A man who once washed dishes in a Chicago restaurant rose through the ranks to become one of the most powerful and untouchable figures in American organized crime—despite being tied to murders, extortion, and political corruption. Paul “The Waiter” Ricca, born Felice de Lucia in Naples, Italy, in 1897, was already working for the city’s underworld by age 17. In 1915, on Mafia orders, he murdered Emilio Perillo, though he later claimed the killing was personal revenge for Perillo breaking an engagement to his sister. After serving two years in prison for that conviction, Ricca slit the throat of Vincenzo Capasso, a witness in the Perillo trial who had testified against him.
He then fled to the United States via Cuba under the alias Paul Maglio. In Cuba, Ricca met Chicago bootlegger and restaurant owner Joseph “Diamond Joe” Esposito, who brought him to Chicago. Ricca worked at Esposito’s Bella Napoli restaurant, first as a theater usher and then as a waiter—a job that gave him his lasting nickname and a convenient cover story when police asked about his profession. The restaurant attracted many of Chicago’s top gangsters, including Al Capone, leader of the South Side gang.
Ricca soon left the restaurant and joined Capone’s organization, helped by mutual friends among Neapolitan gangsters who had returned to Italy. Capone reportedly valued Ricca as a man who could figure the angles in any racket. During one drive-by shooting at the restaurant, Ricca allegedly warned Capone to get down, saving his life while taking a gunshot wound to his own left shoulder. Capone later stood as best man at Ricca’s 1927 wedding to Nancy Emily Giganti, also from Naples.
Ricca’s influence grew with the founding of the national crime syndicate in 1931. When Capone was convicted of tax evasion that year and sentenced to 11 years in prison, Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti was made the nominal successor, with Ricca acting as front boss. But according to organized crime figures like Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, Ricca was the real power, and Nitti was largely ignored and unaware of what was happening. By 1939, Ricca had a firm grip on the Chicago Syndicate.
Power within the organization gravitated toward those strong and cunning enough to seize it, and only Tony “Joe Batters” Accardo and Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik could compare to Ricca in those qualities. According to “The Mafia Encyclopedia,” whenever Ricca said someone should be made to “go away,” he saw to it that the person went away permanently. One of his associates in such matters was Mad Sam DeStefano, one of the outfit’s most notorious loan sharks and psychopathic killers. In the early 1940s, Nitti persuaded Ricca and other outfit leaders to take part in a labor racket and extortion plot directed at Los Angeles film studios.
Chicago mobster John “Handsome Johnny” Roselli took over the projectors union and threatened the studios with strikes and other labor issues. Ricca and Nitti, along with much of the mob leadership, were caught up in the massive shakedown of the motion picture industry and indicted in 1943. On March 18, 1943, the outfit’s top leaders decided it was time to call in Nitti’s cards as the front man. Given the movie indictments, they ordered him to plead guilty and take the fall.
Nitti, who had already served 18 months on an income tax charge at the beginning of the 1930s, was terrified. The next day, March 19, 1943, he was seen walking along railroad tracks, where he pulled a gun from his pocket and shot himself. Ricca received a 10-year sentence in 1943 but was apparently freed in August 1947, thanks to the intervention of Attorney General Tom Clark. The early parole infuriated the Chicago press, which reported Ricca’s assertions that his influence reached the White House.
According to “The Mafia Encyclopedia,” Ricca instructed his lawyers to find out who had the final say in his speedy release, saying that man must want something—money, favors, even a seat on the Supreme Court—and to find out what he wanted and get it for him. While Ricca was incarcerated, Tony Accardo visited him in his cell, posing as his lawyer and keeping him informed of syndicate activities. Within a few years, Ricca allowed Sam Giancana to command the syndicate while he and Accardo hid in the shadows, safe from government scrutiny. Giancana had joined the Chicago outfit in the late 1930s and was in charge of Louisiana’s illegal gambling, illicit liquor trade, and political rackets from the 1940s through the 1950s.
Ricca was identified as the national head of the crime syndicate in the Kefauver Committee hearings on organized crime in the early 1950s. In 1958, the McClellan Committee called him the most important criminal in America. Each time he testified before a committee, Ricca frequently invoked the Fifth Amendment. Ricca lost his citizenship in 1957, and two years later a deportation order was issued.
He used a series of appeals and delays to postpone his deportation to Italy, even petitioning an Italian court to have his Italian citizenship revoked. The Italian government made the remarkable decision to refuse to take Ricca back, even to complete his previous murder sentence. Immigration officials then told him he would need to find another country to accept him. Ricca submitted applications to various nations, including a packet of news clippings explaining why the U.
S. government considered him so undesirable—yet no country showed any desire to let him in. In his later years, Ricca spent much of his time at the Alitalia terminal at O’Hare Airport, listening to Italian tourists speak their native tongue. Some believed he had become a little senile from spending so much time there, but federal agents suspected he was actually setting up meetings with drug or contraband smugglers.
On October 11, 1972, Ricca died of a heart attack at Saint Luke’s Hospital in Chicago, though some accounts claim he passed away in his bed. While Ricca was alive, Mad Sam DeStefano was reportedly safe from retribution. A few months after Ricca’s death, DeStefano was murdered.