Rigged roulette wheel almost certainly used by Al Capone's Chicago gangster mob is discovered by UK games expert by Stephen Jones
Rare table discovered packed with hidden wires, trip switches under tiny screws and batteries secreted in its legs enabled 'Scarface' to cheat gamblers spinning the wheel.
It will come as little surprise that notorious mafia boss Al Capone not only didn't pay his taxes fairly but also his gambling addict customers.
But the lengths the gangster went to cheat them are exposed with the amazing discovery of a rigged roulette wheel that was used in Chicago casinos in the 1920s - at the height of the reign of the criminal infamously known as Scarface.
The rare table used by the underworld was the unlikely 'once-in-a-lifetime' discovery of a games company owner from Chertsey in Surrey, UK.
A restoration he ordered revealed it was fitted with four hidden buttons powered by batteries encased in the table legs which nudged the spin of the ball - technology that in some ways was ahead of its time, so few players would suspect.
It gave the croupier the power to decide where the ball fell on the roulette table by activating tiny pins, invisible to the human eye of a 'well-oiled' gambler.
These actions vastly increased the odds of the House to win and subsequently helped make Capone and his Chicago Outfit their vast fortune during the prohibition era
Alexander Walder-Smith, of The Games Room Company , only discovered the table's hidden secrets when it was taken apart for restoration. Constructed from American walnut, he bought it in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, from a man who'd stored it in his barn for decades unaware of its dark secret
The restorers discovered two pressure pads and two push buttons disguised as tiny screw heads alongside a number of hidden channels for wires. It was a highly-sophisticated invention which allowed the croupier to wander around the edges of the table yet still be able to affect the course of each game.
Somewhat ironically the four Ever Ready batteries were wrapped in newspapers of the day regaling lurid tales of The Mob's activities - helping date the table to having been used in the city from 1929-1931.
Finding such a table is incredibly rare as they were usually destroyed by authorities or The Mob themselves.
Mr Walder-Smith, who makes two or three buying trips to the US every year, said: "It was quite a find - and it's been a real labour of love getting it working again - but it's incredibly dodgy! No one expects to see this again.
He added: "In those days The Mob was generally acknowledged to run the casinos but many a punter must have left the table cursing his misfortune, little realising that the mafia had gone to such great lengths to ensure that he never stood a chance."
Capone, aka Scarface, ordered the murder of seven of his rivals in the infamous St Valentine's Day Massacre. He was eventually arrested for tax evasion in 1931 and died in 1947 - a story retold in the Robert De Niro film The Untouchables.
The fully restored table has now been bought by an unnamed wealthy American collector - with the cheat-mechanism made fully operational using modern batteries.
Mr X added: "He has assured us that he will not be using it to cheat his friends!"
More than two decades ago, testimony by a jailhouse informant named Tommy Dye helped Cook County prosecutors obtain a death sentence for murder against a former Chicago cop who had reputed mob connections and had washed out of the department.
When Dye refused to testify at a retrial, though, the case fell apart, ultimately leading to Steven Manning's release from prison. Two weeks later, then-Gov. George Ryan declared a moratorium on all executions in Illinois, citing the troubling use of jailhouse snitches among many reasons.
Now, Dye finds himself in the middle of another potentially wrongful conviction — his own. A top prosecutor in the San Diego County district attorney's office said it is examining a burglary case to determine if Dye — in prison in California since 2004 — was wrongly convicted.
The Cook County state's attorney's office played a role in securing Dye's conviction in San Diego — a fact Dye blamed on retribution for his refusal to help prosecutors here salvage their death penalty case against Manning, who now is known as Steven Mandell.
In a telephone interview, Dye disputed the account of a Cook County state's attorney's investigator who said that he confessed to the burglary. Dye, who has been in and out of trouble for decades, said he is far too savvy about the criminal justice system to ever confess.
If not for the involvement of Cook County law enforcement officials, "I never would've had to deal with this," Dye said from the California Institution for Men in Chino, the southern California prison where he is being held. "This case had no evidence."
The use of jailhouse snitches by prosecutors across the country has been criticized as among the most persistent and pernicious problems of the criminal justice system. In most cases, they trade information for leniency, raising questions about their credibility. With so many wrongful convictions involving testimony by jailhouse snitches, Illinois and other states have restricted their use in court.
Dye, now 55, was a prolific snitch. As the Tribune described in a 1999 story that was part of an investigation into Illinois' use of the death penalty, he had deep credibility issues, however. He used a series of aliases and had a string of arrests and convictions, mostly for petty crimes. A handsome charmer by nature and a restaurant waiter by trade, he often swindled women out of their money or jewelry.
His testimony against Mandell was pivotal. A onetime Chicago cop until his arrest in an insurance fraud scheme, Mandell became a suspect in a number of homicides, including some with purported organized crime ties. He was charged with the 1990 murder of James Pelligrino, a trucking firm owner whose widow testified at trial that he had warned her that Mandell might kill him. Dye had secretly recorded conversations with Mandell while both were held at Cook County Jail, but the hidden recording device worn by Dye had malfunctioned, leaving jurors to rely on his word against Mandell.
Still, Mandell was convicted in 1993 and sentenced to death, but five years later, the Illinois Supreme Court granted him a new trial. Shortly after the Tribune story on Dye, he refused to be a witness against Mandell at a retrial, and Cook County prosecutors dropped the charges in early 2000. At the time, that made Mandell the 13th inmate exonerated in Illinois, one more than the state had executed since the reinstatement of the death penalty in the 1970s.
After a separate case in Missouri — the kidnapping of a drug dealer — was overturned by the courts, Mandell was set free in 2004.
Mandell sued the two FBI agents who had investigated the cases, saying they had framed him. A jury awarded him $6.6 million, but a federal judge in Chicago set aside the judgment on technical grounds. Dye, while insisting in his testimony that Mandell had confessed to him, also alleged during the trial that the agents had acted improperly by feeding him information about the case.
Mandell's freedom was short-lived. He was charged in 2012 with planning to kidnap and dismember a suburban businessman as part of an extortion plot. Mandell alleged the FBI had targeted him because of his lawsuit, but secretly made audio and video tapes provided hours of evidence that persuaded a federal jury to convict him.
He was again sentenced to life in prison.
Dye, meantime, was convicted in San Diego County of residential burglary, even though he was living with a woman in the apartment where the crime allegedly occurred. He was sentenced to 23 years in prison, but just days after Dye's testimony in Mandell's lawsuit against the FBI, San Diego prosecutors appealed the sentence. The appeals court found Dye was subject to California's three-strikes law, and he was resentenced to 167 years. That was later reduced to 51 years to life.
A key piece of evidence against Dye was testimony from John Duffy, an investigator with the Cook County state's attorney's office who said Dye had confessed the burglary to him. In the recent interview, Dye, however, said Duffy "orchestrated everything from top to bottom" to help obtain his conviction.
In addition, a Dye lawyer said in an affidavit in 2013 that Duffy told her that he believed Dye was targeted because of his role in Mandell's case.
"Mr. Dye was clearly targeted for more harsh treatment based on his having gone 'sideways' on the federal government in the (Mandell) case," another one of Dye's lawyers, Emry Allen, wrote to Deputy District Attorney Brent Neck of the San Diego office's conviction review unit.
Duffy could not be reached for comment. A Tribune Freedom of Information Act request in late February for documents from the state's attorney's office that might reflect involvement of any of its employees has, so far, failed to turn up any records, said the office's open records officer.
Neck said the conviction review unit's examination was focused on the San Diego case, not what happened with Dye in Cook County.
"This case will turn on the facts out here, not the ones from there," Neck said.
Dye said he can appreciate that many people might have little sympathy for him because of the role he has played in the criminal justice system. He said, though, they should be as critical of what has happened to him as they are of others who have been victimized by the system.
"Is it karma to the outsider? Yeah, maybe," he said. "But to me ... it's wrong."
For five years, an enduring mystery has surrounded the story of a prison chaplain who conspired with a convicted hit man for the Chicago Outfit to recover a supposedly rare 18th century Stradivarius violin said to be hidden in the mobster's vacation home.
The violin, once purportedly owned by entertainer Liberace, was likely worth millions of dollars if authentic, but it has never been found.
The FBI came up empty-handed during at least two searches of mobster Frank Calabrese Sr.'s Wisconsin lake house after the feared killer was charged in 2005 in the landmark Operation Family Secrets investigation.
His son, Frank Calabrese Jr., told the Tribune he'd heard his dad talk of a precious violin given as collateral for a juice loan decades ago, but he had never seen it himself. The only trace of it was paperwork uncovered in a 2010 raid of Calabrese's Oak Brook home that referred to a violin with a "Stradivari" label.
Now, in a court filing asking a federal judge to sentence the chaplain, Eugene Klein, to probation later this month, attorneys for the mild-mannered Roman Catholic priest have offered an intriguing new theory. The violin — if it existed at all — could very well have been stolen during a burglary at the Wisconsin home in 2004, they said, years before Klein plotted to find the hidden instrument for Calabrese.
To bolster the claim, Klein's attorneys made public for the first time a decade-old report by police in Williams Bay, Wis., that documents a break-in at the residence that had all the hallmarks of a mob-connected job.
Klein's attorney, Thomas Anthony Durkin, argued in the filing that federal prosecutors have overreached by putting the violin's value at $1 million, a figure that would jack up Klein's sentence.
"There is significant evidence that if the Calabrese family owned an expensive violin, it was long since gone from the Wisconsin residence before Calabrese was indicted," Durkin wrote in the filing.
Prosecutors have not yet made a public court filing saying how long a prison term Klein should be given at his April 14 sentencing in U.S. District Judge John Darrah's courtroom.
Calabrese's son, meanwhile, agreed the violin was likely not at the house by the time of his father's indictment, but not because of a burglary. In a telephone interview on Friday, the younger Calabrese said his father had grown paranoid and confused after years in prison and had likely just forgotten he'd moved the violin to another location. Calabrese was 75 when he died in prison on Christmas Day 2012.
"He had hiding spots all over the place," his son said. "It's probably still out there somewhere." A scribbled note
Klein, 67, entered a surprise guilty plea in February 2015 on the day his trial had been set to begin. He admitted in a plea agreement with prosecutors that he violated especially restrictive prison security measures placed on Calabrese at the federal penitentiary in Springfield, Mo., where Klein was one of the only people allowed to meet with him face-to-face.
Calabrese, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2009 for more than a dozen mob slayings, was first placed under special administrative measures after he was allegedly seen in court mouthing, "You are a f------ dead man," at a prosecutor.
Calabrese was known to have stashed assets in secret hiding places across the country. Testimony in the Family Secrets trial revealed he'd had a fleet of vintage cars parked in an airplane hangar in rural Kane County. The year before Klein met Calabrese in prison, federal agents raided his former home in Oak Brook and discovered a cache of guns, $750,000 in cash, jewelry and loose diamonds hidden in the wall behind a family portrait.
In early March 2011, Calabrese gave Klein a handwritten note hidden in religious materials that instructed Klein to contact Calabrese's friend, Daniel Casale, a longtime restaurateur from North Barrington who grew up with Calabrese in the old Italian-American neighborhood on Chicago's West Side. Calabrese told Klein to ask him about the status of the Wisconsin home, according to court records. At the time, the government had put the home up for sale, with any proceeds to be used to compensate relatives of Calabrese's murder victims.
At their next Communion visit, Calabrese passed Klein a scribbled note that included specific instructions for Klein and Casale to team up with Joseph Myles, a private investigator who had worked on Calabrese's criminal case.
Calabrese proposed that they pose as buyers and that Myles distract the real estate agent while the other two headed to an upstairs bedroom to look for "a little pull out door about 3 1/2 feet high," court records show.
"Be sure to have a little flashlight with you so you can see," Calabrese wrote. "Make a right when you go into that little pull out door. Go all the way to the wall. That is where the violin is."
Meeting in April 2011 to discuss the plot, the three believed that the violin once belonged to Liberace and could fetch millions of dollars on the black market. Citing a program he had "seen on the Discovery Channel," Casale estimated its value at $26 million, according to the court records.
Using Myles' cellphone, Klein called the real estate agent, who told him a buyer was scheduled to purchase the home the next day. Klein returned to Missouri, where he was confronted by FBI.
Neither Casale nor Myles was charged with any wrongdoing. When contacted by a Tribune reporter in February 2015, both declined to comment on the alleged plot. Records show Casale died of a heart attack at 76 in April 2015, two months after Klein pleaded guilty.
A black hat and pry bar
According to the Williams Bay police report, Calabrese's wife had summoned police in April 2004 to report a possible break-in, but no evidence had been found that any entry had been gained to the home.
A month later, however, she returned to the house with a key to the basement tool room. There, she discovered a large piece of fiberglass insulation had been pulled from the walls and ceiling. Along the west wall of the room, a hole had been cut in peg board, and the cinder block wall behind it had been broken out, exposing the hidden room, the police report said.
A black hat, found on top of an empty box, had sawdust on it, leading police to believe it had been worn by the burglar, according to the report. Also left behind was a 36-inch steel pry bar with the price tag still attached, the report said.
Records show that four years earlier, police had also been called to the home for a reported break-in attempt. Calabrese's wife had told police in June 2000 that she'd come up to the house to discover the telephone lines had been cut, according to a Williams Bay police report obtained by the Tribune in an open records request.
When she checked the outside of the house, the wife noticed "pry marks on the basement door," the report said. The officer, however, noted in the report that the pry marks looked old, and no evidence could be found of a break-in.
Calabrese's longtime criminal defense attorney, Joseph Lopez, told the Tribune last week that the mobster had blamed the Wisconsin break-ins as well as other thefts of his assets on his son, Frank Jr., whose decision to reach out to the FBI and cooperate against his father got the ball rolling on the Family Secrets probe.
In fact, one of the main elements of Calabrese's defense during his trial was that the testimony of his son and his brother, Nicholas Calabrese, whose cooperation with authorities broke the case wide open, was part of a conspiracy to keep him behind bars while they stole his hard-earned money.
When Calabrese took the witness stand in August 2007, Lopez tried to question him about the purported thefts, but U.S. District Judge James Zagel cut the testimony short, records show.
"They stole $2 million from me," Calabrese testified, according to a transcript. When prosecutors loudly objected, Calabrese's voice rose to a shout. "How am I supposed to defend myself?" he said.
After the judge sent the jury out of the room, Lopez told the judge the questions went directly to his argument that Calabrese's brother and son wanted him to remain in prison so he wouldn't come after them looking to get paid back.
"And in what way would he come after them?" Zagel asked.
"Well, I guess he would try to get them to sell their property, give him quitclaim deeds to get his money back," Lopez said.
"Right," Zagel said, skeptically.
"He wouldn't kill them, that's not what I'm saying," Lopez quickly added.
Knock-off Stradivarius violins
When the sensational charges against Klein were announced in 2011, Frank Calabrese Jr. told the Tribune the FBI had asked him if he knew of the violin's whereabouts.
"I was told if I did have it and tried to sell it, there would be a problem," Calabrese said at the time. "I told them I don't have it."
In his interview last week with the Tribune, Calabrese called the allegations that he was involved in the Wisconsin break-in lies. He said his father had several hiding spots in the house, including one in the garage, but by 2004 it was likely everything had been moved to other locations.
"The FBI did complete sweeps of that place. There was nothing there," he said.
Wherever the violin is, Durkin, Klein's lawyer, has said there were conflicting reports over its origins and whether it was an authentic 18th century Stradivarius as claimed by Calabrese.
The government's own records of what was seized in the Oak Brook raid indicate the instrument may have been made by Giuseppe Antonio Artalli, not Antonius Stradivarius, which would vastly decrease its worth, according to Durkin. Other Calabrese family records referred to a violin from the 1930s that was valued at about $70,000, he said.
After Klein pleaded guilty, Durkin said he received an unsolicited phone call from Jonathan Warren, chairman of the Liberace Foundation for the Creative and Performing Arts, whose collection includes several violins owned by Liberace and his brother, George, according to the defense filing.
"Each violin happened to be a 'knock off' or counterfeit Stradivarius worth only $300 or $400," the filing said.
Warren is willing to testify at Klein's sentencing hearing that Liberace never owned an authentic Stradivarius, according to the filing.
"It's kind of like looking for unicorns," Durkin told reporters last year. "How do you value a unicorn? I'm not quite sure."
Recently, I had the privilege to speak at the Westchester, Illinois Library on March 19th. What a great group. I want to thank Patrick Callahan for arranging this and his hospitality.
Editor’s note: As President Obama begins his historic visit to Cuba, we are posting some of Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer’s past writings about the U.S.’ relations with and actions toward Cuba. This article was originally published in the Los Angeles Times on Nov. 11, 1997.
You don’t need to rely on Seymour Hersh’s racy new book, “The Dark Side of Camelot,” to know that John F. Kennedy’s administration tried to assassinate Fidel Castro by using Mafia hit men. Denials by former Kennedy aides, led by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and speech writer Ted Sorensen, are simply wrong.
The entire nefarious business is documented in excruciating detail in “Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro,” a 133-page memorandum prepared in 1967 by CIA Inspector General J.S. Earman for Director Richard Helms. The supersecret report was so hot that after Helms read it, he instructed Earman: “Destroy all notes and other source materials” and “Destroy the one burn copy retained temporarily by the inspector general.” This left only one “ribbon copy” kept by the inspector general for “personal EYES ONLY safekeeping.”
Fortunately, that one copy survived; after lengthy lawsuits it was finally declassified in 1993. When Hersh came under attack last week for his new book, I dug out my copy of the CIA report, and there’s no question he got this point right.
I don’t know if Hersh is correct in his assertion that Chicago gangster Sam Giancana stole the 1960 election for Kennedy or that the president shared sexual intimacies with Giancana’s lady friend. But the CIA report makes it quite clear that during the Kennedy years, Giancana was a key player in the effort to overthrow Castro and that the president’s brother, the country’s top law enforcement official, knew all about it.
Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy was told about the Mafia’s assassination plot on May 7, 1962, by CIA agents who, according to the report, “briefed him all the way.” Castro’s revolution had wiped out organized crime’s Havana gambling empire and the revengeful mob was eager to return. But Castro had also nationalized other U.S.-owned businesses, incurring the enmity of American policymakers and thereby making an alliance with the Mafia seem all the more opportune.
Later, in his fateful candidacy for the presidency in 1968, Robert Kennedy would question the logic of unremitting U.S. hostility toward Cuba. But back when he was in his brother’s administration, the get-Castro mentality was all-pervasive. Even after being informed of the use of well-known mobsters in the plot to kill Castro, Robert Kennedy did not object except to wryly request of his CIA briefers that “I trust that if you ever try to do business with organized crime again—with gangsters—you will let the attorney general know before you do it.”
The efforts to kill Castro continued with the clear blessings of the administration. On Aug. 10, 1962, Secretary of State Dean Rusk convened a meeting of what was called the “special group” and, according to the CIA report, “[Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara broached the subject of liquidation of Cuban leaders. The discussion resulted in a Project Mongoose action memorandum prepared by [CIA operative] Edward Lansdale.”
Mongoose was the name of a general sabotage campaign against Cuba that, according to the memoir of a subsequent CIA director, William Colby, included the “sabotage of Cuban factories and rail lines” as well as “spreading nonlethal chemicals in sugar fields to sicken cane cutters.” Efforts to kill Castro with poisoned cigars, infected saccharine pills and explosives fit right in.
True, U.S. planning to kill Castro began during the Eisenhower administration, but it hadn’t amounted to much until the Kennedyites added their special macho zeal. As the CIA report states: “We cannot overemphasize the extent to which responsible agency officers felt themselves subject to the Kennedy administration’s severe pressures to do something about Castro and his regime.” The pressure “to do something” put the knights of Camelot in cahoots with the lords of crime whom Castro had booted out.
That was 35 years ago, but the arrogance of our Cuba policy has not changed. Only now the policy is so ossified that a president who was merely a teenager when his idol Kennedy initiated this policy of fitful revenge is held captive to its inherited inanity.
Last week, President Clinton sanctimoniously justified the continued isolation of Cuba despite his warm welcome for the leader of communist China. Clinton said that the embargo against Cuba must continue until Cuba could prove that “it can turn into a modern state.” Perhaps it isn’t too late for the Cubans to do a joint venture on gambling casinos with the mob to prove just how modern they are.
Virginia Hill has been portrayed in two movies so far, but neither of them did her justice. She's a hard case for a movie character: gangster's moll, Hollywood hostess, Mob courier, a gal with a smart mouth and bad attitude. Her friends said she was also charming, funny, flamboyant and gorgeous.
Hers is a particularly American story – a kind of mirror inversion of Breakfast at Tiffany's, where Audrey Hepburn is Holly Golightly, a charming girl-on-the-make. Holly carries messages to her Mob benefactor in Sing Sing. She has her own secrets – a dirt poor southern childhood, a backwoods husband.
Virginia Hill's secrets put Holly in the shade. They share the dirt poor childhood, but Virginia didn't stop at one mobster – she had a whole stable of the most powerful gangsters in America, and I do mean had. With flaming red hair, a sharp mind and very long legs, she moved up the chain of power – from Joe Epstein, a chubby bookie for the Chicago outfit in the early 1930s, to Joey Adonis, a capo for the Genovese family in New York, and finally to Los Angeles, where she was the girlfriend of Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, New York's man on the coast. He was shot to death in her house in June 1947, a crime that has never been solved, except that everyone believes his "friends" in the Mob killed him for spending too much of their money building the Flamingo Hotel and casino in Las Vegas. Hill had flown to Paris a few days before the hit – and may have known it was coming.
That's a far cry from the laughable final moment of Barry Levinson's otherwise excellent Bugsy (1991), where Annette Bening and Warren Beatty kiss and make up in the rain in Vegas, as he's about to fly back to Los Angeles, and a bullet in the head. It's a Casablanca finale – the plane propeller flashing as she offers to go with him, even though she's terrified of flying. The film is a fictionalised biography of Bugsy, with a brilliant performance from Beatty, who was nominated. Bening gives Virginia Hill a tonne of personality – spitfire one minute, sexpot the next. She loves this man deeply when she doesn't want to kill him. That might be true, or it might not. Solid information about her life is hard to come by, given all the cheap and racy stuff written about her. If she loved Ben Siegel, it was not enough to warn him before she flew to Paris.
Virginia Hill's hard-bitten story was a kind of mirror inversion of Breakfast at Tiffany's with Audrey Hepburn. Photo: Supplied
Hill was one of 10 children, born August 26, 1916, which makes this her centenary year. Michael Munn, in one of the aforementioned racy accounts (The Hollywood Connection: The Mafia and the Movie Business), says she was 15 when she arrived in Chicago from Bessemer, Alabama, with an older man she soon dumped. She began working as a waitress and prostitute. Joe Epstein, a bookie for Capone, is said to have called her The Flamingo because of her long legs. By some accounts he was crazy for her; by others, he was gay and never laid a finger on her, but became a lifelong friend. That's how he's portrayed by Allen Garfield in Virginia Hill, an atrocious 1974 TV movie in which Dyan Cannon sleepwalks through the role.
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From Epstein she moved on to Joe Fischetti, Capone's cousin, then to Adonis in New York, where she first met the handsome Siegel, who was a well-established killer and a long-time associate of Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano.
Hill was by now a dancer, a courier, a Mob tomato, but she thought she wanted to act. In Hollywood she did the rounds of the studios. She took a few small parts, notably as a hat check girl in Manpower (1941) with her friend George Raft (who was himself pretty close to being a gangster), but she didn't need the work. Once she hooked up with Bugsy Siegel, she had her hands full with parties, the racetrack and the Mob businesses Siegel was sent to take over in Los Angeles.
Annette Bening's Virginia Hill in Bugsy was an alluring firecracker. Photo: Supplied
The Warren Beatty movie perpetuates the myth that Bugsy looked at the Nevada desert and saw a gold mine – a paradise where gambling was legal. In fact, the Flamingo Hotel project was started by Billy Wilkerson, publisher of The Hollywood Reporter. When he got into debt, Siegel and Lansky saw an opportunity to move in. Construction costs rocketed to $6 million, most of which was Mob money. Siegel knew the rules: Mob loans came with stiff penalties for late repayment. In the movie, Hill is partly to blame for his death, because she has siphoned $2 million from the project to a Swiss bank account, without Siegel's knowledge. That seems fanciful. She would have been dead before him
.
Virginia Hill went downhill after his murder. She stayed in Europe and tried four times to take her own life. In 1966, she succeeded, under a tree in a snowbank outside Salzburg. A few writers say she was murdered because she was threatening to sell her little black book, containing everything she knew about the Mob, to the US government. They were pressing for $80,000 in unpaid taxes. She died on March 24, 1966, 50 years ago this week, aged 49 years. It was a sad ending to an eventful, somewhat tragic life.
Anthony Catalano was last seen on video surveillance cameras leaving his condo building at 8747 w. Bryn Mawr. He drove off in his Mercedes Benz and vanished. His family filed a missing person report with the Chicago Police Department. The date was March 25, 2009.
Days later, his Mercedes Benz was found parked on a street near the building. It was so clean there was not even one fingerprint or other shred of evidence to be found. It is alleged the car was meticulously cleaned, returned, and parked on the street to avoid security cameras picking up the driver. Why the car was returned is a mystery.
Anthony R. Catalano, missing since March, 2009. Photo Credit: lostmissing.org. Used with permission.
Anthony Catalano was in a dangerous business, the drug business. It is alleged he had ties to Chicago Outfit, Chicago's organized crime group.
There are no friends in the drug business. There are no friends in the Outfit. You are here today. Gone tomorrow. No explanation. It is business. Business is business. Money is money. People are expendable.
On December 23, 2009, Michael DeFilippis was murdered. He was found in his condo at Grand and Harlem. His head was caved in and he was stabbed several times. There was no forced entry, signs of a theft, burglary, or home invasion.
Everything was neat, clean, and tidy. Just a dead body and a dinner table set for two or three, depending on whose version of the tale is believed.
Michael DeFilippis was a friend of Anthony Catalano and Catalano's partner in the drug business.
DeFilippis was also allegedly associated with the Outfit.
DeFilippis and Catalano may have been involved with another nefarious character with alleged mob ties. He was given the nom de plumes, Dr. Millionpills and Dr. Numb-it-all.
Like the disappearance of Anthony Catalano, the murder of DeFilippis was never solved. The DeFilippis family knows what happened to their loved one. They had remains to mourn over and bury.
The Catalano family has no idea what happened to Anthony. They can only hypothesize and keep dwindling hope alive.
The Outfit adage, and by extension those associated with it is, "No one knows what happened to or who killed so-and-so, no one cares, so don't ask."
Anthony R. Catalano's relatives want to know what happened to him. They care. They are asking. Their questions have fallen on deaf ears. They received no answers from the Chicago Police Department, D.E.A., or F.B.I. Friends or family members in law enforcement hit dead ends or were allegedly ordered to stop asking questions, or else.
The cast of characters involved with Catalano and rumored to be involved with his business, social life, and disappearance reads like a roster of notable gangsters' grandchildren. There were ex-cops with South Side Outfit ties who used to be in the drug and chop shop businesses. A family member allegedly laundered much of the drug money. He supposedly got greedy, and was accused of stealing by the missing man.
Catalano and DeFilippis supposedly had drug connections in Wisconsin, Arizona, and Florida. That would indicate the cartels or meth distributors. Some claim Catalano had his own drug problem. He was getting out of control. Anthony was becoming the problem.
All of this is circumstantial. Some of it is speculative. A few accounts border on conspiracy theories. There is no solid proof or evidence the various characters involved had anything to do with the disappearance of Catalano or the murder of DeFilippis.
This month, after seven years, the family can petition to claim Anthony Catalano legally dead. They want answers. They want closure.
Anthony Catalano, from all descriptions, was no saint. He was a bad guy in a bad business with bad people.
Anthony Catalano was also a son, brother, cousin, and close friend. There are people who love him. These people want answers, not dead ends, closed doors, and the sound of silence.
Someone knows what happened to Anthony R. Catalano. In law enforcement or on the streets.
The Catalano family is not looking for justice. They are not looking for revenge. They just want to know what happened. The Catalano family, at the very least, deserves that much.
NOTE: The Chicago Outfit was responsible for over one thousand unsolved murders and disappearances since its founding during prohibition.This story is the result of communication with a member of the family who wants to remain anonymous. There was internet and public records research. As mentioned in the piece, the people alleged to be involved in Anthony Catalano's life, business, disappearance and investigation are numerous, some notorious. The names were made available to me. They were withheld due to the circumstantial, speculative, and sometimes conspiratorial nature of their involvement. —PVB
The heroic goodbyes shared by Annette Bening as Virginia Hill and Warren Beatty as Bugsy Siegel in the movie Bugsy were a romantic fantasy. 
Virginia Hill's hard-bitten story was a kind of mirror inversion of Breakfast at Tiffany's with Audrey Hepburn. Photo: Supplied
Annette Bening's Virginia Hill in Bugsy was an alluring firecracker. Photo: Supplied