Intelligence Report: Operation Family Secrets

Friends of ours: Joey "The Clown" Lombardo, John "No Nose" DiFronzo

It has been nearly a year since the upper echelon of the Chicago outfit was indicted in the biggest mob murder case in US history, Operation Family Secrets. In our intelligence report, ABC7 investigative reporter Chuck Goudie has new details about one of the mobsters charged and one who isn't, at least not yet.

The one who is charged, Joey "The Clown" Lombardo, may be the reason that top hoodlum John Difronzo hasn't been charged as mobwatchers and many defense lawyers figured. You may remember that Joe Lombardo was a federal fugitive since being indicted last spring.

Early this year, just as federal prosecutors were looking to add Difronzo to the indictment, Lombardo was finally caught, temporarily interrupting the government's plan to expand the indictment.

Eighteen murders have been pinned on the who's who of gangland Chicago that was indicted in Operation Family Secrets. When Joe Lombardo was finally arrested in January, after the FBI couldn't find him for nine months, he was the highest ranking reputed member of the Chicago mob to be charged in the case.

Notable by his absence from the indictment was John Difronzo, the same age as Lombardo, 77.

If law enforcement considers Lombardo to be chairman of the board, then Difronzo is the outfit's chief operating officer.

Difronzo claims to be a used car salesman, but federal authorities believe he had a supervisory role in many of the crimes that have been charged against 14 outfit defendants in operation family secrets. Investigators say that Difronzo is a key link His rap sheet lists 26 arrests. Most recently he was convicted in a mob scheme to take over an Indian casino in Southern California and did federal time.

Difronzo is nicknamed "no nose," but not because police once shot him in the proboscis as mob lore has it. Actually, half of Difronzo's nose was sliced off as he jumped through a window during a fur store robbery.

Police caught him at the end of the blood trail and gave his nose back to him. The trail connecting Difronzo to Operation Family Secrets has been more complicated, according to investigators, in a case that has been 30 years in the making.

While researching this intelligence report, the I-Team found a painting of Lombardo for sale on the internet. The North Carolina artist, Gerhardt Isringhaus, tells us his girlfriend has a "clown phobia" and that's why he painted it. Isringhaus says he painted bullet holes in the background, figuring Lombardo has dodged gunfire most of his life. The artist grew up in St. Louis and says his next door neighbor was a seamstress who made wedding gowns for Chicago mob families.

Lombardo is housed at the federal lockup in the Loop, where Operation Family Secrets defendants have been abuzz at talk that Difronzo may be cooperating with the government, an unlikely scenario that defense lawyers deny.

Difronzo's attorney Carl Walsh says that he knows nothing of a pending indictment against his client. The US attorney's office declined comment.

Thanks to Chuck Goudie

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Did the Mob Elect Kennedy?

Friends of mine: Slick Hanner

While a UIC researcher earlier this week presented a case that he said debunked the Mob's impact on the Kennedy's election, is that really the case?

William "Slick" Hanner has a book coming out this fall in which he will refute those who claim the mob did not have a hand in the 1960 Presidential election. An excerpt:

In 1960 I was working in a Mafia run strip joint in Chicago's first ward. Although I was a felon and not allowed to vote, my boss Big Joe Smith (not to be confused with big Joe Arnold) told me to register to vote on election day. Me and the strip joint employees where transported to the polls to vote for Kennedy. "Don't make a mistake," Joe said.

Can you imagine if they did this for Nixon who would have won???

Slick's book, "Thief! The Gutsy, True Story of an Ex-Con Artist," is a Barricade Books release due out in fall of 2006.

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Mob Didn't Turn Out Vote for Kennedy: UIC Professor

Friends of ours: Sam Giancana

No, the Mafia did not win the 1960 presidential election for John F. Kennedy, according to a study by a University of Illinois at Chicago professor.

After Kennedy's razor-thin victory over Richard Nixon in Illinois, which cemented Kennedy's lead in the electoral college, Nixon backers blamed Mayor Richard J. Daley's notorious precinct captains for election-night hijinks. But years later, another argument emerged: Kennedy or his father made a deal with the mob to throw the election in Chicago -- and thus Illinois -- to Kennedy.

Author Seymour Hersh made the argument in a 1997 book, The Dark Side of Camelot. Frank Sinatra's daughter, Tina, and Judith Campbell Exner, reputed former mistress of the late president and of late Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, also made versions of that argument.

To test the theory that the mob turned out the vote in Chicago's 1960 general election, John Binder, a finance professor at UIC, analyzed vote totals for five city wards where the mob reputedly had clout, as well as in Cicero and Chicago Heights.

Those areas performed no differently than the non-mob wards and suburbs, Binder found. "There's really no evidence to support that story," Binder said. "Some of the people telling these stories are nuts."

The Democratic votes in the 1st, 24th, 25th, 28th and 29th wards, as well as in Cicero and Chicago Heights, did not jump any more from Adlai Stevenson in 1956 to Kennedy in 1960 than other comparable wards and townships, he said.

Exner had also said she was sent to deliver money from the Kennedy family to Giancana to help fund union efforts on Kennedy's behalf in the West Virginia primary election in which Kennedy surprised Hubert Humphrey. Binder questions that as well.

"How in God's name is Sam Giancana going to get anything done in West Virginia?" he asked. "They don't have any influence there."

Could the mob's influence in the 1960 Chicago general election have been citywide through the unions as opposed to just the mob-controlled wards? Binder calls that unlikely because Kennedy and his brother had antagonized union leaders during the McClellan hearings.

"There is evidence that unions voted the other way -- they couldn't stand the Kennedys," Binder said.

Thanks to Abdon M. Pallasch

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UIC Researcher Debunks Mob Impact on 1960 Presidential Election

An analysis of voting totals from the 1960 presidential election debunks claims that the Chicago Mob played a significant role in tilting the election to John F. Kennedy, according to a University of Illinois at Chicago organized crime historian and researcher.

"There is little, if any, convincing evidence to support these extreme claims about the 1960 presidential election," John Binder, author of "The Chicago Outfit," writes in a summarized version of the copyrighted article "Organized Crime and the 1960 Presidential Election."

Binder, UIC associate professor of finance, statistically examined election voting by four groups of Chicago wards and suburbs where organized crime would have been most able to deliver votes for Kennedy if it so desired, including:

- the 1st, 24th, 25th, 28th and 29th wards
- the above five wards and the 45th ward
- the five "Outfit" wards and two suburbs (Chicago Heights and Cicero), and
- all six Chicago wards and the two suburbs

The percentage of voters casting a Democratic ballot in 1960 was compared not only to the percentage voting Democratic in the previous (1956) or the next (1964) presidential election, but also to how the other wards in Chicago voted in 1960.

The findings, detailed in an upcoming issue of the journal Public Choice, show that in only one of eight cases is there any evidence of unusually strong Democratic voting that might have been due to organized crime.

"It certainly is not consistent with an all-out effort to elect John Kennedy, because in that case, increased Democratic voting should be evident in more than just 12.5 percent of the tests," Binder said. "The results, as further tests show, are more likely due to a concerted effort to defeat the incumbent Republican state's attorney, which due to straight-ticket voting in some cases, threw a few more votes to John Kennedy," he said.

"Therefore, much of what has been written about the Outfit, the 1960 presidential election and other events involving the Kennedy family appears to be historical myth -- which along with other fascinating myths, should not be taken seriously," Binder said.

Thanks to University of Illinois at Chicago

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