The Chicago Syndicate
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Sunday, December 18, 2005

End of the Run for Fugitive Mobster

Friends of ours: Frank "the German" Schweihs, Joey "The Clown" Lombardo, Nick Calabrese

The union boss slipped into a booth in a restaurant on Jackson Boulevard. He was wearing a federal wire, trembling, as the waitress brought over some ice water. The man he was to meet entered the restaurant, sat down and started glaring at him. The meeting didn't last long.

"The union boss, our potential witness, got scared. He started talking quickly, he started rushing, he blew it he was so scared. Frank Schweihs figured something was wrong. He got up, leaned over and said `I'll see you later' to our witness. The guy almost had a heart attack right there. He was that terrified. That's Frank Schweihs for you," said former FBI agent Jack O'Rourke. "He was a scary guy."

That's the effect Schweihs, known in Chicago Outfit circles as "The German," had on almost everybody he met professionally. He not only terrified witnesses; even Outfit bosses were afraid of him. But someone wasn't afraid of $20,000 and tipped the FBI on Friday that Schweihs, 75, was hiding out in Berea, Ky., some 35 miles south of Lexington. The tipster likely will accept the reward in private.

"Our people drove over to assist, but by the time they got there, the FBI agent had arrested him without incident," said Berea police Lt. Ken Clark. "I guess when the agent asked if he was Frank Schweihs, he said he wasn't, then he played some old mob trick and started grabbing at his chest, saying he had chest pains. But he refused transport to a medical facility. I guess he'll be back in Chicago before long."

The German had been running since before he and 13 other top Outfit figures were indicted in April as part of the FBI's Operation Family Secrets, the most significant and far-reaching investigation of organized crime in the city's history.

With Schweihs' capture, there's only one clown remaining out there. Mob boss Joseph "The Clown" Lombardo still has not been found, though he has the use of his fingers, since he's written letters to his attorney, Rick Halprin, and those letters have all been postmarked in Chicago.

I told you about Family Secrets as it broke, almost three years ago now, when imprisoned mobster Nick Calabrese was quietly whisked into the federal witness protection program and began connecting the dots on at least 18 unsolved mob murders. Calabrese's decision to turn government informant stunned the Outfit and the Outfit's allies in local law enforcement and politics, the three sides of the iron triangle that has strangled this region since the 1920s. When word began trickling out that Calabrese had started talking, the bosses panicked, went underground and weren't about to help their allies in politics.

By then, the politicians had their own problems, with unprecedented federal investigations into City Hall corruption, from trucking and phony affirmative action contracts to political hiring. For the first time in decades, the sides of the triangle couldn't support each other as they had when they were strong. And that alone makes Family Secrets important.

Unlike corruption, there is no statute of limitations on murder. Schweihs has been charged with two killings, and Lombardo was charged with one.

The life they allegedly had in common belonged to Danny Seifert, whose testimony in a federal case on the bilking of Teamsters pension funds could have put Lombardo in prison. But Seifert didn't testify, because he was shotgunned to death in front of his wife and 4-year-old son in 1974. When the gunmen approached him outside his Bensenville plastics factory, he started running and was knocked to the ground by the first blast. One of the killers walked up to him, put the shotgun muzzle against Seifert's head, and pulled the trigger. The federal government's pension fund case fell apart.

O'Rourke recalled that in the 1980s, he was contacted at home by a worried Chicago police officer in the East Chicago Avenue District, after two other cops arrested Schweihs for battery. He allegedly kicked their car because it was parked too close to his home.

"The young cops were full of muscles and Schweihs was angry and they all went at it and took him in, but Schweihs had political people in the station, some guys involved in Streets and Sanitation," O'Rourke said. "And they were arguing to let him loose and police dropped the charges.

"Those two young cops were angry. That was typical Chicago," he said, meaning that the Outfit was taken care of by politicians and cops when it was necessary.

I can't say things have changed much since. A white-owned company with Outfit connections gets $100 million in fake affirmative action contracts and the mayor says they're a hardworking family. The city's budget director said he wasn't surprised that the city's Hired Truck Program was mobbed up, and for that bit of truth, he was canned for poor management.

But it's encouraging when guys like Schweihs are brought in, when Lombardo and 12 others get indicted for unsolved killings. It tells me that things are changing, as the triangle is slowly pried apart.

Thanks to John Kass

Kentucky Residents Shocked by Mobster

Friends of ours: Frank 'the German" Schweihs, Joey "the Clown" Lombardo, James Marcello

Residents in Berea, Kentucky, are shocked at the news that an alleged Chicago mobster was arrested Friday at an apartment complex in their town by the FBI. Gas station cashier Sue Morton says the biggest news up until now was when Cracker Barrel moved to the small town of about ten thousand in the Appalachian foothills.Frank Schweihs

Frank "the German" Schweihs was allegedly part of the top echelon of the Chicago underworld and had been the focus of a nationwide manhunt since April. He and co-defendant Joseph "Joey the Clown" Lombardo slipped away from federal prosecutors just before an indictment was unsealed against Chicago mob boss James Marcello and 13 others in the FBI's Operation Family Secrets investigation.

FBI agents are still hunting for Lombardo.

Landlord Chat Leads FBI to Mob Slaying Suspect

Friends of ours: Frank "The German" Schweihs

An FBI agent arrived at the sprawling Blakewood Apartments complex in Berea, Ky., Friday with a photograph and a question for the landlord. Had she seen the old man in the picture? Her answer was yes--he was the polite gentleman who had been sharing a two-bedroom apartment with a woman for the last two months, the landlord and FBI officials said.

The agent, who was from the FBI's small office in Lexington, Ky., did not tell her she was renting an apartment to Frank "The German" Schweihs, the reputed Chicago Outfit hit man and enforcer. Schweihs had been one of the bureau's most wanted fugitives since he was charged in April in connection with 18 unsolved organized crime murders.

"I assisted only in that they asked me if I could see him in a photograph," the landlord said. "They showed me a picture, but I didn't know anything about him."

After talking to the landlord, the agent parked his car where he could see the front door of the two-bedroom townhouse apartment and called for backup from fellow agents in Lexington and local Berea police, said FBI spokesman David Beyer. But help was still at least five minutes away when Schweihs and a woman emerged from the apartment and got into the sport-utility vehicle parked out front, Beyer said. Afraid of letting the fugitive slip through the FBI's fingers if he drove off, the agent swung his car forward and blocked the path of the SUV, got out and made the arrest alone.

Schweihs, 75, was being held Saturday at the county jail in Lexington. He waived extradition proceedings and would be taken back to Chicago by U.S. marshals, Beyer said. The FBI in Chicago developed a lead that Schweihs might be in southeastern Kentucky, and asked local agents to search the area, Beyer said Saturday.

Berea, a scenic college town of more than 12,000 people about 40 miles south of Lexington, was one area of interest, but Beyer would not elaborate on the information that aroused the FBI's attention. "He went to Berea to check various addresses, and the agent learned of this address," he said.

The complex's owner and manager, who spoke on condition that her name not be published, said she had spoken to Schweihs "on three or four occasions" but had no idea who he was. She had visited the apartment recently to give him a new furnace filter, and as usual he was a "very, very nice guy. Very respectful," she said.

After the arrest, FBI agents interviewed the woman Schweihs was living with but she was not in custody or charged with a crime, Beyer said. The landlord said all she knew about the woman was from a reference sheet the woman provided when she rented the apartment. The woman has a one-year lease for $425 a month, the landlord said. FBI officials said the couple had paid the rent in cash.

The landlord described the nine-building complex as a mixture of families, retired people and students at Berea College.

Thanks to David Heinzmann

Al Capone Index

Al "Scarface" Capone, was an infamous American gangster in the 1920s and 1930s, although his business card reportedly described him as a used furniture dealer. A Neapolitan born in New York, Capone began his career in Brooklyn before moving to Chicago and becoming Chicago's most notorious crime figure. By the end of the 1920s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had placed Capone on its "Most Wanted" list. Capone's downfall occurred in 1931 when he was indicted and convicted by the federal government for income tax evasion and sent to the notorious island prison Alcatraz.
Al Capone
Capone's life of crime started early: as a teenager he joined two gangs, the Brooklyn Rippers and the Forty Thieves Juniors, and engaged in petty crime. He quit high school at the age of 14 when he fought with a teacher and worked odd jobs around Brooklyn, including a candy store and a bowling alley. After his initial stint with small-time gangs, Capone joined the notorious Five Points Gang headed by Frankie Yale. It was at this time he began working as a bartender and bouncer at Yale's establishment, the seedy Harvard Inn. It was here, at the Harvard Inn, that Capone would engage in a knife fight with a thug named Frank Gallucio after Capone had made a bold move on Gallucio's sister. Gallucio had deeply slashed Capone's right cheek with a switchblade, earning him the nickname that he would bear for the rest of his life: "Scarface," a moniker he in fact detested.

In 1919 he lived in Amityville, Long Island, to be close to "Rum Row." Capone was still working for Frankie Yale and is thought to have committed at least two homicides before he was sent to Chicago in 1919. Yale sent his protege to Chicago after Capone was involved in a fight with a rival gang. Yale's intention was for Capone to "cool off" there; the move primed one of the most notorious crime careers in modern American history.

Initially, Capone took up grunt work with Johnny Torrio's outfit, but the elder Torrio immediately recognized Capone's talents and by 1922 Capone was Torrio's second in command, responsible for much of the gambling, alcohol, and prostitution rackets in the city of Chicago. Severely injured in an assassination attempt in 1925, the shaken Torrio returned to Italy and gave the reins of the business to Capone.

Capone was notorious during Prohibition for his control of the Chicago underworld and his bitter rivalries with gangsters such as Bugs Moran and Hymie Weiss. Raking in vast amounts of money from illegal gambling, prostitution and alcohol (some estimates were that between 1925 and 1930 Capone was making $100 million a year), the Chicago kingpin was largely immune to prosecution due to witness intimidation and the bribing of city officials, such as Chicago mayor William "Big Bill" Hale Thompson.

In 1928, Capone bought a retreat on Palm Island, Florida. It was shortly after this purchase that he orchestrated seven of the most notorious gangland killings of the century, the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Although details of the massacre are still in dispute, and no person has ever been charged or prosecuted for the crime, the killings are generally linked to Capone and his henchmen, especially Jack "Machine Gun" McGurn, who is thought to have led the operation along with a young Tony Accardo. By staging the massacre, Capone was trying to dispose of his arch-rival Bugs Moran, who controlled gang operations on the North Side of Chicago. Moran himself was late for the meeting and escaped otherwise certain death. Throughout the 1920s, Capone himself was often the target of attempted murders.

Although Capone always did his business through front men and had no accounting records linking him to his earnings, new laws enacted in 1927 allowed the federal government to pursue Capone on tax evasion, their best chance of finally convicting him. He was harassed by Prohibition Bureau agent Eliot Ness and his hand picked team of incorruptible U.S. Treasury agents "The Untouchables" and IRS agent Frank Wilson, who was able to find receipts linking Capone to illegal gambling income and evasion of taxes on that income.

The trial and indictment occurred in 1931. Initially, Capone pleaded guilty to the charges, hoping to a plea bargain. But, after the judge refused his lawyer's offers and Capone's associates failed to bribe or tamper with the jury, Al Capone was found guilty and sentenced to eleven years in a federal prison.

Capone was first sent to an Atlanta prison in 1932. However, the mobster was still able to control most of his interests from this facility, and he was ordered to be transferred to the infamous California island prison of Alcatraz in August of 1934. Here, Capone was strictly guarded and prohibited from any contact with the outside world. With the repeal of Prohibition and the arrest and confinement of its leader, the Capone empire soon began to wither. At Alcatraz, Capone went in with his cocky attitude. However, when he attempted to bribe guards, he was sent to the "hole", or solitary confinement. The same also stood for socializing, and eventually Capone's mental stability began to deteriorate. One example of his erratic behavior was that he would make his bed and then undo it, continuing this pattern for hours. Sometimes, Capone did not even want to leave his cell at all, crouching in a corner of his cell and talking to himself in gibberish. He began telling people that he was being haunted by the ghost of James Clark, a victim in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. It was apparent over time that Capone no longer posed any threat of resuming his previous gangster-related activities.

Sometime in the mid-1930s, and at Alcatraz, Capone began showing signs of dementia, probably related to a case of untreated syphilis he contracted as a young man, a sexually transmitted disease, potentially very harmful if not treated. He spent the last year of his sentence in the prison hospital, and was released late in 1939. After spending a year of residential treatment at a hospital in Baltimore, he retired to his estate in Miami, Florida.

Capone was now a broken man. He no longer controlled any mafia interests. On January 21, 1947, he had an apoplectic stroke. He regained consciousness and started to feel better when pneumonia set in on January 24. The next day he went into cardiac arrest and that was his death. Capone was first buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Chicago's far South Side between the graves of his father, Gabriele, and brother, Frank, but in March of 1950 the remains of all three were moved to Mount Carmel Cemetery on the far West Side in Hillside, Illinois.

Past Chicago Syndicate Articles with Al Capone

Friday, December 16, 2005

Mob Fugitive Arrested in Kentucky

Friends of ours: Frank "The German" Schweihs, Joey "The Clown" Lombardo, Paul Schiro

A 75-year-old man reputed to be a longtime mob enforcer was arrested Friday at an apartment complex in a small Kentucky town, eight months after being charged with two murders in a federal indictment in Chicago.

Frank "The German" Schweihs had eluded authorities since April when he and 13 other defendants, including reputed mobster Joey "The Clown" Lombardo, were indicted in connection with 18 long-unsolved Outfit-related murders, loan sharking and illegal gambling. But local police said Friday that Schweihs apparently had been staying in the Blakewood Apartments in 12,000-resident Berea, Ky., for only two or three days. "I would say this is probably the biggest fish we ever got in our little pond," Berea police Lt. Ken Clark said of the capture.

A special agent from the FBI's Louisville office found Schweihs at the apartment complex and, at about noon Friday, the FBI called local police for backup, Clark said. "With his past history, they were sort of figuring it could get ugly," Clark said. But backup wasn't needed.

"We probably had people down there within 10 minutes, and by the time we got there [the agent] had already taken Mr. Schweihs into custody," Clark said. "Evidently [Schweihs] exited the apartment as if he was going to leave... So the FBI agent really had no choice. He had to [make the arrest]."

After the indictments in April, Schweihs and Lombardo became fugitives. FBI officials said both had disappeared before the indictments. Lombardo is still at large.

Federal prosecutors charged the two with the 1974 murder of Daniel Seifert, a Bensenville businessman scheduled to testify against Lombardo and others in a Teamsters pension fund fraud case. Schweihs also was charged with joining co-defendant Paul Schiro in a 1986 gangland murder in Phoenix.

"I'm sure the agents are pleased," FBI spokesman Ross Rice said. "They're going to be able to devote more resources now to finding Mr. Lombardo."

Schweihs appeared Friday before a federal judge in Lexington, Ky., FBI officials said. He is being held in Lexington until he can be brought back to Chicago to face charges, officials said.

According to Clark, an apartment manager at the complex said Schweihs and a woman had been staying there for two or three days and were in the process of trying to lease an apartment.

Thanks to Michael Higgins and Matt O'Connor

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