Born Dec. 1, 1907, in Chicago, he never made it beyond the third grade, Joe had plenty of criminal smarts. He began his criminal career as a muscleman and gunner for the Capone Mob in 1935. Heading the Goon squad in Cicero, Ill. Basically what he did was protect the Capone stronghold of the Hawthorne Hotel in Cicero. He would guard the entrance at all hours of the day, displaying an array of weapons, ranging from machine guns to automatic pistols. During the 1970s this Hotel was bought by Aiuppa and renamed it, Towne Hotel. It became the essential rendezous for the bosses of the Chicago syndicate.
The Hotel was notorious for a gambling den it housed. While on a raid in 1970, police along with Federal agents, went into the basement of the Turf Lounge, began tapping on walls, and discovered a panel that opened into an empty room. There was a steel trap door in the floor which was bolted from below. The officers broke through the steel door using sledgehammers and picks. There was an underground passage that they followed that led to another steel door. Breaking through the door like the they had with the first door, they discovered a dice game operation with four men conducting the gambling. At that moment everyone involved in the gambling quickly jumped to there feet and ran to escape passages, that had been designed by Joseph Aiuppa just for this very reason.
Aiuppa was not the smartest man, due in part to his low education. When taking the Fifth Amendment fifty-six times in front of the McClellan commitee, he stumbled the brief statement he had to repeat. Even when his so-called boss, Gus Alex, provided a card with the words to be read on it, Aiuppa managed to garble even that.
In 1951, he was convicted of contempt of Congress when testifying before the Kefauver Committee, it was later reversed.
He served a year in jail for failing to register gambling devices. In 1962, in Fort Scott, Kan. he was jailed for three months for killing 562 mourning doves from Kansas to Illinois. The legal limit was 10. With this incident he earned his strange sobriquet, "Doves" Aiuppa.
Aiuppa was a gambling specialist but his extensive Cicero operations have concentrated over the decades on flesh-peddling and scores of lounges and strip joints where the customers were commonly given knock-out drops in their drinks. These wealthy customers would later wake-up in a cheap Hotel room with a prostitute and on of Aiuppa's gunsels waving a blank check that they had signed when drunk, for the drinks and women.
This deviation of the old Badger game brought an estimated $500,000 a year into the Aiuppa-syndicate coffers. Actual prostitution produced double the amount in Cicero alone each year with gambling operations exceeding two million dollars each year.
For years bartender, waitress,and waiter unions in Cicero were commanded by Aiuppa, taking away large amounts of the dues from their unions for syndicate profit. Joseph and his Goons, including topgun James "Turk" Torello, moved in on the adult film and bookstores of Chicago in 1976, attmepting to gain control over all the pornography stores, including a large chain operated by Paul M. Gonsky. Gonsky supposedly refused to hand-over the pornographic operations to Aiuppa, so he was marked for death. He was later killed by gun shot on Sept. 21,1976.
Information was always important to Aiuppa. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, he allegedly spent a small fortune on obtaning information about mob activities by buying an informant, deputy sheriff, Richard Cain. He wore a wire into police headquarters. He reported back to Aiuppa to warn him and other on raides againste their whorehouses and gambling dens. For this services Cain was paid somewher near $2,500 a month. Cain was later suspected of selling information to both police and the syndicate. Hew was killed in 1973.
After syndicate leader Sam "Momo" Giancana was murdered in 1975 the allegiance to the mob began to disappear. Tony Accardo gained leadership of the Outfit at that time, after having been gone into self-imposed exile for ten years. Auippa rose to enforcer under Accardo, but never made top level policy. Joseph's main job was to deal with insurgent mobsters lusting after Giancana's vacated position. One such was gangster was Anthony Spilotro. Spilotro represented the Outfit in Las Vegas. Skimming money from Casino earnings and returning the hundreds of thousands to Chicago syndicate leaders. Spilotro allegedly started taking a portion of the skim for himself. He and his brother Micheal disappeared in 1986. They were later found,in Indiana, by a farmer plowing his field. A nearby farm was owned by, Joseph Auippa. Even though Aiuppa is in prison he is still a force in the mob. He controls Cicero operations, while his crew reports to Chicago boss Sam Anthony Carlisi.
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