Richard Cain wore a badge, worked for the Chicago Outfit, and developed secrets that made him dangerous to both sides.
Retired Kansas City Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins welcomes Michael Cain, Richard’s half-brother and author of The Tangled Web: The Life and Death of Richard Cain, Chicago Cop and Mafia Hit Man. Drawing on family letters, police records, court transcripts, and interviews, Michael traces Richard’s path from Chicago vice detective to a trusted associate of mob boss Sam Giancana.
Michael describes allegations of police payoffs, compromised investigations, a leaked jury list in Tony Accardo’s case, and a staged recovery of stolen pharmaceuticals. He also discusses Richard’s wiretapping work in Cuba, his years in Mexico, and the convictions that sent him to federal prison.
The conversation builds toward Michael’s account of Richard’s extraordinary plan to eliminate the Outfit’s leadership—and his murder at Rose’s Sandwich Shop before that plan could unfold. It’s a family perspective on one of Chicago’s most complicated underworld figures, with Gary bringing a detective’s eye to the difference between Richard’s stories and the evidence he left behind.
In this episode:
• Richard Cain’s relationship with Sam Giancana.
• Cash envelopes and corruption inside the Chicago police.
• His rise to lead Cook County’s Special Investigations Unit.
• Tony Accardo’s jury list and the FBI’s response.
• Criminal cases, prison, and Richard’s return to Mexico.
• Michael’s account of a planned takeover of the Chicago Outfit.
• The fatal ambush at Rose’s Sandwich Shop.
Featured book: The Tangled Web: The Life and Death of Richard Cain, Chicago Cop and Mafia Hit Man by Michael Cain.
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Transcript
Gary Jenkins: [00:00:00] Hey, welcome all you wiretappers out there. It’s Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective back here in the studio. I’m going to Chicago today. I know a lot of Chicago fans out there will be looking forward to this show. I have Michael Cain on here, and Michael Cain you may not know that name, but I’ll bet you know Richard Cain, his brother.
And Michael’s written a book called The Tangled Web: The Life and Death of Richard Cain, Chicago Cop and Mafia Hit Man. And Richard Cain , a complex man, I would say. So welcome, Michael.
Michael Cain: Thank you. Thank you.
Gary Jenkins: Would you say your brother was a complex individual?
Michael Cain: He defines complex.
Yeah.
Gary Jenkins: That’s what I thought. So before we get on into, as an adult, tell me about Richard Cain as a brother. What was he like when you guys were kids, ?
Michael Cain: Let me first clarify that he was a half brother.
His mother was my father’s first wife.
And his mother, Lydia was [00:01:00] the daughter of Italian immigrants from northern Italy. She was one of the first, one of the first people that I met when I started my research. She was reluctant to speak to me. She was a very paranoid individual. And when we finally did meet face-to-face she took a liking to me.
Whenever I would see her, she would give me artifacts, newspaper clippings that she had accumulated over the years and and other things that, that kept me going. And she would mail things to me. She wrote to me two or three times a month.
And he was 17 years older than myself. I grew up in a small town in Michigan, and when he got out of the military, he moved there with his first wife. And that didn’t [00:02:00] last very long because he and my father were, had a very contentious relationship.
He tended bar in a downtown saloon for a while. And that was in the early ’50s. He went to work when he came out of the Army. He went to work for a private investigator in Miami.
And while he worked for that guy John Buenz He’s, he had a lot of clients in Cuba, Buens did. So Richard would would go to Cuba frequently. He was adept at tapping telephones. That was his primary what he brought to the table there. And one of their primary clients was Fulgencio Batista- who was then the president of [00:03:00] Cuba. Richard tapped a lot of phones in Cuba because Batista wanted to know what the communists were up to. That was his primary goal. He feared the communists. After a couple of years in Miami, he moved back to Chicago. He took a job with UPS.
He was head of security for UPS in Chicago. And that was w- when I started my research, that was one of the first places where I found relatively hard evidence of his call it his crooked side. He one of the biggest deals that he was involved in there was there was a, a big company function off-site, and Richard went to this with his boss and left his keys with a, with an associate.
I’m not sure who that [00:04:00] was. But they used the keys to get into the building, into the warehouse, and they stole a boatload of stuff, even a couple of full trailers and of course Richard was not considered a suspect because he was with the bus all night. While he was working at UPS he took a course in polygraph.
He was just building his resume. And around that time in the ’54, ’55 he was encouraged by Sam Giancana to join the police department. Sam was a, an old family friend on, on his mother’s side. She had known Sam since he was a kid. He applied to the police academy and they [00:05:00] discovered that , he had a vision problem and he was too short.
I’m not sure what the standards are today, but then you had to be 5’8″ to join the police department, and he was 5’7″.
That was a problem to him. He was disappointed. He told Sam about it, and Sam said, ” here’s 500 bucks. Give it to the doctor.”
He’s doing a physical.” And that took care of everything on that side of it. His graduation photo from the police academy, he also had terrible vision.
And so he’s in the lineup for the graduation photo, and he’s clearly the shortest guy- … on the stage, wherever that was, and the only one wearing glasses.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah. And back then you really had stringent tests on the eyes. Even when I came on in 1971 a lot of people didn’t get on because they really couldn’t correct it quite enough.
[00:06:00] Yeah, he probably had another $500 bribe he had to pay for that one too.
Michael Cain: I think he did. And his vision that, that was tested when he went to prison, his his vision was, like 20/400.
Gary Jenkins: Oh, wow.
Michael Cain: And at the time of his death he was legally blind and was not allowed to drive.
Oh, that takes us to, ’56 was when he graduated from the academy
Gary Jenkins: So he’s like a young district policeman with the Chicago PD that he starts off with, like everybody does. And then how, did he gravitate into the investigations parts?
Michael Cain: He within a year he was a, a detective. And that, that doesn’t happen unless you-
Gary Jenkins: Yeah
Michael Cain: have a really close relationship with the chief of detectives. ’57 he became a, a detective assigned to the vice squad And he [00:07:00] developed close relationships with a number of prostitutes. I actually have a list of the women that he knew, and I don’t have any proof of how close he bonded with them, but it was generally accepted that he was a regular user.
And his first bad run-in with the PD happened in ’59. He came to visit us as he did frequently in Michigan, and he told us this story about he and his partner, Jerry Shallow having an an encounter with a pimp behind the bus station in downtown Chicago.
And they attempted to arrest him and he pulled a weapon and started shooting. [00:08:00] And as Richard told the story to me and to our family he fired three rounds at the bad guy and missed.
Richard always carried a .38 Special. Jerry Shallow carried a Magnum.
357. So they were on opposite sides of the alley, in his telling. And he had fired three rounds and missed, and Jerry Shallow yelled at him from across the alley, “That’s pretty lame, Cain. Let me show you how to do it.” And he fired a single round, hit him in the head and killed him.
That’s the story that Richard told me, and for which he received a a citation from the command structure at the Chicago PD. Fast-forward a lot of years when I got into my research I [00:09:00] discovered that there was a, a wealth of information available to me through the Freedom of Information Act w- within the Chicago PD.
So I got I don’t know, 40 or 50 pages from them. One of the documents was a series of letters from the attorney for the deceased. The, the attorney was , a young guy just out of law school. And he knew that the Harry Figel was the bad guy. And his attorney a young guy named Kelly- Was doing almost totally criminal work be- because fresh out of law school
so he and Figel had become relatively good friends.
The attorney wrote to the police department after Figel was killed and he said, this, [00:10:00] this story is not true.” That actually Richard and Jerry Shallow abducted this guy on the South Side.
They took him downtown into the bus station or behind the bus station and and executed him essentially. , The proof in the pudding was the fact that the shot that killed him entered in the back of his head.
The upshot of that was that the, the lawyer had it pretty straight, and he had witnesses who had seen Figel be abducted So that’s, that was an interesting for me seeing both sides of that story.
Gary Jenkins: Really?
Michael Cain: The Chicago PD,
Gary Jenkins: did they just kick that under the rug then? It just, like it never happened?
Michael Cain: They gave him a citation for-
Gary Jenkins: Yeah. [00:11:00] They called it a- After- … a clean bill … after all that. Oh, wow. That’s crazy. So he did he graduate on into detective work? What kind of detective work did he do?
W- he was in the vice squad, I assume he probably was helping the Outfit with their gambling, did you find any evidence about that?
Michael Cain: Yeah. The the absolute truth of the matter is that as I said earlier he joined the police department at the behest of Sam Giancana.
Sam wanted a a a bag man that he could trust.
Richard wound up working, doing police work for about four or five days out of the month. And the rest of the time was spent visiting all the precincts, handing envelopes to the the cops that were that would accept them.
And I found that, and a number of them did not accept them. O- one in particular was, , a [00:12:00] lieutenant with the PD who I interviewed several times and he told me that he was offered by Richard an envelope of cash and he said, I don’t want anything to do with that. I’m not gonna take money t- for doing my job except from the city.” So he figured that he’d get heat for that a- and possibly even get whacked.
But he said that ultimately there was no pushback at all. They said, “Fine, if you don’t want it we’ll distribute it elsewhere.”
There was a, a columnist for the Chicago American at the time. He eventually wrote for all of the newspapers in Chicago. He told me that one night Richard called him and said, “Come with me, I wanna show you something.”
So they sat in a car across the street from one of the precincts. [00:13:00] And at that time someone else was the actual bag man, but Richard and this guy watched the people walk in and walk out. And guys that were off-duty and meeting with a guy that Richard identified.
And he said they sat there for almost three hours watching the money come in and come back out with, in the hands of different people.
Gary Jenkins: So let me understand this. He had been the bag man for Sam Giancana, taking envelopes of cash around to corrupt policemen all around Chicago.
Then he graduates from that. He’s not doing that anymore. And he gets with a newspaper reporter, and then takes him out and shows him how that whole scheme was working. That’s right. Richard Cain was a duplicitous son of a gun, wasn’t he, boy?
Michael Cain: He was a- [00:14:00]
Gary Jenkins: Man …
Michael Cain: the next trouble spot for him happened in 1960.
He was hired by , the chief investigator for the Cook County state’s attorney. And this guy said that they were worried about an election coming up. And Ben Adamowski was the was a Republican and he held the DA spot. So they wanted Richard to gather evidence to discredit this guy f- with the in the upcoming election.
He was never trained in intelligence work officially, so he didn’t really know how to do that. He rented an office across the hall from Adamowski, and put a camera up in the transom so that he could, capture who was coming to visit this guy. It took about four hours [00:15:00] for them to figure out that there was a camera in the transom.
So they called the police. The police came and there was it was just, so obvious what they were trying to do. Richard was given two options. He could s- face arrest or he could resign. And Jerry Shallow told a bit of a different story, so he was allowed to stay on the police department was docked some pay.
But Richard had to resign.
Gary Jenkins: So now, this Jerry Shallow, you mentioned him before. . They were just partners all along- They were … been partners in vice, and just continued to work different things together?
Michael Cain: Yeah. And they eventually became very close.
Gary Jenkins: Okay.
Michael Cain: Jerry the only murder that is clearly attributable to Richard was a woman in Indianapolis [00:16:00] who had, had dated a a mobster.
They broke up and she was threatening to write a story about their relationship and his relationship with the outfit. This guy decided that she had to go. He had hired three different hitmen one simply took the money and moved to Arizona. One simply ignored the guy, kept the money.
And Richard was the third one. So he and Jerry Shallow drove to Indianapolis found this woman followed her to a Kmart parking lot where her mother went into the store to buy some things and the woman stayed in the car waiting for her mother. Richard walked up to the car and shot her pretty much point-blank through the [00:17:00] window.
And off they went. An- another really stupid mistake that he made was on the way out of Indianapolis, he threw the gun out the window and I don’t know a whole lot about being a criminal, but throwing a gun out the window on the freeway makes no sense at all. You throw it in the river throw it in a pond or something.
Gary Jenkins: How did you find out about that? Was this Indianapolis police reports that’d be something that would really be kept on the down low at the time.
Michael Cain: Yeah, at the time it was they didn’t do much of an investigation. But a number of years later Jerry Shallow was arrested on a burglary charge and actually went into witness protection.
I have a copy of his confession.
He released all the details
Gary Jenkins: That is really interesting. Richard is…
doing all these different things. He’s working for the mob. [00:18:00] He’s not working for the mob, but yet he’s working for the mob. And he goes into the Cook County Sheriff’s Office. He leaves the police department, under a cloud af- by this point in time. He goes to Cook County Sheriff’s Office, correct?
Michael Cain: He clearly under a cloud, but what he did then was he moved to Mexico.
Gary Jenkins: Oh, that’s when he moved to Mexico?
Michael Cain: The first time. He,
Started a business i- in Mexico City, where he taught polygraph to the members of the Supreme Court.
And polygraph was, is acceptable in, a trial in Mexico. It was.
Gary Jenkins: I remember reading that he spoke Spanish pretty well. I have to assume that he started out learning Spanish when he did that first gig with the Cubans and for Batista.
And he learned Spanish then, and then he’s refined it over the years.
Michael Cain: Yeah. Of course he spoke Italian before he spoke Spanish.
Gary Jenkins: Ah.
Michael Cain: But th- that helped him absorb the Spanish more [00:19:00] quickly- Yeah … than some folks might have. In 1960 he went to Mexico and he he did investigative work for Batista again because Batista was thinking that he could reclaim his position after Castro took over w- at the end of ’59.
And I guess it was the first of January of ’50. Anyway, he he did work back in Cuba. He did work throughout the the region for other governments. Almost always doing wiretaps that were focused on finding communist sympathizers. He maintained a correspondence with Richard Ogilvie who had been a prosecutor, a federal prosecutor in Chicago.
He hired Richard as an investigator when they were trying [00:20:00] to prosecute Tony Accardo. Richard and Tony Accardo were well acquainted with one another. And so he was able to on Accardo’s behalf get a copy of the jury pool for Accardo’s trial And an FBI agent named Bill Roemer found out that through a, a bug that he had in the mob headquarters found out that they had this jury pool.
‘Cause he recorded conversations where they were going through the list to see if anybody recognized a name, somebody that they could bring over to their side. And he r- Richard had acquired that list while working for Richard Ogilvie, who I don’t know if you recognize that name.
He later became sheriff of Cook County- … and then governor of Illinois. [00:21:00] Bill Roemer, the FBI agent, went to the judge who was oblivious to that, that risk. So he got an agreement, made an agreement with the judge to pitch that jury pool and announce on the first day of trial that they had a new jury pool which the mob hadn’t had a chance, wouldn’t have a chance to to work through.
So that was in in the early ’60s. And around that time he and Ogilvy were in regular correspondence. And bec- because Richard’s mother l- liked me like a son, she gave me all of Richard’s letters. All of the letter- letters that he wrote to her [00:22:00] And among those were a number of copies of a number of letters that that he shared with, that he wrote to Richard Ogilvie.
And he was clearly developing that relationship, taking it to the next level. Chicago, the City of Chicago is a, I think still today is a clearly a Democratic, Yeah … city. But Cook County is clearly Republican. N- no one running for sheriff, no Democrat running for sheriff had won since the 19th century.
Ogilvie really wanted that job, so R- Richard volunteered to help him with his campaign. He left Mexico to come and work on the campaign. When he got to Chicago, he sat down with Ogilvie and said, “I can guarantee this [00:23:00] election, but there’s something I want in return, and that is I wanna be named chief, essentially chief of detectives chief of a new branch called the Special Investigations Unit.”
And Ogilvie w- went for that. Said, “Okay if we win the election, you’ll get that job.” So Richard went to work. You’ve heard, everybody’s heard the stories about the voter fraud in Chicago back in those days.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Michael Cain: So they lined up, Richard lined up a, a group of guys who would go to polling stations and approach people.
They had a formula for who they would approach and greet them outside the polling place and offer to pay them $5 if they would vote for Richard Ogilvie.
And they would [00:24:00] actually, I don’t know what it was like in Kansas City but they used to have curtains that, that came in behind you in a polling booth- they would go into the booth with the voter-
to make sure that he pulled the lever for Ogilvie.
Gary Jenkins: . I think they have rules today maybe still that only one person can be in the voting booth alone.
Michael Cain: Exactly.
Gary Jenkins: They did the same thing in Kansas City. I know a guy, when he was a young kid, he said he’d go meet this one state senator who, i- on Election Day, and the senator’d have a huge big wad of $1 bills, and they’d just go around to the different precinct passing out the money and say, “Here’s who you vote for.”
They didn’t follow them in to make sure they did it, but everybody, did it ’cause they knew what side of the bread got the butter. So same all over. Yeah.
Michael Cain: Ogilvie won the election against all odds. And on election night he had a, a, a party of sorts in his hotel suite.[00:25:00]
And I’m still trying to remember this guy’s name who wouldn’t take the bribes at the police department. He had been offered a position by Ogilvie to take over as chief of the patrol division.
And nobody knew anything about his Ogilvie’s continued relationship with Richard Cain.
But on election night when the, the polls clearly showed that he was wi- gonna win, he brought in these key people and he announced that he had appointed Richard Cain as chief of the Special Investigations Unit.
Gary Jenkins: That’s what we call the fox in the henhouse there, man.
Michael Cain: Exactly. He Ogilvie said, “No, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna change it.” So Richard Cain became the chief and started bringing in his guys under him. [00:26:00] And I’ve spoken with a couple of the, the guys who worked for him in those days and the the stories
Gary Jenkins: It’s good. It’s interesting as hell.
Michael Cain: He he used his position as chief of the Special Investigations Unit to extort money from the Outfit. He told Tony Accardo and the next guy in line that, “You will pay me $5,000 a month. And in return for that when we have to raid a, a house of prostitution or a gambling operation, w- we’ll either, I’ll either kill it or I’ll give you a heads up so you can clean it up so that when the cops come in, they can’t find anything.”
A- and so he used his position to bring in a lot of personal money for [00:27:00] himself. A- and there was a, a, a burglary done at a, a drug a drug distribution warehouse. It was burglarized. They took, I can’t remember exactly, a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of drugs. And Richard tried to negotiate with the insurance company to return those drugs if they would pay him some money. And that negotiation fell apart.
So Richard rented a, a motel room, and one of his lieutenants rented a motel room, and they and they filled it up with about $50,000 worth of those drugs.
Somebody tipped the cops that this was happening, so they they… he brought press with him a lot [00:28:00] of times and on this instance he brought a couple of reporters with him. There was a, a, a photograph in the Chicago Tribune of Richard standing with one foot on a case of drugs and holding a Thompson submachine gun.
One of the reporters was talking with the manager of the motel and asked to see the registration slip for that h- that, that room, and he recognized the handwriting of this lieutenant who, who works for Richard. So he notified the cops. Long story short Richard and three of his guys were tried and convicted of perjury since they, they lied to the grand jury.
Those three of those convictions were later overturned. And R- Richard was was happily [00:29:00] overturned, but he was recharged later on w- when the, there was a, a bank robbery. I’ll… That’s a, an interesting story that All trials result in a transcript and I was given a copy of the trial transcript when Richard was charged with what they call misprision of felony, which, which is not telling a government official when you know a crime has been committed.
The bank robbers had been arrested within a half a day of the robbery. They just… it was four days, before they were all scooped up. Willie Potatoes Todano specifically, asked Richard to polygraph the, the robbers to find out which one of them had, had ratted to the cops.
It turned out that nobody did, but they were just upset that it, they all got arrested so, so [00:30:00] rapidly. So Richard had, and o- one of his lieutenants Bill Witzman meet the, the gang at a motel, and he polygraphed them all. One of them failed the polygraph. And he was murdered six months later, so Richard was arrested and went on trial he m- maintained that it never happened because he wasn’t physically there. Bill Witzman, the guy who actually administered the polygraph, testified against against Richard, which, left him no, no wiggle room.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah.
Michael Cain: So he was sent to the federal penitentiary in Texarkana for f- four years.
And along the way they recharged him with [00:31:00] the, the drug company case. So he had to plead to that in order to avoid another trial. So they added six months to his sentence of for that he served about three and a half years of that sentence a- and again wrote a number of letters to his mother.
And just the, the stories that he told were, you can’t necessarily believe anything that he says- … but he told some fantastic stories. One of, one of which was, it’s not really relevant to the criminality of his life, but there was a guy a- another organized crime guy in prison with him, and this guy was a stone cold killer, a hit man.
And he and Richard were [00:32:00] close because Richard was the only guy in, in Texarkana who spoke Italian. So it was the only guy that this guy could talk to.
Anyway, they became good buddies. Richard was assigned to work in the laundry, and he s- he started messing with this guy when he’d pick up his clothes, he’d give him pants that were an inch smaller than- what he was used to.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah.
Michael Cain: And he’d say, “God, “I’m gaining weight. I don’t know why.” So anyway he gets out of prison in ’71 and went to, went back to Mexico and shared a house in Cuernavaca with Sam Giancana. I don’t have any solid proof of this, but I’ve heard from enough people that I’m inclined to believe it that he and Sam [00:33:00] traveled the world making deals.
They’d attempted to get casinos on cruise ships. They were gonna get a casino in Tehran in Iran. Richard had a girlfriend who was a young woman who was close with his twin daughters. She told me that Richard invited her to go along to Mexico one time. They stayed for a couple of weeks and they were coming back, and it was her and Richard and Sam in the car, and he had a, a, a secret route to get across the border.
And they stopped for a, a rest at one point, and Richard invited this, this young woman to the rear of the car, and he said, “I just, I thought you might enjoy seeing why we go through all of these hoops to get out of Mexico and into the US.” He opened a shoebox [00:34:00] that was a standard size shoebox-
Halfway filled with diamonds.
And the FBI has long, had long suspected Sam of smuggling diamonds. They came from South America. But and they were all gone when Sam died a few years later.
He and Sam had some sort of a falling out, Richard and Sam.
Gary Jenkins: Now, is this after Sam came back and established residence back up in Chicago just before he got killed- … and then Richard comes back at the same time?
Michael Cain: No. Sam was still in Mexico.
R- Richard put together a a scheme to take over the outfit in Chicago And he he approached two of his closest friends and asked them to participate. They both said no. So he hired hit men from [00:35:00] Mexico because he, at that point, he couldn’t trust anybody in Chicago to, keep this a secret.
Richard had a driver at the time. He was unable to see well enough to drive. He had a driver, and the driver was a good deal younger than Richard. He thought he had a career in the outfit. He chose the outfit over Richard and told them what he was planning to do.
He was gonna kill all of the leadership in Chicago- … and be the last man standing. He was in a s- in a park in downtown Chicago with a, a girlfriend of his, and sh- she heard, she felt something go through the, her hair. It turned out to be a bullet but it didn’t hurt her.
And Richard recognized at that point that he was in a great deal of [00:36:00] danger but he didn’t wanna make any changes to the plan. He continued on with his planning
Gary Jenkins: Was he trying to recruit other guys?
Michael Cain: No, no Chicago guys.
Gary Jenkins: No Chicago guys.
Michael Cain: He recruited hitters from Mexico.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah. Just trying to figure how he thought that he was gonna step right in, because he’s been out of the country for quite a while and he doesn’t have a patron within the outfit that other people, have confidence in and look up to.
Michael Cain: He didn’t have a pa- patron, especially considering that he was planning to kill them all.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah. I’m not sure how he thought that would work, but I guess- … maybe he was,
Michael Cain: I can’t explain it.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah.
There’s a lot of things about Richard Cain that are unexplainable.
Michael Cain: That’s true. That’s true. On the 20th of December- He, this, this mass execution was gonna happen on New Year’s Eve, [00:37:00] and that was built around the, the fact that Sam spent every New Year’s Eve in, in Hawaii. And he would have been the easiest to get to. And the rest of the, the hits in Chicago re- required a, a good deal more planning.
So on the 20th of December that year, he was murdered in a, a restaurant on the west side.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah. It’s Rose’s Sandwich Shop. That’s a famous hit there. I- It is. Yeah … I understand that Frank Schweihs, Frank the German, and maybe Joey Lombardo might have been the hitters on that.
Michael Cain: Joey Lombardo-
was definitely there. The list just expands out from there. But- Yeah … Frank Schweihs was definitely on the short list. And I have I’ve spoken to several cops who were there. An intelligence detective told me that , he and his partner had been assigned [00:38:00] to follow, this guy that Richard had some difficult times with. And they followed him that morning, picked him up at his house and followed him i- into town.
And they were chatting sitting in the their car. They saw this guy go into Rose’s and they said geez, I don’t wanna sit around here just watching him eat lunch while we’re getting hungry.” So they drove off and went someplace else for lunch.
About 40 minutes later they got a call on a radio that there’d been a shooting at Rose’s, and they said, “Damn, we were just there.”
Gary Jenkins: Yeah. I think that might have been Marshall Caifano. I think I read somewhere where Marshall Caifano had gone into Rose’s and then left just before- Then what? … the, the hit went down
Michael Cain: Yeah, he was the one,
Gary Jenkins: . All right, Michael Cain, this has been great. Guys, the book is The Tangleddd Web: The Life and Death of [00:39:00] Richard Cain, Chicago Cop and Mafia Hit Man, and this is his brother, Michael Cain, and he really, you did a lot of great research you got those court transcripts, you talked to people who were actually involved at the time.
It’s really gonna be a good solid factual story of your brother, Richard Cain.
Michael Cain: It was a, it was an amazing bit of research and I’m a, a writer by trade. Actually I was an accountant when this all started.
Gary Jenkins: Now you’re a writer.
Y- do you have a lot of pictures, documents, and stuff in it, too?
Michael Cain: Yeah. Yeah there’s, in the, the, the book, which is available on Amazon, there’s eight or 10 pages of photographs from Richard’s life.
Gary Jenkins: All right. Great. One last question, did do a FOIA? Were you able to get any help from the CIA about his involvement in the anti-Castro movement down there?
Did you get documents from them?
Michael Cain: They of course denied that they were involved in that. But one thing [00:40:00] I meant to drop in was that in the early ’60s Richard called my father, our father and he was always trying to rebuild his relationship with his father. And so he was pleased to share with his father that he would…
had just come back from Cuba where he had been sent to assassinate Fidel Castro.
And he later told people that I know that he had a female accomplice. They actually got into the the presidential palace there. He had a female accomplice who was captured and killed.
Richard made it out.
Gary Jenkins: All right. Richard Cain, The Tangled Web: The Life and Death of Richard Cain, Chicago Cop and Mafia Hit Man. And guys, I’ll have a link to buy this book on Amazon. I think you’ll really like it. You really give that behind-the-scenes, a different view of the Chicago outfit than a lot of the other books have…
That are out [00:41:00] there. So thanks a lot, Michael.
Michael Cain: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.