Rating: 
Summary: An epitaph for an honorable enemy
Review: William F. Roemer, Jr., may have known Chicago mob boss Anthony Accardo better than anyone outside the Outfit. That's because Roemer spent much of his career as an FBI agent trying to put Accardo in prison. He never succeeded, but over the years he developed a grudging respect for the head of Chicago's organized crime family. And in this memoir of the mob during Accardo's reign, Roemer pays just tribute to his old adversary on the strange terms that inevitably govern relationships between career criminals and the cops who try to put them away for good. Roemer acknowledges Accardo's genius, his love for his family and willingness to run the Chicago Outfit with as little bloodshed as necessary (still a veritable river, though). At the same time, Roemer makes sure we know how ruthless and merciless Accardo was and how he never blinked at torture and murder as management tools to keep his organization under control.Tony Accardo deserves much closer historical scrutiny than he has received heretofore. He started his career in organized crime as a protege of Jack McGurn, one of the Outfit's top enforcers. McGurn is credited both by historians and mob legend as the man who planned and executed the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929, a multiple killing that finished off Al Capone's last real challenge to underworld dominance in the Chicago area. Roemer speculates that Accardo may have been one of the gunmen who carried out the hit. If nothing else, Accardo proved to be a very proficient enforcer himself and this, combined with his obvious intelligence, paved the way for his rapid rise through the ranks. By the mid 1940s, Accardo was the head of the former Capone organization, a position of power he would only relinquish upon his death in the 1990s. Accardo may have been the most dangerous mobster of them all. He had a genius for every aspect of organized crime life and he molded the Outfit in his image. Under "Joe Batters" the Outfit took a much lower public profile than it had during Capone's flamboyant reign. It also diversified its operations and expanded its turf to include most of the U.S. west of the Mississippi River. Accardo constantly shifted strategies and resources to cope with changing conditions in the underworld and, after the mid-1950s, the increasing pressure of federal law enforcement to dismantle the Outfit for good. Roemer had a front seat to most of this. A good intelligence officer, he came to know Accardo and many of his lieutenants on a personal basis. I think it is a tribute to Roemer's own sense of fairness that he acknowledges the good he found in some of these men at the same time he remorselessly exposes the evil they committed. Roemer also goes out of his way to make sure we understand that many of the Outfit's members made sure their own children never followed them into the life. A man who obviously loves his own family, Roemer recognizes that instinct in the men he hunted and honors it. It may strike us as odd or even perverse, but in the small world of the Outfit and those honest lawmen trying to break it, it's a stand-up behavior. Roemer has been called onto the carpet by other reviewers of this book for injecting himself too much into the narrative. I understand the limitations this imposes on the book's narrative, limitations which ultimately undermine it as a close account of Accardo's career and the history of the Chicago mob between the end of the Capone era and today. But someone without a vested personal interest in that history will someday provide us with the narrative account we really want. I say take Roemer's book on its own terms -- an autobiography viewed through the lens of the life of Chicago's greatest criminal ever. You'll come away with a vivid impression of both men and a feel for how the terms of adversarial engagement between mobsters and lawmen create their own strange set of ethics and morals over time. In that sense, Roemer has presented us with a very important sociological source document.
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