Frank Nitti

• 1. Introduction

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  Frank Nitti, born Francesco Raffaele Nitto, rests in Mount Carmel Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois. His grave lies to the left of the main Roosevelt Road entrance, about 50 ft from the gate. To the right of that gate is the family plot of Al Capone, marked by a 6 ft white monument stone. Straight ahead lie Dean O'Banion and Hymie Weiss, North Side Gang members whom the Chicago Outfit killed under Capone. Nitti was an Italian-American organized crime figure based in Chicago, and his grave sits among the names of that underworld. How did a Brooklyn pinsetter and barber come to run the Outfit? Who wanted him dead in 1932? And why has his burial in a Catholic cemetery stayed controversial?

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• 2. Brooklyn Beginnings

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  Angri, in the province of Salerno in Campania, Italy, is where Nitti was born on the 27th of January 1886. He was the second child of Luigi and Rosina Fezza Nitto. His father died in 1888, when the boy was two years old. Within a year his mother married Francesco Dolendo. Two children were born to that couple, but neither survived. That left young Francesco and his older sister Giovannina as the only children.

  Dolendo emigrated to the United States in July 1890. The rest of the family followed in June 1893, when Nitti was seven. They settled at 113 Navy Street in Brooklyn, New York City. The boy attended public school and worked odd jobs afterward to help support the household. His sister married a 24-year-old man when she was only 15. His mother gave birth to a half-brother, Raphael, in 1894 and to another child, Gennaro, in 1896.

  After the seventh grade, Nitti quit school. He worked as a pinsetter, a factory worker and a barber. The family of Al Capone lived nearby, and Nitti became friends with Capone's older brothers and their criminal gang, the Navy Street Boys. Later journalists reported that Nitti and Capone were cousins. That was not true. Their families lived only blocks apart in Brooklyn, and both had come from the same area of Italy.

  A worsening relationship with Dolendo pushed Nitti out of the house in 1900, when he was 14. He took work in various local factories. Around 1910, at the age of 24, he left Brooklyn altogether, and the record of his life grows thin from that point.

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• 3. Chicago and Galveston

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  Williamsburg, a neighborhood of Brooklyn, may have been where Nitti worked around 1911, though little can be ascertained about these years. He probably moved to Chicago around 1913 and worked as a barber. There he met the gangsters Alex Louis Greenberg and Dean O'Banion. On the 18th of October 1917, he married a Chicagoan named Rosa, called Rose, Levitt in Dallas, Texas. Where the couple lived afterward remains uncertain.

  By 1918, Nitti had settled at 914 South Halsted Street in Chicago. He renewed his contacts with Greenberg and O'Banion and became a jewel thief, a liquor smuggler and a fence. His smuggling drew the notice of the Chicago crime boss John "Papa Johnny" Torrio. It also drew the notice of Torrio's newly arrived soldier, Al Capone.

  Texas offered Nitti a second field of work. As a newcomer who knew the Texas area, he became a partner in the Galveston crime syndicate run by Johnny Jack Nounes. In 1924 he is reported to have stolen a large sum of money from Nounes and a fellow mobster, Dutch Voight. Nitti fled back to Chicago.

  Years later, someone spotted him in a Houston bar, and word reached Nounes and Voight. The two Galveston mobsters found Nitti, drove him back to Galveston and made him return the money. By then Torrio had been succeeded by Capone, and Nitti's fortunes in Chicago were about to change.

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• 4. Capone's Lieutenant

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  Whisky from Canada fed the operation that Nitti ran for Al Capone. He imported it and sold it through a network of speakeasies around Chicago. Under Capone, Nitti's reputation soared, and he became one of the boss's top lieutenants. Capone trusted him for his leadership skills and business acumen. In the early days Nitti served as a personal bodyguard, and in time he was in charge of all the money flowing through the operation.

  Family origins gave Nitti a further use. His family came from the same part of Italy as Capone's. That let him help Capone penetrate the Sicilian and Camorra underworld in a way Capone could not manage alone.

  When Capone went to prison in 1929, he named Nitti to a triumvirate that ran the mob in his absence. Nitti was head of operations. Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik was head of administration, and Tony "Joe Batters" Accardo was head of enforcement.

  Nitti's nickname was "The Enforcer", yet he used Mafia soldiers and others to commit violence instead of doing it himself. As he rose, his business instinct told him to stay away from the "dirty work" for which hitmen were paid.

  His private life changed in those years too. Frank and Rose divorced in 1928. Shortly afterward he married Anna Ronga, the daughter of a mob doctor and a former neighbor of the Nittis in the 1920s. The couple adopted a son, Joseph, through the Tennessee Children's Home Society.

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• 5. Taking the Throne

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  Eighteen months at the United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth, was Nitti's sentence when he and Capone were both convicted of tax evasion in 1931. Capone was sent away for 11 years. Nitti walked out on the 25th of March 1932 and took his place as the new boss of the Capone Gang.

  Some revisionist historians have called Nitti a mere "front boss" and claimed that Paul "The Waiter" Ricca was the real head of the Chicago Outfit. Both contemporary and modern accounts say otherwise. According to Nitti's biographer Mars Eghigian, Nitti's age, brilliance and reputation made him Capone's personal choice. The alternatives, Ricca and Murray Humphreys, were younger and less experienced.

  Ricca did hold the reins, but only briefly. He was acting boss for six months, between Capone's imprisonment in October 1931 and Nitti's release. Nitti was anxious about violating his federal parole, so Ricca acted as his emissary that same March. Chicago police arrested Ricca with Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky and other mobsters, and a prominent photograph followed. That picture led some people to conclude wrongly that Ricca was the new boss.

  With Nitti calling the shots, the Outfit moved beyond prostitution and gambling. It took control of labor unions, which led to the extortion of many businesses. That expansion put Nitti on a collision course with the city's new political order.

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• 6. Shot on LaSalle Street

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  Room 554 at 221 N. LaSalle Street in Chicago was Nitti's office, and on the 19th of December 1932 a team of Chicago police raided it. The team was headed by Detective Sergeants Harry Lang and Harry Miller. Lang shot Nitti three times, in the back and the neck. He then shot himself, causing a minor flesh wound, to make the shooting look like self-defense. He claimed Nitti had fired first.

  Court testimony later insisted that newly elected Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak personally ordered the attempt. Cermak supposedly wanted to eliminate the Chicago Outfit in favor of gangsters who answered to him. Nitti survived and was acquitted of attempted murder in February 1933. At that trial Miller testified that Lang received $15,000 to kill Nitti. Another uniformed officer testified that Nitti was unarmed when he was shot. Lang and Miller were both fired from the police force and each fined $100 for simple assault.

  Two months later, Giuseppe Zangara shot and killed Cermak while the mayor stood talking with President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt was Zangara's target, but the shots missed him. A conspiracy theory emerged in Chicago sometime before 1999, claiming Zangara was a hired killer working for Nitti.

  John William Tuohy, who has written numerous books on organized crime in Chicago, reviewed Secret Service records. In a detailed 2002 article he argued that Cermak was the real target. Researchers who cite court testimony add that Cermak had directed an assassination attempt on Nitti less than three months earlier.

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• 7. Final Days

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  Mercy Hospital in Chicago was where Anna Nitto died on the 19th of November 1940, from an unspecified internal ailment. On the 14th of May 1942, Nitti married Annette, called Toni, Caravetta. She was widowed less than a year later.

  In 1943, many top members of the Chicago Outfit were indicted for extorting the Hollywood film industry. The defendants included Nitti, Phil D'Andrea, Louis "Little New York" Campagna, Nick Circella, Charles "Cherry Nose" Gioe and Ralph Pierce. Ricca and John "Handsome Johnny" Roselli were also named. The Outfit was accused of trying to extort money from large studios, including Columbia Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, RKO Pictures and 20th Century Fox. The studios had cooperated to avoid union trouble, which the mob itself had stirred up.

  At a meeting of Outfit leaders at Nitti's home, Ricca blamed Nitti for the indictments. Ricca said the scheme had been Nitti's and that of Willie Bioff, an FBI informant and one of Nitti's trusted associates. In his view, Nitti should go to prison. Nitti was severely claustrophobic after his first term and dreaded another confinement. It was also rumored that he was suffering from terminal cancer.

  The day before his scheduled grand jury appearance, Nitti had breakfast with his wife at their home at 712 Selborne Road in Riverside, Illinois. When she left for church, he said he planned to take a walk. Instead he began to drink heavily, loaded a .32 caliber revolver and put it in his coat pocket. He walked five blocks to a local railroad yard.

  Conductor William F. Seebauer and switchmen L.M. Barnett and E.H. Moran were riding in a caboose. They were backing their train slowly southward over the ungated Cermak Road in North Riverside. They spotted Nitti walking on the track, apparently oblivious, and shouted a warning. He stepped off the tracks and staggered toward the fence. Three shots rang out. The railroad men first thought he was shooting at them, then realized he was trying to shoot himself in the head. The final bullet entered behind his right ear and lodged in the top of his skull.

  Police Chief Allen Rose of North Riverside rushed to the scene with a sergeant and several patrolmen and recognized Nitti at once. William McNalley, the coroner's toxicologist, found a blood alcohol level of 0.23 at autopsy. Frank Nitti died on the 19th of March 1943, at the age of 57. A coroner's jury ruled the next day that he "committed suicide while temporarily insane and in a despondent frame of mind".

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• 8. On Screen

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  Bruce Gordon played Nitti in many episodes of the original ABC television series The Untouchables, which ran from 1959-63 and drew on Eliot Ness's memoirs. Harold J. Stone took the role in the 1967 Roger Corman film The St. Valentine's Day Massacre. In the 1972 film The Godfather, a montage of crime scene photos from the war between the Five Families includes a photo of Nitti found dead.

  A pizza gave Nitti an odd cameo in the 1983 film Easy Money. There, "the Frank Nitti" is the name of a kind of pizza ordered to the house of Rodney Dangerfield's character.

  In the 1987 film The Untouchables, Billy Drago plays a fictionalized Nitti. The film has Ness, played by Kevin Costner, throw him off a Chicago courthouse roof during Capone's tax evasion trial in the early 1930s. That is years before the real Nitti's suicide in 1943. Anthony LaPaglia played him in the 1988 biopic Nitti: The Enforcer, and Paul Regina in a 1993 television version of The Untouchables.

  Stanley Tucci played Nitti in the 2002 film Road to Perdition. Bill Camp played him in the 2009 film Public Enemies, and Will Sasso in the 2013 Comedy Central series Drunk History. The name has even reached ice hockey. The goaltender Antero Niittymäki has worn an image of Nitti on his helmet because the two names are so similar.

  Sylvester Stallone played Nitti in the 1975 film Capone, opposite Ben Gazzara as Capone. The film shows Nitti starting as a bodyguard, assassin and adviser, then secretly betraying Capone by selling the IRS files that led to his arrest for tax evasion. Its last glimpse of Nitti, now head of the Outfit, is a visit to the dying Capone at his Palm Island estate in 1946. That scene falls three years after the real Nitti's death.

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