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In this episode of Gangland Wire, host Gary Jenkins takes listeners deep into one of the most chilling and revealing moments in Chicago mob history—a secretive 1967 party for Mob stalwart, Fi Fi Buccieri. It was held at the legendary Edgewater Beach Hotel. What appeared to be a lavish celebration was, in reality, a tightly controlled gathering of roughly 300 mobsters, political figures, and underworld insiders. The occasion marked the 40th birthday of feared Chicago Outfit enforcer Fiore “Fifi” Buccieri, a man whose reputation for violence made him one of the most dangerous figures in the city.
Despite not being invited, veteran journalist Bob Wiedrich managed to infiltrate the event, raising serious questions about security, secrecy, and the gathering’s true purpose. This was no ordinary party. Federal surveillance later revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had the room bugged, capturing disturbing conversations—including laughter and casual recollections of torture and murder by Buccieri and his associates.
Central to this episode is Buccieri’s alleged role in the brutal torture and murder of William “Action” Jackson, a crime that horrified even seasoned law-enforcement agents. These wiretap recordings provide rare insight into the mindset of mob enforcers and the normalization of extreme violence within the Chicago Outfit during the 1960s.
The timing of the party was critical. Chicago boss Sam Giancana had recently been released from prison, and rumors swirled that major power moves were underway. Evidence suggests this birthday celebration doubled as a covert mob summit, where leadership issues, alliances, and strategic decisions were quietly discussed away from public view. This party was a who’s who of the Chicago Outfit. Men like Mike Glitta, Teets Battalgia, Ceaser DiVarco, Ross Prio, Larry The Hood Bounaguidi, Irvin Weiner, Dominic DiBello, Wee Willie Messino, Joseph Cortino ( former chief of police in Forest Park and several others.
You will learn how Anthony Accardo and his driver Jackie Cerone avoided the scene when the cops started taking pictures and writing down names. I also explore the role of the Santa Fe Saddle and Gun Club, an organization tied to questionable fundraising activities that blurred the lines between organized crime, business interests, and local politics. These raffles and social events weren’t just about money—they were about influence, access, and control.
Throughout the episode, I break down the cast of characters who attended this gathering: loan sharks, enforcers, racketeers, and political fixers. Their interconnected stories reveal a dense web of loyalty, fear, and ambition that defined the Chicago mob scene at its peak. This episode uses the Edgewater Beach Hotel as more than a setting—it becomes a symbol of mob glamour masking ruthless criminal reality. It’s a reminder of how deeply organized crime once penetrated American society, and why these stories continue to fascinate, disturb, and resonate today.
0:04 Chicago Mob Tales
1:39 Fifi Buccieri ‘s Infamy
3:19 Giancana’s Absence
4:22 The Santa Fe Saddle and Gun Club
5:36 Edgewater Beach Hotel
8:36 Police Intelligence Operation
12:22 The Notorious Players
16:02 Entertainment at the Banquet
18:54 Reflections on the Meeting
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Transcript
[0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there in gangland, wireland,
[0:03] especially you guys up in Chicago. Yeah, I’ve done several stories on Chicago. I’m on a Chicago trip right now, I guess. I’m going to do one more with our friend, Mr. Cooley, Bob Cooley. We just haven’t set up a time yet, but I’m going to do one more with him for sure. But I’m going to keep some of these Chicago stories up. I got such a great reaction. You know, you guys, you know, like and share these, as they say, on the apps and on YouTube. But anyhow, let’s go back to March of 1967.
[0:36] There was a real well-known reporter named Bob Wendrick at the time. He really covered the mob in Chicago. I mean, he might as well have been a member of the mob in Chicago. He was so close to so many people up there. And he had some really good sources and some inside tracks. And he went to a party, but he wasn’t invited to that party. You know, they never really were going to invite Bob Weindrich to a party. It was $25 a plate. There was about 300 outfit mobsters and their associates attended this party. Some of their political associates even. They called a chief of police and I think a mayor of a suburban city. It was at the Edgewater Hotel. It was sponsored by the Santa Fe Saddle and Gun Club. It was to honor the birthday of outfit enforcer, killer, and loan shark Fiore Fifi Bussieri. Fifi was a vicious killer, man. I mean, he was bad. Straight out of the Capone days.
[1:36] And he was kind of best known in more modern times. It happened not too long before this party, I believe, or around this time, maybe right after.
[1:48] He took part in the multi-day, I believe, three-day torture and murder of a bookie, a great big fat bookie named William Action Jackson. There’s some images, some pictures, a picture of him in his trunk was showing a lot of the torture that they did to him out there. I’ve seen it on the Internet. They kind of cut back on those pictures and try to keep those from getting circulated around on Facebook and some of the social media apps. I assume it’s still out there. Um, but anyhow, the Bureau had a, had a hidden microphone in a guy’s house, Jackie, the lackey Saron, who was, uh, uh, a Cardo’s driver at the time had a, had a hidden microphone in there and Jackie Saron and a couple others. And one of them was Fifi Sierra, Bussieri. I don’t remember who else it was. We’re laughing about Lacks and Jackson’s reactions to the cattle prod and some of the other gruesome details.
[2:45] They thought he was talking to the hated FBI agent Bill Romer at the time, but in fact, he was not. He wasn’t talking to anybody. I did find one blurb where he was thought to be a child molester. So, you know, I don’t know. And I’m thinking it was a child of one of his girlfriends or something like that. I’m not sure. But anyhow, they tortured the heck out of him for about three days. Fifi came out of the 42 gang. If you remember, it was Alibaba and the 40 Thieves, so that meant there was 41 in Alibaba’s gang, and they wanted to have one more
[3:17] than Alibaba, so they named themselves the 42 Gang. This party happened just as Sam Giancana was getting out of jail.
[3:25] He didn’t attend, and he left for Mexico about that time to avoid further grand jury appearances. He’d been in jail about a year, I think, because they give him the old give you immunity and you have to testify. If you don’t, then they find you in contempt of court and send you to penitentiary or a jail for a year or so for the length of grand jury. And so he left town right after that and went down to Mexico for several years. Some speculate this meeting was really to get everybody together in one place and have some private meetings off the side without law enforcement really knowing what was going on, where Ricardo and Paul the Waiter Rica would name Joey Doves Iupa as the new boss in place of Gen Cona and make some other personnel shifts. You know, a few years later, when Giancana comes back, there’ll be a whole string of murders around the time he’s murdered because of some of his people that were always loyal to Giancana.
[4:22] This Santa Fe Saddling Gun Club, anybody ever heard of that? I had not heard of this before. It was a registered club. The president was Joseph Scaramuza, who owned a gun store at Halstead & Taylor, which is, I believe that’s right down there in the middle of Mobland. There was an informant in the jfk files as i was researching scaramusa there was an informant that claimed that scaramusa knew jack ruby well and as they checked into scaramusa over that they found found that this halstead gun store that he owned had sold three pistols that were recovered after some puerto rican terrorists shot up the house of representative a few years before now you know what all that means i don’t know but uh and i remember that when i was a little kid these puerto Puerto Ricans, uh, now, uh, they tried to, they were trying to assassinate Harry Truman, who was staying out of the white house and the Blair house, uh, which is, I think maybe that’s where the vice president stays. Sometimes I’m not sure. Anyhow, he was not in the white house and they, they had a plan to assassinate him. They also went into the house of representatives and shot it up. They wanted complete freedom from the United States at the time. Now there’s not been any Puerto Rican freedom movement since that I know of. Anyhow, um.
[5:36] The Edgewater Beach was a faded but once grand dom of hotels along Lake Michigan. They had their own beach for a while. Then something moved in between them and the beach. And it was about to declare bankruptcy. It was located a few guys that live in Chicago. It was 5555 North Sheridan.
[5:56] And now members of the Chicago Police Intelligence Unit had found out about that themselves. It was like Weindrich had. Maybe they hip Weindrich to it. That all works, all that little undercover stuff. You have an employee at the Edgewater who knows somebody who knows somebody, and the work starts leaking out. When you have something this big, you have 300 people there, and it was really to make some money too, charged $25 a plate, and they did another little fundraiser. They’ve been selling raffle tickets all over Chicago and all, like down in northwestern Indiana. And in Indiana, anywhere that the outfit had some kind of influence and businesses that they could hold up. It’s like policemen. We used to go out and sell circus tickets. They were like $2 a ticket, but it wasn’t really for a ticket. It was like a support the police circus, which then gave a piece of the money to some police or widows and orphans fund. I don’t remember exactly. This is when I was brand new. and you were given like a handful of circus tickets and you’re supposed to go out to your local businessmen and sell them. Of course, they always bought them. All you had to do was go in and say, you know, I got some police tickets or circus tickets and they’d buy them. And they weren’t exactly even a ticket. They were a coupon and then they helped go buy a ticket. But, you know, that’s what they were doing, and that’s where they were.
[7:23] Intelligence unit was milling around the hotel. They were, you know, I think what they were trying to do was waiting to see if the operators of this banquet, as this thing got going, if somebody actually, you know, drew, made a drawing or really raffled off a new car, which is what supposedly the raffle tickets were for, which would give them an excuse then to raid this place, saying it was an illegal lottery and then start really identifying the participants you know all of them that were there make them air everybody give you id and all that and then they had they were really loaded for bear they had 65 cops waiting close by it’s something called the foster avenue beach so it was it was a hell of an operation now the outfit during this time learned that the cops were going to be there and someone called Tony Accardo and Paula Guadarica, who were, you know, supposed to be there. They were like the headliners. They were the big ducks at that show. And really, if it was about having some meetings to realign personnel and name, maybe they’re going to have a making ceremony, but I doubt that.
[8:30] But maybe they were going to name Joy Iupa as the new boss because he was the next boss. Somebody warned him not to come. And, of course, Jackie Lackey’s Roan didn’t show up either because he was a Cardo’s driver.
[8:47] Cops, I’m going to tell you about some of the people the cops did find there and identify. Ross Prio, his north side loan shark and enforcer who had been Gen Conn’s second command and was reportedly consulted on all outfit murders. Now, Ross Prio, he’d been around. I can’t remember. I think he was out of the 42 gang himself. He had been around since the Capone days and a well-respected guy, had a lot of guys under him. And he was a bad dude. He was a bad actor. He was dangerous as hell and could take part in torturing the whole nine yards. They saw Irving Weiner there. He was a mob-connected bail bondsman. He was a guy who ended up a few years later walking with Alan Dorfman when somebody came up behind Dorfman and shot and killed him. Dorfman was their big guy in the Teamsters. Dorfman had helped him get those loans out of the Teamsters pension fund and loaned to people that wanted to buy Las Vegas casinos. Then everybody would get a kickback from those casinos. So he was integral. He was being investigated as an official of the Twin Cities.
[9:54] Food products company and he had my he had partners felix milwaukee phil aldoricio and sam teach battaglia and marshall caifano i mean this guy is erb wiener he was he was a money man for the mob well known as a money man and and he was he was involved with with lombardo joe lombardo and tony splatter and some others and they got a loan for a guy named from the teamsters fund but for a guy named danny seifert they thought danny seifert had started a company with a lot of this money, and he was going to testify about how he got this Teamsters loan is my understanding. And I believe Lombardo and probably Frank Suisse showed up and killed him one day. He never spent a night in jail. Weiner never spent a night in jail. Go figure that. He’s kind of like, almost like Tony Accardo, huh? I saw a guy named Mike Glitta. He was an outfit member who had B-Girl bars, had these kind of hustling bars, and was involved, heavily involved in the porn business now. Um.
[10:54] There was a lot of porn shops in Chicago, and Gletta was really, he was the guy on the porn shops. Chicago Crime Commission published something that said he supervised all pornography operations in an area that went from the near north side clear to the Wisconsin state line. So everything from, say, Rush Street on north was his. I guess he wasn’t down in, I think, Old Town is where Redwood met and some porn shops down there. and Frank Suisse was extorting money from some of them. Mob watchers claimed that Glitter always reported directly to Vincent Solano, who was a labor union leader and a capo, and the guy that probably had Tokyo Joe, Joe Ido killed. He was a racket boss on the north side and all the way up to the north suburbs. Identified a guy called Larry the Hood, who I’d seen that name before. It’s a really hard name to pronounce. was a Bonaguiti.
[11:54] He was a mob wannabe at the time. As I researched into him, he was really just a wannabe. Hung around the Rush Street bars and he was associated with Mike Glitta. And he’ll eventually get an opportunity when Ross Prio dies and Mike Glitta has a heart attack and he moves on up real quick because he’s always in there around and he knows the porn business and the B-Girl bars on that near north side. And he’s the one that goes around and collects after after Glitter has a heart attack.
[12:23] Another Northside vice boss named Joe Caesar Joseph DeVarco, he was dropped off by an underling driver. He came out of the 42 gang himself and is a well-known gangster on the Rush Street area. Dominic DiBello was a Northside gambling operator. He was seen with a friend of his and a fellow gambling operator named Bill Gold, or called Bill Gold. He had a longer name than that, and I don’t know him. If you guys make comments down below, if you know who this Bill Gold was and what the story was with him, he probably just ran a sports book or something or helped with the off-track betting outlets. And they arrived just before a guy named Joseph Cortino, according to the newspaper report. He was a former Forest Park chief of police. He was suspected of protecting gambling operations and leaking law enforcement information to the mob. A guy you hear mentioned, I’ve not really seen much on in detail, Willie Massino, and they called him Wee Willie because he was little, but he was supposedly really, really a bad character.
[13:26] Here’s a guy when I believe it was Mario Raginone was invited to go on some kind of a crime, and he saw Willie Massino and somebody else in the area. And he said, uh-oh, if those guys are anywhere in the area where I am and they’ve got me kind of isolated like this, you know, going to do a crime so I’m not telling anybody where I’m going and what I’m doing and who I’m with, you know, they’re going to hit me. And he went in after that. That’s how feared Wee Willie Messino was. He had been a loan shark collector and enforcer for Tony Cardo and a guy named Joseph Gagliano, who I don’t know must have faded off into the woodwork by the 70s. 1970 he went to prison for kidnapping and beating a couple of contractors who owed money to the mob, George and Jack Chiagoris.
[14:19] Sounds like they’re maybe Greek, huh? After he got out of the penitentiary, he went to work as an advisor with Marco D’Amico, who was, you know, remember Marco D’Amico had a gambling operation, and that’s who Bob Cooley worked with a lot. And he also did some work for Jackie Cerrone.
[14:37] So Turk Torello, James Turk Torello, he was confronted by the cops as he was unloading sound equipment out of his, wherever his car. He yelled at him as they walked up. He said, hey, he said, I got machine guns in these boxes. You want to come and see? He was kind of a wise-ass, you know. He was a capo of the 26th Street crew and directly under Fifi Busseri. One time, he had been sent by an angry mob boss named Sam Giancana, who we all know, Mobo. And he was going to partner up with Jackie Cerrone to kill an outfit member named Frankie Esposito down in Florida. But the Bureau had recorded Giancana’s conversation and warned Esposito. and he came right back around. He didn’t help the Bureau. You know, you go out and you warn a guy and then you try to bring him in and make him a snitch or make him a cooperating witness in the end because they’re trying to kill him. They don’t all come in. And he ended up coming back to Chicago and settled his dispute with Giancana and that hit was canceled. According to the tape recordings, Torello and his killers were going to murder Esposito and cut him up in small pieces and feed him to the sharks off the Florida coast. You know, they had houses down in Florida. That’s where they, that was Jackie Cerrone’s Florida house where they overheard him and Fifi talking about the murdering and torturing Action Jackson.
[16:03] Now, I mentioned bringing in the sound equipment. They had entertainment. Vic Dimone was the entertainment that night. Now, Vic Dimone has long-held connections to the Chicago outfit and I believe the Genovese family. I didn’t really go way in deep into him. I’ve got a bunch of notes. I’ll probably do a story just about Vic Dimone.
[16:26] Maybe he was the character in The Singer and The Godfather, that kind of a blend of Frank Sinatra and Vic Dimone. As a singer in the Godfather movie. Guys named a couple brothers, Joseph and Donald Grieco, were there. Well, they had been in business with Vic Damone in the Vic Damone Frozen Pizza Company. Paul Rica and Fifi Boussieri had brought the famous singer Vic Damone into the outfits world and got him to lend his name to this frozen pizza business. And what they did, the Grieco brothers, They use it as a cover for their loan shark activities, but, you know, they sold pizzas, too, although I’ve never heard of. I don’t ever remember seeing a Vic DeMone frozen pizza. Vic DeMone had even taken his show to Giancana’s joint, the Armory. And if you’ve ever been by the Armory, it’s just like a neighborhood bar. A neighborhood joint is not a place. But Vic DeMone was big. You know, he would be playing Madison Square Garden maybe at the time or the big clubs, the Copacabana in New York. And they got him to bring his show out to.
[17:33] Gincana’s Joint the Armory kind of like at his Villa Venice he got Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis to bring their show there and it was not exactly it was not the Copacabana they tried to make it into the Copacabana of Chicago but it never really got there another guy they saw was an outfit bookmaker and a tough guy out of Cicero who will get killed here in a little bit Sam Sambos Cesario Yeah.
[17:59] He was a longtime workhorse. He’s well-liked throughout the whole Chicago underworld, but he made a mistake. He ended up marrying a girlfriend slash mistress, the Gomar of Milwaukee Field Aldericio, while he was in the penitentiary. Two guys showed up with this woman. He marries her. They’re sitting out in front of their house. It was like a brownstone. It was a hot summer night. They’re sitting out in lawn chairs out in front of their house, and two guys pull up and run up and kill him. They say Harry Ailman was the guy that did that. They call that. I’ve had some kickback on this when I said this one time before a few years ago. I didn’t really investigate into it. But, you know, the popular story is that it’s a hit from beyond the grave because Aldericio had already died in prison
[18:50] between the time he gave that order and this actual murder. So that is a story of the big meeting at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago.
[19:02] It wasn’t exactly like Appalachian or some of the other famous mob meetings, and it was just Chicago only. They didn’t identify that they named anybody from out of town at this thing. Seemed like it was a big moneymaker, maybe a meeting that you could hire some other little meetings in, get people in there that you didn’t really want to be seen with in public. This article, they talked about other politicians and businessmen that were there, but they didn’t really name them. I guess they didn’t want to get sued or whatever, but it was a, it was definitely, it was a fundraiser. He charged 25 bucks a plate and then have that, uh, that lottery for that car. And, and, you know, they never gave that car to anybody. And you know how much money you can raise with, with, you got, you know, a hundred guys or so going out, mob guys going out and raising money, selling lottery tickets at five bucks, 10 bucks each. You can raise a lot of money like that. So maybe it’s just one more big Chicago scam and honored Fifi Boussieri at the time. I don’t know. But anyhow, thanks a lot, guys. I thought it was an interesting story, and I thought you would find it interesting. And some of the people that they named that were there, I wish I’d have been there, but writing down license numbers and taking pictures and all that stuff. So keep coming back. Like and subscribe, as they say. And we’re just going to keep doing this and doing this.
[20:24] I’ve gotten some you know I’ve got some things up that are like non-fiction books that are based on mob stuff, I don’t know if that’s okay or not, but I kind of like mixing that up. There’s only so many mob stories out there. You know, I don’t want a lot of these that have already been told. I don’t remember seeing any. I kind of looked around in the other podcast having this story. So I try to find them. You know, give me any tips, your comments that you can. I’ll try to look it up. And if I can find enough information, I’ll do the story on it. So thanks a lot. And adieu to you guys out in Chicago. I bet it’s colder up there than it is down here. Thanks, guys.