Mobsters & racketeering

This post was inspired by a 1959 Life Magazine feature story on the Chicago underworld. The magazine created a fictitious café to show the goods and services that actual mobsters forcibly provided to restaurants. The illustration above indicates those areas of mob involvement commonly found in restaurants then – and probably now to some extent.

In the magazine, a brief description of some of the real life gangsters who had invaded restaurants was linked to the illustration, complete with headshots of them (not shown here).

Here is a summary of who furnished what:
1 Former Capone lieutenant operates in laundry (and produce) unions. (See my earlier post about gangsters in the restaurant laundry business.)
2 Hit man handles steam cleaning of beer tap coils.
3 Slot machine operator also gets a cut of juke box revenues.
4 Former Capone gunman is boss of bartenders.
5 & 8 Two gangsters push Fox Head beer and get a cut.
6 Another juke box boss also handles vending machine merchandise.
7 A third juke box boss runs 15 Teamster locals and handles delivery drivers.
9 Meat supplies are furnished by the syndicate nightclub controller.
10 Man who handles syndicate bookkeeping also sells glass-washing machines through a front.
11 Former Prohibition-era bootlegger handles liquor distribution.
12 Glassware and glass-washing boss handles machines that happen to break glassware, stimulating his business.

The movement of mobsters into these fields began at the end of Prohibition, when bootlegging became obsolete. The mob had infiltrated the Teamsters Union in Chicago, and used it to their own advantage, doing little if anything for the workers, who saw little benefit and in many cases did not even know they were members.

Strangely enough, Life seems to have left out mobsters in the trash removal business.

As the story explains, if the restaurant owner “balks, the syndicate can harass him by ordering pickets to scare off customers. If this fails, the mob, which controls waiters and bartender union locals, can call members out. Since the mobsters also control Teamster locals who deliver, they can put the owner out of business by cutting of his supply of beer or by stopping his garbage pick-up.”

The next step would be violence such as burning down the restaurant, dramatically so in the case of suburban Chicago’s Allgauer’s Fireside Restaurant in 1958, whose owner was being punished for testifying at a Senate hearing on organized crime. The “workers’ union” at Allgauer’s was under the control of a local underworld leader. The crime was never solved. I would say “curiously unsolved” except that was always the case.

© Jan Whitaker, 2025