A New Book Exposes a Marx Brothers Link to Organized Crime

Zeppo Marx “never killed anybody, as far as I know,” Robert S. Bader, author of the upcoming Zeppo: The Reluctant Marx Brother, told The Guardian. But that’s about the nicest thing Bader has to say about the least famous Marx brother. 

“This guy was really shady,” Bader explained. “It’s hard to believe, but he was on this driven mission to make more money than his brothers, and he didn’t care how he did it.” 

By some accounts — Groucho’s for one — Zeppo was the funniest of the Marx Brothers when they weren’t on screen. But he mostly played the handsome straight man in movies like Duck Soup and Monkey Business, rarely getting the laughs except when reacting to the antics of Groucho, Chico and Harpo. 

Offscreen, Bader says, Zeppo had multiple ties to organized crime. How connected was he? He flattened one of Lucky Luciano’s guys and got away with it. “One night at a boxing match in Los Angeles, (Pat) DiCicco got into an argument with Zeppo, who punched him in the face and knocked him out. If anybody else had done that to Pat DiCicco, they probably would have been killed,” Bader noted. “But Zeppo was so well connected that it was overlooked. They didn’t do anything to him. He was not frightened at all. He was one of them.”

Harpo’s wife, the late Susan Marx, certainly noticed. She told Bader about attending a Hollywood fundraiser that was “filled with mobsters.” Her brother-in-law made his way around the room, greeting every shady character. She raised her eyebrows, asking Harpo, “How come Zeppo knows all these guys?”

Not surprisingly, the rest of the Marx Brothers were worried that Zeppo’s nasty habits would eventually involve them as well. Zeppo “would lose $100,000 playing cards and the next night he’d win $200,000. The Marx brothers were frightened of this,” Bader told The Guardian. “They didn’t want to have any connection to his debt.”

But Groucho in particular loved Zeppo, who could make him cry with laughter. All of the brothers called each other every day. “That’s just the way they were.”

Zeppo left the movies to start a talent agency, funded with cash from a series of celebrity jewelry heists, according to Bader’s reporting. He believes Zeppo may have even organized the crimes as he was the scam’s only two-time “victim.” When it came to his new venture, Zeppo “didn’t have the money, but then he suddenly had the money.”

How believable is Bader’s scandalous account? Zeppo’s son Tim thinks it’s on the money, releasing a statement that claims the new book “accurately portrayed my father as a charming, funny but narcissistic individual.”

It sounds like Zeppo lived his life by one of Groucho's jokes: “Those are my principles, and if you don't like them, well, I have others.”