Family Affair Read online

  For the next few years, Joe Batters was forced to come back to Chicago full-time and retake the mantle as leader of The Outfit. He did so carefully, assigning Gus Alex and Joseph “Joey Doves” Aiuppa as “council members” and attempting to supervise the syndicate as a group. In 1973, when he believed that the crime family had stabilized, he stepped back once again and named Aiuppa the new front boss. After Jackie Cerone was released from prison, he joined up with Aiuppa in The Outfit hierarchy, taking the position of underboss, while Accardo settled back in as consiglieri.

  The Outfit in the 1970s was highlighted by Aiuppa and Accardo’s decision to go after the city’s non-mob-connected car thieves and chop shops. Known as “The Chop Shop Wars,” it took a period of several years to get all of the independent auto boosters and their operations under the mafia’s umbrella. Many of the operations’ leaders bristled at the notion of paying a street tax on their business, cutting the mob in for a percentage, and not getting anything in return. Some outright refused and were killed. By the end of the decade, however, The Outfit—specifically the South Side crews, led first by James “Jimmy the Bomber” Catuara and then by Albert “Caesar the Fox” Tocco, who were both overseen by caporegime Al Pilotto—successfully reigned in all the chop shops, giving the syndicate another racket in their pocket and considerably more cash to add to their bottom line.

  The 1980s brought new technology and, with it, a new way for the Chicago mafia to make money—the video poker machine. They placed the electronic games in as many restaurants and bars as they could muscle into, and in just a few years, it became one of the family’s biggest rackets. The decade also brought the end of The Outfit’s run in Las Vegas, as a result of a shift in leadership. An extensive indictment of the entire Outfit hierarchy, minus Accardo, on charges of pension fund fraud and stealing from four casinos they secretly owned and operated resulted in convictions that sent Aiuppa, Cerone, and Joseph “The Clown” Lombardo, the syndicate captain responsible for looking after Nevada, to prison for lengthy sentences. Accardo selected West Side caporegime Joseph “Joe Nick” Ferriola to replace Aiuppa as boss; Ferriola’s leadership came to an end three years later when he succumbed to cancer. His biggest claim to fame during his tenure as don was that Tony Spilotro, the family’s lieutenant in Las Vegas, who had gradually gotten overly drunk on power and whose behavior had become totally out of control, was killed on his watch.

  Tony Accardo died in 1992, leaving behind an epic legacy in the annals of mob history. Remnants of Accardo’s lengthy reign weren’t hard to find in the years to follow—Sam “Wings” Carlisi, a top messenger of The Big Tuna’s orders, took over for Ferriola, although his stay on top was short lived: He was jailed in 1993 on a racketeering indictment and eventually convicted in 1996. Three more Accardo protégés—Joey Lombardo, John “No Nose” Di Fronzo, and John “Johnny Apes” Monteleone—diligently looked after The Outfit in the 1990s and into the new millennium, carrying on their mentor’s reputation for solid leadership and maximum respect from those they lead.

  “Due to their savvy way of doing business, their unique leadership structure, and their geographical placement within the United States, The Outfit really was the most powerful crime family in the country for a majority of the twentith century,” says former FBI agent Richard Stilling. “The families in New York might have had Chicago on pure numbers and general perception, but on influence and ability to get things done, The Outfit takes the cake. Their hierarchy lends itself to a more harmonious existence. Power flows more laterally than vertically, and in most cases that protects against members getting too ambitious. Plus, Chicago is the heart of the Midwest and, as a result, the epicenter of our nation’s commerce. Every truck and plane making their way across the country must pass through Chicago. This gives the mafia there a lot of clout. They can shut everything down with the snap of a finger, and they know it. The New York mafia may control the East Coast, but the boys from The Outfit have everything else.”

  3.

  Clown Prince of the Mob

  The Rise of Joey Lombardo

  Many would argue that Joseph Lombardo’s arrest in Family Secrets marked the end of an era in the Chicago mob. He’s an underworld personality like no other in the history of organized crime—recognized for his quick wit and humorous charm just as much as for being a highly feared mob enforcer and top-grade gangland administrator. Cagey, resilient, and cunningly deceptive, Lombardo endeared himself to the residents of his longtime West Side neighborhood while at the same time becoming one of Chicago law enforcement’s most sought after targets and toughest adversaries. The man is truly an enigma of epic proportions, the Second City’s own Jekyll and Hyde. Everyone has a different opinion regarding the mafia’s one and only clown prince. To some, he was a heartless killer who preyed on the ills of society to make his living. To others he was a community leader and grandfatherly mentor whose presence in their neighborhood was indispensable. But no matter what your thoughts on the man are, the fact is, until his recent incarceration, Lombardo was a staple on the streets of Chicago for over 50 years and remains one of the final links to The Outfit’s glory days of the mid-twentieth century—a true man’s man and a presence in the fabric of the city with few equals.

  It was a long road to the top for Joey Lombardo. He was born to Italian immigrants Michael and Carmela Lombardi on New Year’s Day 1929 as Giuseppe Lombardi, the sixth of eleven children. Money was scarce in the Lombardi household. Coming to the United States from the tiny town of Bari, Italy, in 1919, and settling in “The Patch,” a West Side Italian neighborhood, they scraped by with Michael working a number of menial jobs to support his wife and ever-growing bevy of children. He would work a few years as a butcher and then a few years as a printer. No matter what his employment situation, Michael was always able to make just enough money to put food on the family table. It wasn’t the life Joey wanted.

  Sent to work at a young age to make money for the family, Joey was a paperboy, shoe shiner, boxcar loader at the local train station, and bell boy at the Blackstone Hotel off Michigan Avenue. It wasn’t long before he realized there was fast money to be made participating in certain black market ventures. Once he hit the tenth grade at Wells High School—where he walked the same halls as future Outfit lead John Di Fronzo—Joey began taking wagers on sporting events and then taking the money he made from his betting operation and loaning it out to classmates who needed a little extra cash to fix up their cars or to take their girlfriends out for a night on the town. Active in high school sports, he was a member of the basketball, wrestling, and swim teams. After high school, Lombardo even did some amateur boxing, before turning in his gloves for a set of clubs, spending a good chunk of time in his early twenties hustling less talented players on the links.

  Lombardo’s career as a professional criminal began in 1947, when at the age of eighteen he burglarized an area grocery store to pay for a medical procedure for his sick mother. After that, there was no looking back. He jumped full-fledged into the life of a hoodlum. Introduced to rising mob capo and Tony Accardo protégé John “Jackie the Lackey” Cerone when caddying for him on the golf course and put under his wing, Joey the Clown was off to a fast start. Displaying a knack for the seedier side of business, Lombardo adapted quickly to making a living on the streets and soon became known as a jack of all trades in the Chicago underworld as he worked his way up The Outfit ladder. His versatility as a crook became his calling card and paid substantial dividends for the notoriously wisecracking mafia lieutenant, earning him several promotions and an anointment by the sitting mob hierarchy as a future Outfit leader. Although known to many people as The Clown, he also went by the nickname “Lumpy” for the many lumps he placed on the heads of his enemies when he took on the role of gangland enforcer.

  Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he developed a reputation as a shrewd card sharp and gambling operator, running high-priced poker and craps games across the city, and as a top-notch thief, pulling jobs with the ar
ea’s best burglary crew. He was a hijacking specialist, taking down truckloads of goods from the cargo section of O’Hare Airport, and a highly efficient strong arm, who was sent on the toughest collection and enforcement assignments by The Outfit administration. On the side, he ran profitable sports book and loan-shark businesses, and to curry favor with his mentors in the mob, often continued to caddy for the likes of Outfit heavyweights Tony Accardo and Fiore “Fifi” Bucceri. Various police reports list him as owning a trucking company and maintaining interest in a number of construction-related businesses.

  TO be a successful criminal you have to be smart, but you also have to be lucky. Early on in his career on the street, Lady Luck always seemed to be on the side of The Clown. When he was indicted in 1963 along with several other local wiseguys for allegedly running a wide-spanning loan-sharking operation, the state’s star witness—an indebted money borrower who claimed he was taken into the basement of an Outfit-owned saloon, tied to a support beam, and violently beaten unconscious—developed a sudden case of amnesia while on the witness stand. Just like the previous ten times he had been arrested, Lombardo skated on the charges. In order to become a made man, Lombardo is alleged to have killed a Chicago-area hotel owner and bookmaker named Manny Sklar, stalking him for several days before ambushing and gunning him down in front of his Lake Shore Drive apartment in 1965. According to FBI files, it is believed he was inducted into the crime family just a month later, sponsored by Jackie Cerone.

  Marrying a local girl named Maria Nigro at the Holy Rosary Church on Western Avenue in 1951, Lombardo set down his adult roots in the same area of the city in which he had grown up—near the West Side at the intersection of Grand and Ogden Avenues. The newlyweds moved into Maria’s family’s apartment at 2210 West Ohio Street and never left. Real estate records show that the Lombardo family eventually purchased the entire apartment building; Lombardo’s wife and daughter are currently listed as co-owners.

  While rising through the ranks of the city’s crime syndicate, Joey Lombardo managed to build a nice, but modest, life for him, his wife, and his in-laws in the three-story brick building on West Ohio Street. The couple had two children, Joseph Jr. and Joanne, and Lombardo was a doting father, attending almost all of his daughter’s dance recitals and even coaching his son’s Little League baseball team. Maria’s parents lived upstairs and became very close to Joey, even going as far as calling him their “son.”

  He started to hold court daily at a coffee and sandwich shop up the street from his apartment and over the years became a fixture of his West Side community. Like a stop sign or a fire hydrant, he was always there. He walked the streets with regal flair. Despite continually being pegged by the police and the press as a rugged, short-tempered gangster, Lombardo had the community’s utmost respect, quite often being turned to in times of need by neighborhood residents in the same way others would seek counsel and guidance from the area’s politicians or clergymen.

  When by the late 1960s and early 1970s, a majority of his Outfit brethren began moving from the city into the surrounding suburbs, he stayed. Not a huge fan of travel, Lombardo was a typical homebody, rarely leaving Chicago, let alone his comfort zone in the area around Grand and Ogden. This loyalty to his surroundings endeared him even more to the locals.

  “The neighborhood was old school all the way,” recalls former FBI agent Jack O’Rourke. “A lot of the people there were immigrants or sons and daughters of immigrants. It was a comfort thing with them. They wanted a don-like figure to be there and help look after the area. The kind of guy who had the juice to help people with their problems. Joey was drawn to that mentality like a moth to a flame and was happy to play the role.”

  The older Lombardo got, the more responsibilities his superiors in The Outfit bestowed on him. By the time he turned forty-five, he was hitting his full stride, a force to be reckoned with in national—not just local—underworld circles. Upon the death of Sam “Teetz” Battaglia in 1973, Lombardo was named captain of the entire West Side of the city and given a crew of over three dozen soldiers to command. He was also given authority over Tony Spilotro and his crew operating in Las Vegas and was tapped to look after the crime family’s interest in the Teamsters Union pension fund and its official supervisor, longtime mob associate Allen Dorfman. After the imprisonment of Milwaukee Phil Alderesio, he is alleged to have been put in charge of The Outfit’s enforcement team and asked to oversee the coordination and carrying out all of the mob executions in the area. At this time, he was also given the job of corralling all the city’s pornography and strip clubs under The Outfit umbrella. The Clown was a very busy man.

  UNTIL the 1980s, although having been arrested well over a dozen times and having faced some pretty heavy charges a few times to boot, Joey Lombardo had never been convicted of any crimes. This made the government angry and made The Clown a top priority. The FBI saw its best opportunity at nailing Lombardo was through his and The Outfit’s foothold in the Las Vegas hotel and casino industry via its control of the Teamsters pension fund. Although the feds knew of the relationship between Sin City, the Outfit, and the labor union for quite some time, they had never been able to prove it. That all changed in 1978 when an FBI surveillance team in Kansas City listened in on a very damaging conversation that opened up the floodgates in the government’s investigation and signaled the beginning of the end for the mob’s reign in the desert’s gambling Mecca.

  A court-authorized wiretap installed in a mafia-run restaurant—put in place to gather information on a recent unsolved murder committed in the area—picked up a discussion between Carl “Corky” Civella, the acting boss of the Kansas City crime family, and Carl “Tuffy” De Luna, his second-in-command. The discussion discretely laid out a wide-spanning conspiracy that involved several Midwest mob syndicates silently managing, financing, and stealing from various Las Vegas casinos. This information led to another wiretap being installed in Civella’s home that recorded yet another, more in-depth conversation between Civella, De Luna, and a lieutenant of theirs stationed in Nevada. They described in detail how never-ending piles of cash made it from the casino’s count room into the pockets of several mob bosses located thousands of miles away, insulated from the deed by several layers of underling.

  Acting on the evidence culled from the two wiretaps, the FBI was able to indict and eventually convict the sitting administration of the Kansas City mafia syndicate. Combining the wiretap evidence from Kansas City with meticulous handwritten records of Las Vegas-based mob activity confiscated from Carl De Luna’s residence during his arrest, the FBI was able to jump-start a similar investigation into the Chicago Outfit and their illegal interests in the desert—interests that at that time were the responsibility of Joey Lombardo.

  By bugging the insurance company office of Allen Dorfman, a frequent visiting and conversation spot of Lombardo’s, for a six-month period in 1979, the feds accumulated additional incriminating audio surveillance. With the cooperation of real estate entrepreneur Allen Glick, whose Argent Corporation fronted ownership of the Stardust, Hacienda, and Freemont hotels and casinos on behalf of The Outfit, the government’s case was airtight. But they weren’t done yet.

  Things continued to get worse for Lombardo. While in the process of investigating him for the massive skimming operation being conducted at the triumvirate of mafia-backed casinos, the FBI stumbled on his involvement in a bribery scheme that implicated a Nevada senator. Acting on behalf of the Teamsters, Lombardo had arranged to sell a 5.8-acre lot that was owned by the labor union and located next to the Las Vegas Hilton to U.S. Senator Howard Cannon at a decreased rate in exchange for Cannon’s aid in squashing a trucking industry deregulation bill that was being proposed by the House Judiciary Committee in an upcoming vote. Convicted in both cases, he was sentenced to a pair of ten year prison terms, that, lucky for him, the judge ordered were to run concurrently.

  However, even after Lombardo left Chicagoland for his extended stay behind bars in 1982, t
urning over responsibility for his crew to his top lieutenant, James “Jimmy Boy” Cozzo, there were some loose strings to be taken care of. Certain members of The Outfit felt that Allen Dorfman, who was convicted of aiding Lombardo in the bribing of Senator Cannon, would not be able to complete his prison time. They were worried he was soft and would be prone to turn witness for the government. In their minds, it was time to cut ties—in the mob vernacular, kill him to ensure silence. The fact that Dorfman had been incarcerated less than ten years earlier for an Outfit-related scheme and had not caused any problems for Lombardo and his mob associates didn’t seem to matter. Leaving a lunch meeting at a suburban hotel coffee shop in January 1983, Dorfman, who was out on bond pending his sentencing, was gunned down in the parking lot of the Lincolnwood Hyatt by two assailants wearing ski masks.

  RE-EMERGING from incarceration in 1992, Joey Lombardo returned to his old stomping grounds—the West Side of Chicago—and wasted little time making his presence felt in the local press. In the weeks following his release from prison he placed an ad in several Chicago area papers that stated: “My name is Joey Lombardo. I’ve been released on parole from federal prison. I never took an oath with guns and daggers, pricked my finger to draw blood, or burned paper to join a criminal organization, If anyone hears my name used in connection with any criminal activity, please notify the FBI, the local police, and my parole officer, Ron Kumke.”