Sam "Momo" Giancana

Giancana ran the Chicago Outfit for about nine years and is the only man in this archive whose file runs through a Senate intelligence committee. He was shot in his own basement kitchen four days after his sixty-seventh birthday and a week before he was due to answer that committee's questions.

He took the organisation in the late 1950s, in a role Tony Accardo had stepped back from without stepping away, and he ran it in a manner Accardo plainly disliked: visibly, in nightclubs, next to entertainers, in the newspapers.

The Castro plots

The 1975 Senate committee established that the Central Intelligence Agency had recruited American organised crime figures in an attempt to kill Fidel Castro, and that Giancana was one of them.

This is the point at which the archive has to be careful, because the material around it is the most heavily mythologised in American crime writing. What the committee documented is that the approach happened and that the plots existed. What it did not establish, and what nobody has established since, is any of the larger structures built on top of it.

Prison, exile, and the basement

Called before a federal grand jury in 1965 and given immunity, he refused to answer and spent a year in jail for contempt — the cost of the rule, paid exactly.

On release he left for Mexico and stayed until Mexican authorities deported him in 1974. The organisation he came back to had moved on without him.

On 19 June 1975 he was shot seven times in the basement kitchen of his home in Oak Park while cooking sausage and peppers. The weapon was a .22 with a silencer. No one has ever been charged.