Anatomy of a Mafia hit (Part 1)
Ken “Tokyo Joe” Eto, alias Joe Montana, a Japanese-American gambling boss nicknamed “Tokyo Joe” by the media and “Joe the Jap” by mobsters, is remembered as one of a handful of persons ever taken for a “one-way ride” by Mafia hitmen who survived.
Ken Eto’s near-death experience can be reconstructed from detailed testimony he gave before the President’s Commission on Organized Crime on April 22, 1985. As he testified in front of that crime-investigating committee, the man he says ordered his murder two years before, Vincent A. “Vince Innocence” Solano Sr., then head of Chicago’s North Side rackets and Eto’s so-called “boss in the Outfit,” sat in the back of a courtroom in Chicago’s Dirksen Federal Building waiting for his own turn to testify.
Unlike his former underling, Vince Solano invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination to every question he was asked except his name. His scheduled testimony immediately followed Eto’s. So the feared Mafia leader had to sit there and listen as Eto recalled how he (Solano) set him up for a hit.
Eto served the Outfit loyally for nearly 30 years before his life in the Outfit began to unravel overnight due to Solano’s paranoia. ...
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