Friends of Ours Blog Profiles Outfit's "Little Caesar" DiVarco

The Outfit's Little Caesar, Joseph DiVarco 
Friends of Ours has posted a lengthy and revealing profile, hot off freshly available FBI documents, of  Joseph "Little Caesar" DiVarco, a member of Chicago's Outfit charged with heading gambling, vice and nightlife on Chicago's Near North Side from the mid-1940s to the mid-1980s.

He was a huge earner, the story notes, basing this on recently released FBI documents.

"For example, an informant told the FBI in 1971 that "money . . . is no problem for DI VARCO inasmuch as he made big money in the past and saved much of it," and then another informant told the FBI a year later that "DI VARCO has money and is constantly looking for a way to make more money."



DiVarco had a specialty, too, the blog notes, which was "entangling the Outfit rackets such as gambling and prostitution under the cover of bars and clubs, and the FBI files comprehensively detail his control of the nightlife industry on the Near North Side.

"The Outfit had interests in most establishments, the agencies which staffed them and the vendors who supplied them.

"There didn't seem to be a single angle which escaped the mob's attention in its penetration of the nightlife industry.

"Little Caesar was involved in so many seemingly legitimate ventures perhaps in another life he would have been an upstanding member of the Chamber of Commerce, and one almost can imagine the mobster believing his own lie when telling the FBI during a 1963 interview "that he was not engaged in any illegal activities and that he was a working man who worked hard at his businesses."

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