micide detective explained the killers had probably taken Mendell's pants so he wouldn't run away. "If I had known they were going to kill me," Pecoraro says, "I would have gotten out of there with or without my pants."

The torture visited on Mendell made him the focus of the investigation into the bur­glars' deaths. The Chicago Tribune initially described him as "an ex-convict who had served federal and state prison terms for theft, sale and possession of narcotics." But that record is hard to verify', along with much else about his background.

Some police first reported his name as Mandell, the sort of spelling they saw in Lincolnwood, a suburb with a large Jewish population. But according to Social Secu­rity records, Mendell hailed from South Dakota, where his name can be traced back to farm families who fled Ukraine to homestead on the Great Plains. His first known Chicago address, in a blue-collar South Side neighborhood, was recorded when he was arrested, at the age of 20, for

killing a narcotics snitch. His alleged part­ner in the crime was a cocktail waitress seven years his elder, whom the newspa­per described as a pretty, dark-eyed red­head. Prosecutors dropped the charges when their key witness's credibility was called into question.

In his few remaining years, Mendell somehow made the transition from low-level drug dealing to high-end burglary. He was next in the news at the age of 23 when he was arrested outside a Goldblatt Bros, department store, pretending to be a repairman called to fix the burglar alarm. By then his home address was on the North Side, in one of the ritziest high-rises on the city's lakefront.

John Volland, a retired lieutenant with the Chicago Police Department's Criminal Investigation Unit, would not have been surprised if Mendell had actually worked for an alarm company. "I often wondered who trained him," he says. "Other people had his capacity to get through burglar systems, but he was unique in knowing what he could get away with."

For a while it looked as if he could also get away with living a double life. Just two years after the Goldblatt arrest he was married and living in his nice Lincolnwood home. According to pub­lic documents, his wife, Victoria, was 12 years his senior, but Mendell looked older than his age, so perhaps they were a good match. According to Volland, they both appeared to be engaged in her father's tool-and-die business.

But during this time, Mendell also kept up with his booster buddies and still frus­trated police attempts to nail him. "The trouble with good thieves is they don't leave much behind," says Jack O'Rourke, an FBI agent who has spent his career pursuing them. Mendell carried police scanners, like other professionals, but he also had a sixth sense about surveillance, pulling to the side of the freeway when­ever he thought he was being tailed.

In 1971 Mendell was arrested again with some ominous associates, all home-boys from the South Side. The charge was stealing $250,000 worth of Bayer aspirin from a trucking depot. An FBI stakeout caught the boosters at a highway rest stop just as they were ready to cross state lines. Along with Mendell were three made members of the Outfit, including Sam Bills (the only one to serve time for the theft) and Ronald Jarrett, who would be arrested more than 50 limes for charges ranging from assault and burglary to rape. .Although Jarrett was never charged with murder, he was known inside the Outfit as a stone-cold killer. He was both neighbor and friend to Frank Calabrese and was ultimately gunned down in 2000 by a rival drug dealer.

For the FBI's Pecoraro, free-agent

criminals like Mendell were different

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from anything he had seen in the Big Apple. "At least in New York you had the families, so you could identify who was working with who," he says, "but Chicago was just a mess."

No caper typifies the crazy-quilt nature of Chicago crime more than the Levinson's jewelry burglary, one of the biggest Chi­cago scores of the 1970s. Stuck on a block with an adult bookstore and seedy bars, Levinson's didn't look like a good target for a high-value heist. Although Harry Levin-son insisted on being called a jeweler in the press, the word Icxnis was prominently dis­played on the sign over his store. Like any other pawnshop's, his windows were clut­tered with the faded and tacky.

But there was treasure buried inside. A relentless showman, Levinson had purchased one of the world's largest dia­monds, the 70.2-carat Idol's Eye, and every so often trotted it out for auctions, claiming he would accept only bids of more than $1 million. Although he had no takers by December 1977, he did attract another sort of unwanted attention. The Saturday night before Christmas, a crew of what police later described as highly skilled technicians made their own bid for Levinson's jewels. From the roof they threw a tarpaulin over the alley side of the building and used an acetylene torch un­der the shroud to cut through the bars on a second-floor bathroom window.

Once inside they found five differ­ent vaults to crack, a diabolical challenge. They came away with a haul worth more than $1 million in jewels and fur but didn't open the largest safe, which held the Idol's Eye. Not that they didn't try. They stayed through the day on Sunday and into the early hours of Monday morning. By the time they left, the water they had used to cool the metal their torches had cut stood inches deep on the showroom floor.

Some investigators now believe two dif­ferent crews may have teamed for the op­eration—one mostly Mob connected, the other independent. One thing was certain: Only Mendell could have engineered the elaborate setup that overcame the five dif­ferent alarm systems supposedly making Levinson's burglarproof. To maintain a continuous circuit Mendell trailed cables— camouflaged with garbage—100 yards down the alley, up the side of an apartment building and into a black box that sat in the middle of a vacant first-floor apartment.

After opening his doors that Monday, 80-year-old Levinson sloshed dumbstruck through the store. In 60 years of business he had never suffered as much as a robbery, let alone a heist of this magnitude. He called the police, but according to Roemer, in Gen­uine Gixljather, he also called Tony Accardo, who was soon seen lunching with Levinson

at Chez Paul, a restaurant not far from the store. Roemer writes that Spilotro (by this time based in Vegas) had fingered Mendell. In days, he asserts, the loot was coughed up and dutifully returned to Levinson.

Today no one intimately familiar with the Levinson's burglary or the Outfit be­lieves Roemer's rosy scenario is true. First, since Mob burglars were involved, Accardo wouldn't have needed Spilotro's help to identify the wire man. In addition, Accardo would probably have felt no obligation to return anything to Levinson other than a finder's fee. The jeweler had already filed a police report, which forced him to make an insurance claim, so he was likely to get something back for his loss.

As for the burglars, Accardo made them learn their place in the Outfit food chain. They were told to fork over Levinson's loot to Mob fences, who would charge far more in commission than independents.

Although Mendell's crew complied with these edicts, they regretted it im­mediately and let others know of their unhappiness. FBI agent Zack Shelton investigated their deaths and today has no doubt Mendell and some members of his crew went on to burglarize Accardo's house. "Obviously, it was a stupid thing to do, but it could have been a 'Screw you. Mob' sort of thing," he says.

The thought that Accardo would have kept the jewels in River Forest has always seemed the most preposterous part of the break-in story. But in the world of the Out­fit a little knowledge was a dangerous thing, and for anyone familiar with the history of Accardo's house, the notion of a hiding place would not have seemed far-fetched.

Ernest Hemingway once wrote that his hometown. Oak Park, was a neighbor­hood of "wide lawns and narrow minds." In that case. River Forest—Oak Park's neighbor—had even wider lawns if not narrower minds. The village is contigu­ous with Oak Park but almost exclusively residential, an enclave for a few thousand families. By the middle part of the 20th century it was home to industrial mag­nates, executives and professionals. As late as 1967 the village still required a mini­mum home-construction cost to "maintain a high-standard residential town."

Despite those standards, River Forest had another reputation—for housing the royalty of the Outlit. No doubt its proximity to downtown Chicago was a plus. It was also surrounded by gritty blue-collar suburbs where the crew leaders and their soldiers lived. Paul Ricca. Accardo's best friend, was among the first River Forest mobsters. A di­rect heir to Capone, Ricca nevertheless set a subdued tone with his stately Prairie-style home. When a Hollywood extortion racket he was involved in went awry, a federal prison became Ricca's principal residence. In his absence Accardo took the Outfit reins and never released them.

At five-foot-11, with broad shoulders,

Accardo was a big man by Outfit standards. To much of the world he was known as Tony. But to those who knew him best, he was Joe, as in Joe Batters, a nickname that harked back to his days in Al Capone's crew when he brought the great American pastime down on the head of anyone who dared defy his boss. If he made his bones with brute strength, he later made his mark with cunning: first when he organized Chi­cago's five Mafia groups into one clenched fist and next when he extended its reach all the way to California. His hammerlock on unions, the Teamsters in parucular. gave him access to the pension funds that built the Las Vegas strip for the Mob.

Accardo's River Forest lifestyle expanded as his criminal empire did. In 1951 he moved into a Roaring Twenties mansion built by the flamboyant manufacturer of Majestic radios. A monstrous English Tudor, it had 22 rooms, an indoor swim­ming pool and a bowling alley. L'nlike some of the other kingpins in town. Ac­cardo was no recluse. He sent his two sons and two daughters to local schools and threw open his doors to their friends and parents. On Fridays in his study he and his understated wife, Clarice, hosted movie night, showing first-run features direct from downtown theaters (supplied by his brother, who ran the projectionists union). Joe Batters himself would carry trays of hot dogs for the kiddies.

Such overtures went unreciprocated by his neighbors. The children were rarely invited to birthday parties. In a town where the country club was an important part of society, Accardo was blackballed when he applied for mem­bership. He finally gave up and bought his own golf course in a nearby town. Vet despite the snubs, his oldest daughter chose to live in River Forest and enrolled her children in the public schools.

Maybe to keep close to their grandchil­dren, the elder Accardos decided to remain in River Forest when they became empty nesters. In 1963 they purchased a corner lot on Ashland Avenue, down the street from where they had first lived in town, and commenced to build their retirement home. Accardo reportedly paid careful at­tention to the design, and to oversee con­struction he picked a local contractor who was also a neighbor: Van Corbin. who had changed his name from Sam Panveno and whose cousin ran the rackets in the south­ern suburbs. With this pedigree, Corbin was someone Accardo must have felt could be trusted, but his faith likely wavered two years later, after Corbin experienced finan­cial reverses. During negotiations with the IRS Corbin was encouraged to share the blueprints of 1407 Ashland, something he made the mistake of divulging to Accardo. Soon after, Corbin decided to downsize himself—from a house to an apartment— and checked his family into a courtyard motel the night before the move. The next morning, as another motel guest was shaving with his door open, he saw Corbin

being cornered in the parking lot by two tanned, muscular men wearing sunglasses. He watched as they pulled out .22-caliber pistols with silencers and gunned Corbin down—as professional a hit as you could see outside the movies.

The murder was never solved, and no further Accardo connection has been proved, but with Corbin's death 1407 Ash­land was born in blood and clouded with rumor, like a pirate's buried treasure. On the street, Outfit wiseguys would always wonder what was so special about the house that Accardo would kill to keep it hidden.

Vincent Moretti, the wisest wiseguy ever, was probably well acquainted with the Corbin story. He lis'ed in Elmwood Park, the working-class suburb just across the road from River Forest and near both Accardo's house and the motel where the contractor was killed. Any effort to make sense of the break-in story must tail back to Moretti. By stomping him, the Mob had singled him out for special punishment, perhaps because he should have known better. He was as much as 20 years older than the others and was, obviously, Italian.

But he could also have been beaten for playing a more pivotal role in the burglary plot than previously thought. There's some debate about whether he was given up by Mendell or his nephew, a burglar who worked with Mendell and also snitched to the Mob. But there is no doubt Moretti was in­volved with the break-in. When po­lice searched his possessions after his death, they found boxes of cuff links Accardo used to send out as Christmas gifts, items that could have come only from Big Tuna's home.

Moretti was no longer a burglar when he was killed but a fence for indepen­dents like Mendell, Garcia and Ryan. He had the most to lose when the bur­glars were forced to use Mob fences for the Levinson's loot. But could he have been blamed for encouraging Mendell and I he others to steal it again? Could he have been so reckless as to challenge Accardo? Those who knew him answer with an unqualified yes.

Born into a large brawling family, Moretti and two of his brothers started out as policemen but showed no in­clination for law enforcement. They killed and were killed. All were eventu­ally ousted from the force, and in 1968, after his conviction for burglary, the papers referred to Vincent as a hood. Although the Outfit always had its share of renegade ex-coppers, it wanted no part of Moretti. He worked as an inde­pendent and graduated to loan-shark­ing and fencing. Big and burly with a shaved bullet head, lie terrorized Chi­cago's swank bars and clubs, making obscene comments to attractive women and threatening to light their men.

Vice cop Andy Murcia had an un­nerving brush with Moretti when he was moonlighting as a security detective for the Ambassador East Hotel, then a Chicago hangout for visiting celebri­ties. He was summoned to the disco by the hotel's owner, who was appalled by Moretti's behavior at his bar. Describ­ing the incident for the website The Columnists.com, he writes, "All I saw was a tough-looking guy with a half-crazed look on his face. He was wear­ing an unbuttoned shirt that exposed his gorilla-hairy chest and too many gold chains." Coming up from behind, Murcia stuck his pistol in Moretti's back, identified himself as a policeman and escorted him out of the hotel. Left on the curb, Moretti swore revenge. Marshall Caifano, then an Outfit under-boss and mutual acquaintance of Moretti and Murcia, attempted to intercede. He commanded Moretti to stay away from the Ambassador East but warned the cop to watch his back. Caifano told Murcia that Moretti was "his own worst enemy." Even to an underboss Moretti could be "at times uncontrollable."

At this point Caifano, a tiny former enforcer, was in his late 60s. Like the septuagenarians Accardo and Joey Ai-uppa, his longtime right-hand man, he no longer had the physical presence to

strike fear in a mindless thug. But if Moretti thought the old men who ran the Outfit were literally toothless, he would soon be surprised.

Through spring and summer 1978, FBI agent.s Pecoraro and Shelton continued to make important breaks in the burglar case. The two were unlikely partners: Shelton was dapper with a neatly trimmed mus­tache, brushed-back hair and a distinctive Louisiana accent (one agent's wile called him the Cajun Casanova); short, dark and intense, Pecoraro was often confused by the mobsters with one of their own.

Between the two of them, they could disarm or intimidate just about anyone. In a chance meeting with Accardo's son-in-law, they got him to volunteer that there had been a burglary at 1407 Ashland and that the old man was so "pissed," he had rushed back from Palm Springs. In an­other break they tracked a low-level par­ticipant in the Levinson's burglary to a Texas campground, where he confirmed that the thieves were forced to give the loot back to the Outfit. Most important, they subpoenaed mobster phone records for the times prior to each murder. Although the records listed only the numbers that were dialed, they revealed a chain of calls, starting with Accardo and then branching

out to his underbosses (in particular to Aiuppa, then 71), the suspected hit men and ultimately to the victims. In each case it appeared that the burglars were being set up by someone they knew—perhaps on the ruse of participating in a juicy score.

Steve Garcia had already fled to Miami when another burglar lured him back to Chicago. Phone records show Mendell last talked to Ron Jarrett, his violent South Side buddy from the aspirin heist. FBI agents are convinced Jarrett assisted in Mendell's murder along with John "IJtde Tony" Bor-sellino, another, much slicker crew leader.

According to FBI agent O'Rourke, who had an informant who was friendly with Little Tony, the hit man later had qualms about what he'd done, especially when the informant told him Mendell had been "a real good kid." Borsellino replied, "That kid went through hell. We tortured him pretty bad. I feel like tearing up my union card now."

Borsellino went on to say the whole af­fair had gotten out of hand. He believed some burglars were killed who had noth­ing to do with the Accardo break-in, but when he suggested that to Aiuppa, the old man replied, "Kill all the burglars. They're all beefers [informants] anyway." Borsellino would be killed a year later but more mercifully, with a couple of .22s to the back of his head.

Before long Shelton and Pecoraro had enough evidence to empanel a grand jury. In October 1978 Michael Volpe, the elderly caretaker who had discovered the break-in, came to give his testimony. His lawyer did not arrive in time to brief him before he was called into the grand jury room. Even in his broken English, the caretaker blurted out more than his employer expected. Five days later he disappeared, never to be seen again.

While this was an unfortunate devel­opment for Volpe, it was no setback for the investigation. Shelton could then go

before a magistrate and request a search warrant for Accardo's home, claiming there was absolutely nowhere else to search for the missing witness. After three tries he got his warrant.

On November 11, 1978, with no warn­ing, Shelton, Pecoraro and a team of two dozen other agents assembled in the driveway of 1407 Ashland Avenue. As the Tribune reported, "The raid was believed to be the first time law enforcement au­thorities have entered and searched the crime lord's home."

Accardo had already left for California, so the agents summoned his 39-year-old daughter, Marie Kumerow, who lived a few blocks away, and asked her to open the door. At the sight of the agents, she balked. Shelton recalls, "She said, 'I don't think I can. Daddy will be really mad at me." Then I said, 'You don't understand. I have a search warrant. You can let us in, or we'll have to tear the door down. I think your dad would be madder if we have to tear down his front door.'"

Kumerow opened the door, but her sis­ter, 37-year-old Linda Palermo, soon ar­rived with Bernard Bruno, their father's obstreperous pint-size lawyer. "She was cussing us out, and he kept asking every­one for their name and number," Shelton says. The agents proceeded as delicately as possible through the house. Two agents were assigned to a room, and a floor leader would consult with a government lawyer before anything could be seized.

Once inside. Pecoraro could see that the first floor sprawled farther than he would have thought from the street, but aside from gold faucets in the bathroom he found nothing especially opulent. Plaques from churches and other charitable institu­tions hung on the wall, offering gratitude for Accardo's contributions. Pecoraro was assigned to the master bedroom, where he discovered a little black notebook in the nightstand. "It was filled with an amazing

amount of stock transactions in blue-chip companies," he says. "Hundreds and thou­sands of shares. It looked like he was trading in oilier names, too, but I wasn't allowed to lake it." Among the lew items they did take was a message pad from the kitchen, with the cryptic notation "Harry—-Jeweler."

Oddly enough the day's most impor­tant finds were in the basement. But the basement at 1407 Ashland was not just any basement. It was accessed through one of the mirrored panels in the foyer. Once down the stairs and past the restaurant-size stainless-steel kitchen, the agents saw a cavernous room more than 50 feet long that amazed everyone present. "You could fit the entire upstairs in that one room." Pecoraro says. It held a round conference table with 34 chairs and a movie screen.

To one side was Accardo's office. "When we opened the door," Shelton recalls, "the daughters were more interested to see the inside than we were. You could tell there were places in that house where they were not allowed." The heads of stuffed animals were mounted on the walls. The agents also remember several pictures of Accardo the angler, holding up big fish to make light of his nickname.

More disturbing was the furnace room with an array of open incinerators. They found a pair of glasses in one. "We couldn't get a prescription out of them because they were burned so badly," Shelton says. "But we all think they were Volpe's and that they burned him in there."

O'Rourke made the biggest discovery, behind an oversize door next to the walk-in cooler. It was pulled open to reveal a walk-in safe. This could have explained Accardo's secrecy about the house's con­struction; it may also have been what Men-dell and the other burglars were looking for. After a few more hours of negotiation the safe too was opened, revealing a vault 10 feet wide and 15 feet long. Levinson's jewels were not there, but something that

seemed almost as rewarding was: cash in bundles of $5,000 stacked inside a wine box—a total of $275,000. Two Smith & Wesson .38s sat on another shelf.

Since Palermo had testified for the grand jury that her parents' house held nothing of value, Shclton seized the money on the slim pretext that it was "the fruits of a crime—the crime of perjury."

I~he agents knew the source of the money. Other investigations had started to uncover the Outfit's methods for skimming casino cash. Working with the Federal Reserve, Pecoraro and Shelton could track most of the bills back to Las Vegas banks. The serial numbers in some bundles were still in the order they were printed at the mint.

As the grand jury investigation went into 1979, Pecoraro and Shelton thought they had the final piece to link Accardo to the killings. They were turning up the heat on Gerald Carusiello, a well-liked Outfit thief. Phone records showed him talking to both the Mob bosses and some of the burglars. He could have provided the bait that drew his friends to their death. Then, one night in September, Carusiello fell for such a trap himself. He was found dead outside a condo complex in the black clothes, gloves and hat of a booster. "We probably caused his death," Shelton says. "We were just about to revoke his parole to convince him to talk."

There was no one left alive—or willing to talk—who could Ue the deaths to Levin-son's, the break-in or the Mob bosses. Even­tually even the cash went back tea Accardo: An appeals court ruled it could not be seized unless it was tied to a criminal investigation. In his decision, the judge had fun with the case's "strange" facts. In one footnote, he writes, "An interesting question arises as to whom a 'known burglar' is known. If the government's theory is correct in this case, the occupation of the deceased persons in­volved must have been known to some lai^ge segment of the population. Such a reputa­tion could not have been advantageous and indeed must sometimes be fatal."

It was no laughing matter for the FBI agents who had worked on the burglar case. "It would have been nice if we could have seized that money." Shelton says, "but at least we kept it from him for 18 months."

Just a few years later the skim investi­gations would bear fruit with Operation Strawman, which won the conviction of Ai-uppa and other major Outfit underbosses. If the feds had had the cash from the safe, they would have snared Accardo, too, but he dodged another bullet, as he would do until he died, in 1992, at the age of 86.

If nothing else, the case spoiled the house for Accardo. In 1979, just months after the feds executed the search warrant, he put 1407 Ashland on the block. It has passed through only a few hands since. The incin­erators have been removed and a hot tub installed. A real estate agent says one owner used the safe to store her wrapping paper.

A parking ticket indicated the car had sat, with Mendell in it, for more than a month in the cold.