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Ex-Chicago cop to be sentenced today for grisly kidnap, murder plo

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"I was happily retired, living with my lovely wife in a golf course community in Naples," Mandell, 64, said Thursday as he delivered bizarre remarks at his sentencing in a packed federal courtroom. "It was the perfect life."
Instead,he came out of retirement in 2012 and returned to Chicago, where he was soon arrested in a grisly plot to kidnap, murder and dismember a suburban businessman. Mandell said he was once again framed by an untrustworthy informant, continuing his "long FBI nightmare."

But U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve was unmoved by the melodrama. Moments after the former Chicago cop wrapped up more than 30 minutes of mostly rambling remarks — including cheerfully wishing the judge a merry Christmas — St. Eve sentenced him to life in prison for kidnapping and extortion conspiracy and added a mandatory five-year sentence for a gun conviction.

It was an emphatic end for Mandell, a reputed underworld figure whom law enforcement has long considered a dangerous killer and elusive target.

Years ago Mandell — who then went by the name Steven Manning — was sent to death row for the drug-related 1990 slaying of a trucking firm owner. After his murder conviction was overturned on appeal, he won a landmark $6.5 million verdict in a lawsuit against the FBI. A judge, however, later threw out the verdict, and Mandell never collected a penny.

Mandell moved to Florida after the ruling and vanished from the public eye. Several years later, he came back to Chicago under his new name and soon was meeting with reputed mobsters at La Scarola restaurant on Grand Avenue, according to court records.

The latest case against Mandell unfolded in October 2012 when he and his accomplice, Gary Engel, were arrested outside the Northwest Side office of George Michael, a former banker and real estate mogul who pretended to go along with the macabre plan to kidnap Riverside businessman Stephen Campbell and extort him for his cash and property.

Michael had helped Mandell outfit a Devon Avenue storefront with an industrial sink, butcher table and other equipment needed to drain Campbell's body of blood and chop it to pieces. But Michael was wearing a wire for the feds, and the storefront — which Mandell dubbed "Club Med" — was rigged with a hidden FBI camera.

Engel hanged himself in his jail cell shortly after he and Mandell were arrested, authorities said.
In the videos played at Mandell's February trial, he laughed when he described how victims often come unglued before their deaths. He mimed a blindfolded prisoner, then drew a hand across his throat to signify a killing. He seemed to have mirth in his eyes as he made moaning sounds describing the carnage he could inflict.

"Uhhhh please ... aaaaaaahhhh! It's pitiful," Mandell said in one recording.


Mandell's attorney, Francis Lipuma, sought as few as 12 years in prison, saying Mandell should get credit for the two decades he spent behind bars for a murder he didn't commit. Lipuma noted that no one was actually harmed in the kidnapping plot and said if Mandell were released in his 80s, he'd be at a point in his life "when criminal activity would have concluded."

But in asking for a life sentence, Assistant U.S. Attorney Amarjeet Bhachu painted Mandell as a sadistic narcissist who "actually takes pleasure from hurting people."

"He likes it. It arouses him!" said Bhachu, pointing to the defense table at Mandell, who took a sip of water from a Styrofoam cup.

In her ruling, St. Eve said Mandell's actions showed a "complete disregard for human life."
"The pure delight that you showed in those videos … it came through loud and clear," St. Eve said. "The glee in your face was very apparent. It was, quite frankly, chilling."

St. Eve said a life sentence was necessary to keep Mandell from returning to a life of violence and crime.

When FBI agents raided Mandell's Buffalo Grove home after his arrest, they found more than $16,000 in cash in two separate stashes as well as thousands of dollars more in a safe-deposit box at a nearby bank, recent court filings show. Mandell has asked for the money to be returned to his 83-year-old wife, but prosecutors have objected in sealed filings.

jmeisner@tribpub.com
Twitter @jmetr22b

A haven for mobsters

Palm Springs a neutral zone where organized crime families mingle and relax, without fear of retribution
Bruce Fessier, The Desert Sun
 
In August of 1961, senior FBI agent Clayton Taylor opens an auxiliary office of the Los Angeles bureau in Palm Springs, a town where mobsters like Pat Marcy and Sam Giancana spend their winters. Clayton has 140 cases in the first year alone.

The big fish in Palm Springs is Tony Accardo, the Chicago Outfit's consigliere. Two agents make the drive in from L.A. to help Taylor locate the mobster nicknamed "Joe Batters"and "Big Tuna." But they have no luck until a local insurance adjuster joins the agents for a barbecue.
"I know where he lives," the insurance man says. The agents look at each other knowingly — as in, "sure you do." So they drive to the man's office and he pulls the address for Accardo.

"He was staying in a house in Canyon Country Club, on Alhambra," Taylor says years later. "It had wind damage to the roof. He had been the insurance adjuster on that and had met the tenant."

The Palm Springs FBI office doesn't have sophisticated surveillance devices in the early-'60s. In Chicago, agents use bugs under the written authority of U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, although the recordings aren't admissible in court. In the desert, Taylor has to personally tail or interview mobsters to gain information. Burt Spivack, a top Spa Hotel executive, notices Taylor spending so much time observing people coming in and out of the resort, they develop a friendship.
Still, some of Clayton's investigations are almost comical.

Like the search for Doc Stacher, who is Mafia kingpin Meyer Lansky's West Coast gambling czar. Hearing that Stacher is in town, Taylor drives up and down Indian Avenue, checking hotel after hotel to no avail. He ends his search at Vista Chino because he doesn't think there's any action beyond The Riviera.

A block away, Stacher is staying at the Racquet Club.

Another time, Clayton is trying to find Frank Buccieri, the head of gambling and loansharking operations on Chicago's West Side and the brother of hit man Fifi Buccieri. Every morning, Taylor unknowingly jogs past the home Buccieri is renting.

"What I found was most of the organized crime figures came here to vacation," Clayton later says. "They stayed mostly at the El Mirador Hotel and they would spill over to the Spa [Hotel] and a couple of the others. Then they would rent houses for the season."

By the time Taylor retires from the FBI in 1977, Riverside County Sheriff Ben Clark offers this assessment of mob activities in the desert: "Some big hoodlums may put their heads together in the Coachella Valley and plan a crime. But the actual crime they're planning won't occur here; it may happen in Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, New York or New Jersey."Ditto that, says Taylor.
"I would do surveillance on (Chicago mobster) Johnny Rosselli, but, whoever he met with, you never picked up anything of value that showed they were violating any laws or doing anything illegal or planning."

Open territory

As organized crime experts piece together the web-like structure of the national syndicate, it becomes apparent that mobsters are strategizing in Palm Springs.

Part-time Palm Springs resident Joe Fusco — the one-time head of Al Capone's Prohibition-era beer-manufacturing operation — is seen hosting a meeting with Chicago mobsters Accardo, Rocky Fischetti and Jake Guzik, New York boss Frank Costello, Genovese family associate Phil Kastel and criminal attorney Abe Pritzker.

Pritzker is a partner in a Chicago law firm with Stanford Clinton, the general counsel to the Teamsters Pension Fund. Pritzker, Pritzker & Clinton use the Illinois loan company Frontier Finance as a holding company for mob assets, and its president is none other than Frank Buccieri.

By the late-'70s, there are more than 100 mobsters believed to be living in Palm Springs, mostly from Chicago. In just four years, they've invested nearly $50 million in the desert.
 
"Palm Springs is like Switzerland for organized crime," Deputy Chief Sam Lowery of the Riverside County Sheriff's Office says. "It's become neutral territory where mob figures can come and relax and not worry about being bumped off. They have been very successful at blending into the community."
Local law enforcement is so passive about the influx of mobsters, other agencies won't share information with them.

"The Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit [in Los Angeles] considered that if they gave information to the Palm Springs Police Department, it was in the hands of the mob within an hour," says former Palm Springs cop Mark Moran years later.

"Chief (Bob) White had a reputation for being very close to all the mobsters, and Palm Springs was like Miami. It was an activity-free zone so that any mobster from any part of the United States — any one of the families — could come here and not suffer the potential consequences of being next to another family that was in competition with them."

Lee Weigel, another former Palm Springs cop, chief of police and a city councilman, echoes Moran's assessment. "All through the 1970s, we were kind of persona non grata with the LEIU," Weigel says. "Word in the police department was this is a place where organized crime figures came. But it wasn't a family territory. (It was) like open territory — like a place of no organized crime business and a truce territory."

Taylor gets his information from a source in the district attorney's office. "Whether he would share it with the police department, I don't know," Taylor says.

Vacation town

Palm Springs, the mid-1970s.

Moran and fellow cops discover illegal gambling operations at local joints the Old World, The Nest and Jilly's, which is owned by Frank Sinatra's close friend Jilly Rizzo. After Moran shuts down the Old World, Palm Springs Police Chief Bob White calls him into his office.

"Why are you checking Jilly's?" White asks. "Why are you checking the Old World?"
"Because there is illegal activity going on in there," Moran says.
"We don't do that," says White. "You are not to do this."

Despite the city's lax policy toward mobsters, Weigel says he never hears Palm Springs cops being told not to investigate possible illegal activity.

"There were many briefings about organized crime and organized crime figures," he says. "None were ever pointed out and designated as 'hands off.' "

But mobsters don't come to Palm Springs to lay low.

"You'd run into them all over the place," Weigel says. "But they weren't doing drugs. They weren't bossing around unions. We felt that they weren't criminally active."

The city of Beverly Hills has an ordinance prohibiting ex-cons from entering its city more than five times a month, and L.A. boss Mickey Cohen is arrested for violating it in 1957. Cohen is also arrested in Palm Springs during Chief Gus Kettman's era for failing to register as a convicted felon.
But by the '70s, the mob is so integrated into Palm Springs, the police can't enforce such strict policies.

"Los Angeles had people assigned to organized crime figures," Weigel says. "They would say, 'We hear [Frank] Buccieri is coming to Palm Springs.' And we wouldn't do anything. We were too small to pay attention to every organized crime figure that came to town."

So Buccieri and his pals roam the local restaurants and nightclubs.

"People who came in to Pal Joey's were mob people," says its co-owner, Joe Hanna. "Somebody introduced me to a guy by the name of Frank Buccieri, who was a mob guy... Tony Accardo used to come into Pal Joey's. He'd bring 10 to 12 guys in. He was a gentleman. He always had a bunch of people in there, but he was a real gentleman."

Mel Haber hosts many of them at his restaurant, Melvyn's at the Ingleside Inn in Palm Springs. But he never sees criminal activity from them in the desert.

"When I came in there were still juke boxes," Haber says. "They didn't have the juke boxes, they didn't have the pay phones, they didn't have the garbage. They didn't have anything like they had in every other city. I knew of a couple bookmakers in town. I knew about big card games in the country clubs. But there was no big business.

"I once asked Frank Buccieri — I was in my cups, I had too much to drink. I said, 'Mr. B, I've got to ask you a question. I'm high profile' — this is when I first opened up (in 1975). 'If I was in New York, I'd have 10 guys hitting on me. How come nobody had a hit on me?' He said to me, 'Pal, as long as we vacation in this town, there will never be business in this town.' And there has never been business in this town. Never been organized crime business in this town."

Assigned to RFK

Taylor had a personal relationship with RFK. "He would pick up the phone and call me on a specific case," he says. So he heard things about that legendary bacchanal weekend. He heard Marilyn Monroe was there. And he heard Frank Sinatra was irate that his friend, JFK, wouldn't stay at the presidential wing he had built for him at his Rancho Mirage compound.

"At that time there were some ill feelings because Frank supposedly had done a lot to get him elected," says Taylor. "I did see or hear that some of the golf carts that Frank furnished to the Rat Pack were taken away and some of the guys were kicked out of the Rat Pack — Peter Lawford."

But RFK didn't participate in the party where JFK was also said to have a tryst with an intern while guests popped amyl nitrates. RFK had come from a meeting with the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco. JFK was just getting ready to leave the Crosby house after a Sunday morning service at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Palm Desert. Taylor was chauffeuring RFK to join the president for their trip back to Washington, D.C., But it wasn't a smooth operation.

"I met Bobby Kennedy at the airport and I took him down to the little white house," Taylor says. "I get back home and his briefcase was still in the car. He forgot his briefcase! So I took that back to him that night. But Secret Service took over (security) pretty much until the President was assassinated." 
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