Muscleman's Money

Among the rich racketeers who commute to their showplaces in the western Chicago suburb of River Forest (pop. 12,500), none lives in higher style than Anthony Joseph Accardo, 52, top banana in the crime syndicate founded by the late Al ("Scarface") Capone. Tough Accardo's $200,000 stone and concrete mansion, designed like a combination pleasure dome and pillbox, offers various conveniences: an indoor swimming pool, two bowling alleys, a pipe organ, a roof garden where strolling violinists play dinnertime waltzes, vast reception rooms, six master bedrooms, baths where the water flows from gold faucets, and--a special convenience to guests with an urgent sense of privacy --a walled-in parking lot protected from the eyes of reporters who like to look up license numbers. In his own bathroom the gang chief likes to loll in a $10,000 tub carved. from a single piece of Mexican onyx.

Labor Racket. Accardo, arrogant in cafe society suit and dark sunglasses, refused last week to tell the U.S. Senate labor-management investigating committee anything about his high standard of living, or how he keeps it. Testifying under subpoena, he set the style for six other professional gangsters who uniformly claimed that to talk at all would be to risk selfincrimination. Accardo let a total of 172 questions pass without answer. Samples: Where were you born? Do you operate your affairs to get control of unions? Do you have any scruples against killing? Do you have any respect for your government? Such a performance made a "mockery" of the Fifth Amendment, snapped Chairman John McClellan, and he threatened the often-arrested but never-convicted Accardo with a charge of contempt of Congress.

By their usual methods, Chicago gangsters had tried to make everybody else equally untalkative. Their arsonists burned one restaurant whose owner was seen with committee investigators (TIME, May 26); other hoods threatened other prospective witnesses by visit and telephone. But silver-haired Donald Strang, for one, would not be terrified. Strang, 56, turned up to tell what happened when a mob-run local of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union staked professional pickets around his Howard Johnson restaurant at suburban Niles (pop. 15,000) in 1952. Items:

P: Husky, 24-hour-a-day pickets threw firecrackers under his nonunion (by choice) employees, menacingly bellowed out license numbers of customers' cars.

&$182; Employees found their tires slashed, sugar in their gas tanks.

P: Teamsters, paired once again with mobsters, refused to deliver food or haul away garbage.

P: Dump keepers in the area, somehow warned, refused to accept the garbage when Strang bought a trailer to haul it away himself.

P: The Chicago Restaurant Association, where Strang sought help in his fight against the union demand for payoff, turned out to be tied to the mob through Lawyer Abraham Teitelbaum, who secretly passed Strang's $2,240 payment for legal fees directly to the union.

Questioned in the witness chair about mob-union connections, Teitelbaum tried to duck under the Fifth Amendment and the First, Sixth and Sixteenth. Back in River Forest, glued to their TV sets for the Chicago telecast of the hearings, Tony Accardo's neighbors began to catch a glimpse of how he earns his living.

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