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Guilty verdict born of a dinner meeting



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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