Accardo, Anthony Joseph

(AKA: Big Tuna ; Joe Batters ), 1906-1992

Accardo, a product of the Capone era, rose through the ranks as have all leaders of the U.S. Mafia - syndicate, beginning as a ruthless gunman and enforcer for Scarface as early as 1922 at the age of sixteen. Son of a Sicilian shoemaker, Accardo was born in Chicago on Mar. 28, 1906. During the mid-1920s, Accardo earned his fierce sobriquet, Joe Batters, because of his ability to wield a baseball bat on those who displeased his bosses,mostly loan-shark victims who failed to make their weekly payments, and truculent bar owners who did not sell enough of the Torrio-Capone brew during Prohibition.

Accardo had become so well known in underworld circles as a loyal and fearless gunman that Capone selected him as one of his personal bodyguards, and he worked under the direction of Frank Nitti and, sometimes, Machine Gun Jack McGurn. It was Accardo's job, as a front-line bodyguard, to stop anyone from invading Capone's headquarters, the Lexington Hotel. Throughout 1928, Accardo was observed by detectives as he sat in the lobby of this hotel with a machine gun in his lap. No policeman thought to walk up to the gangster and arrest him for displaying such a lethal rapid-fire weapon, for Capone at the time owned most of Chicago's judges and police.

Accardo fell foul of the same people who had imprisoned his mentor, Al Capone. IRS agents began to probe deeply into his fabulous income and he was indicted for tax evasion. In 1960 he was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison and fined $15,000. But the conviction was later overturned by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sitting in Chicago because of so-called "prejudicial" newspaper publicity that had occurred during Accardo's trial. He was a free man and could go on to boast, as he does to this day, that he never spent a night in jail, even though Accardo had been cited for contempt in the Kefauver Hearings in 1950-51 and had taken the Fifth Amendment 172 times before the McClellan Committee.

When Accardo's tax conviction was overturned in 1960, he went on playing "dead" as the top don of Chicago but systematically continued to pull the strings, especially after Paul Ricca retired in 1968; Ricca died of natural causes in 1972, leaving Accardo in complete control, Tony Accardo died in 1992