Paul Ricca

Paul "The Waiter" Ricca , actually Felice DeLucia (born November 14, 1897 in Naples , † October 11, 1972 in Chicago ), was an Italian-American mobster and head of the Chicago outfit .

history

In 1915 Felice DeLucia was sentenced to two years in prison for killing a man who wanted to testify against him in court. After serving his sentence, he boarded a ship on August 10, 1920 and emigrated to New York City , where he changed his name to Paul Ricca . Then he went to Chicago .

In Chicago he got a job as a waiter at a restaurant owned by Joseph "Diamond Joe" Esposito . This is where Ricca's nickname “The Waiter” comes from , although he quickly became a full-time gangster as the city's mobsters came and went in the restaurant.

Ricca soon came under the wing of Frank Nitti , who had succeeded the imprisoned Al Capone as leader; but especially among those of Johnny Roselli in Los Angeles . The Chicago outfit had expanded to the West and had influenced the film studios in Hollywood through the infiltration of the unions . Big film companies like RKO , Paramount Pictures , MGM and 20th Century Fox were skimmed off.

However, these machinations were exposed in the film industry and on March 18, 1943, a meeting took place at Frank Nitti's house, at which he was deposed. Ricca in particular feared the end of the entire outfit at the meeting if the administrative pressure continued. Nitti was a well-known gangster targeted by the press, police and judiciary. The following day, Nitti committed suicide.

However, this did not prevent the judiciary from continuing the ongoing investigation and on December 30, 1943 Ricca was sentenced to prison terms along with Phil D'Andrea , Johnny Roselli , Willie Bioff etc. Ricca and Co. were serving their sentences in Atlanta State Prison. The local leader Warden Joseph W. Sanford was a typical southerner, hated Italians and Catholics, and had a Ku Klux Klan background. When D'Andrea refused to eat in prison because of illness in order to have food brought to him from outside, Sanford ordered a urine test and then declined the request. Ricca herself tried to move to Leavenworth , which was closer to Chicago, but Sanford refused. The responsible supervisory authority in Washington did not speak out in favor of the move.

It was not until May 1945 that the multimillionaires Louis Campagna , D'Andrea, Charles “Cherry Nose” Gioe and Ricca managed to get the transfer done on the grounds that it was no longer reasonable for their families to pay the travel expenses to Atlanta. Although the Atlanta prison authorities protested, the transfer was carried out in July 1945. From Leavenworth, Ricca was back in business. Anthony Accardo visited him there under the name Joe Bulger . Accardo's tow was often Eugene Bernstein , a tax expert who had worked for the IRS for ten years . A deal was reached with the tax authorities, and when Harry Truman gave in to pressure from Chicago, the gangsters were allowed to be released, although prosecutor Boris Kostelanetz had strongly opposed it. However, when his position passed to General Clark , parole was granted immediately. Ricca, Gioe, Campagna and D'Andrea were released on August 6, 1947. After all, they had to accept a fine of $ 500,000. The outfit's attorney was later found to be a personal friend of the chairman of the parole board.

These remarkable circumstances ensured that the Chicago newspapers did their own research, which led to a hearing in Congress in September 1947. Accordingly, the outfit had contacted the New York families through Jake Guzik and had Frank Costello play his political contacts there.

After his release, Ricca acted as consigliere of the outfit , as the judiciary would probably not have tolerated his further action in the first line of the outfit . It is possible that Anthony Accardo and Ricca then formed a kind of leadership duo in which the weight shifted more and more to Accardo.

Ricca moved to Detroit in his later years and died of a heart attack on October 11, 1972.

literature

• Jay Robert Nash: World Encyclopedia of Organized Crime . First Paragon House, New York 1992.

Web links

• Paul Ricca on gangstersinc.tripod.com ( Memento from September 17, 2003 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
• Paul Ricca in the database of Find a Grave (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ "Friends In High Places" on www.ipsn.org of November 3, 2001 (English)

predecessor	Office	successor
Frank Nitti	Head of the “ Chicago Outfit ” of La Cosa Nostra 1943 - 1945	Anthony Accardo