Former cop who plotted kidnapping,
murder met the man who recorded plans at West Side restaurant
February 23, 2014|By Jason
Meisner, Tribune reporter
The story behind the bizarre
trial of Steven Mandell and his plot to murder and dismember a businessman
began at a quiet table at a popular restaurant on Chicago's Near West Side.
It was July 2012, and real
estate mogul George Michael was lunching at La Scarola on West Grand Avenue. At
the table was Albert Vena, a reputed Outfit boss, and several other alleged
mobsters. A friend brought Mandell to the table and introduced him to Michael,
and a relationship was born.
What unfolded over the next three months,
culminating in Mandell's sensational arrest that October, was "so
chilling, so grim ... it's almost stunningly hard to believe," as one
federal prosecutor said in court.
Mandell, a former Chicago cop
who was once on death row, was convicted Friday on charges he plotted to
kidnap, torture, kill and dismember a suburban businessman. The jury acquitted
him, however, in a separate plot to kill an associate of a reputedly
mob-connected strip club. Mandell faces up to life in prison.
Michael secretly wore a wire
for the feds and pretended to go along with the plan to kill Riverside landlord
Steven Campbell. Michael found Mandell a suitable space to carry out Campbell's
torture and murder — a Northwest Side storefront that Mandell referred to as
"Club Med" — and had contractors outfit it with an industrial sink,
butcher table and other equipment needed to drain the body of blood and chop it
to pieces.
The undercover recordings made
by Michael, as well as conversations caught on FBI cameras at Club Med, gave
Mandell's trial the feeling of something out of a Quentin Tarantino movie.
There was snappy dialogue, a cast of foul-mouthed underworld characters and
moments of dark humor.
Jurors seemed to be stunned at
times as they listened to Mandell and his alleged accomplice, Gary Engel, joke
about mutilating Campbell before they killed him. Much of the action played out
on a giant screen in U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve's darkened courtroom as
jurors watched hours of video of Mandell and Engel making final preparations
for Campbell's kidnapping. They laid out saws, knives, a meat cleaver and
Ambien pills in case they needed to put Campbell to sleep. A chessboard was set
up to pass the time.
The jury heard the two quibble
over the workmanship of their torture chamber, with Engel pointing to the
plumbing and exclaiming in a clipped Chicago accent, "What the (expletive)
is this (expletive) abortion?" Engel hanged himself in his jail cell soon
after his arrest.
Also featured was a 30-minute
video from an infrared camera mounted on an FBI spy plane. An agent in the
plane circling high over Arlington Heights followed Mandell as he placed a
tracking device on a girlfriend's car and tossed what amounted to a killer's
"to-do" list inside a garbage can in a secluded suburban park.
On the last day of testimony,
some jurors cracked smiles as they listened to a series of phone calls Mandell
made to his 82-year-old wife from a Loop federal jail after his arrest. Mandell
told her to find her Nissan that he'd left parked near Campbell's home,
instructing her in a cooing voice several times to "throw away" the
trash in the car, explaining, "You need all your space for your
groceries."
A frustrated Mandell could be heard trying to
give his wife directions to the car as she wrote them down. "Just go to
Joliet Road!" Mandell shouted.
"Oh my God, I'm telling
you," she replied. "Ah, slow down!"
The jury also convicted him of
obstruction of justice.
The trial offered a short
course on the current state of the Chicago Outfit and included names like
"Little Guy" Vena and Robert Panozzo, the convicted burglar who
Michael testified introduced him to Mandell during that lunch at La Scarola.
One part of Michael's testimony
went barely noticed amid the lurid charges against Mandell, but it undoubtedly
caught the attention of the people who dined with Michael that July day at La
Scarola. The FBI recorded the meeting, though the tape was never played during
Mandell's trial and his attorneys were barred from delving into how or why it
was made.
After the verdict was handed
down Friday evening, U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon called the case
"extraordinary" and praised the work of the FBI and federal
prosecutors in taking a dangerous figure off the street.
Robert Holley, the special
agent in charge of the Chicago FBI, acknowledged that Michael's role in the
case was significant, but he stopped short of praising him for wearing a wire.
"Yes, there was a risk to
him for his involvement in this case, but he did what he needed to do,"
Holley said.
jmeisner@tribune.com
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