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

By Jason Meisner, Chicago Tribune contact the reporter

 

After decades of drama in Chicago, including a murder conviction, death sentence, shocking exoneration and landmark lawsuit against the FBI, all Steven Mandell says he wanted to do was quietly live out his golden years in Florida.

 

"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."

Prosecutors push life sentence for ex-cop in slaying plot

Jason Meisner

 

 

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.

Steven Mandell at Dirksen U.S. Courthouse

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.

Former Palm Springs FBI agent Clayton Taylor at the Palm Spring resident agency of the Bureau’s Los Angeles Field Office on Thursday, October 23, 2014.
(Photo: Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun)

 

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.

Jilly Rizzo (right) is seen with Frank Sinatra in this undated photo.
(Photo: file/The Desert Sun)

"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.

Lee Weigel, a former Palm Springs cop, chief of police and a city councilman on October 4, 2011.
(Photo: Wade Byars/The Desert Sun)

"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." 

Mafia Hit Man Confesses to Killing President Kennedy

By Jim Meyers

Mafia hit man James Files says in interviews first aired nationally on Newsmax TV Thursday night that he worked along with major mob figures and fired the shot that killed Kennedy from the grassy knoll at Dealey Plaza in Dallas.

Friday, Nov. 22 marks the 51st anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's tragic assassination and Newsmax TV marked the occasion by airing the provocative premiere of the blockbuster documentary "I Killed JFK", featuring never-before-seen footage of Kennedy's confessed killer.

The documentary, produced by Hollywood’s Barry Katz, presents convincing forensic evidence supporting Files' contention that he, and not Lee Harvey Oswald, fired the fatal shot at America's 35th president.

"I squeezed off my round. I hit him and blew his head backward," Files said of the single shot he fired that fateful day.

"I Killed JFK" Executive Producer Barry Katz said: "Until now, no one has ever confessed to the murder of JFK, and most people still believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was the killer. After the world sees this special, I am confident that the greatest mystery of our generation will finally be solved."

Files, who changed his name from Jimmy Sutton, was born in Alabama in 1942, and after a stint in the Army became associated with both the Chicago mob and the CIA.

He worked under mobster Charles "Chuckie" Nicoletti, an underling of mob boss Sam Giancana. Giancana and other mobsters had been angered by the president’s brother, Robert, who as U.S. attorney general was targeting organized crime in a major prosecution effort.

Retired FBI Special Agent Zack Shelton appears in the documentary and reveals that he provided inside information to private investigator and Kennedy assassination investigator Joe West about Files possible connection to the Kennedy killing.

Two decades after the assassination, Files told West he would confess to Kennedy's killing in return for immunity from prosecution. West was negotiating on Files' behalf when he died in 1993.

Files is currently incarcerated at the Danville Correctional Center in Danville, Ill. He was convicted of the attempted murder of two police officers during a roadside shootout in 1991 and sentenced to 50 years in prison.

The documentary chronicles how Files, along with Nicoletti and mobster Johnny Roselli, came to be in Dallas on the day Kennedy was assassinated.

In his "I Killed JFK" interviews from prison, Files tells why he chose to position himself on the grassy knoll to await JFK's motorcade while another shooter took a different position.

"I've got the railroad yard in back of me," he said. "We got a parking lot there and I got a place where I could stash whatever I would need, and I could pass myself off as a worker in the railroad yard for the time being until the time comes and nobody would really pay any attention to me."

Shortly before the assassination, Files said, "I went back to the plaza, got my briefcase out with the gun in it. I went into the railroad yard, put it away where nobody could see it."

As the Kennedy motorcade entered the plaza and made a turn, the president's car cruised past a street sign in front of Files.

"That's when I started focusing through the scope. As far as I can see at this point the president has not been hit in the head. I've seen the body lurch. I know he's been hit. How serious I don't know.

"But my last instructions were we're going for head shots. If you have to take a shot take it, but don't fire unless you really have to.

"I was aiming at his right eye. When I pulled the trigger it was almost like looking from six feet away through the scope.

"As I squeezed his head moved forward. I missed and got it right along the temple, right behind the eye. I squeezed off my round. I hit him and blew his head backward. I fired one shot and one shot only.

"I never saw Mr. Nicoletti shoot Kennedy but I know he was the man in the building who was supposed to be doing the shooting.

"As I was leaving Dealey Plaza nobody tried to stop me. There were two police officers within 20, 25 feet of me. I didn't run. I just carried a natural gait and proceeded to exit, just like a businessman walking away from lunch."

Files, who received no compensation for the interviews, spoke of a shell casing he ejected from his gun.

"I took the shell casing. I bit down on it. I looked at it and set it on the stockade fence. There was an indentation from my teeth on the shell casing."

A man and his son discovered a casing of the same caliber in the area just behind where Files claimed he was positioned on the grassy knoll in 1987. The casing was buried four inches in the ground. A dental forensics expert confirmed that an indentation on the casing was made by human teeth.

Shelton is one of two former FBI agents who believe Files' story is credible.

He said: "I have tried to verify Files' story. A lot of that story I have been able to verify," including that a shot was fired from the grassy knoll "exactly where Files said he was standing."

The documentary presents mounds of other evidence that Kennedy's assassination was not the work of a lone gunman and that Files' account is more credible than the official version put forth by the Warren Commission.

Files himself asserts: "Oswald never fired a shot."

"I Killed JFK" will re-broadcast on Newsmax TV on Friday, Nov. 21, at 11 p.m. and midnight EST, on Saturday at 2 a.m., 10 a.m., and 10 p.m. EST, on Sunday at midnight and 8 p.m. EST, and Monday at midnight EST.

Newsmax TV is America's fast-growing news and information channel, now carried in more than 35 million U.S. satellite and cable homes on DirectTV Ch. 349 and Dish Network Ch. 223.

Newsmax TV also is available online at newsmaxtv.com, via OTT devices and as a free Newsmax TV app on iPhone (iOS), Android and other smartphones.

Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.Newsmax.com/Newsfront/john-kennedy-assassination-confession-mafia/2014/11/20/id/608736/#ixzz3KOWoyRxw

Anniversary of John F Kennedy Assassination: Who Was Jack Ruby, the Forgotten Assassin's Assassin?

Jack Ruby in January 1964



Lee Harvey Oswald is hurried into an ambulance after being shot at Dallas City Prison by nightclub owner Jack Ruby (Getty)

By Lydia Smith

Two days after US president John F Kennedy was shot dead on 22 November, his assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was to meet the same fate while being led through the basement of the Dallas Police Headquarters on his way to county jail.

 

Dallas nightclub operator Jack Ruby had been waiting in the corridor among the gathered pressmen. He stepped out and shot the president's killer in the chest in full view of witnesses and television pictures. The bullet penetrated Oswald's stomach, tearing his vena cava and aorta.

 

The unconscious Oswald was rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital where, in an ironic twist of fate, doctors had 48 hours earlier tried to save the life of President Kennedy. Oswald's death was, however, soon after announced to millions of stunned viewers on a television broadcast by the Dallas police chief.

 

Life of crime

 

Jack Ruby, born Jacob Leon Rubenstein, had a childhood marked by juvenile delinquency and spent time shifting between foster homes. Moving on from selling horse-racing tip sheets in Chicago, he was drafted into service in 1943 to join the US Army Air Force during World War II. He worked as an aircraft mechanic at bases in the US until 1946.

 

One year later, he moved to Dallas with his brothers, where he went on to manage nightclubs, strip clubs and dance halls. Over time, he developed close ties to Dallas police officials, who frequented the nightclubs and were provided with free prostitutes and liquor.

 

Ruby's ties to the criminal world became apparent in 1959, when he went to Cuba to visit his friend Lewis McWillie, an influential Dallas gambler and associate of mafia boss Santo Trafficante. British journalist John Wilson-Hudson, who was imprisoned in Cuba at the time, claimed that Ruby may have met with Trafficante directly.

 

In the 1950s, Ruby was reportedly involved with smuggling guns and ammunition from Galveston Bay, Texas, to Fidel Castro's guerrillas in Cuba. James Beaird, who claimed to be a poker player with Ruby, told the FBI that Ruby did not have a side – but was "in it for the money".

Blaney Mack Johnson, an FBI informant, said Ruby was "active in arranging illegal flights of weapons from Miami" to Cuban pro-Castro forces in the early 1950s.

 

Assassination of Kennedy, motives and Mafia conspiracies

 

Many have speculated that Ruby was deeply involved in organised crime, while conspiracy theorists assert that Ruby shot Oswald as part of an overall plot surrounding the assassination of Kennedy.

 

Yet the Warren Commission – which attempted to reconstruct Ruby's movements around the time of JFK's murder – found no evidence linking his killing of Oswald to any larger conspiracy to assassinate the president.

 

According to the Commission, Ruby was in the second-floor advertising offices of the Dallas Morning News when he heard about the assassination of Kennedy just five streets away, at the Texas School Book Depository.

 

The Commission stated that there was no "significant link" between Roby and organised crime, in a 1964 biography.

 

Fifteen years later, however, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) said in a similar investigation that he "had a significant number of associations and direct and indirect contacts with underworld figures". They added that despite this, Ruby was not a "member" of organised crime.

 

In March 1964, Ruby was convicted for murder with malice for the death of Oswald. A year later, Ruby conducted a brief televised news conference, in which he hinted that his motives may have been influenced by underworld crime.

 

"Everything pertaining to what's happening has never come to the surface. The world will never know the true facts of what occurred, my motives," he said.

 

"The people who had so much to gain, and had such an ulterior motive for putting me in the position I'm in, will never let the true facts come above board to the world."

 

When asked by a reporter: "Are these people in very high positions, Jack?", he responded "Yes."

Ruby was known to be acquainted with both the police and the mafia. The HSCA noted that Ruby had known mob boss of the Chicago Outfit Sam Giancana and Joseph "Egyptian Joe" Campisi, the alleged boss of the Dallas crime family of the American mafia from 1973 until 1990.

 

In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations stated: "Ruby's shooting of Oswald was not a spontaneous act, in that it involved at least some premeditation."

  

Reputed mob boss Joseph Andriacchi lists River Forest mansion for $2.15 million

By Bob Goldsborough, Special to the Tribune



Reputed mob boss Joseph Andriacchi, who for more than two decades has been reported by law enforcement organizations and the Chicago Crime Commission to be a high-ranking member of the Chicago Outfit, has listed his four-bedroom, 6,350-square-foot mansion in River Forest for $2.15 million.

In 1990, the commission identified Andriacchi, now 81, as a member of the Outfit’s Elmwood Park street crew, and then in 1997, the group concluded that Andriacchi, was the chief of the Outfit’s North Side street crew.  In 2007, the Tribune reported that commission leaders’ intelligence from law enforcement sources had indicated that Andriacchi was controlling the mob’s north region and heading its Elmwood Park crew. That was consistent with information that officials had gleaned in 2001 when they secretly taped now-deceased mob enforcer Frank Calabrese Sr. identifying Andriacchi as the boss of the Elmwood Park crew.

Now, Andriacchi has placed his longtime mansion on the market.

 

Through a bank trust, Andriacchi paid $765,000 in 1992 for the land that the property sits on. Almost immediately, he turned around and sold a three-bedroom vintage house on the property for $590,000 to a local physician, who now has that home on the market for $1.399 million.  Andriacchi then set about building his French Country-style mansion on the vacant portion of the land that he purchased in 1992.

According to court records, Andriacchi’s mansion was the subject of a foreclosure action in 2012 after his lender initiated foreclosure proceedings against more than 20 commercial and residential properties Andriacchi owned after the reputed Outfit boss stopped making payments on a more than $4 million loan that used those properties as collateral.

Flashback: Chicago Voters Elect "Made Member " of Chicago Mob to City Council

Flashback: Chicago Voters Elect "Made Member " of Chicago Mob to City Council For 23 Years- He Pushes Through Chicago's Handgun Ban

 

Alderman Fred Roti

 

The American Thinker. He was a "high ranking" made member of the Chicago Mob. His job was to disarm law abiding citizens. He got the job done in 1982. Chicago's City Council chambers were part of a racketeering enterprise for mail and wire fraud.

 

http://nalert.blogspot.com/2014/11/flashback-chicago-voters-elect-made.html

Sam Giancana's daughter aims to cash in on gangster's memorabilia

By JOHN M. GLIONNA contact the reporter

 

CrimeLifestyle and LeisureAl CaponeFidel Castro

 

Notorious gangster's mementos to be on auction block, as well as coroner's report on his slaying. Sam Giancana liked to boast that he owned Las Vegas, Miami and Chicago -- where he was shot to death. Gangster Sam Giancana was shot to death in '75 at his Chicago-area home; family said they heard nothing.

 

He was one of Sin City’s original gangsters, an international crime boss who liked to brag that he owned Las Vegas, and an unapologetic irritant of Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy.

Sam Giancana has been dead for decades -- shot execution-style in 1975 as he prepared a midnight snack of sausages and spinach in the basement of his Chicago-area home. But many of his prized possessions are still around -- and some are being sold Saturday in Las Vegas.

 

Organizers say the estate auction features a significant Mafia antique collection of a crime figure once characterized as a “tough, swaggering, flamboyant murderer.” He was the most outrageous gangster of all time - the FBI followed him everywhere. Many say he was under contract to help the CIA kill Fidel Castro.- Geno Munari, owner of Munari Auctions.

 

Available for bidding both online and at the Gambler’s General Store in downtown Las Vegas are never-before-seen photographs, including a rare snapshot with Frank Sinatra, court transcripts, arrest reports, the coroner’s report and such personal mementos as monogrammed silverware and wine glasses. Each item includes a certificate of authenticity, signed and verified by his surviving daughter, Antoinette Giancana, said Geno Munari, owner of Munari Auctions.

 

“He was the most outrageous gangster of all time – the FBI followed him everywhere,” Munari said. “Many say he was under contract to help the CIA kill Fidel Castro. He was also a guy who wrote beautiful cards to his wife. The auction features the good and the bad of a notorious crime boss.”

 

Born Momo Salvatore Giancana, he rose to become a powerful chief of the Chicago crime syndicate in 1955, taking over the daily operations from the aging Anthony “Big Tuna” Accardo. Both Giancana and Accardo worked in the old Al Capone gang of the 1920s and '30s.

 

Tony Montana, a Las Vegas resident who once served on Giancana’s staff, said Capone had no choice but to incorporate Giancana after he helped start a rival Chicago syndicate called the 42 Gang. “He was into some things with a bunch of guys, including Milwaukee Phil and the English brothers, and they were robbing and shaking down so many joints that Capone took notice of them,” he said. “They were young and he figured he’d better bring them on board.”

 

Giancana soon became the new face of U.S. organized crime, leading the criminal infiltration of labor unions, gambling casinos and legitimate businesses, relying more on corrupt politicians and police than on his own thugs.

 

Early on, Giancana developed a reputation as a killer. During World War II the draft board labeled him “a constitutional psychopath with an inadequate personality.” In a military interview, when asked what he did for a living, Giancana matter-of-factly replied, “I steal.”

Officials sent him home as unfit for service. And they didn’t know half of it, unaware of the illegal mayhem Giancana would eventually inflict.

 

Years later, in Las Vegas, he bragged about rubbing elbows with Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack as he ran various casinos. He once told an FBI agent: “I own Chicago. I own Miami. I own Las Vegas.” Michael Green, a historian at UNLV, said Giancana’s power in Sin City was shadowy but very real. “As Woody Allen once said, ‘Organized crime figures saved a lot of money on office space."

 

Giancana was one of the first inductees into the so-called Black Book, a list of undesirables compiled by the Nevada Gambling Commission, and he had an invisible hand in running “almost certainly the Riviera and possibly the Sands,” Green said.

 

We all committed crimes. If we didn't, we wouldn't have anything to talk about.- Tony Montana of Las Vegas, who once served on Sam Giancana's staff. His criminal career included a shadowy relationship with the CIA. In exchange for his help organizing a plot to kill Castro, experts say, agents tapped the hotel room of comedian Dan Rowan, who Giancana suspected was interested in his then-girlfriend, Phyllis McGuire -- the youngest member of the McGuire Sisters -- whom he met in Las Vegas in 1960.

 

Montana said his job for Giancana was to help set up new bars and restaurants. “He had to make money somewhere legitimately and he couldn’t legally get a liquor license,” he said.

Giancana lived most of his final years in Mexico, on the lam from federal authorities, but was deported back to the U.S. in 1974. Within a year, he was dead. As federal authorities pressured him to open up to a newly formed grand jury, the aging mob boss was shot six times at close range late one night, before he got to enjoy his midnight snack – his end as violent as his life.

 

Dressed in a sports shirt and slacks, he was found lying face-up in a puddle of blood. His wife was on the second floor of the fortress-like home in Oak Park, and told police she heard nothing.

 

Experts say mob figures believed Giancana, 67, was planning to talk to federal authorities about their activities. He was set to appear before a Senate committee in Washington a few days later.

 

Montana said the items for auction on Saturday include several valuable photos, including one of the capo on the beach, accompanied by bodyguards including Murray “The Camel” Humphries.

 

Montana then launched into a brief history of which figures “got whacked” and why, including a list of their crimes.

 

“We all committed crimes,” he said. “If we didn’t, we wouldn’t have anything to talk about.”

Cold case, San Mateo: Mob hit suspected in 1952 car-bombing death of prominent sportsman/Chicago Connection

By Natalie Neysa Alund

Bay Area News Group

  

SAN MATEO -- Wealthy Peninsula sportsman Tom Keen started his morning on Feb. 2, 1952 by giving some duck eggs to a friend. Then he kissed his wife goodbye and got into his Cadillac.

Moments later, when he turned the key in the ignition, a fiery ball of flames consumed the garage of Keen's prestigious 16-room San Mateo home. The 56-year-old man was dead from a suspected car-bombing mafia hit that remains a mystery.

 

"No one was ever singled out as the car bomber, but the mob was the suspect," San Mateo Police Sgt. Rick Decker said of the more than half-century old cold case that centers around Keen, who held a prominent position in dog-racing circles across the nation.

 

The proof, Decker said, is inside the department's meaty case file -- a beat-up box containing deteriorating manila folders that contains evidence, including pieces of detonator wire and chunks of shrapnel removed from Keen's body after his death.

 

Evidence revealed that when Keen started the Cadillac in his garage at 105 Hayward Ave., sticks of dynamite strapped to the bottom of the car exploded.

 

The blast blew Keen's body into the back of the car, shearing off his legs. Neighbors rushed to the scene believing a water-heater had exploded and called the fire department.

To friends, Keen was a "hearty backslapping sportsman with a million friends," according to reports published by the Oakland Tribune in 1952.

---

A businessman and engineer, he built the country's first dog-racing track in Belmont in the late 1930s and later established and ran the Town and Country track in Bayshore City.

 

Keen owned the International Totalizer Co. in Belmont. The company had a virtual monopoly on installing dog-race betting equipment at tracks throughout the nation in cities including Denver, Miami and Chicago.

What may have been his downfall, police said, was his invention of a machine that shows the odds before a race and the race's winning payoffs.

Published reports from the San Mateo Times indicated gangsters wanted to buy Keen's business because "anything that is mechanical can be rigged for a profit" and that gamblers were angered by Keen because "the odds on the dogs weren't coming out of his machines the way the boys wanted them to."

The unidentified sources said Keen refused to sell and his machine guaranteed absolute honesty in betting odds. San Mateo police investigators were looking into reports that, the year before his death, Keen resisted gangster proposals to "fix" the machines in the interest of gamblers.

Decker, who oversees the cold case, said Keen also had connections to "Scarface" Al Capone. Keen and local two local business partners set up a dog-racing track on property owned by Capone in Cicero, Ill, where he became closely associated with one of Capone's "front men" Edward J. O'Hare, who was killed in a 1939 gangland slaying that was never solved.

Keen later dropped out of the Chicago scene and moved to San Mateo, where he continued running dog tracks.

Today, cold case homicide investigators said they don't have much hope of finding out who placed the dynamite under Keen's car.

Too much time has passed, Officer Anthony Riccardi said. "Anything that's been kept quiet for more than 50-60 years likely involves the mafia and typically people don't talk when the mob is involved. Ever."

In addition, evidence is deteriorating and the suspect and witnesses would be very old, if not dead, Decker added.

"If the guy who did it was 18, he's 80 now, and most of the people involved in the case were in their 40s," Decker said. "The suspect and witnesses are likely about 100 today. Like with Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance, it appears it's a true mafia case that may never be solved."

Anyone with information about this case is asked to call police at 650-522-7626

Contact Natalie Neysa Alund at 510-293-2469. Follow her at Twitter.com/nataliealund.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"A Gun In My Gucci:" Former FBI agent shares career of intrigue

Posted: Nov 10, 2014 9:53 PM CST

 

Updated: Nov 11, 2014 3:53 PM CST

 

By Kevin Rader, WTHR political reporter

 

 

Elaine Smith, a former FBI special agent, wrote a book about her career.

 

Ken Eto, also known as "Tokyo Joe," survived a mob hit to fight back with Smith.

CARMEL, Ind. -  
          
At age 36, Elaine Smith got a late start as an FBI agent - but she quickly made up for lost time.
The story of her trailblazing career is a story filled with violence, intrigue and the mob.

"His name was Ken Eto, 'Tokyo Joe'," Smith told Eyewitness News reporter Kevin Rader in her living room.

It was Chicago, February 1983. Eto was shot three times by the mob.

"The first survivor out of 1,100 mob murders in the history of Chicago to live and tell about it and he only knew one name in the FBI and it was my name," she continued.

Smith's new book, "A Gun in my Gucci," details how two outsiders would work together to take down the Chicago mob.

"To have a mobster ask for you on his deathbed is an amazing thing," she added.

But he didn't die and for the next 17 years Eto and Smith, who has called Carmel home for the last ten years, made the mob pay. The two mobsters who botched the murder met their untimely death one week later.

"Oh man, this is great stuff. I can't wait to get it written down and tell everybody. We gotta open a case on this. We need to do this and this and this. I was very excited. I knew it was a pot of gold," she remembered.

Forty-five mobsters would be brought to justice in cases involving millions of dollars. The Teamsters would be turned inside out and former Illinois Governor George Ryan would be turned out of office in disgrace.

"Everybody suspected George Ryan, but no one had hand-to-hand payment to him, but he had," Smith noted.

Even today, 12 years after she retired, Smith handles the handcuffs with the expertise of an FBI agent and she misses that .45 pistol.

"I left the FBI and I knew it was going to be changed. I would have loved to stick around to see how it would be changed and see how things were going to go," Smith reflected.

She says the book which she dedicated to her husband Tom, who was also an FBI agent, took six months to write.

"People ask, 'Did you do any undercover?' I said no. I never wanted to be anyone's girlfriend, wife or somebody's secretary. That is not why I went to school and that is not who I grew up to be," she stated.

She grew up to be the first Supervisory Special Agent in the Chicago FBI. A position she held the final 10 years she spent in the bureau.

"I think this would be a fabulous movie. You would just need to sex it up," she concluded.
But there is an abundance of violence and intrigue.

By the way the Smiths are both retired from the FBI, which means they were the very first Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

But they didn't try to kill each other. They helped each other.

Exclusive: Outgoing U.S. Prosecutor Gary Shapiro says goodbye

An ABC 7 I-Team Exclusive

By Chuck Goudie 

               

Monday, November 03, 2014

 

CHICAGO (WLS) --

 

If Gary Shapiro looks more like your friendly neighborhood banker, he is proof that looks can be deceiving. On his last day of a career that began with the Justice Department in 1972, Shapiro talked terrorism, corruption and his career-long crusade against the Chicago mob.

As he boxes up the trinkets of a 42-year career Monday afternoon, Shapiro has already stored away an encyclopedic knowledge of Chicago crime.

"Sometimes doing these cases is like an archeological dig," Shapiro says. "You're literally going back, historically, 30 to 40 years."

That is what Shapiro says it took the government to win the landmark "Family Secrets" mob murder case in 2007, decades after the organized crime strike force that he worked on built the foundation of the prosecution.

In 2014 he says the outfit still exists on illegal gambling profits, but isn't what it was.

"They don't have the political connections that they once had in the city," he says, "They don't have the judicial connections."

 

The new organized crime is foreign terrorism, and since 9/11 Shapiro says federal authorities in Chicago have refocused on the jihadist threat.

"There have been public statements by terrorists organizations that Chicago is a target," he days. "I think that anybody with any common sense knows terrorists look for symbols, and the economic strength of Chicago and the American economy makes it a symbol."

A sore point for Shapiro is Jon Burge, who became a symbol of Chicago police torture. Burge is about to be released after 5 years in prison.

"The sorts of things he did to his victims, the sorts of things he did to the reputation of the CPD, are really beyond measurement," he says.

The most feared criminal Shapio ever put away was mob hit man Harry Aleman

"He was one of those guys who was very good at what he did, which was killing people or short of killing them, scaring the hell out of them," he says.

Shapiro also offered his final thoughts as we head into Election Day:

"I'd like to think our prosecutions of George Ryan and Rod Blagojevich had an effect on our political or judicial system," he says, "but I'm just not sure that's really true."

Robert DeNiro, Robert Pattinson film 'Idol's Eye' shuts down production

By Teresa Jue on Nov 3, 2014 at 4:54PM

Production has been shuttered on Idol’s Eye, the crime drama from director and writer Olivier Assayas based on the 2007 Playboy article “Boosting the Big Tuna” by Hillel Levin.


Deadline reports that the film’s production company and financier Benaroya Pictures has decided to cut off financing for the movie due to the producers’ failure to meet  financing deadlines; the film was expected to begin filming in Chicago and Toronto in October. The film would have starred Robert DeNiro, Robert Pattinson, and Rachel Weisz.
Benaroya Pictures released a statement regarding the production’s shut down:

“The company cannot continue to put its investment at risk and has been forced to stop cash flowing the production. This is something all of us wanted to avoid, but due to the producers missing a number of financing criteria deadlines that were mutually established by all parties, we were left with no other options. Benaroya Pictures plans to retain the rights of the film and move forward with production on the picture after we generate a revised script and assemble a new filmmaking team.”

Idol’s Eye is a multilayered crime thriller surrounding the mob world, following the true story of a crew of robbers who were murdered after robbing the home of Chicago mob boss Tony “Big Tuna” Accardo in 1978. Assayas has recently been on the festival circuit celebrating his most recent film, Clouds of Sils Maria, starring Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart.
Benaroya Pictures did not immediately return EW’s request for comment.

Madison's Wonder Bar Steakhouse has mob history, ghosts

The 85-year-old Wonderbar Steakhouse in Madison was a mob hangout for many years. It was built by Roger "The Terrible" Touhy and run by his brother Eddie, who disappeared in the 1950s.

In the late 1920s, Chicago gangster and Al Capone rival Roger "The Terrible" Touhy was making bucketloads of money from his bootlegging and gambling operations on the northwest side of Chicago. Some sources say he was making an impressive $1 million a year by 1926.

To help out his bartender brother, Eddie, as well as launder illicit earnings and get booze into Wisconsin, the Irish-American mob boss and his sibling built a small, castle-like restaurant — complete with turrets — on a dirt road on the outskirts of Madison.

They dubbed the place on E. Olin Ave. Eddie's Wonder Bar, and it gained a reputation as a gangster hangout that served good meals and drinks. In addition to locals, it also entertained the likes of John Dillinger, Capone, Baby Face Nelson and other gangsters. In the '70s, it was a gathering place for politicians and University of Wisconsin-Madison heavyweights such as football hero and former athletic director Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch.

The Wonder Bar Steakhouse continues to serve patrons today. And while the area has grown up around it, the ivy clad brick building — complete with the original back bar — looks much as it did in the 1930s. Moreover, it serves steaks popular 80 years ago, including porterhouse, sirloin and T-bone cuts. (The latter two sold for $1 and 75 cents respectively, according to a 1934 menu.)
Better still, for those who believe in such things, the restaurant is said to have ghosts.

Shawn Bortz, Wonder Bar chef for the past six years, said the restaurant has had other names in years past, including the Cigar Box, M.O.B. and The Bar Next Door. In the old days, it was often under surveillance by the FBI and had removable sections in the turrets through which the mobsters could poke their Tommy guns. No shootouts were recorded at the place.

"The gangsters came here to escape the 'heat' on their way up north and to stash money," he said. "They also gambled and did other things, both legal and illegal. And while no one was ever said to be killed here, the story is that Eddie, who disappeared in the 1950s, may be buried behind the second-floor fireplace. We also think some nasty stuff might have taken place in the basement — 'corrections' and that sort of thing."

Bortz said the Wonder Bar also had a tunnel that ran toward Lake Monona that was used to smuggle booze and help the racketeers escape from "G-men and other cops who were on their tail." The Touhy brothers were the sons of an honest Chicago cop who had six boys, Bortz said. Many of them became involved in organized crime, and some were killed by Capone hit-men.

The 93-seat restaurant has dark paneling, which manager Rick Shuffle said may be original. A portrait of a voluptuous and scantily clad redhead hangs over the downstairs fireplace, perhaps a niece of the Touhy brothers, Shuffle said.

The painting is 60 years old, and the young woman, who looks to be about 25, is said to haunt the restaurant.

Equally popular is the 1938 police booking photograph of a young Frank Sinatra. It was taken in his hometown of Hoboken, N.J. The ticket shows he was arrested for "seduction," which means he was busted while having an affair with a married woman, Shuffle said.

Bar manager Jason Kiley said the specter of a man wearing a 1930s-era Fedora hat and a trenchcoat has been seen standing at the top of the stairs, as well as a young girl. They're not certain about her connection to the place.

Bortz said he's heard the young girl laugh. And once, when he was alone in the basement, he said, he heard a heavy door slam near him, causing him to flee upstairs.

Bortz said his menu focuses on steaks and seafood. His favorite meal is the cowboy steak, a 23-ounce cut with the bone in it. Another popular dish is the Chilean sea bass with a banana curry served with sweet potato shoestrings. In season, he said, the halibut served with a garlic panko crust is a winner.
Cooking at the Wonder Bar is something of a family affair, too, Bortz said. His mother, Elizabeth Bortz, prepares all of the restaurant's desserts. Bortz said she makes a mean cheesecake, chocolate torte and creme brulee.

Though Eddie disappeared in the mid-1950s, Roger lived until 1959. He was convicted — wrongly, Kiley said — of kidnapping John "Jake the Barber" Factor, a sibling of cosmetics mogul Max Factor. Roger was sentenced to 99 years in prison in 1934 but escaped from the Stateville Correctional Center in 1942. He was arrested by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover several months later in Chicago after robbing an armored car of $14,000. He was sentenced to an additional 199 years at Stateville for the escape and robbery.

He was finally released on parole in 1959, 25 years after he was first incarcerated. It's not known if he ever made it back to the Wonder Bar. He was shot and killed 22 days after he got out of prison on the doorstep of his sister's Windy City home.

Though Capone had been dead for 12 years, his "associates" were blamed for the hit. On his way to a hospital, the dying man told a reporter from a Chicago newspaper: "I've been expecting it. The bastards never forget!"

Getting there: The Wonder Bar Steakhouse is at 222 E. Olin Ave. off John Nolen Blvd. near the Alliant Energy Center. Madison is roughly 80 miles west of Milwaukee via Interstate 94 and Highway 12.

More information: Call (608) 256-9430 or see the restaurant website at wonderbarmadison.com.
For the scoop on other things to see and do in and around the capital city, see the Greater Madison Convention & Visitors Bureau at visitmadison.com.

Brian E. Clark is a Madison writer and photographer.