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20 Significant Mafia Hits

Khalid Elhassan February 19, 2019 23 min

17. Charles “Cherry Nose” Gioe Stuck His Nose Where It Didn’t Belong

Charles “Cherry Nose” Gioe was a high ranking mobster in the Chicago Outfit. A specialist in extortion and blackmail, he was sent to Des Moines in 1936, to expand the mafia’s activities there. From his base in Iowa, Gioe bankrolled a Hollywood extortion scheme, which shook down studio executives, by threatening them with costly labor strikes and disruptions by a mob controlled union. The racket was eventually busted, and Gioe was convicted of extortion and locked up for four years, before getting paroled in 1947.

In 1954, a fellow Chicago mobster, Joseph “Joey” Glimco, dynamited a Chicago Howard Johnson restaurant then under construction, in a bid to extort the building contractor. When Gioe was asked to intercede on the contractor’s behalf, he foolishly agreed, and totally misreading the situation and the dynamics involved, asked Glimco to “lay off”. On the evening of August 18th, 1954, Gioe left a business meeting and got into his car, but no sooner had he sat down, than another vehicle pulled up, and its occupants opened fire. Gioe was killed instantly, but a bullet to the temple.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.