The motion picture The Untouchables taught us that clean cut Fed Elliott Ness threw Al Capone enforcer Frank Nitti off a building after Nitti told the G-Man that Ness's Irish cop friend Malone died screaming like a stuck pig. As Nitti fell shrieking to his death, Ness shouted, "did he sound anything like that?!" The irony of that bit of movie malarky is this: Frank Nitti was actually killed by motion pictures.

In the spring of 1943, Frank Nitti, figurehead of the Chicago Outfit, walked several blocks south from his home to a railyard and tried to fire a thirty-two caliber lump of lead into his brain pan. He missed. His second try was high and outside (perhaps taking his cue from beleagured Sox pitcher Eddie Smith who wild-pitched his way to 20 losses in '42). With two holes in his hat he sat down and gave it another shot. Third time's a charm, as they say. Nitti was motivated to fire a pistol sorta, kinda aimed at his skull by his absolute panic at having to do a significant stretch in the concrete corral for extortion. Nitti was scheduled to testify in front of the Grand Jury the following day.

Nitti, along with colorfully named toughs Handsome Johnny, Cherry Nose and The Waiter, was indicted after a large living associate, Willie Bioff (who died spectacularly - but that's for later), ratted him out. Bioff and his dim-witted pal, George Browne, had been getting rich since the early 1930s via a nifty extortion operation; and the target of their little bit of genius entrepreneurship was the fledgling movie business; specifically, Chicago movie palace owners.

A decade or more before Nitti met up with Capone in the South Side of Hell, Bioff and Browne were buffalo nickle and diming along the main streets of Chicago. If they had had a brochure, it would have said this: "Why have your theater burn down to the ground when you can have the promise of protection from labor strife from B & B for just thousands a year?" Bioff and Brown did so well they angled their aim a little higher: the Balaban and Katz theater organization.

Bioff and Browne, by now infiltrating theater guilds and unions, extended this fine offer to Barney Balaban: donate $20,000 to our "soup kitchen" and wages will freeze. Oh, and your theaters won't burn down.

Barney Balaban found the whole thing sort of hilarious. His thinking was this: these clowns are going to steal the money anyway, there will be no paperwork, my workers won't strike, and I can claim I donated $100,000 to the soup kitchen while pocketing 80k away from the gaze of the IRS. Balaban happily turned over the money - in cash.

As Browne busied himself burrowing into the ranks of the theater workers union - he eventually rose to the post of President of the IATSE (you see their logo at the end of Hollywood movies) - Bioff made the monumentally dumb move of spending the ill-gotten dough in grand fashion at mob run casinos and yammering about it like a knucklehead. News of this spread up the mobster food chain to one mean man: Frank Nitti.

Al Capone, prior to being carted off to the hoosegow, had broached the idea of raiding the tills of Hollywood to his minions. Nitti, recalling his former boss's fine notion, "invited" Bioff and Browne to his home. He made them an offer they couldn't refuse.

Ensconsed in both the unions and the lovely palms of Hollywood, Bioff and Browne began their enterprise with upwards of 90% of their take going to Chicago. Though the thought of agitating Nitti certainly played a role, all of the major studios were happy to pay off the two nimrods for the simple reason that it saved them money. No labor strife, no uninterrupted production schedules, everything maintaining an even strain. The losers in all of this, of course, were the tradespeople; the workers.

Now, here's where the movie business kills Nitti: The Chairman of the Board of 20th Century-Fox Film Corp., Joseph Schenck was the only studio chief who paid his tithe with a personal check. The President of the Screen Actors Guild, Robert Montgomery (father of Elizabeth), came upon a copy of the check and reported it to the IRS.

Schenck sang like a bird and went to the slammer. Bioff sang like a canary so well that the Feds let him keep all the money, and Nitti blew his brains out before he could squeal like a stuck pig.

Which brings us to this weeks's Timecode; a taste of Boxoffice's coverage of the trial of Joseph Schenck. And who better to put in his two cents? Six-time Oscar®-nominated screenwriter Ben Hecht, co-author of the most celebrated play about the newspaper business, The Front Page.

Oh, I promised you a spectacular death. After doing a little time, soaking up some Arizona sun, and back slapping future senator and Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, blabber-mouth mobster Willie Bioff retired with his big pile of dough to Las Vegas. In the fall of 1955, Willie climbed into his truck and turned the key. Tada!

Now, go read this week's Timecode before I burn your home theater down and then come back and leave me some comments; I get paid by the comment. So far - 7 bucks.

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