Tony "Joe Batters" Accardo

Accardo came up as a Capone gunman and was still the final authority in Chicago sixty years later, which makes him the longest continuous presence in this archive and the least visible.

He took the Outfit in 1947 and never really put it down. When it suited him he held the title; when it did not, he handed the title to somebody else and kept the authority, which is the arrangement Chicago used for the rest of the century.

Not a boss in the New York sense

The Outfit was never structured like the five families and did not have a seat on the Commission in the way they did. What it had instead was a small group of men who agreed among themselves, and Accardo at the centre of it.

That structure is why it outlasted everything New York went through. There was no throne to take, no succession to fight over in public, and no obvious single defendant for a prosecutor to build a case around.

Las Vegas

The casino money that reached Chicago in the 1970s reached it under Accardo. He did not run it — Joseph Aiuppa and Jackie Cerone ran it, and both went to prison for it in 1986 — but nothing of that scale moved without him.

He was in his eighties by the time the Kansas City wiretaps unwound the whole arrangement, and he was not charged.

The end

He died of natural causes at eighty-six, in 1992, at home.

Of every man in this archive who reached the top of an organisation, he is the one who kept it longest and gave the record least. That is not an accident of luck. It is the same decision, taken every year for half a century, not to be the most interesting man in the room.