Chicago Heights: Little Joe College, the Outfit, and the Fall of Sam Giancana

by Charles Hager, David T. Miller, Louis Corsino (Foreword by), Ashleigh D'Andrea (Afterword)

Overview

Winner, ISHS Best of Illinois History Award, 2019

In this riveting true story of coming of age in the Chicago Mob, Charles “Charley” Hager is plucked from his rural West Virginia home by an uncle in the 1960s and thrown into an underworld of money, cars, crime, and murder on the streets of Chicago Heights.
 
Street-smart and good with his hands, Hager is accepted into the working life of a chauffeur and “street tax” collector, earning the moniker “Little Joe College” by notorious mob boss Albert Tocco. But when his childhood friend is gunned down by a hit man, Hager finds himself a bit player in the events surrounding the mysterious, and yet unsolved, murder of mafia chief Sam Giancana.
 
Chicago Heights is part rags-to-riches story, part murder mystery, and part redemption tale. Hager, with author David T. Miller, juxtaposes his early years in West Virginia with his life in crime, intricately weaving his own experiences into the fabric of mob life, its many characters, and the murder of Giancana.
 
Fueled by vivid recollections of turf wars and chop shops, of fix-ridden harness racing and the turbulent politics of the 1960s, Chicago Heights reveals similarities between high-level organized crime in the city and the corrupt lawlessness of Appalachia. Hager candidly reveals how he got caught up in a criminal life, what it cost him, and how he rebuilt his life back in West Virginia with a prison record.
 
Based on interviews with Hager and supplemented by additional interviews and extensive research by Miller, the book also adds Hager’s unique voice to the volumes of speculation about Giancana’s murder, offering a plausible theory of what happened on that June night in 1975. 
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809336722
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	07/12/2018
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	184
Sales rank:	623,291
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Charles Hager gradually worked his way from sweeping up his uncle’s bar to earning responsibility and trust as a friend of the Chicago Outfit. He left the Heights in 1975 and built a series of successful businesses in West Virginia and North Carolina.
 
David T. Miller is a writer and editor based in Lexington, Kentucky. He contributed to several books and edited Earned in Blood: My Journey from Old-Breed Marine to the Most Dangerous Job in America by Thurman Miller.
 

Read an Excerpt

PROLOGUE
 
On the evening of June 19, 1975, Sam “Momo” Giancana was cooking sausages and peppers in his home in Oak Park, Illinois, a village just west of Chicago, when a gunman shot him in the back of the head, turned his body over, and shot him six more times in the face and neck. His blood had not yet dried before news of the execution of one of America’s most recognized crime bosses was splashed over the national press and stayed there for weeks. The story had everything—money, power, sex, crime, politics, and an unsolved murder. 
 
Newspaper readers couldn’t get enough as details about Giancana as a mob killer, as a confidante and lover of Marilyn Monroe, and as someone connected to the plans of the Central Intelligence Agency to assassinate Fidel Castro began to dominate the headlines. It would take years for the public to know the reach of his political and social connections, but the gruesome details of his death have become the bloody grist of scores of movies, books, and articles over the ensuing four decades. Every account offers theories about who killed Giancana, and why, but no killer has been charged, much less convicted, and as time has passed the likely culprits have faded into history. 
 
Otherwise, I wouldn’t be writing this story, for fear of mob retaliation. But now, more than forty years after the fact, I finally feel safe to tell my story, and with it the story of the Giancana killing. First I need to tell you how I came to be in the Outfit, how I can know what I know. I know about the Giancana killing because I chauffeured the boss who gave the order. I rented my home to the man who pulled the trigger. And I was in the car when Giancana’s killer blew off the back of the real killer’s head. It took me years to piece it all together, but it fits. And I got the full story of the Giancana hit from the trigger man himself. 
 
This isn’t a book about suppositions or theories or conspiracies. What you will read in the following pages is true to the best of my knowledge, and I was there for most of it.
 
I was born in a squalid hamlet in West Virginia’s Hatfield and McCoy hill country, one of ten hungry children who often had nothing more than oatmeal to eat for an entire week. Although I was a ninth grade dropout from an impoverished rural family I was blessed with sharp street smarts, an organized mind, and an unfailing memory. Today, that memory enables me to tell the story of Sam based on events that transpired these decades ago. When I was thirteen my uncle, Columbus Hager, took me out of my rundown Appalachian one-room to Chicago Heights, Illinois, where he ran a bar for the Outfit. Under his tutelage I began my life as a rather naïve apprentice criminal. I moved cars and packages from one place to another, never knowing what was in them, and I was smart enough not to ask. Uncle Columbus never specifically told me, but I realized over time that every car I moved was carrying money or was to be sold or was headed to a chop shop to be stripped of valuable parts. 
 
Coming of age in the Mob in 1960s Chicago was my education not only in the ways of crime but also in the ways of “justice”; during that era the police and courts were almost entirely controlled by organized crime. I rose to become a chauffeur to the top bosses, a fixer of horse races. A bagman for millions of dollars of mob money, and an enforcer of racket collections—the so-called street tax levied by the Outfit. When I discovered how much I loved horses I also became the mob’s expert on fixing harness races. Eventually, as I moved up in that world, I became an owner, a trainer, and a driver in that fix-ridden world. I found few things more exciting than putting a pile of money on an array of top trotters running as fast as they could without breaking into a gallop. And I knew how to see to it that the horse I wanted to win did so more often than not. 
 
I was on top of the world. I was young and healthy, I had plenty of money in the bank, I had a family, a successful business, friends who would protect me. 
 
Then one day it all came crashing down. 
 
Five years later I was left with only a prison record and questions that would take me years to answer and would lead to the book you’re holding now.
 

Table of Contents

Foreword Louis Corsino xi

Prologue 1

Introduction 3

1 Triply Damned 6

2 Chicago, Uncle Columbus, and a New Life 14

3 The Pride of Dingess 22

4 Clothes Make the Boy 24

5 Home Again 32

6 An Unmade Man 37

7 A License to Steal 41

8 The Ropes 55

9 You Can't Win, You Can't Break Even, You Can't Even Leave the Game 62

10 Mr. Lucky 68

11 A Punk in the Trunk 74

12 I'm the Guy 83

13 Goodbye Sam, Goodbye Dick 89

14 With Fresh Eyes 102

15 Old Haunts 104

16 A Bag of Bones Can Talk 111

17 When You Got a Job to Do, Better Do It Well 117

18 The Puzzle Pieces 127

Epilogue: From the Mob to the Mines 134

Afterword Asbleigh D'Andrea 141

Acknowledgments 143

Notes 145

Index 159

Editorial Reviews

This distinctly personal memoir of mob life as it played out for Charles Hager in Chicago Heights, Illinois, in the 1960s and 1970s is a candid, revealing, and up-close statement about gangster life on the fringe. It’s not a world of glamour and the Godfather. It’s tough. It’s gritty. It’s violent and it’s often ugly.”—Richard C. Lindberg, author of Gangland Chicago: Criminality and Lawlessness in the Windy City

“This book provides a fascinating look into one of the most famous murders in gangland history. It also challenges widely held beliefs about the organization of the Outfit, the traditional organized crime group in Chicago. Easily readable and insightful.”—Robert M. Lombardo, author of Organized Crime in Chicago: Beyond the Mafia

“This is a well-written ‘personal document’ in the Chicago School tradition, indispensable for those who want to understand the day-to-day workings of the Outfit.”—John M. Hagedorn, author of The Insane Chicago Way: The Daring Plan by Chicago Gangs to Create a Spanish Mafia

"A simply fascinating contribution to the growing library of American organized crime biographies and histories in general, and the Chicago Outfit in particular, "Chicago Heights: Little Joe College, the Outfit, and the Fall of Sam Giancana" is an especially and unreservedly recommended addition to personal reading lists, as well as community, and academic library Organized Crime collections and supplemental studies reading lists in particular."—Carl Logan, Midwest Book Review
 

From the Publisher