They made an offer that couldn’t be refused.
Chicago mobster Anthony Accardo’s former home, at 1407 Ashland Avenue in River Forest sold for $1.5 million, the Chicago Tribune reported. Accardo, said to have headed the Chicago Outfit syndicate, lived in the five-bedroom ranch for 15 years, among several homes in the neighborhood that included a 22-room home on Franklin Avenue.
The 1963 home features distinctive white Roman brick and crab orchard stone walls. It was burglarized in 1977 while Accardo and his wife were on vacation. Shortly thereafter, five suspects turned up dead. No one was ever charged.
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The FBI searched the home in November 1978 after a longtime friend and house man for Accardo failed to show up at a federal grand jury session two months earlier. Agents found $250,000 in cash, a police scanner and a glass-enclosed gun case. Accardo sold the home in 1979 before moving to another River Forest home and then ultimately Barrington Hills. He died at 86 in 1992.
It went into contract less than two weeks after being listed for $1.5 million in September. The most recent buyers paid $1.2 million in 2001.
The 4,400-square-foot home has four full baths, two half baths, fireplaces, terrazzo floors and a decorative stone wall. It also has a finished basement with a 1,300-square-foot ballroom, a banquet kitchen and two-room guest suite. The home, which sits on more than a half acre, also has a wine cellar, a stone driveway, a basketball court and — and perhaps unsurprisingly, given its history, a perimeter fence.
[CT] — Victoria Pruitt