CRIME: The Little Red Car

The nation’s No. 1 hood, Anthony Joseph (“Tony”) Accardo, 54, alias Joe Batters, is the very model of a modern mob general. He is popularly credited with half a dozen murders dating from his days as gunman to the late Al Capone, but has never spent a night in jail. Unlike Capone, whom he eventually succeeded as grand vizier of Chicago crime, Tony cleverly paid his taxes on enough income from gambling and “miscellaneous sources” (more than $1,000,000 between 1940 and 1955) to justify his $500,000 mansion in suburban River Forest, Ill. and his lavish vacations in Florida. Even when the feds started pressing for a more detailed accounting of his sources of income, Tony had an angle: he went Capone one better and got himself a job. It was possibly the worst mistake he ever made.

Accardo’s job was a lazy man’s dream: $65,000 salary as salesman for Chicago’s Premium Beer Sales, Inc., plus 5¢ a case on all the Fox Head beer he sold. For a touch of realism, Tony even deducted $3,994 in depreciation and gas-and-oil expenses for his little red sports car, a Mercedes-Benz SL 300, on his tax returns as business expenses. That gave scholarly Chicago Crimebuster Richard Ogilvie, 37, the clue he needed. Ogilvie, sole survivor of a Justice Department investigative group ostentatiously set up in 1958 to combat Chicago crime, checked with 3,500 local tavern owners, discovered that not one of them had ever seen Tony come around, at least to sell any beer.

Last week, after a two-month trial during which Ogilvie proved that Accardo’s beer-selling sinecure was merely a front for his gambling and labor-racketeering interests, a federal court jury convicted him on three counts of tax evasion. Tough Tony Accardo, the man who never went to jail, faces a sentence of up to nine years in prison and $15,000 in fines.