FBI Says Mob Eyed Rosemont Casino

The reputed head of the Chicago mob and his half-brother were caught more than two years ago on FBI surveillance videotape discussing organized crime's efforts to infiltrate a casino in Rosemont, the head of the FBI's organized crime unit in Chicago testified Tuesday.

A portion of the grainy and muffled videotape, recorded surreptitiously in the visiting room of the federal prison in Michigan where James Marcello was incarcerated at the time, was played openly for the first time. It was part of the Illinois Gaming Board's ongoing public hearing aimed at stripping the Emerald Casino once planned for Rosemont of its riverboat gambling license. But attorneys for Emerald attempted to cast serious doubt about the relevance of the tape and whether FBI Special Agent John Mallul's opinion of what Marcello, the reputed boss of the Chicago mob, and his half-brother Michael Marcello were discussing in the coded conversation was accurate.

Emerald attorney Robert Clifford also pointed out that the portion of the tape played was only a two-and-a-half minute piece of a five-hour conversation and that the testimony was part of the gaming board's effort to yank Emerald's license by sullying Rosemont's reputation. "Is this fair to produce this?" Clifford said. "I don't think so."

According to Mallul's testimony about the discussion, James Marcello asked Michael Marcello what influence and control organized crime would have in a Rosemont casino. They also discussed what role longtime Rosemont Mayor Donald Stephens would have in the casino deal.

"Are we gonna be in there at all?" James asks on the tape as he sits next to his half-brother in the crowded visiting room.

"I don't ... MGM or one of them companies will wind up with it," Michael responds. "I mean he ain't gonna get it like he wanted it before."

Mallul testified that the "he" Michael Marcello referred to was Stephens. In July Mallul testified that an informant had placed Stephens in a suburban restaurant meeting with several high-ranking members of organized crime to discuss what control the mob would have over contracts at the casino.

"It's my opinion based on this conversation, Donald Stephens had a special interest in having Emerald itself be a casino in Rosemont," Mallul testified.

When asked to describe "special," Mallul said he thought the mayor had an "extraordinary interest" in Emerald being selected as the casino in Rosemont as opposed to another casino firm, in part to have more control over the casino.

Rosemont attorney Robert Stephenson questioned Mallul's opinions about what the vague conversation between the brothers was actually about. "The guy is either a liar or incompetent," Stephenson said. "In either case, he should be immediately fired by the FBI."

In April federal prosecutors charged the Marcello brothers, along with more than a dozen other alleged members of organized crime, with an array of crimes. James Marcello is charged with the murders of Anthony Spilotro and Michael Spilotro in 1986, and Michael is facing charges that include conducting an illegal gambling business.

The March 24, 2003, conversation between the two brothers also included a new allegation that former Chicago alderman and Cicero village attorney Edward Vrdolyak played a role in getting former Chicago Crime Commission investigator Wayne Johnson to settle a defamation lawsuit Stephens had filed. The two brothers implied that because of the settlement, Rosemont was allowed to continue to seek a casino.

The suit stemmed from comments Johnson made in 2001 about a "troubling ... litany of associations" between Stephens and six people the commission considered to have criminal or mob ties. The month after Johnson accepted the job of Cicero police chief in 2003, Johnson and Stephens privately settled the suit when Johnson said in a letter that he had "no personal knowledge about Mayor Donald E. Stephens' business dealings."

"The V guy put his arm around him," Michael Marcello said, referring to Vrdolyak, according to Mallul. "Put 'em over there in that town [Cicero]. He backed off the other guy [Stephens] out there."

Johnson and Vrdolyak both flatly denied the assertion, saying they never met each other until after Johnson became police chief, a job he left this year. "Ed Vrdolyak had nothing to do with that letter," Johnson said.

"It's absolute folly to say that anything like that ever went down," Vrdolyak said. "LSD must be coming back. It's nuts."

The testimony came on the second-to-last-day of testimony in the hearings. The administrative law judge overseeing the case, former federal judge Abner Mikva, is expected to rule no sooner than next month.

Thanks to John Chase and Brett McNeil

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Gotti Deadlocked

A federal jury deliberating the case of John A. "Junior" Gotti indicated Monday that it was deadlocked on a racketeering charge against the son of the late mob boss, John Gotti.

Jurors, at the urging of the judge, were to resume deliberating Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan. In a note to U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin on the seventh day of deliberations, jurors asked what they should do if they were deadlocked over the question of Gotti's so-called withdrawal defense.

Gotti, 41, claims he quit the Gambino organized crime family before July 22, 1999, meaning the five-year statute of limitations would have expired on racketeering charges.

The judge read the jurors a charge encouraging them to keep deliberating until they reached a unanimous verdict. They worked about another two hours before quitting for the day.

Prosecutors allege Gotti ordered his Gambino crew to give radio personality Curtis Sliwa a severe beating in retaliation for Sliwa's on-air rants against his father, John Gotti.

A masked hit man shot Sliwa, a WABC radio host and the outspoken founder of the Guardian Angels crime-fighting group, during a struggle in a taxi. Sliwa survived, and he testified last month against Gotti, as did admitted mobsters who pleaded guilty and became government cooperators.

The defense told jurors that Gotti had nothing to do with the Sliwa attack and said he retired from the Gambinos following an unrelated racketeering conviction in 1999. Prosecutors dismissed the claim, saying Gotti used his name to rise in the crime organization and gave orders and collected kickbacks beyond 1999.

Gotti faces a sentence of up to 30 years in prison if convicted of multiple racketeering charges. His father was sentenced to life in prison in 1992 and died there 10 years later.

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A City of Saints and Sancho Panza #NewOrleans

Tennessee williams and William Faulkner loved it because it tolerated every kind of eccentricity. So did Lillian Hellman, who grew up on Prytania Street, and Walker Percy, who lived across Lake Pontchartrain, and William Burroughs, who lived under the Huey Long Bridge in a house that Jack Kerouac wrote about in “On the Road.”

New Orleans isn’t a city. It’s a Petrarchan sonnet. There’s no other place on the planet like it. I think it was sawed loose from South America and blown by trade winds across the Caribbean until it affixed itself to the southern rim of the United States.

Its first denizens were convicts and whores, followed by slaves, mystics, pirates and environmental idealists such as James Audubon and chivalric soldiers such as John Bell Hood. The architecture of the Garden District and the Vieux Carre had no peer in the Western world. Every antithetical element in the New and Old Worlds somehow found a home in New Orleans. For a writer, the city was a gift from God. Jackson Square was a re-creation of the medieval era in the best sense. Between the facade of St. Louis Cathedral and the Cafe du Monde across Decatur, string and brass bands played for coins flipped into a hat, bizarre people rode unicycles without apparent destination, jugglers tossed wooden balls, and sidewalk artists under a canopy of live oaks and palm fronds sketched portraits for tourists.

In the early morning, the air smelled of night-blooming flowers, ponded water in the courtyards, spearmint growing in the lee of a shady wall, the salt breeze blowing out of the south. The balconies above the iron colonnades groaned with the weight of potted plants and dripped with bougainvillea that turned blood red by December. For pocket change you could catch the streetcar at Canal and St. Charles and ride uptown to the Carrollton District through the most beautiful neighborhood in America. But loving New Orleans, like loving the state where my family has lived since 1836, is like falling in love with the great whore of Babylon. It’s not coincidence that the American incarnation of the mafia, or Black Hand, had its inception in New Orleans and announced its presence in 1891 by murdering the police commissioner. Keeping the tradition alive, U.S. Sen. Huey P. Long gave the state of Louisiana to Frank Costello and the Mob. The slot and racehorse machines came from Chicago; the credit line that bought them came from my family’s hometown, New Iberia. In my lifetime, one of the most despised politicians in the state was an attorney general who tried to shut down the cathouses and gambling joints in the southern parishes. In Louisiana we love the idealism of Don Quixote, but we have always made room for his libertine, hedonistic sidekick, Sancho Panza. But New Orleans is a tragedy, and not simply because of a hurricane. In the early 1980s, crack cocaine hit the city like a hydrogen bomb. Simultaneously, the Reagan administration cut federal aid to New Orleans by half. The consequence was disaster. The murder rate soared, matching Washington’s. White flight into Jefferson Parish was on a level with the Exodus from Egypt. New Orleans cops not only committed robberies and investigated their own crimes, they actually committed murders -- in one instance the execution by a female officer of the witnesses to her crime.

David Duke managed to put a black face on criminality and was almost elected governor of the state.

Within New Orleans’ city limits, the population is 70% black. These are mainly hard-working, blue-collar people who have endured every form of adversity over many generations. But another element is there too, one that is heavily armed and morally insane. These are people who will rob the victim, then arbitrarily kill him out of sheer meanness.

A combination of environmental aberrations had made the city a longtime target for a natural catastrophe. The levee system shotguns the silt from the Mississippi deep into the Gulf, preventing it from flowing westward so it can rebuild the coastline. Oil companies have cut 10,000 miles of canals through freshwater marsh, killing the root systems that hold the wetlands intact. Each year a landmass the size of Manhattan Island is eroded away by the tidal influences of the Gulf. As a consequence, New Orleans sits not unlike a saucer floating in a flooded sink.

All the meteorologists predicted Katrina would hit New Orleans head-on, at category 5 wind speeds of 175 mph. No knowledgeable person had any doubt about the consequences. New Orleans would have been nothing but a smudge in the storm’s aftermath, the levees reduced to serpentine traces in the silt. Instead, the storm shifted toward the northeast, and dropped in velocity by 35 mph, reducing itself to a category 4 storm by landfall.

Two days after the city was flooded, the president stated, on television, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” The disingenuousness of the statement, or its disconnection from reality, is, to my mind, beyond comprehension.

I was on a seismograph drill barge during Hurricane Audrey in 1957 and, as a news reporter, I covered Hurricane Hilda when it hit Louisiana in 1964. But nothing I ever experienced compares with the suffering of the people in Orleans and St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes and southern Mississippi during recent weeks. That the elderly and the infirm could drown in retirement homes and hospitals in the U.S. has forced us into an introspection that I hope will lead people from dismay to anger.

For the rest of my life, however, I want to remember not only the faces of Katrina’s victims but the images of the Coast Guard rescuers hanging from cables under helicopters; firefighters and cops who threaded boats through the darkness while being shot at; the medical personnel who used hand ventilators to keep their patients alive for six days; the soldiers and ministers and ordinary people who gave up all thought of themselves in service to their fellow human beings. In their anonymity, they glow with the aura of Byzantine saints.

New Orleans is an emblematic city. Its story is an ongoing one. Its culture will not change. But if we don’t help New Orleans to rebuild, we’ll not only lose a national treasure, we’ll lose a big part of ourselves.

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Mayor Donald E. Stephens: I didn't meet with mob

Rosemont Mayor Donald E. Stephens adamantly denied under oath Thursday that he met with the mob in 1999 to talk about a casino for his town. And, in an ironic twist, a reputed mob boss on the lam is backing him up.

Joey "The Clown" Lombardo fired off a letter to his lawyer last month denying an FBI informant's claim that Lombardo and reputed mobsters John "No Nose" DiFronzo, his brother Peter DiFronzo, Joe "the Builder" Andriacchi, Rudy Fratto and other alleged hoodlums met with Stephens at Armand's Pizzeria, an Elmwood Park restaurant, according to Rick Halprin, Lombardo's lawyer.

"Let me inform you that it is positively a lie," the hand-printed letter, which included misspellings, read. "I have never, never, ever sat down with Mayor Stephens and the rest of the names in the article. I will take truth serum or lie detector test if the agent and there reliable witness will take one. It has to be done by a private co., not the FBI."

Lombardo, 76, has been missing since a major federal indictment linking the mob to 18 unsolved murders came down in April. Shortly after the indictment, a letter from Lombardo arrived by mail at Halprin's Chicago office. That letter, postmarked in Chicago and directed at U.S. District Court Judge James B. Zagel, proclaimed his innocence and asked for a separate trial from the others indicted. However, FBI spokesman Ross Rice said agents don't necessarily think Lombardo is hiding out in the Chicago area.

The FBI launched international manhunts for Lombardo and co-defendant Frank "the German" Schweihs and are offering rewards of up to $20,000 apiece for their arrests. Lombardo, 76, who had lived on Chicago's Near West Side for more than half a century, and Schweihs, 75, who last lived near Ft. Lauderdale, face up to life in prison if convicted.

The latest letter was dated Aug. 24 and postmarked Aug. 25 in Chicago. The letter was on three-ring notebook paper and was accompanied by two Chicago Sun-Times articles, including a July 19 clipping about Lombardo's alleged meeting with Stephens, Halprin said. "I doubt that he has a home subscription," Halprin said of Lombardo. "I have no idea where Mr. Lombardo is," Halprin said. "I'm saying the same thing I've said over and over again: It's my obligation to tell Joey, I can only tell him he should surrender himself and prepare for trial."

'Ridiculous nonsense'

FBI agent John Mallul had testified on July 18 that an informant told him of the Armand's meeting. Mallul's testimony came during a state Gaming Board hearing to revoke the license of Emerald Casino, which has been trying to open a casino in Rosemont but has been bogged down by mob allegations.

Lombardo says he also sent a separate letter to Rosemont's village attorney denying the Armand's meeting. "And also if I met with these people on that date, May 29th, 1999 I would have been in violation of my parole and probation," the letter to Halprin read.

Rosemont attorney Bob Stephenson confirmed he recently received two letters, purportedly from Lombardo. One appeared to mirror the Halprin letter, the other was a brief note in which Lombardo told Stephenson he remembered him from an old Teamsters trial, Stephenson said. The letters were signed "Joseph Lombardo I'm an innocent man," wording similar to the letter sent in the spring. The Rosemont letters were turned over to the feds, Stephenson said.

Word of the latest round of Lombardo correspondence came as Stephens testified before retired Judge Abner Mikva, who will rule whether Emerald should lose its gaming license. Stephens testified he was "absolutely not" at the Armand's meeting -- and said he had never even been to the restaurant.

Outside of the hearing, Stephens, 77, called the Armand's allegation "such ridiculous nonsense."

'I hate my son-in-law'

"The FBI agent said there was some informant. Well, at the very least, the informant's a liar," Stephens said. "As a matter of fact, I also understand that my [ex-]son-in-law was at this meeting. I've got news for you, I hate my son-in-law. I've never gone around the block with him in my car. Never."

Excerpted from articles by Carol Marin and Shamus Toomey of the Sun Times and by Matt O'Connor and John Chase of the Tribune.

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Mafia Cops Lawyers Demanding Witness Information #NewYork #MafiaCops

Lawyers for the "Mafia Cops" are pressing federal prosecutors to disclose whether a key government witness was a secret informant at a time when he allegedly helped engineer some mob murders.

Edward Hayes, who is representing ex-NYPD detective Stephen Caracappa, said in a letter to prosecutors that he has learned that the informant was providing information to the government much earlier than the defense has been led to believe

Caracappa, 63, and Louis Eppolito, 56, have been indicted on charges they worked as moles for the mob while they were detectives in the 1980s and '90s, and played roles in several hits. Court records and law enforcement sources have indicated that convicted drug trafficker Burton Kaplan is the main source of information used to get the two former cops indicted.

Citing his own sources and a recent Vanity Fair article, Hayes said in his Sept. 1 letter to prosecutors that Kaplan was providing information to the government well before the 2005 indictment against his client. If true, said Hayes, Kaplan might have himself exploited his relationship with investigators to glean information useful for the mob hits.

"Obviously, if he had a relationship with some law enforcement agency and failed to disclose it: 1. that relationship could be a source of information used to kill these individuals, and 2: failure to disclose it could show that he felt guilty or desired concealment of the relationship," Hayes said in his letter to Brooklyn Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Henoch.

Kaplan, whose daughter is a city criminal court judge, was convicted in 1998 on charges he trafficked in several tons of marijuana. He was sentenced to 27 years in prison. He apparently began cooperating against the former detectives in 2004. Kaplan reportedly was the intermediary between former acting Lucchese crime boss Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso and Caracappa and Eppolito. Government records also revealed that Kaplan had ties to high-ranking members of the Bonanno crime family. He apparently began cooperating in early 2004.

According to an article in Vanity Fair last month that cited two retired police detectives and an FBI agent, all unidentified, Kaplan never disclosed his status as a confidential informant in the 1980s. The magazine stated that the FBI agent later changed his story, claiming to have never used Kaplan as an informant.

Hayes asked Henoch to provide him with information about "the circumstances in which Mr. Kaplan first began providing information of any sort to any government representatives, particularly federal agents." Hayes also wants to know if Kaplan was an informant when he was arrested in the 1990s.

Henoch couldn't be reached for comment.

Thanks to Anthony M. Destefano

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