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" Final Resting Place of Sam Giancana"

        

Sam "Momo" Giancana
15th June 1908 - 19th June 1975
Started as a hitman for Capone. Rose to boss of the Chicago crime family. Friend of celebrities such as Frank Sinatra & Marilyn Monroe. Rigged the Chicago vote for John Kennedy in 1960. Rumoured to have been behind the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 & Robert Kennedy in 1968. He fled to Mexico, but was deported back to the USA in 1974. Subpoena'd to appear before a crime commission, where he was said to be ready to talk. Sam never appeared, someone emptied a gun into his head whilst he was frying up a bedtime meal of Italian sausages and escarole.
Mount Carmel Cemetery, Hillside, Chicago, Illinois.

Born in Chicago's "Little Italy," Sam Giancana was arrested more than 70 times in his life, but was imprisoned only twice. Giancana's nickname "Momo" was derived from the slang term "Mooney" (which meant "crazy") as Giancana had long had a reputation for very unstable and unpredictably vicious behavior.

Giancana started his criminal career in the 1920s on Chicago's West Side as a member of a violent street gang called "The 42s" (the name came from associating themselves with Ali Baba and the 42 Thieves, an obvious mistake). He soon developed a reputation for being an excellent getaway driver, high earner and vicious killer. These qualities got him noticed by the successor to Al Capone, Frank "The Enforcer" Nitti. It is widely reputed Giancana and other mobsters had been recruited by the CIA during the waning days of the Eisenhower administration to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who had taken power in January 1959. Giancana was himself reported to have said that the CIA and the Mafia are "different sides of the same coin." It is also widely reputed that at roughly the same time Joseph P. Kennedy recruited Giancana to help mobilize labor union voter and financial support behind his son, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy in the latter's bid to secure the Democratic nomination for the 1960 Presidential election.

There are also strong suggestions that during his presidency, JFK maintained close links with Giancana and the Chicago Mafia as he continued the practice of covertly using the Mafia in a bid to assassinate Castro. The two men also shared the same lover, Los Angeles socialite Judith Campbell who also apparently acted as a courier between the two men, passing money and information.

Giancana was forced to step down as Mafia boss in 1966 because of his greed (refusing to share the profits of his Latin American gambling operations—a major violation of Mafia protocol) excessively high-profile personal behavior (openly associating with various popular entertainers like singers Phyllis McGuire and Frank Sinatra) and serious legal problems, serious enough to have had the FBI place Giancana under close, intense and relentless surveillance. In response to these setbacks, the dethroned Giancana spent the next seven years (1967-74) in exile in Cuernavaca, Mexico until the Mexican government (under pressure from the US Justice Department) had him deported to the United States. Returning to Chicago, Giancana was assassinated on 19 June 1975 while cooking Italian sausage and peppers in the basement of his home in Oak Park, Illinois (which had been under close FBI and Chicago Police observation) shortly before he was to appear before a Senate committee investigating CIA and Mafia links to plots to kill Castro. Giancana was subsequently buried in a family mausoleum at Mount Carmel Cemetery in the Chicago suburb of Hillside, Illinois.

The unknown assassin shot Giancana in the head seven times with a silenced .22 caliber handgun (In his book 'Sinatra: The untold story', Author Michael Munn says the gun used was a .29 caliber weapon). Although some suspected the CIA was responsible for the shooting (as Giancana had a somewhat troubled history with the agency), CIA Director William Colby was quoted as saying, "We had nothing to do with it." Many researchers believe Colby's claim as it seems much more likely that Giancana's onetime friend and Chicago Mafia boss Joseph "Joey Doves" Aiuppa ordered the hit on the disgraced "Momo" because he had become too talkative and Aiuppa feared Giancana would reveal everything he knew about Chicago mob operations (including Giancana's alleged complicity in orchestrating the JFK assassination) during his upcoming Senate committee appearance. It is widely believed that Dominick "Butch" Blasi was his assassin. Other suspects are Harry Aleman and Anthony Spilotro.

Giancana is the subject of several biographies, one of which, Mafia Princess, was written by his daughter Antoinette and filmed in a poorly reviewed TV movie starring Tony Curtis as Giancana. A 1995 TV movie named Sugartime depicts Giancana's relationship with Phyllis McGuire, with Sam being played by John Turturro. Other movie portrayals of Giancana include Oscar winner Rod Steiger in the miniseries Sinatra and Robert Miranda in the HBO movie The Rat Pack. Cable company TNT is working on a six hour miniseries of the life of Sam