Show playing in The Loop connects leaders of The Chicago Outfit to the crime of the century and names the real shooters
It was the crime of the century.
Anyone over the age of 60 remembers exactly where they were on November 22, 1963 when they found out President John F. Kennedy was shot during a parade in Dallas. You remember where you where, how your teachers and parents reacted and the widespread grief citizens of the United States felt. Just like anyone older than 25 remembers September 11, 2001, the date of Kennedy’s assassination is one ingrained in your memory.
But as sure as you are about where you were that day and how you heard, there has been an unprecedented amount of uncertainty behind how the tragic event unfolded.
Yes, the Warren Commission ruled a year later that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in the murder of the president, firing three shots (in six seconds, with a zig-zagging bullet) from the sixth floor of the Book Depository as the President’s motorcade passed Dealey Plaza. There was no conspiracy, just a lone gunman that took out the most powerful man in the world.
But as the years have passed, that explanation just doesn’t hold up. Recent polls have consistently showed more than 60 percent of Americans do not believe Oswald acted alone, and 77 percent say we will never know how it happened. According to a witness of the actual event, some polls show up to 93 percent of the country believes there was a conspiracy involved.
There have been numerous theories as to who was responsible. Some say it was the CIA, Fidel Castro supporters, the KGB or even then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson who masterminded the crime.
But “Assassination Theater,” a theatrical work based on actual investigative journalism, makes a strong case that it all comes down to the mob. The Chicago Outfit in particular.
Play actors Michael Joseph Mitchell, Mark Ulrich, Ryan Kitley and Martin Yurek enthrall the audience as they portray the big names associated with the mob, the FBI, U.S. government and ‘Overworld’ leaders such as Johnson and Chief Justice Earl Warren, who you’ll find reluctantly accepted the role of leading the investigation and only at the insistence of Johnson. Every bit of the play connects to an actual statement or stance the characters made in real life. There’s no fiction to this, just a really, really good account of what very well may have happened.
Without giving too much away, the show makes a case that it was the mob who organized the hit on JFK and the FBI played a big part in the cover-up. While the Warren Commission claimed Kennedy was shot by only Oswald, who was on the sixth floor of the book depository, this account says there were at least three shooters: one in the Dal-Tex building across the street, another in the Book Depository but on the other side of the building and the third, James Files, from behind the fence in the grassy knoll.
Files, who is still living as a prisoner in Joliet, admits he was the assassin who fired the “kill shot” and specifically detailed the crime to Zack Shelton, a former FBI agent played by Ulrich. Watch the play and you’ll find out just how everything he admitted to checked out when more and more evidence was uncovered.
To this day, anyone can still go to Dealey Plaza and find the angle from the grassy knoll was a straight shot to the spot where the president was hit. Hitting the target from the sixth floor of the Book Depository would be much more difficult.
The story is taken from the perspective of Hillel Levin, an investigative reporter played by Mitchell and Shelton. While Levin was interviewing Shelton in 2007 about a break-in at a reputed Chicago mob leader’s home in the late 1970s, Shelton asked him why he wasn’t doing anything on “the real story.”
“The real story,” aka how the mob killed JFK. They had the motive: the number of indictments against mob leaders had risen 500 percent during the Kennedy years. There’s evidence of Files, and his accomplices, being in Dallas the week of the shooting. And the discrepancies between the president’s first autopsy at Parkland Hospital in Dallas and the one later that day at Bethesda in Maryland have always shown that something fishy was going on.
Find out more about the role of Jack Ruby (the strip club owner who shot Oswald two days later on national television) and how the mob may have also played a role in the death of Robert Kennedy, John’s younger brother and attorney general, while he was running for president five years later by watching for yourself. For Chicago history buffs, you’ll also be intrigued by the mob’s connection to the death of former Mayor Anton Cermak.
‘Assassination Theater’ runs until January 10 at the Museum of Broadcast Communications in The Loop.
You really need to watch this five times to gather all the jam-packed information included in the performance. I consider myself to have above average knowledge of the case, having studied it in both high school and college and having visited the site in Dallas to speak to locals, including witnesses. But even I wish I could have hit the pause button a few times during the show. To allow every bit of information to sink in. Because it’s that juicy. It’s that important.
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Eat (and Drink) Your Way Through Sinatra's Chicago
See why the Windy City was without a doubt his kind of town
(Photo by BriYYZ on Flickr)
Frank Sinatra may have been a blue-eyed boy from Hoboken, but he had a real thing for Chicago. Sinatra claimed that he performed in Chicago more than any other city—even Vegas. It was where he made a name for himself as a performer, first working the room as an opening act at the Sherman House Hotel and then finding fame when he took up with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra at the Palmer House.
During the singer’s heyday, he had the run of the streets with his Rat Pack pals and celebrities including Marilyn Monroe and Ella Fitzgerald. Between performances, he spent hours tucked into local clubs. Even his love affairs reflected his love of the city: When Sinatra married Barbara Blakeley, he made sure to have his wedding reception at the Italian Village.
But the crooner of songs like “Chicago” and “My Kind of Town” was also part of the city’s dark side. In 1960, he allegedly helped Chicago mobsters buy votes for the John F. Kennedy campaign. When the mafia came under investigation during JFK’s term, Sinatra paid the price—by playing eight consecutive days of forced performances with the Rat Pack at mob boss Sam Giancana’s night club in the Chicago suburbs.
You can still tour or see a show at many of the performance venues where Sinatra took the stage, but why not toast the singer's 100th birthday on December 12 from one of his favorite watering holes? Each of these bars and restaurants was frequented by Sinatra and his cronies, and together they make up a delicious tour of Frank’s Chicago. If you’re going to raise a toast to Ol' Blue Eyes, consider doing it with a Jack on the rocks. Frank would prefer it that way.
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Sinatra and the mob
Just what was Frank Sinatra's association with "made men"?
At some point in the early 1980s, Pablo Escobar built a private zoo. The Colombian drug baron had yet to embark on his campaign of assassinations and bombings that soon terrorised his country, leaving a trail of dead politicians, judges and police in its wake. Business was good. Profits were up. Less than a decade into his career as el Zar de la cocaína, Escobar had cars, planes, sports fields, houses, lakes, farms, all the fine food and drink he could need. An African hippopotamus? Why not? Send one to the ranch – no, make that four. As a local fisherman later said, anything could happen at “the whim of [the] villain”.
Anything, it seems, including an audience with Frank Sinatra. In 1983 Escobar took members of his extended family on a trip to the United States. After queuing for rides at Disney World in Florida and taking a tour of the FBI building in Washington, DC, they embarked on a 760-mile pilgrimage to Graceland, Elvis Presley’s house in Memphis. The wives and children were then sent home and the men went to Las Vegas, gambling their way through $1m of walking-around money and staying at the Caesar’s Palace casino. It was there that the Escobars, masquerading as a group of “important real-estate investors”, were introduced to the headline entertainment.
“We had dinner one night with Sinatra,” recalled Roberto Escobar, Pablo’s brother, who was so thrilled to meet the singer that he “had goose bumps”. “During dinner, Pablo told Sinatra that we were going to make a helicopter tour the next day and Sinatra asked to come with us . . . Frank Sinatra became our guide as we spent about an hour and a half flying all over the area. ‘This is the Colorado River, this is the Grand Canyon.’ He showed us all the scenery.”
Sinatra, it turned out, had been unaware of his new friends’ true identities. A few years later, when Pablo Escobar had become an internationally wanted super-criminal whose cartel was bringing in more than $60m a day (in 1989 Forbes reported that he was worth $3bn), the acquaintance who had introduced them at Caesar’s Palace received a phone call. It was the singer. “I’ve been watching TV,” he said, alarmed and probably pissed off. “Is that Pablo Escobar the guy we met in Las Vegas?”
It was an innocent encounter but one that was in keeping with Sinatra’s lifelong fascination with criminals. He was born in 1915 into a family of Italian-American immigrants who lived in Guinea Town, a cobblestone district of New Jersey populated almost entirely by fellow expatriate countrymen. His parents – Marty, a boxer-turned-fireman, and Dolly, nominally a midwife but also a “facilitator” in the community who carried out illegal abortions and organised for the Democratic Party – owned a boozy tavern during Prohibition. Dolly’s brother Lawrence was rumoured to have been a whiskey hijacker for the bootlegger Dutch Schultz and, it’s said, Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Willie Moretti, Frank Costello and Lucky Luciano – a who’s who of the era’s mafiosi – passed through or operated in the neighbourhood. Maybe some of them stopped at Marty’s and Dolly’s bar for a drink.
Frank Sinatra’s involvement with gangsters was a complicated one. The myth, as popularised by Mario Puzo in his novel The Godfather (and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 film adaptation), is that the singer was simply a ring-kissing beneficiary of the Cosa Nostra. In Puzo’s rather dubious fictionalised account, both Sinatra’s contract-breaking departure from Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra in 1942 and his selection for his Oscar-winning acting role in From Here to Eternity (1953) were direct results of a capo dei capi’s interventions.
Yet, although it’s true that the singer associated freely with “made men”, his entanglement with them seems to have been based more on mutual curiosity than a client-padrone relationship. At a time when Italians in the United States were still despised as ethnic outsiders, the lawless, gun-wielding enforcers of Old-World “justice” must have appealed to the young Sinatra, just as, later in his career, his unparalleled status as the world’s best-known Italian American – if not quite the world’s best-known American – must have won him the respect of the uomini di rispetto.
And it seems that he made himself useful to crooks, regardless of whether or not they were Italian. In Sinatra: the Chairman (newly published by Sphere), James Kaplan details the singer’s arrangements with gangsters such as Joseph “Doc” Stacher, a Jewish syndicate leader who allegedly “fronted Frank $54,000” to buy points in the Sands casino in Las Vegas. Sinatra’s relatively clean criminal record and his drawing power as an entertainer made him a perfect fit as a frontman for the business – the gambling town was run more or less openly by mobsters, but appearances had to be kept up.
In 1960, Sinatra and a group of associates applied to buy a majority stake in Cal-Neva, a resort and casino that straddled the border between California and Nevada. This time, the singer, according to Kaplan, was “fronting for Sam Giancana” – the Sicilian-American leader of the Chicago Outfit, the organisation once run by Al Capone. Another co-owner, also behind a protective wall of fronts, was the former diplomat Joseph Kennedy. The first news of the takeover ran in the newspapers on the day that Kennedy’s son John won the Democratic presidential nomination.
Sinatra once said that he had been attending Democratic Party rallies since before he learned to read the slogans on the banners that his mother made him carry, yet his interest in John F Kennedy seems to have been something closer to a crush. During their brief bromance, the singer campaigned vigorously for JFK, whom he nicknamed “Chickie Baby”, and invited him to pal around with the then nascent Rat Pack – his unofficial club that included Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr and the actor Peter Lawford (who was married to Kennedy’s sister Patricia). When Joseph Kennedy summoned Sinatra to ask for his help in getting John the support of the Mob, the singer flew off to meet Giancana on a golf course. Soon after, the gangster “almost certainly” helped engineer voting irregularities in JFK’s favour in the state of Illinois, Kaplan writes.
If, as Norman Mailer once observed, the dream life of America is made up of a “concentration of ecstasy and violence”, Sinatra is surely that dream life personified. His relationship with killers and extortionists, though unfortunate, has become the stuff of myth and his music is curiously shaded by its seedy implications. Dean Martin’s whiskey-soaked yet tonally perfect delivery evokes an unpolluted sense of warmth and congeniality, even when he purrs sinister lines such as: “Brother, you can’t go to jail for what you’re thinking.” (What could he be thinking?) Yet listening to the Voice, as Sinatra was known, is often a deeper, darker experience, especially on his albums of ballads and what he called “saloon” songs. On Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely, Sinatra and Strings and No One Cares, the lyrics speak of heartbreak and yearning, but to many 21st-century listeners it is hard to escape the proximity of violence suggested by the singer’s reputation.
It is an undercurrent that, in song, is redirected inwards. We may have heard stories of Sinatra sending an uncomplimentary journalist a tombstone with her name on it, or instructing his driver to go through – not around – the reporters who swarmed him but, in his music, the sense of danger attached to his persona as a star becomes something more abstract. It heightens his performances, making each great song of lost love or longing sound as grand and as important as lost love or longing feels.
There is a desperate seriousness in much of Sinatra’s singing that redeems cliché and shows it to be absolute truth, reminding us that the most profound words we are likely to hear – “I love you” – sound corny and have been uttered billions of times before. “I need your love so badly./I love you, oh, so madly,” he sings in “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You”. Hear a square say this and you may gag. But hear a villain reduced to such depths, a villain who could make anything happen on a whim, and somehow the effect is reversed. There is a strange nobility in the performed debasement of Sinatra, the man who seemed to have it all.
The reality was that he had it all – and nothing at all. Sinatra spent his middle years pining for his errant second wife, Ava Gardner, the screen siren who left him to dally in Spain with one of the toreros who inspired Hemingway’s The Dangerous Summer and whom the obsessed billionaire Howard Hughes jealously had watched by a detective who was later involved in a CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. Success in his various careers placated Sinatra only so long as the sun was up. In the wee small hours, he would stare up at photographs of Gardner, arranged in a shrine in his room, or shoot at them with pellet guns. He couldn’t stand to be alone. “The nights are endless things,” he sings in “When No One Cares”. The lyrics were by Sammy Cahn but in Sinatra’s recording, the singer seems to inhabit every line, every note.
I sometimes wonder what it would be like to listen to Frank Sinatra without any knowledge of his life – would it carry the same weight of lived experience? In the end, any singer’s songs stand or fall on their artistic merits and their emotional resonance with listeners; biography can only have a supplemental relationship with the work. Yet Sinatra was more than a singer: he was a star, and one of the brightest of the 20th century. Who would want to shield himself from that myth and all its violent, ecstatic beauty?
Anything, it seems, including an audience with Frank Sinatra. In 1983 Escobar took members of his extended family on a trip to the United States. After queuing for rides at Disney World in Florida and taking a tour of the FBI building in Washington, DC, they embarked on a 760-mile pilgrimage to Graceland, Elvis Presley’s house in Memphis. The wives and children were then sent home and the men went to Las Vegas, gambling their way through $1m of walking-around money and staying at the Caesar’s Palace casino. It was there that the Escobars, masquerading as a group of “important real-estate investors”, were introduced to the headline entertainment.
“We had dinner one night with Sinatra,” recalled Roberto Escobar, Pablo’s brother, who was so thrilled to meet the singer that he “had goose bumps”. “During dinner, Pablo told Sinatra that we were going to make a helicopter tour the next day and Sinatra asked to come with us . . . Frank Sinatra became our guide as we spent about an hour and a half flying all over the area. ‘This is the Colorado River, this is the Grand Canyon.’ He showed us all the scenery.”
Sinatra, it turned out, had been unaware of his new friends’ true identities. A few years later, when Pablo Escobar had become an internationally wanted super-criminal whose cartel was bringing in more than $60m a day (in 1989 Forbes reported that he was worth $3bn), the acquaintance who had introduced them at Caesar’s Palace received a phone call. It was the singer. “I’ve been watching TV,” he said, alarmed and probably pissed off. “Is that Pablo Escobar the guy we met in Las Vegas?”
It was an innocent encounter but one that was in keeping with Sinatra’s lifelong fascination with criminals. He was born in 1915 into a family of Italian-American immigrants who lived in Guinea Town, a cobblestone district of New Jersey populated almost entirely by fellow expatriate countrymen. His parents – Marty, a boxer-turned-fireman, and Dolly, nominally a midwife but also a “facilitator” in the community who carried out illegal abortions and organised for the Democratic Party – owned a boozy tavern during Prohibition. Dolly’s brother Lawrence was rumoured to have been a whiskey hijacker for the bootlegger Dutch Schultz and, it’s said, Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Willie Moretti, Frank Costello and Lucky Luciano – a who’s who of the era’s mafiosi – passed through or operated in the neighbourhood. Maybe some of them stopped at Marty’s and Dolly’s bar for a drink.
Frank Sinatra’s involvement with gangsters was a complicated one. The myth, as popularised by Mario Puzo in his novel The Godfather (and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 film adaptation), is that the singer was simply a ring-kissing beneficiary of the Cosa Nostra. In Puzo’s rather dubious fictionalised account, both Sinatra’s contract-breaking departure from Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra in 1942 and his selection for his Oscar-winning acting role in From Here to Eternity (1953) were direct results of a capo dei capi’s interventions.
Yet, although it’s true that the singer associated freely with “made men”, his entanglement with them seems to have been based more on mutual curiosity than a client-padrone relationship. At a time when Italians in the United States were still despised as ethnic outsiders, the lawless, gun-wielding enforcers of Old-World “justice” must have appealed to the young Sinatra, just as, later in his career, his unparalleled status as the world’s best-known Italian American – if not quite the world’s best-known American – must have won him the respect of the uomini di rispetto.
In 1960, Sinatra and a group of associates applied to buy a majority stake in Cal-Neva, a resort and casino that straddled the border between California and Nevada. This time, the singer, according to Kaplan, was “fronting for Sam Giancana” – the Sicilian-American leader of the Chicago Outfit, the organisation once run by Al Capone. Another co-owner, also behind a protective wall of fronts, was the former diplomat Joseph Kennedy. The first news of the takeover ran in the newspapers on the day that Kennedy’s son John won the Democratic presidential nomination.
Sinatra once said that he had been attending Democratic Party rallies since before he learned to read the slogans on the banners that his mother made him carry, yet his interest in John F Kennedy seems to have been something closer to a crush. During their brief bromance, the singer campaigned vigorously for JFK, whom he nicknamed “Chickie Baby”, and invited him to pal around with the then nascent Rat Pack – his unofficial club that included Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr and the actor Peter Lawford (who was married to Kennedy’s sister Patricia). When Joseph Kennedy summoned Sinatra to ask for his help in getting John the support of the Mob, the singer flew off to meet Giancana on a golf course. Soon after, the gangster “almost certainly” helped engineer voting irregularities in JFK’s favour in the state of Illinois, Kaplan writes.
If, as Norman Mailer once observed, the dream life of America is made up of a “concentration of ecstasy and violence”, Sinatra is surely that dream life personified. His relationship with killers and extortionists, though unfortunate, has become the stuff of myth and his music is curiously shaded by its seedy implications. Dean Martin’s whiskey-soaked yet tonally perfect delivery evokes an unpolluted sense of warmth and congeniality, even when he purrs sinister lines such as: “Brother, you can’t go to jail for what you’re thinking.” (What could he be thinking?) Yet listening to the Voice, as Sinatra was known, is often a deeper, darker experience, especially on his albums of ballads and what he called “saloon” songs. On Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely, Sinatra and Strings and No One Cares, the lyrics speak of heartbreak and yearning, but to many 21st-century listeners it is hard to escape the proximity of violence suggested by the singer’s reputation.
It is an undercurrent that, in song, is redirected inwards. We may have heard stories of Sinatra sending an uncomplimentary journalist a tombstone with her name on it, or instructing his driver to go through – not around – the reporters who swarmed him but, in his music, the sense of danger attached to his persona as a star becomes something more abstract. It heightens his performances, making each great song of lost love or longing sound as grand and as important as lost love or longing feels.
There is a desperate seriousness in much of Sinatra’s singing that redeems cliché and shows it to be absolute truth, reminding us that the most profound words we are likely to hear – “I love you” – sound corny and have been uttered billions of times before. “I need your love so badly./I love you, oh, so madly,” he sings in “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You”. Hear a square say this and you may gag. But hear a villain reduced to such depths, a villain who could make anything happen on a whim, and somehow the effect is reversed. There is a strange nobility in the performed debasement of Sinatra, the man who seemed to have it all.
The reality was that he had it all – and nothing at all. Sinatra spent his middle years pining for his errant second wife, Ava Gardner, the screen siren who left him to dally in Spain with one of the toreros who inspired Hemingway’s The Dangerous Summer and whom the obsessed billionaire Howard Hughes jealously had watched by a detective who was later involved in a CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. Success in his various careers placated Sinatra only so long as the sun was up. In the wee small hours, he would stare up at photographs of Gardner, arranged in a shrine in his room, or shoot at them with pellet guns. He couldn’t stand to be alone. “The nights are endless things,” he sings in “When No One Cares”. The lyrics were by Sammy Cahn but in Sinatra’s recording, the singer seems to inhabit every line, every note.
I sometimes wonder what it would be like to listen to Frank Sinatra without any knowledge of his life – would it carry the same weight of lived experience? In the end, any singer’s songs stand or fall on their artistic merits and their emotional resonance with listeners; biography can only have a supplemental relationship with the work. Yet Sinatra was more than a singer: he was a star, and one of the brightest of the 20th century. Who would want to shield himself from that myth and all its violent, ecstatic beauty?
Feds say reputed mobster threatened business partner from prison
"Quit being a FINK and answer my call," convicted mobster writes.
Paul Carparelli, it seems, is not a very gentle guy. He was caught on undercover recordings ordering an associate to "crack" a man who owed a debt. He allegedly sold drugs out of his house, in front of a young son. He managed an extortion ring, federal prosecutors say, and threatened contract beatings to break a victim's legs and knock "the living piss" out of his ex-wife.
And in August, three months after he pleaded guilty in federal court to a trio of extortion counts, he threatened a former business partner from prison, prosecutors allege.
"Doesn't matter if I get 6 months or 6 years when I'm done were [sic] gonna have a talk," Carparelli, a reputed Outfit associate, wrote in an all-capital letters email to the man. "So put your big boy pants on and get ready."
In intercepted emails and prison calls, Carparelli referred to his business partner as a "fink" after he stopped returning his calls and accused him of cooperating with the government, prosecutors said. He also claimed the man owed him money.
"The 1500 means nothing," Carparelli wrote. "Its [sic] the point that matters!!!!!! ... See you when I get out!!!!!! Partner!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
In the Wednesday filing in federal court detailing the exchange, assistant U.S. attorney Heather K. McShain argued the behavior demonstrates that Carparelli cannot kick his violent tendencies and thus deserves the maximum sentence of 11-plus years in prison.
"This is the life of which Carparelli is 'proud' and to which he is loyal — a lifetime of crime," McShain wrote. Later, she wrote, "Clearly, sitting in prison and awaiting sentencing has done nothing to signal to Carparelli that he must change his ways. ... Only a meaningful sentence will send that message to Carparelli, as well as deter his future criminal conduct and violence.
Carparelli's attorneys disputed many of the government's characterizations of their client, saying in a rebuttal presentence filing that Carparelli often was attempting to collect legitimate business debts and did not use violence or threats.
Carparelli, 47, who allegedly has long-standing ties to the Outfit's Cicero crew, was arrested in July 2013. Agents recovered two guns, $170,500 in cash and nearly $200,000 in jewelry — including a gold bracelet with the name "Paulie" spelled in diamonds — in a safe hidden in the crawl space of his Itasca home, court records show. A 300-pound union bodyguard who was working with Carparelli, George Brown, began secretly cooperating with the FBI.
In a 2013 recorded conversation between the two men, a transcript of which was submitted by McShain in the presentencing court filings, they discussed how to confront a man who owed them money.
Brown: "What exactly do you want this guy to do if this fat (expletive) doesn't have the money?" Brown asks.Carparelli: "OK, if he doesn't have a check today, we need to ring his bell and ask him when are some funds gonna start being available. ..." Carparelli said.
Brown: "Alright, so he's got the go-ahead to (expletive) blast him? That's what you want?"
Carparelli: "Well, I ... I ... I want, I want a response from him first, I want a response from him first, you know what I mean? You understand what I'm sayin'?"
Brown: "Hold on."
Carparelli: "I'd rather just, I'd rather just go there and get a response from him and then, and then if that doesn't work, then we blast him."
In pleading guilty, Carparelli admitted involvement in plots to use intimidation and violence to collect debts on behalf of two businessmen. He was remanded into federal custody for threatening a government cooperator in August. He then wrote a series of emails and made calls to several friends and associates, including attempts to settle debts and finalize the closing of the deli he operated with the man he became upset with in the emails.
"Hey dude at somepoint we need to have a conversation dont know what your problem is but im not gonna be here forever you cant dodge me BUDDY!!!!! so quit being a FINK and answer my call!!!!!!!!" Carparelli wrote to the man on Aug. 7, under the subject header "yo."
Sentencing is scheduled for Dec. 21.
poconnell@tribpub.com
Twitter @pmocwriter
And in August, three months after he pleaded guilty in federal court to a trio of extortion counts, he threatened a former business partner from prison, prosecutors allege.
In intercepted emails and prison calls, Carparelli referred to his business partner as a "fink" after he stopped returning his calls and accused him of cooperating with the government, prosecutors said. He also claimed the man owed him money.
"The 1500 means nothing," Carparelli wrote. "Its [sic] the point that matters!!!!!! ... See you when I get out!!!!!! Partner!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
In the Wednesday filing in federal court detailing the exchange, assistant U.S. attorney Heather K. McShain argued the behavior demonstrates that Carparelli cannot kick his violent tendencies and thus deserves the maximum sentence of 11-plus years in prison.
"This is the life of which Carparelli is 'proud' and to which he is loyal — a lifetime of crime," McShain wrote. Later, she wrote, "Clearly, sitting in prison and awaiting sentencing has done nothing to signal to Carparelli that he must change his ways. ... Only a meaningful sentence will send that message to Carparelli, as well as deter his future criminal conduct and violence.
Carparelli's attorneys disputed many of the government's characterizations of their client, saying in a rebuttal presentence filing that Carparelli often was attempting to collect legitimate business debts and did not use violence or threats.
Carparelli, 47, who allegedly has long-standing ties to the Outfit's Cicero crew, was arrested in July 2013. Agents recovered two guns, $170,500 in cash and nearly $200,000 in jewelry — including a gold bracelet with the name "Paulie" spelled in diamonds — in a safe hidden in the crawl space of his Itasca home, court records show. A 300-pound union bodyguard who was working with Carparelli, George Brown, began secretly cooperating with the FBI.
In a 2013 recorded conversation between the two men, a transcript of which was submitted by McShain in the presentencing court filings, they discussed how to confront a man who owed them money.
Brown: "What exactly do you want this guy to do if this fat (expletive) doesn't have the money?" Brown asks.Carparelli: "OK, if he doesn't have a check today, we need to ring his bell and ask him when are some funds gonna start being available. ..." Carparelli said.
Brown: "Alright, so he's got the go-ahead to (expletive) blast him? That's what you want?"
Carparelli: "Well, I ... I ... I want, I want a response from him first, I want a response from him first, you know what I mean? You understand what I'm sayin'?"
Brown: "Hold on."
Carparelli: "I'd rather just, I'd rather just go there and get a response from him and then, and then if that doesn't work, then we blast him."
In pleading guilty, Carparelli admitted involvement in plots to use intimidation and violence to collect debts on behalf of two businessmen. He was remanded into federal custody for threatening a government cooperator in August. He then wrote a series of emails and made calls to several friends and associates, including attempts to settle debts and finalize the closing of the deli he operated with the man he became upset with in the emails.
"Hey dude at somepoint we need to have a conversation dont know what your problem is but im not gonna be here forever you cant dodge me BUDDY!!!!! so quit being a FINK and answer my call!!!!!!!!" Carparelli wrote to the man on Aug. 7, under the subject header "yo."
Sentencing is scheduled for Dec. 21.
poconnell@tribpub.com
Twitter @pmocwriter
Copyright © 2015, Chicago Tribune
Reputed mob crew member not hot on firefighter career
written by Sun-Times Staff posted: 12/20/2015, 06:30pm
few years he worked in west suburban Bloomingdale.
“I said for twenty-eight grand a year, I’ll drive you, and you guys wanna go fight the fire, I’ll go get the donuts,” Carparelli is quoted as saying in a transcript of a phone conversation he had with one of his goons in March 2012. Carparelli, 48, wasn’t high on helping people.“It just wasn’t the job for me, you know. You gotta help them f—— people,” Carparelli said
Nor was he crazy about helping the elderly, who would call in the middle of the night with health problems and disrupt his sleep at the fire station, according to the transcript. “So the fire response is always pickin’ up them old f—in’ f—ers that are croakin’ in the nursing home. You know what I mean?” he asks.
“The lady, oh, I’m havin’ chest pains, I’m havin’ chest pains. She says I’ve been havin’ chest pains since 6:30, 7:00, you know, at night. I looked at her, I said lady, it’s 2:00 in the morning. You wait until 2:00 in the morning and call us, why didn’t you call us at 7:00, you woke everybody up,” Carparelli said, according to the transcript. “She looked at me and got hot,” he adds, laughing.
In May, Carparelli pleaded guilty to his key role in a series of extortion conspiracies around Chicago as well as in Las Vegas, the East Coast and one in Wisconsin that caused the debtor to urinate in his pants and hand over a Ford Mustang because he feared Carparelli’s henchmen.
Carparelli wants probation. A single parent, he says he needs to be out to take care of his teenage son. Federal prosecutors want the judge to sentence him to more than 11 years behind bars.
The feds say he’s a key associate of organized crime figures in Chicago, while his attorney contends Carparelli is nothing more than a big-talking wannabe wise guy.
Contributing: Jon Seidel
few years he worked in west suburban Bloomingdale.
“I said for twenty-eight grand a year, I’ll drive you, and you guys wanna go fight the fire, I’ll go get the donuts,” Carparelli is quoted as saying in a transcript of a phone conversation he had with one of his goons in March 2012. Carparelli, 48, wasn’t high on helping people.“It just wasn’t the job for me, you know. You gotta help them f—— people,” Carparelli said
Nor was he crazy about helping the elderly, who would call in the middle of the night with health problems and disrupt his sleep at the fire station, according to the transcript. “So the fire response is always pickin’ up them old f—in’ f—ers that are croakin’ in the nursing home. You know what I mean?” he asks.
“The lady, oh, I’m havin’ chest pains, I’m havin’ chest pains. She says I’ve been havin’ chest pains since 6:30, 7:00, you know, at night. I looked at her, I said lady, it’s 2:00 in the morning. You wait until 2:00 in the morning and call us, why didn’t you call us at 7:00, you woke everybody up,” Carparelli said, according to the transcript. “She looked at me and got hot,” he adds, laughing.
In May, Carparelli pleaded guilty to his key role in a series of extortion conspiracies around Chicago as well as in Las Vegas, the East Coast and one in Wisconsin that caused the debtor to urinate in his pants and hand over a Ford Mustang because he feared Carparelli’s henchmen.
Carparelli wants probation. A single parent, he says he needs to be out to take care of his teenage son. Federal prosecutors want the judge to sentence him to more than 11 years behind bars.
The feds say he’s a key associate of organized crime figures in Chicago, while his attorney contends Carparelli is nothing more than a big-talking wannabe wise guy.
Contributing: Jon Seidel
Mob associate gets 4 years in prison for plotting to break debtor's legs
Jason MeisnerContact ReporterChicago Tribune.
Mob associate given four years in prison for plotting to break both legs of car dealer who owed him $250,000
The two mob-connected tough guys were expecting a big payday for breaking the legs of a deadbeat suburban businessman, but like any job it came with its own headaches.
The guy who had ordered the beating, Michael "Mickey" Davis, wasn't just anybody. He was a longtime partner of reputed mob lieutenant Salvatore "Solly D" DeLaurentis and had Outfit connections that purportedly went all the way to the top.
Davis was looking for a crew that would administer a vicious beating to Melrose Park used car dealer R.J. Serpico for failing to pay back a $300,000 loan. He wanted the beating to look like a domestic incident. And he wanted it done in short order, court records show.
"We definitely can't (expletive) around with these guys or we're gonna have a big (expletive) headache," Paul Carparelli, the man entrusted to get the beating done, told his associate in a series of recorded phone calls in July 2013. "The guy already gave the down payment. He's a (expletive) mean mother(expletive). I don't wanna have no problems with him."
Unbeknownst to Carparelli, the beefy union bodyguard he'd enlisted to coordinate the assault, George Brown, had been nabbed months earlier in an unrelated plot and was secretly cooperating with the FBI. In July 2013, agents swooped in to stop the beating before it was carried out.
On Tuesday, Davis was sentenced to four years in prison for ordering the violent assault that seemed ripped from the pages of a low-grade gangster film.
"No one is above the law, and the means used, breaking legs, should only be seen in the movies," U.S. District Judge Samuel Der-Yeghiayan said in handing down the sentence.
Davis, 58, a wealthy landfill owner, showed no emotion as the decision was announced. In the courtroom gallery, several family members wiped tears from their eyes, and Davis' wife, Lisa, doubled over at the waist and stared at the floor.
Davis was convicted in June of two extortion-related counts. Prosecutors had asked Der-Yeghiayan for a sentence of up to six years in prison, saying Serpico still suffers from lingering psychological issues stemming from the ordeal.
Serpico testified at trial that he was afraid he would "end up dead" after Davis paid a visit to Ideal Motors one day in early 2013 and demanded his money back. According to Serpico, Davis asked him in a thinly veiled threat, "How are your wife and kids doing? Are you still living in Park Ridge? Does your wife still own that salon in Schaumburg?"
"These kind of people are — they are ruthless," Serpico testified. "And they're going to do whatever they can to get their money."
Serpico testified at trial that he was well aware of Davis' friendship with reputed Outfit bosses John and Peter DiFronzo and that he often saw Davis and Peter DiFronzo cruising past his Ideal Motors dealership in DiFronzo's black Cadillac Escalade. Serpico said he also had heard that Davis was partnered with DeLaurentis, a feared capo convicted in the 1990s of racketeering conspiracy in connection with a violent gambling crew.
Prosecutors allege that within months of the ominous confrontation at Ideal Motors, Davis, infuriated that Serpico had still failed to pay back the loan, ordered his brutal beating, enlisting the help of the owner of a well-known Italian restaurant in Burr Ridge to find the right guys for the job. The restaurateur went to Carparelli, who in turn hired a team to carry out the beating for $10,000, according to prosecutors. Carparelli pleaded guilty to a separate extortion in May.
Davis' lawyer, Thomas Anthony Durkin, said Davis has known the DiFronzo brothers since childhood and that for years he has maintained a business relationship with them through his landfill in Plainfield, where two DiFronzo-owned construction companies have paid millions of dollars to dump asphalt and other debris.
Durkin even showed jurors a photograph that Davis kept on his office desk of him and a shirtless Peter DiFronzo deep-sea fishing off the coast of Mexico.
In court Tuesday, Durkin painted a picture of Davis as a kind and generous person who overcame a hardscrabble upbringing on Chicago's Northwest Side to become a successful businessman.
"He's not a mobster. There's no evidence of that whatsoever," Durkin said. "Unfortunately, in this town there are people who have grown up with people like that, but it doesn't mean you can't speak to them, it doesn't mean you can't play golf with them."
jmeisner@tribpub.com
Twitter @jmetr22b
The guy who had ordered the beating, Michael "Mickey" Davis, wasn't just anybody. He was a longtime partner of reputed mob lieutenant Salvatore "Solly D" DeLaurentis and had Outfit connections that purportedly went all the way to the top.
"We definitely can't (expletive) around with these guys or we're gonna have a big (expletive) headache," Paul Carparelli, the man entrusted to get the beating done, told his associate in a series of recorded phone calls in July 2013. "The guy already gave the down payment. He's a (expletive) mean mother(expletive). I don't wanna have no problems with him."
Unbeknownst to Carparelli, the beefy union bodyguard he'd enlisted to coordinate the assault, George Brown, had been nabbed months earlier in an unrelated plot and was secretly cooperating with the FBI. In July 2013, agents swooped in to stop the beating before it was carried out.
On Tuesday, Davis was sentenced to four years in prison for ordering the violent assault that seemed ripped from the pages of a low-grade gangster film.
"No one is above the law, and the means used, breaking legs, should only be seen in the movies," U.S. District Judge Samuel Der-Yeghiayan said in handing down the sentence.
Davis, 58, a wealthy landfill owner, showed no emotion as the decision was announced. In the courtroom gallery, several family members wiped tears from their eyes, and Davis' wife, Lisa, doubled over at the waist and stared at the floor.
Davis was convicted in June of two extortion-related counts. Prosecutors had asked Der-Yeghiayan for a sentence of up to six years in prison, saying Serpico still suffers from lingering psychological issues stemming from the ordeal.
Serpico testified at trial that he was afraid he would "end up dead" after Davis paid a visit to Ideal Motors one day in early 2013 and demanded his money back. According to Serpico, Davis asked him in a thinly veiled threat, "How are your wife and kids doing? Are you still living in Park Ridge? Does your wife still own that salon in Schaumburg?"
"These kind of people are — they are ruthless," Serpico testified. "And they're going to do whatever they can to get their money."
Serpico testified at trial that he was well aware of Davis' friendship with reputed Outfit bosses John and Peter DiFronzo and that he often saw Davis and Peter DiFronzo cruising past his Ideal Motors dealership in DiFronzo's black Cadillac Escalade. Serpico said he also had heard that Davis was partnered with DeLaurentis, a feared capo convicted in the 1990s of racketeering conspiracy in connection with a violent gambling crew.
Prosecutors allege that within months of the ominous confrontation at Ideal Motors, Davis, infuriated that Serpico had still failed to pay back the loan, ordered his brutal beating, enlisting the help of the owner of a well-known Italian restaurant in Burr Ridge to find the right guys for the job. The restaurateur went to Carparelli, who in turn hired a team to carry out the beating for $10,000, according to prosecutors. Carparelli pleaded guilty to a separate extortion in May.
Davis' lawyer, Thomas Anthony Durkin, said Davis has known the DiFronzo brothers since childhood and that for years he has maintained a business relationship with them through his landfill in Plainfield, where two DiFronzo-owned construction companies have paid millions of dollars to dump asphalt and other debris.
Durkin even showed jurors a photograph that Davis kept on his office desk of him and a shirtless Peter DiFronzo deep-sea fishing off the coast of Mexico.
In court Tuesday, Durkin painted a picture of Davis as a kind and generous person who overcame a hardscrabble upbringing on Chicago's Northwest Side to become a successful businessman.
"He's not a mobster. There's no evidence of that whatsoever," Durkin said. "Unfortunately, in this town there are people who have grown up with people like that, but it doesn't mean you can't speak to them, it doesn't mean you can't play golf with them."
jmeisner@tribpub.com
Twitter @jmetr22b
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