FBI memoranda, September 1947: Congressman Busbey's parole-bribery allegation and a profile of John Roselli (Vault Roselli Part 01)
FBI memoranda to the Attorney General report Congressman Fred Busbey's allegation that a quarter of a million dollars was rumored to have been paid for the 1947 paroles of Campagna, D'Andrea, Gioe, Ricca and Roselli. The memoranda do not find it true.
- Date
- 1947-09
- Kind
- case-file
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- Rights
- A record of the Federal Bureau of Investigation released under FOIA through the FBI Vault. A work of the United States government, public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105.
The opening part of the Roselli file. FBI memoranda of September 15 and 16, 1947 (the page shown is the Director’s memorandum of September 16, captioned “Bribery”) to the Attorney General report that Congressman Fred Busbey of Illinois, relying on a Chicago Tribune reporter, said that a quarter of a million dollars was rumored to have been paid to obtain the paroles of four “members of the Capone Gang,” Louis Campagna, Phillip D’Andrea, Charles Gioe and Paul Ricca (DeLucia), and of John Roselli, possibly through a St. Louis attorney, Paul Dillon.
A profile of September 16, 1947 says Roselli was born June 4, 1905 in Chicago, was convicted on December 22, 1943 in the Bioff extortion case and sentenced on December 31, 1943 to ten years and a $10,000 fine, and that the five men were paroled from federal institutions on August 13, 1947.
The allegation is the congressman’s, passed on from a reporter; the memoranda record it and do not find it true. Later parts of the file (Parts 02 to 06) hold the investigation that followed. The birth data are as the 1947 profile gives them; later FBI reports give a different birthplace. This archive read the page through the Vault viewer’s OCR text layer. The scans are poor; names, dates and figures can be garbled, and many names are redacted under FOIA exemptions (b6, b7C, b7D).
