Green Mill Capone Hangout, Still Jumping Joint

Friends of ours: Al Capone, "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn

It's a Saturday night at Chicago's Green Mill Lounge and "da joint" — as owner David Jemilo calls it — is jumpin'. A largely yuppie crowd is packed tightly inside the room. Alcohol (mostly beer and martinis) flows freely, the noise is deafening, and the air is thick with cigar and cigarette smoke. At the far end, heard long before they are visible through the smoky haze, the band plays what always plays at the Green Mill: jazz.

The people seated near the stage are listening intently to the music. Those sitting or standing near the bar are drinking and talking.

No one is eating. At the Green Mill, you will not encounter the menu of "buffalo wings" and other such fare found in most other bars. No popcorn, not even pretzels and nuts. Food would just be a hassle and a distraction from the jazz-booze-smoke-conversation aesthetic that makes the Green Mill the Green Mill.

David Jemilo calls the Green Mill a "jazz joint," and that's mostly what it has been since the doors opened in 1907. It's quite possible, in fact, that the joint antedates jazz, which grew out of a melange of musical styles in turn-of-the century New Orleans. Now celebrating its 100th year, the Green Mill has the distinction of being the oldest continuously running jazz club in America.

Opened in 1907 as Pop Morse's Roadhouse, the club in the Uptown area, about four miles north of Chicago's Loop, was purchased in 1910 by the Chamales brothers, who named it the Green Mill Gardens.

The club operating today is only a small part of the original sprawling complex. Adjacent to the club was an elegant restaurant, which was joined to a ballroom. A second-story ballroom called the Rhumba Room offered Latin music. The first-floor ballroom opened onto elegant gardens, and in the early years, tuxedoed men and women in evening gowns danced the night away to the tunes of leading orchestras. (The oldest ad for the Green Mill is for Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra in 1915.)

It was also the heyday of ragtime and vaudeville, and the nightclub's patrons listened to Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor and Sophie Tucker belt out hits of the era. Chicago was then one of the main production centers for the new silent film industry, and the nearby Essanay Studios turned out a stream of Westerns filmed along the Chicago River. During breaks, "Bronco Billy" Anderson and other stars would mosey up to the Green Mill and tie their horses to a hitching post provided by the club while they knocked back a round or two.

In the early 1920s, Prohibition hit and the Green Mill became a wide-open "gin joint," in the words of Steve Brand, who tended bar there from 1928 to 1960. In the early '20s,, the Chamales brothers leased the place to members of the Chicago mob including a 25 percent interest to "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn, thought to be one of the leaders of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

Mr. Brand says the Mill became the favorite hangout of Al Capone, who was frequently found in the center booth in front of the bar where he could keep an eye on the door. Capone owned a speak-easy in the basement of a building across the street, but he preferred the Green Mill because the police had been paid off, permitting "wide-open" action. "People brought their booze in flasks or hollowed-out canes," says Mr. Brand, and "waitresses brought coffee mugs for them to drink it out of."

When Capone and company really wanted to swing, they opened a trap door behind the bar and descended into rooms in the basement where they could escape, if need be, through a series of tunnels. But mostly, "Big Al" just liked to hang out quietly and listen to the music of his favorite performer, Joe E. Lewis, who was earning the phenomenal fee of $650 a week.

In 1927, however, Lewis got greedy and took a job at the New Rendezvous Club for $1,000 a week. It was a big mistake. A week later, an outraged McGurn dispatched three thugs to visit Lewis. The three smashed Lewis' head, slit his throat, cut out part of his tongue and left him for dead.

Lewis survived, and a compassionate Capone gave him some money to get by on. Although it took him three years to learn to talk, Lewis made a comeback as a comic — at the Green Mill. The story was made into a 1957 movie, "The Joker Is Wild," with Frank Sinatra playing the part of Joe E. Lewis. Today in the Green Mill, the episode is immortalized by an unknown poet in doggerel framed behind the bar.

Big Al was ingesting spaghetti;
Machine Gun McGurn, surprisingly still
Said to Joe E, "You'll look like confetti
If you try to leave the Green Mill."

For two decades after the end of Prohibition , the Green Mill continued to flourish. Over a beer at "the joint," David Jemilo talks about those years as his father had described them to him. "He would go to the Aragon Ballroom when he was 18 years old with his buddy Duke and meet women or whatever and after that they would come over to the Green Mill after dancing at the Aragon, and they had drinks and dancing and lots of fun," Mr. Jemilo says.

The Uptown Theater was built next door to the Green Mill and brought a new spate of celebrities to the bar. Now boarded up, the Uptown in those days was an opulent movie palace that featured live entertainment by the leading stars, such as Charlie Chaplain. After the show, stars and patrons would head over to the Green Mill.

The Green Mill "was a cabaret joint," Mr. Jemilo says, "and a lot of famous people came here to hang out — you know like Charlie Chaplain, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman."

The list of famous patrons includes Billie Holiday, Lillian Russell and Wallace Beery, and many of them — Holiday and Goodman included — joined in impromptu performances. "You had to be dressed up at night in those days to come here," says Mr. Jemilo. "Of course, in those days, everyone was dressed up."

In the 1950s, things began to change. The Aragon Ballroom, and later the Uptown Theater, closed, the area deteriorated and many of the Green Mill patrons died or moved away. The owners struggled to keep the doors open, but by the 1980s their clientele was made up mostly of winos, homeless people and petty criminals. That was the situation when Mr. Jemilo and his wife visited the Green Mill for the first time.

"It was pretty rough," he says. "You know, drug dealers, pimps, whores, bums and people sleeping on the floor. You had to step over them when you walked in. It was just a real tough crowd and you had to look over your shoulder all the time. It was one of the roughest bars in the city."

Despite the deteriorated state of the Green Mill, "we immediately fell in love with the place," Mr. Jemilo says. "You could tell that it was beautiful at one time, but everything was falling apart," he says. "I told my wife I'm going to buy this place — just talking — and six months later, I did buy it because the price was right and the owner was 70 and his wife walked with a walker and the place was in a shambles."

Mr. Jemilo made basic repairs, cleaned up the "joint" and evicted the unsavory denizens. Now the historic club with its nightly jazz is an "in" place for Chicago yuppies and a magnet for jazz fans nationwide, as well as the preferred hangout for a diverse group of longtime regulars — and not just a few celebrities.

Mr. Jemilo fondly recalls the night he and jazz singer Sarah Vaughn "got drunk together," and "the Monday night I was working the door and Microsoft mogul Bill Gates came in with five guys after a Bears game." Told that there was a $3 cover charge, Mr. Gates "pulls out three singles and gives them to me. They were sitting around drinking and having a good time and I think he liked the fact that he had to pay the three dollars."

Behind the bar is a photo of Capone with the inscription, "Dave, thanks for running my joint real good. Al."

The inscription is bogus, of course, but hundreds of Green Mill regulars would enthusiastically endorse the sentiment.

Thanks to James C. Roberts

Tweet

Mobster's Cousin Jailed 22 Years for Whack He Did Not Commit?

Friends of ours: Vincent Carini, Eddie Carini, Salvatore "Fat Sal" Mangiavillano, Frank Smith
Friends of mine: Carmine Carini

Carmine Carini’s cousins were assassins. Prosecutors and Mafia defectors have credited them with numerous killings. One time they were ordered to kill a federal prosecutor but instead they killed his father, an administrative judge who handled parking tickets. They were killed for their blunder.

Their names were Vincent and Eddie Carini, and they were bad guys to hang around with if you wanted to stay out of trouble. Carmine did hang around with them, and did not stay out of trouble. At age 25, he was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for the murder of a record store owner, a crime some say he did not commit.

That was the year his son was born, 1985. Since then he has never implicated his cousins in the killing, even as he filed eight applications to contest his conviction on procedural grounds. None of these found success — not the effort to fault a defense lawyer for failing to object when a juror was dismissed, not the effort to challenge the verdict sheet, nothing. But as of yesterday morning Mr. Carini is no longer a convicted murderer, on account of a celebrity lawyer and radio show host, two prolific Mafia cooperating witnesses and a story of tortured conscience that leads right back to Vincent and Eddie Carini.

Before a dozen of Carmine Carini’s relatives and supporters in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, Justice Guy J. Mangano Jr. vacated the conviction and ordered a new trial on charges of second-degree murder. Mr. Carini exhaled deeply, and there was a round of applause.

“In between crossing himself,” said his lawyer, Ronald L. Kuby, a host of a radio show, “he said he’s ready to come home.”

But first Mr. Carini will have to decide how ready. An assistant district attorney, Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi, offered him the chance to plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter, a charge that carries a sentence of 8 1/3 to 25 years and would allow him to leave prison almost immediately. “The people still certainly believe in his guilt,” Ms. Nicolazzi said, adding that a plea bargain would require him to acknowledge a role in the killing.

Mr. Carini has maintained he played no role. After the hearing, he returned to the holding pens to consider his lot, a proposition requiring him to cast his memory back to the early 1980s.

Back then, court documents show, Salvatore Mangiavillano, known as Fat Sal, was a car thief and a high school classmate of Eddie Carini. And Frank Smith was a teenage car thief with a specialty: four-door models by General Motors.

After breaking a car’s interior lights to obscure the occupants from view, Mr. Smith has testified, he could get $200 from Vincent and Eddie Carini, whom he described as “tough guys and killers.” Mr. Smith, by his own account, graduated to participate in murders with Vincent and Eddie Carini.

On Nov. 18, 1983, a record store owner named Verdi Kaja, who had business dealings with the Carinis, was summoned to a car, driven several blocks, shot three times in the head and dumped in the street.

With the testimony of witnesses who said they had watched Carmine Carini get into the car, he was convicted as the driver and the gunman. Prosecutors said he later visited the victim’s family to warn them against talking to the police.

During Mr. Carini’s time in prison, the Mafia’s fortunes experienced a well-documented waning. Federal prosecutors adopted Mr. Smith and Mr. Mangiavillano as reliable cooperating witnesses in a number of cases. And in June 2004, United States attorneys wrote to the Homicide Bureau of the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, disclosing that both men had heard Vincent Carini, who had long since been killed, confess to the murder of the record shop owner.

The homicide bureau chief, Kenneth M. Taub, passed this information along to Carmine Carini, who began to seek a new trial. At a hearing in February, Justice Mangano entertained the new accounts from the cooperating witnesses.

This put state prosecutors in a fix: To discredit the witnesses could amount to undermining successful federal Mafia prosecutions.

At the hearing, both men recounted hearing Vincent Carini’s confession.

Mr. Mangiavillano described it this way: “I seen him standing outside his mom’s house. His mom’s house, I believe to be on 88th Street and 17th Avenue, across the street from the schoolyard. Anyway, I seen him standing there. I pulled over and I seen that he was sobbing, he was crying. I asked him what was the matter and he told me, ‘My cousin Carmine just got convicted for a murder that I did.’ ”

Prosecutors argued that Carmine Carini has had access to this information for years; defense lawyers countered that factors including the intricacies of Mafia codes of conduct would have prevented him from obtaining any sworn testimony.

At a hearing in April, prosecutors said the new evidence fit a more convincing theory of the crime: Carmine Carini drove the car, while Vincent Carini sat in the back seat and fired the gun. Under the legal doctrine of acting in concert, a jury could accept that version of events and still convict Carmine Carini of murder. But before that theory can be explored in a new trial, Mr. Carini has a decision to make. Justice Mangano set his bail at $500,000. As he was handcuffed and led away, Mr. Carini blew a quick kiss to his family.

Outside the courtroom, his relations gathered around the lawyer, Mr. Kuby, to ask how they could mortgage their houses for bail. “I was hoping that he was going to walk out right now,” said Mr. Carini’s 22-year-old son, the one born the year he went to prison, the one he named Vincent, just like his cousin.

Thanks to Michael Brick

Tweet

Mob Hit Attempted on San Francisco Freeway?

A man underwent surgery for critical injuries on Thursday after a gunman riddled his car with bullets on a San Francisco freeway offramp - an attack a witness called a "mafia-style execution."

San Francisco police Sgt. Neville Gittens said the unnamed victim was taken by ambulance to San Francisco General Hospital after the 1:05 p.m. shooting at the end of the Interstate 80 offramp and Fifth and Harrison streets. The man suffered numerous gunshot wounds, including a shot to the chest, Gittens said.

Investigators do not believe it was a case of random violence. "This appears to be a targeted shooting, based on the number of rounds fired," Gittens said.

Witnesses watched in shock as the gunman got out of his vehicle and fired multiple shots into the victim's blue Dodge Charger.

One woman, who did not want to be named, said she was driving behind the Charger and a green vehicle and approaching the end of the ramp when traffic stopped at a light. A man got out of the green vehicle and walked over to the Charger with a gun in his hand. "He just opened fire until the light changed, then the green car sped up Fifth Street" toward downtown San Francisco, she said.

The victim's car remained in the middle of the intersection for hours Thursday afternoon, its rear window shattered and blood on the ground and in the vehicle, which was riddled with more than a dozen bullet holes. The Fifth and Harrison streets offramp was also closed as investigators examined the crime scene.

Thanks to Bay City News

Tweet

Happy Mother's Day from the Mob

Friends of ours: Jimmy "The Gent" Burke, Al Capone, Benjamin "Lefty Guns" Ruggiero, Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, Vincent "The Animal" Ferrara, Abe "Kid Twist" Reles, Angelo "Buddha" Lutz, John "Junior" Gotti, John "Dapper Don" Gotti, Robert Spinelli, Paulie Vario, Henry Hill

Each and every Mother's Day until he landed behind bars, mobster Jimmy "The Gent" Burke performed a sacrosanct ritual.

Burke, the mastermind behind the $5.8 million Lufthansa heist immortalized in Goodfellas, dropped a few C-notes on dozens of red roses from a Rockaway Boulevard florist. He then toured the homes of his jailed Luchese crime family pals, providing their mothers with a bouquet and a kiss.

He never missed a year, or a mom.

Burke's gesture was no surprise to his fellow hoodlums: Mother's Day was the most important Sunday on the organized crime calendar, when homicide took a holiday and racketeering gave way to reminiscing - often over a plate of mom's pasta and sauce.

"These guys, they do have a love for their mothers," said Joe Pistone, the FBI undercover agent who spent six Mother's Days inside the Bonanno family as jewel thief Donnie Brasco. "They thought nothing of killing. But the respect for their mothers? It was amazing."

So amazing, Pistone recalled, that Bonanno member Benjamin "Lefty Guns" Ruggiero once told him that the Mafia - like a suburban Jersey mall shuttered by blue laws - closed for business when Mother's Day arrived each May.

No vendettas or broken bones. Just gift baskets and boxes of candy.

"Absolutely," said mob informant Henry Hill, who described his old friend Burke's annual rite. "It's Mother's Day, you know?"

The bond between gangsters and their mothers is more sacred than the oath of omerta and more complex than anything imagined by Oedipus. Pistone watched stone murderers suddenly grow misty when discussing their moms - or her meals.

"They're not embarrassed to say how much they love their mother," said Pistone, author of the new mob memoir Unfinished Business. "I can remember guys talking about cooking: 'My mom made the best braciole.' Or 'My mother taught me how to make this sauce.' "

No surprise there: The way to a made man's heart was often through his stomach, as many mob moms knew long before their sons moved from finger paints to fingerprints.

Mob heavyweight Al Capone - a man who never needed a restaurant reservation during his Roaring 20s reign atop the Chicago underworld - preferred his mother's spaghetti with meat sauce, heavy on the cheese. (Capone's sentimentality didn't extend to other holidays. On Feb. 14, 1929, he orchestrated the submachine-gun slayings of seven rival bootleggers in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.)

Capone wasn't alone in his mismatched emotions: warm, maternal love and cold, homicidal rage. Genovese family boss Vincent "The Chin" Gigante shared a Greenwich Village apartment with his ninetysomething mother, Yolanda, even as he ruthlessly directed the nation's most powerful organized crime operation during the 80s and 90s.

New England capo Vincent "The Animal" Ferrara did a 16-year prison stretch for racketeering, getting out of prison just two years ago. His first trip as a free man: a visit to see his 90-year-old mom. But gangland mother-son ties transcend more than just geography and generations; they cross ethnic lines, too.

Abe Reles, a Jewish hit man of the 30s, was known to contemporaries as "Kid Twist" for his preferred method of execution - he would wrap his thick fingers around a victim's neck for one final snap.

Despite 42 arrests (and 11 admitted murders), the "Kid" remained his mother's loving son. And he showed up at her apartment each Friday night for a traditional Sabbath meal of gefilte fish, chicken soup and boiled chicken.

One Friday, Reles showed up with a guest. The three shared a meal before the Kid's mother left for a movie. By the time the film was finished, her son - assisted by a mob associate - had bludgeoned and strangled their guest before disposing of the body.

Mrs. Reles returned to share a cup of tea and a piece of honey cake with her boy, according to Robert A. Rockaway's mob tome But He Was Good To His Mother - a history of loving Jewish sons turned heartless killers.

Those mobbed-up kids often had their affection reciprocated from mothers blinded by love to mounting evidence of their offspring's larcenous lifestyles.

Philadelphia gangster Angelo "Buddha" Lutz was arrested in 2001 on racketeering charges - and released on $150,000 bail when his mom put up her house as collateral. (She was later free to visit him in prison, where he was sentenced to serve nine years.)

Mob matriarch Victoria Gotti went even further for her son, John A. "Junior" Gotti, offering her $715,000 home up for his bail. When Junior went on trial three times in the last two years for racketeering, Victoria appeared in court each time - even as defense lawyers admitted that he once headed the Gambino crime family.

"If you're the president or a gangster, that has nothing to do with a mother's love," Pistone said. "I think that's one of the main reasons for their bond."

When authorities last year dropped the charges against Junior, the mob scion - his father was the late "Dapper Don" John Gotti - repaid his mom's devotion. Gotti spent Thanksgiving Day at Victoria's hospital bedside after she suffered a stroke.

For some, like Robert Spinelli, love of Mom complicated their chosen profession. Spinelli served as the getaway driver after his brother and a second man tried to kill the sister of mob informant "Big Pete" Chiodo, but he was stricken with guilt over the shooting.

At his 1999 sentencing, Spinelli stood with tears streaming down his face when recounting the botched hit against Patricia Capozzalo, who had just dropped her two children off at school. "She reminded me of my mother," the weepy gangster confessed before getting a 10-year jail term.

For Hill, his beloved mother provided a passport - Italian - into the Mafia back in the 1950s.

Young Henry was a mob wannabe, hanging around the taxi stand that served as the business office for Luchese capo Paulie Vario. When the mobsters discovered the kid with the Irish surname was half-Sicilian, on mother Carmela's side, he was greeted like a paisano. "Everything changed when they found out about my mother," Hill told author Nick Pileggi for the book Wiseguy, which chronicled his evolution from wiseguy to mob turncoat.

Hill, speaking from his current home somewhere on the West Coast, recalled that Jimmy Burke attached particular importance to Mother's Day because he was abandoned by his own parents at age 2. Hill also recalled how his hot-tempered pal wasn't so dewy-eyed one day later.

"He'd kiss all the mothers on Sunday," said Hill. "And then the next day, he'd kill their husbands."

Tweet

Was Mob Hit Really a Love Triangle?

Puzzled family members made plans Wednesday to return the body of a man killed in a Las Vegas Strip bombing to Mexico as investigators looked into his background for a motive. "They don't understand the killing or the way of the killing," said Johannes Jacome Cid, consul in charge at the Mexican Consulate in Las Vegas, who is advising the relatives of Willebaldo Dorantes Antonio.

Dorantes Antonio, 24, was killed early Monday when a homemade bomb left on this roof of his car at the Luxor hotel-casino's parking garage exploded as he picked it up.

Jacome Cid was helping the family handle donations to a bank account to transport Dorantes Antonio's body back to the town of San Jose Miahuatlan, in the Mexican state of Puebla.

Max Dorantes, a cousin helping make funeral plans, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview that he and other relatives had no idea who left the small bomb that killed Dorantes Antonio as he left work at a Nathan's Famous hot dog stand with a girlfriend. The woman escaped injury. "He was not part of any gang," Max Dorantes said. "He was a working guy, a very good guy. He worked two jobs. He was one of my good friends."

Max Dorantes, 22, of Newport, Ore., confirmed that his cousin was in the U.S. illegally and had two girlfriends - one a co-worker at Nathan's and the other who left their 6-month-old son with relatives at home in Mexico when she traveled to Las Vegas about two weeks ago. He was not sure if the two women knew about each other.

Investigators, who have said they believe Dorantes Antonio was the intended target of the blast, said the explosion was not a terrorist act or a mob hit.

Tom Mangan, a senior special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said investigators were fitting together the puzzle of Dorantes Antonio's dual dating relationships, his immigration status, his travels between Mexico and the U.S. and his work. "The questions are: Who would want to do this? Why this guy? And why this method?" Mangan said. "That information is going to come out once we delve into the details about this guy."

Authorities say the motion-activated device exploded with the force of a stick of dynamite, mortally wounding him in the head and blowing a 12-inch hole in the 1996 Dodge Stratus that Max Dorantes sold him in November. Dorantes Antonio died about two hours later at a hospital.

Police have been reviewing surveillance videotapes of the parking garage to try to identify who left the device and when.

Police have not identified the woman who was walking with Dorantes Antonio when he reached his car, but said she was cooperating with investigators. Max Dorantes said she was from Guatemala and had been dating Dorantes Antonio for about six months.

Willebaldo Dorantes Antonio had been in the United States illegally for about three years, his cousin said. He worked nights at Nathan's Famous hot dogs inside the pyramid-shaped Luxor hotel-casino, and days at Quiznos sandwich shop inside the neighboring Excalibur.

Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested three suspected illegal immigrants at Dorantes Antonio's house after the explosion, said Virginia Kice, regional spokeswoman for the federal agency in Laguna Niguel, Calif. Two men were from Mexico and one was from Guatemala, Kice said.

Frank Bonnano, chief executive of the Nathan's franchise owner, Fifth Avenue Restaurant Group in Las Vegas, said he believed Dorantes Antonio provided residency documentation when he was hired.

Quiznos manager Chris Spanna said Dorantes Antonio submitted a Social Security card and a required Las Vegas police health card when he was hired three weeks ago. Spanna said he did not know until Wednesday that Dorantes Antonio was not in the United States legally.

Funeral arrangements were being handled by Nevada Funeral Service in Las Vegas, which said plans and services were private.

Thanks to Ken Ritter

Tweet