Covering the Mob

"Why bother us this way?" demanded Chicago's No. 2 hood of the reporter. The hood was Sam (Mooney) Giancana, general manager of Chicago mobdom, and at that particular moment last week he was doing nothing more than throwing a $20,000 wedding reception at the La Salle Hotel for his blonde daughter. The reporter was the Chicago Tribune's Sandy Smith, 39, who rarely misses the chance to crash a mob soiree. "Sure." pleaded Giancana, "some of us are ex-convicts. but are we supposed to surfer forever for a few mistakes we made in our youth? Look at that kid pointing to his new son-in-law, slicing the many-tiered wedding cake. Now everybody is going to hook him up with me. No one will hire him. I'll have to give him a .45 and put him to work for me."

As Reporter Smith pocketed the guest list, copied from place cards, Mobster Giancana grumbled volubly on. He had a sneer for congressional investigating committees ("They couldn't catch me for a year; I like to hide from them"), a boost for syndicated crime ("What's wrong with the syndicate? Two or three of us get together on some deal and everybody says it's a bad thing. But those businessmen do it all the time and nobody squawks"), the back of his hand for the draft board that rated him a constitutional psychopath in 1943: "Who wouldn't pretend he was nuts to stay out of the Army? I told them I steal for a living. They thought I was crazy but I wasn't. I was telling them the "truth."

Binoculars & a Bus. These quotes, startling from an executive of Chicago's tight-lipped underworld, made lively front-page reading in the Chicago Tribune last week. They could have been reaped only by the Trib's Sandy Smith, who knows the mob's pecking order better than most hoods, and far better than any other police reporter in town.

Ever since 1952, when the Trib assigned him to a series on Chicago-area gambling, Smith has relentlessly followed the mob. With a fellow Trib reporter, he crouched for days in a car near Chicago's taxicab union headquarters, discovered--by the simple reportorial expedient of training binoculars on the visitors, and now and then riding a city bus past the building for a close-in gander--that it was crawling with thugs, hoods and hired guns. Their nine-part expose mercilessly pinned Joey Glimco as the leader of this unsavory band, nominated Glimco for repeated uncommunicative appearances before federal rackets investigators. To this day Glimco spits at Smith whenever the two meet.

Like a Picnic. Smith also specializes in covering the mob's social functions as an uninvited and unanimously undesirable guest. In 1956 he borrowed a room in a neighboring house to survey a gala Fourth of July garden party flung by No. 1 Mobster Tony Accardo. Stung by all the publicity, Accardo subsequently shifted the party to the home of his chauffeur.

By going to the mob's weddings, wakes and funerals, Smith says. "I get a good idea of who's in the mob and whom they're dealing with, and what's new." Other reporters, possibly in envy, suggest that this kind of intimate coverage can only goad gangland into throwing something more substantial than Joey Glimco's cud. But big (6 ft., 210 Ibs.), confident Sandy Smith has built no barricade around his Woodstock home, where he lives with his wife and four children. "If you cover the mob," he says, "you expect to get cursed and spat at. But you're as safe as if you were covering a Sunday-school picnic."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.