Sometimes, when people hear that a producer optioned something I’ve written or that one of my books was turned into a TV series, they think I have a golden connection. “Who do you know?” they ask. “Is it your agent, the producer, or maybe an actor?” I have to explain I have no more clout than they do. In fact, writers like me who do not sit on the top of bestseller lists are on Hollywood’s lowest rung of the food chain. Like plankton, we are the basis for almost all the life in the sea, but are not very much feared or respected. Once your rights for a property are optioned or sold, showrunners and screenwriters will turn to interns and think the results they pull up on Google are more valid than your years of research.
Still, some experiences can be entertaining despite the dreams they pop like soap bubbles. My wife says the backstories of the movie projects gone bust are more interesting than anything the filmmakers would put on the screen. One such example involves an article I wrote for Playboy called “Boosting the Big Tuna.”
It was about a house a couple blocks from where I lived in River Forest, just west of Chicago. From the street, the place looked like a very nicely landscaped ranch, dwarfed by the much larger homes around it. If you had a more discerning eye, you saw the Italian fieldstone on the facade and carved mahogany in the large front door. It had been built by Tony Accardo, the man who ran Chicago’s mob—known as the Outfit—for nearly fifty years. I would argue he was the most powerful organized crime figure in the second half of the twentieth century. Among other things, he used the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund to build or control most of the casinos on the Las Vegas Strip.
He previously lived a few blocks from the ranch house in a castle-style compound with an imposing iron gate, something like the New York Corleone home we see in The Godfather. But besides his residence, Accardo kept a low profile in public, dressing and comporting himself like the business executives who were his neighbors. In 1963, after he began spending more time in a lavish Palm Springs spread, he decided to downsize, perhaps to continue watching his grandsons play football and basketball at Oak Park River Forest High School, where, I was told, he would climb into the stands unaccompanied by any bodyguards.
When I moved into the neighborhood, I used to hear a story about three burglars breaking into Accardo’s home in 1978. In a couple of weeks, they were all found dead in cars parked around the Chicago area. Two were in the trunks with their throats cut open. One of them, the 31-year-old leader of the gang, named John Mendell, had been trussed up in a way that could have strangled him as he bled to death and was apparently tortured first by ice picks. Also found dead were the burglars’ fence, an Italian ex-cop who was brutally stomped for not knowing better, and a friend who unwittingly drove him to his execution.
My neighbors used to speculate how this could have happened. Some felt the burglars picked the wrong house for a break-in and paid the price for not knowing the owner. But then, in 2007, the federal government brought to trial fourteen Outfit members, including much of the leadership. Among the charges were their role in the murder of seventeen people. At the top of the list were notorious figures like Tony Spilotro—the Joe Pesci character in Casino. But at the bottom, barely noticed by the press, was John Mendell. I then had a news hook to write about the misbegotten break-in.
As I discovered, the burglars did know who owned the house. They were searching for loot from the heist of Levinson’s, a jewelry store and high-end pawn shop in downtown Chicago. Supposedly, Mendell had been to a precious gems exhibition and seen Harry Levinson flaunting a 70-carat diamond necklace called the Idol’s Eye. Then, after casing the shop, he and his crew picked a Saturday night to overcome multiple burglar alarms to break inside. They could see an old-fashioned floor safe in the backroom from the front of the store and figured it would be a cinch to crack. But once inside, they realized the diamond was in a vault with a stainless steel door like they have in banks. Although the crew constructed a massive torch to blast through it, the sparks and flames it unleashed bounced back to catch the ceiling on fire and open the sprinkler system. Although they didn’t get the diamond, Levinson claimed they still got away with a million dollars of furs and jewels from the floor safe.
According to the police, the burglars stored their plunder in the machine shop that Mendell took over from his father-in-law. From there, it was stolen back by the mob. The burglars’ fence, a crude wannabe gangster despised by the Outfit, allegedly egged them on to commit the home invasion. He had heard rumors that Accardo installed a giant walk-in safe when he built his retirement home and was convinced the Levinson’s loot was there. Not only did the burglars not find that safe, they didn’t even gain entry to the expansive basement—as big as the rest of the house—where it was concealed. They fled before the elderly Italian caretaker arrived, leaving behind overturned bookcases and pants with the pockets turned out strewn across the living room.
Accardo reported none of this to the police. He decided to take matters into his own hands. But after the burglar bodies turned up, the FBI’s organized crime agents realized they might have a unique opportunity to imprison Accardo, who, despite his long criminal career, had never spent a night behind bars. Two enterprising agents visited the neighborhood and stopped to chat with the Godfather’s grandson when they found him outside his family’s nearby house. They said they were investigating burglaries in the area. The teen volunteered that one had happened to his grandpa, and boy, was he “pissed.” With that information in hand, the feds could impanel a grand jury and put Accardo under oath. He feigned ignorance of any break-in, but his caretaker was a different story. He entered the grand jury room before the mob’s lawyers could brief him. He probably said too much despite his broken English because it was the last time he was seen in public.
Now, the FBI agents had probable cause for a warrant to search Accardo’s home, ostensibly to locate the caretaker. Unlike the burglars, they quickly discovered a hidden door in the foyer and a staircase leading to the basement. Down there, they found a restaurant-scale kitchen with gleaming stainless steel fixtures, a party room with a movie screen that lowered from the ceiling, and a round conference table big enough for thirty-four chairs. More ominously, at the bottom of the incinerator in the utility room, they plucked out the eyeglass frame they saw on the caretaker but had no other means to link the charred remains to their missing person.
They were luckier with the walk-in safe, which an agent found behind a false cabinet panel. The Godfather’s attorney, who was there with his two daughters, was given an ultimatum. Either provide a combination or watch them cut through the handle with a torch. After hearing from his client in Palm Springs, the attorney pulled a plate from the pantry with three numbers taped to the bottom. Inside the safe, the agents found two registered Smith & Wesson handguns and bundles of hundred-dollar bills stacked in a wine box. They amounted to $275,000 (worth $1.3 million today). Back at headquarters, the agents could trace the cash to banks in the Las Vegas area. They had good reason to believe it was “skimmed” from casino counting rooms since they had recently launched Operation Strawman, a secret probe into the Outfit’s ties to Sin City. But they couldn’t reveal their suspicions about Accardo’s bundles without blowing the cover on their investigation, still years away from completion. The agents were forced to return the cash to Accardo’s attorney and watch as he laboriously counted out each bill. While Strawman did break the Outfit’s hold on Las Vegas and put several of its leaders in prison, Accardo remained unscathed. He died in 1992 at the age of 86, having never spent a night in prison.
I called the story “Boosting the Big Tuna” to play off the nickname given to Accardo by the press because of his love for deep-sea fishing and a few photos that showed him standing next to a dangling albacore. Very quickly, I got a nice offer for the rights from one of the Chicago producers of Barbershop. However, my book agent in LA steered me to someone who offered a comparative pittance, saying she was much more likely to get a movie made because of her connections to studios and actors. Indeed, she brought the project to Universal and an Academy Award-winning screenwriter who saw nothing special about Accardo or the Outfit. He wrote an outlandish heist movie set in present times that bore little resemblance to the article. Although I could have used the dough, I wasn’t too sad when Universal let it go.
The project then bounced around for another half-dozen years when, surprisingly, it caught the attention of Olivier Assayas, a French auteur—who wrote and directed highly acclaimed films produced in Europe. The Clouds of Sils Maria was soon to be released, which was about the relationship between Juliette Binoche, who played a famous actor on stage and screen, and her personal assistant, Kristen Stewart. From what I could see, he made intensely personal pictures. Still, some did involve crime and violence, particularly a TV series about Carlos the Jackal, a terrorist who operated from the mid-70s to mid-80s. He was most known for raiding a meeting of OPEC, where he killed some Arab oil ministers and kidnapped several others. Olivier was proud of the project’s original reporting that revealed Sadaam Hussein’s role as the foray’s instigator and financier. In his emails to me, Olivier stressed his interest in applying similar journalistic integrity to the Big Tuna story, which he called Idol’s Eye. We exchanged nearly one hundred pages of notes as he wrote the script, and Olivier kept pressing me for every detail involved with the Levinson’s heist.
The sources for my article had mostly been police detectives, FBI agents, some Chicago Tribune articles written by David Axelrod (who became a top campaign advisor for Barack Obama), and older clips about John Mendell that covered his previous arrests. For Olivier, I reached out to Mendell’s old mob associates, who didn’t know what happened with Levinson’s but mostly expressed contempt for my protagonist. Yes, Mendell could overcome some burglar alarms, but he was not the master wireman that Axelrod made him out to be. Some referred to him as “Shoes,” a nickname he hated that was bestowed when he served as a cobbler during his stint at a federal prison in Sandstone, Minnesota, a job they said no self-respecting criminal would take.
Finally, I decided to see if I could find one of the jewelry shop burglars who did not break into Accardo’s house. I had several candidates in what is known as the “Santiago Proffer” from the Family Secrets case. These were documents the government turned over to the defense that showed all the statements from their informants. The names were redacted, but that was done with a magic marker in those days. I could still make out the number of letters in the redaction and then match those up with the suspects I heard from FBI agents. One of those names appeared most often, matching with just one person. I decided to track him down, eventually handing a letter and copy of the Playboy article to a former girlfriend in a trailer park. I’ll refer to him as Jake here, and a few weeks later, when I picked up his call, Jake started our conversation by shouting, “Who the fuck gave you my name?” I then told him how I found out he was involved. He quickly calmed down and said, “You should know your article is totally wrong.”
As it turned out, unlike Mendell, Jake was the real deal—a jack of all trades for a prolific and mostly successful crew of burglars. After one job, he had to leave behind the black box he created to overcome burglar alarms. It went into the Chicago Police Department evidence locker and was then turned over to the director, Michael Mann, who put it in the first scene of his movie Thief. Jake was also the go-to guy with safe cracking. Eventually, he was caught and served time in prison. When he got out, he had nothing more to do with the mob and started a legitimate business.
Mendell, he explained, never broke into Levinson’s. He told a friend about the diamond, who then tipped off Jake’s crew leader. They rushed to do the job before Shoes. But as I wrote in Playboy, it was not as easy as it looked. In fact, it was even harder. Once they saw the vault, Jake decided to make short work of the floor safe. When he used his torch to cut through the area around the handle, it opened up a vial of tear gas, a trick the old safe makers used to punish those who abused their products. The burglars had to clear out of the store until the fumes cleared—a risky proposition since there was a police station just across the street. The safe’s contents were hardly worth the effort, mostly pieces Levinson pawned for North Shore dowagers, barely worth five figures in total and nowhere near the million dollars the jeweler claimed he lost the next day. After someone went out to get the parts, Jake assembled what’s known as a Burning Bar, a massive torch using a tank of oxygen for fuel and a pipe stuffed with wires to ignite the flame and keep it burning at the highest possible temperature. He said they continued blasting with the bar even as the ceiling smoldered and the sprinklers rained down. He managed to burn a hole through the wall next to the vault door, but everything inside started to catch fire when they decided to stop.
Besides providing me with a wealth of details, Jake had the most plausible reason why Mendell risked breaking into Accardo’s house. Unlike Jake and his crew, who knew better, Shoes believed what Levinson said about losing a million dollars of merchandise and figured that much loot could only be stored somewhere the mob thought was impregnable. However, when I sprung Jake and his story on Olivier, it all sounded too complicated for the auteur. While he appreciated the details about the attempted heist, he preferred the Mendell myth from my article to what actually happened.
For the producers, my most important contribution was to help convince Robert De Niro to play Tony Accardo. They arranged for me to meet him in his office at the Tribeca Company in lower Manhattan. Despite his cantankerous reputation, I always found “Bob” pleasant and even-tempered. Given his past projects, he was exceptionally well-informed about organized crime and the Outfit. I didn’t have to persuade him to play Accardo. He was intrigued by the man’s immense influence and that he had never been portrayed on the screen. I later learned he had already done considerable work with his longtime hair and makeup team to see if he could look like Accardo. He most wanted me to help him sound like the big boss.
This was not a new challenge for Bob. His character, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, in Casino, was also from Chicago, but neither De Niro nor Pesci, who played Spilotro, took on that nasal, high-pitched Second City twang. At first, Bob asked for any audio clips I could find, but the only recordings of Accardo span the seconds it took him to invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to testify in Congressional hearings. I next suggested we get some mobsters no longer in the Outfit to read his lines. Gianni Russo, who played Carlo in the first Godfather movie, roped in a few, and I found others. I would meet them at a Chicago film studio, hand over Olivier’s latest script, and turn on the tape recorder. We would then hear some humorous renditions that included the stage directions, but almost all questioned the dialog. It wasn’t crude enough. As one explained about Accardo in private conversation, “He wouldn’t say ‘asshole.’ He’d say ‘cocksucker.’”
At Bob’s request, these comments led me to rewrite the dialog—something I’m sure Olivier did not appreciate. However, what I wrote met with the approval of our readers, and eventually, we narrowed them down to one individual I could record over the phone. On many mornings around 6:30, I’d get a call from Bob’s assistant, who would then put Bob on the phone. De Niro and I would discuss more lines for our guy to read, and after he did, I’d email the recording to the assistant.
Beyond the opportunity to portray Accardo, De Niro also looked forward to working with Olivier. He had a distinctive directing style that also attracted Kristen Stewart’s good friend, Robert Pattinson, to play Mendell. He had been her co-star in the very popular Twilight films. Also on board was British actor and Oscar winner Rachel Weisz to play Mendell’s wife, who was twelve years older. Despite the glittering cast, Idol’s Eye had a budget below $20 million, much of it financed against commitments by international exhibitors. They supposedly looked at scripts, too, but were mostly drawn to stars who were big box office in Europe and Asia.
Among my other assignments, the producers wanted me to drive Pattinson around the Chicago area to the various crime scenes in the movie. By this time, for reasons of budget and verisimilitude, the producers had decided to film in Toronto. The Canadian city still had more streets resembling 70’s era Chicago than Chicago. But some actual locations still had a gritty authenticity you couldn’t find elsewhere, and Pattinson enjoyed seeing them. No scenery was more vital to the story than Accardo’s house. The current proprietor had grown up with Tony’s grandchildren and saw the place while the Godfather was still there. With museum-like care, he kept Accardo’s office and party room much as he remembered them. I don’t know how his daughters ever forgave him for not pulling them out of school to see the big star traipsing around their house. However, with a cap pulled down over his head and a slight mustache, I wondered how recognizable Pattinson looked, even to his most ardent fans.
I would find out when we went to a very early lunch in Lincolnwood, the northernmost neighborhood in Chicago. It was close to Mendell’s home and the machine shop, but we were also there to meet a real mobster who knew the burglars’ fence. Because of what I had written about the Outfit in a recent book, he didn’t want to be seen with me anywhere near his stalking grounds in the western suburbs. He felt he would not be spotted in the rib place up north and sat with his back to the entrance. Hardly anyone was there when we entered, but the young woman serving our table looked at Pattinson with a narrowed eye. I soon saw her pull over another server to give us the once-over. Before long, as we were deep in conversation about the fence, a hapless manager leaned in to say we were such a nice-looking table, he wanted to take a picture of us. The mobster jumped up, ready to strangle him. It took his buddy to say, “You idiot. They don’t want your picture.” Indeed, even at that early hour, word had leaked out. A line had formed in front of the restaurant, waiting to ask Pattinson for an autograph or selfie before he left.
The future Batman could not help but feel the real-life mobsters were a little offputting. He was much more comfortable meeting Jake, who I felt could fill him in on the daily life of a freelance burglar. We drove together to the site of Levinson’s (which had turned into a steakhouse) where Jake could take us through the high- and low-lights of the unproductive heist. Along the way, my two passengers bonded when I told Pattinson how Jake was under constant surveillance by the FBI at the height of his criminal career. The actor replied that he could relate. Paparazzi constantly followed him. The two then swapped their techniques to evade unwanted followers.
One other thing Jake and Pattinson had in common was chain smoking. Later that night, they went to a massive club on the south side of Chicago. It had a few bars, a restaurant, and multiple sound stages for country music. Jake thought it was the sort of working-class venue where there would be no American equivalent of the dreaded paparazzi. Even though the weather was in the fifties, they asked if they could eat on the picnic tables outside so they could keep smoking. The manager was happy to comply, but soon after, a twenty-something woman server appeared holding a Pattinson photo she had pulled off the Internet and asked for an autograph. According to Jake, a hundred people were milling about to gawk at them by the time they finished their meal.
The club date did not end Jake’s association with the actor or Idol’s Eye. As the first day of production neared, I got stray requests for such things as vintage photos of hotel lobbies and mailboxes. I also got more questions about the Burning Bar that I did not feel qualified to answer. After bouncing what I heard off Jake, we realized that the prop people could blow up Pattinson or his double to generate the flow of flames and sparks Olivier wanted to see bounce off the vault door. I expressed our fears to De Niro, who demanded the producers send Jake to Toronto to ensure no unexpected calamities would befall the faux heist.
For Jake, this opportunity was the icing on the cake. From our first tense phone call about how I found his name, his contribution to the film had become one of the most exciting experiences of his life, which was saying a lot, given the things he faced as a criminal.
Even though I wasn’t in Toronto, the first day the cameras rolled was also exciting for me. That’s when the rights holders get 90% of the purchase price for their property. My check, for a little more than $100,000, would more than compensate for the months of time I had gladly volunteered for the project. The night before, I got a call from Jake, who had settled in his hotel and had already met with Pattinson for a smoking klatch. I didn’t expect to hear from him again for another twenty-four hours. But early the next morning, while in California on a college visit with my son, my cell phone buzzed with a call from Jake. “Hey,” he said. “They’re pulling the plug on this thing.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. On the set, before filming began and the cash register popped open for people like me, someone announced they couldn’t proceed. Funds were available to get the cast and crew home, but that was it. I next called the assistant producer, who had been my main contact. She was in tears, and with her French accent, she said it was like we had all lost a baby. However, it could get worse. I had already had my early morning call with Bob, and he told me he would soon be headed to Toronto on his private plane. She announced that news to the people around her and then said, “Can you call him and make him stop?” It was a request that defied all the biomechanics of Hollywood. They were asking plankton to steer a whale. But a few minutes later, I was on the phone with De Niro, who may have sighed a bit but took the news calmly. His first comments were in line with what Hyman Roth said in The Godfather Part II. “This is the business we’ve chosen.” But then, maybe more for my sake than his own, he added, “Maybe it can still come back together again.”
It didn’t. The root of the problem was Michael Benaroya, the producer who was supposed to be fronting the money for production. Although he kept blaming Olivier for not cutting his script, the truth was that he had become overextended. He’d pull the plug on a Bruce Willis movie a few months later. This one was already in production, so maybe someone like me had already gotten his check.
Over the next few years, Olivier and his French producer tried to resurrect Idol’s Eye. One potentially disastrous ploy was to replace De Niro with Sylvester Stallone. Every eighteen months or so, I’d get a few thousand dollars to extend their option on “Boosting the Big Tuna.” The last time I saw Olivier was at the Toronto Film Festival. He lamented all the people in Hollywood who get paid for films that never get made. Only after we parted did I realize he was talking about me. My last contact with Bob was more generous. He sent me a handwritten note thanking me for all my hard work and wishing something more had come of it.
