The Darkness Descends on a Mobster

It’s not often that I come across a game that’s a must have.

I play a lot of games and many of them only generate interest for a short amount of time. You pick up a shiny new game, play it like there’s no tomorrow, and then quickly become bored with it and move on to another game.

With the exception of World of Warcraft, most of the games that I review go back to the shelf once my review has been written. The Darkness, by publisher 2K Games, is definitely not going back to the shelf.

The game is based upon Marc Silvestri’s comic book of the same name. You play a member of the mob who is double-crossed by the Mafia boss. You shoot your way through many goons in your attempt to escape but are eventually cornered in a situation that you will not escape from.

Just when it seems that there is no way out. you are “selected” by a demonic force that chooses to use you as its host. With the demonic powers at your disposal, you are quickly able to dispatch your enemies and survive. Now, you have to see how long you can live with this demonic force within you.

The game is graphically gorgeous and the character models are extremely detailed. The dialogue is superb and seems like it’s lifted right out of a Tarantino script or an episode of The Sopranos. Voice actors must have had a blast recording this game; they certainly did their jobs and they deliver a terrific performance.

This game is rated “M” for mature and there’s definitely a reason for that. First of all, the game’s dialogue is heavily influenced by mob-style movies, so the dialogue is littered with swearing. Secondly, your use of your demonic powers can be quite grotesque.

When manifesting The Darkness, you have two shadow tendrils that resemble demonic snakes at your disposal. Other than just looking cool, their other function is to allow you to feed on the hearts of your enemies. The tendrils tear the hearts out of fallen enemies and consume the heart right before your eyes. Gross? You betcha. Awesome? Definitely.

I have so many games to review that I don’t tend to fixate on one game for too long at a time. However, The Darkness is definitely being added to my collection. This game is just too damn good to not have available at the house.

Thanks to Rob Michael

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Judge Imposes Gag Order at Family Secrets Mob Trial

The federal judge at the trial of five alleged members of Chicago's organized crime family on Friday imposed a gag order, saying it would "enhance my ability to conduct a fair trial."

Judge James B. Zagel's order bars attorneys "from making extrajudicial statements regarding the merits of this case that a reasonable person would believe could be publicly disseminated."

He said the order would help him to conduct a fair trial because it was likely any commentary on the merits would prejudice the jurors. Zagel said barring parties from making comments to the news media may limit coverage and "prevent these proceedings from taking on a carnival atmosphere."

The indictment in the case outlines a racketeering conspiracy by the mob that includes 18 murders, gambling, extortion and loan sharking. Charged are Frank Calabrese Sr., 69; Joseph (Joey the Clown) Lombardo, 78; James Marcello, 65; jewel thief Paul Schiro, 70, and retired Chicago police officer Anthony Doyle, 62.

Zagel said his order would apply only to commentary or opinions on the merits of the case and would not block lawyers from providing reporters with information about scheduling and other such matters.

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Former Judge Faces 20 Years In Prison For Mafia Dealings

Friends of ours: Genovese Crime Family, Nicholas Gruttadauria
Friends of mind: David Gross

A former Nassau County judge pleaded guilty Friday to trying to launder more than $400,000 for members of the Genovese crime family.

David Gross, 45, admitted he agreed to try to launder the cash he knew was the result of a jewelry heist. What Gross did not know is that one of the men he was making the deal with was an undercover FBI agent.

Federal prosecutors said Gross planned to keep up to 20 percent of all cash he agreed to launder. He also agreed to try to sell more than $280,000 worth of stolen diamonds. "Sworn to do justice, a sitting judge violated his oath as well as the law when he partnered with a member of organized crime to launder proceeds of criminal activity," U.S. attorney Roslynn Mauskopf said.

Gross was first elected as a Nassau County judge in 1999. He was arrested in 2005 and suspended pending the outcome of the criminal case against him. The investigation began after the FBI developed leads stemming from raids on several mafia-run gambling houses on Long Island.

New York FBI Director Mark Mershon described Gross' criminal conduct as "the most egregious betrayals of the public trust."

Investigators said the former judge had teamed up with Nicholas Gruttadauria who they said is a member of the Genovese crime family. Gruttadauria has also pleaded guilty. FBI officials said the two men tried to use invoices from Freeport restaurant Cafe By The Sea to launder the money.

Gross faces 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Thanks to WNBC

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How the Mob Impacts Your Wallet

Despite the sensational charges - racketeering and 18 murders - the trial of five alleged Chicago mobsters isn't exactly capturing the public's attention.

"There's an awful lot of attitude that we don't have to worry about the Outfit anymore," said James Wagner, head of the Chicago Crime Commission and a former FBI agent who battled the mob in New York and Chicago.

The five defendants all say they're innocent. In addition, Joseph "The Clown" Lombardo Sr., Frank Calabrese Sr., James Marcello, Paul "The Indian" Schiro and Anthony Doyle are all in their 60s and 70s, and the murders are alleged to have happened decades ago.

That may lead people to think the mob is ancient history, Wagner said. But he and another former FBI agent say that's not true. And while it may seem distant and irrelevant to suburban residents, experts say there are many reasons for the public to care about the outcome of such trials and the health of the mob, Wagner said:


James Stolfe, the owner of the popular Connie's Pizza, recently testified that he was threatened by two goons in the 1980s to pay "street tax" so he could stay in business - or else. Stolfe said he ended up paying $100,000 upfront and then $1,000 a month to Calabrese Sr. until 2002, not so very long ago.

"That's one example (of how the mob is still operating), but there are ... any number of businesses out there who are facing the same problem," Wagner said. "In all of those businesses, that's (the cost) passed on to the consumer."

"We're all paying an extra tax to support the Outfit," he said.

The link between unions and the mob is long and storied. The loser, Wagner said, is the average working member who gets stuck with contracts of questionable benefit while mobsters live high on the hog.

One illustration of this is the federal takeover of the Laborers International Union of North America because of pervasive mob influence. After the national takeover, the feds drilled down to its grass roots, its membership organizations. In Chicago, that was the Construction and General Laborers' District Council.

"The rights of members of the union to control the affairs of the union have been systematically abused," wrote federal trustees in 1999 court filings. "Those union members who might have opposed this corrupt state of affairs have been intimidated into silence."

At the time, the national union was made up of 21 locals and 19,000 members. Shortly before the takeover, the union's president was Bruno Caruso, who was "at least" an associate of organized crime, the trustees of Laborers International alleged. The group's vice president was John "Pudgy" Matassa Jr., a made member of the mob, they further claimed.

Besides serving as a "Who's Who" of mob leadership, union bosses spent thousands in union money on luxury meals and the like, the union trustees alleged.

Despite the court action against it in 1999, the Outfit fought tooth and nail to keep some hold on the unions. The fight lasted until 2004, when the court case was closed, shortly after forcing out several people alleged to be abusing union funds. The list included Joseph Lombardo Jr., son of Joseph Lombardo Sr., currently on trial.

In the last decade, dozens of people were convicted of abusing Chicago's Hired Trucks program, with truck companies paying city officials kickbacks to be in the program or, in some cases, to get paid for little or no work.

Some of the companies had mob ties "and therefore made a bundle of money off the improper management of the program," Wagner said. "Certainly a healthy percentage were connected to organized crime."

Those corruption costs are on top of the tax dollars that cover the labor and expenses of the FBI and U.S. attorney's office as they investigate the mob.

Gambling remains the life-blood of the mob, said Wagner and Peter Wacks, a former Chicago FBI agent who fought the mob for decades. "It's always been a big money-maker for them," Wacks said.

That remains true today. Along with the five men on trial now, numerous defendants pleaded guilty before the trial began to running a video poker ring until at least as late as 2003. "They've advanced, basically, like the rest of society has: electronically," Wacks said.

Another defendant, Nicholas Ferriola, admitted to operating a sports bookmaking operation, with "juice" loans made to losing gamblers.

Sports betting operations are particularly popular with the mob, Wagner said, because Illinois casinos do not allow them.

Even supposedly legitimate casinos are not immune to the mob. The proposed Rosemont casino was scuttled after the gaming board proved it had hidden investors tied to the mob. Taxpayers are still losing out on the proceeds of that casino license while the battle rages on in the appellate courts.

The Grand Victoria Casino in Elgin casino paid more than $3 million in fines in 2001 after it was discovered it gave an air handling system contract to the son of a mob figure. The son had no experience in the industry, Wagner said.

The Illinois Gaming Board also banned several organized crime figures from casinos, said Wagner, who once was an investigator for the gaming board. "We got them banned, including Donald Angelini," the mob's oddsman, Wagner said.

Other banned mobsters "were basically outfit loan sharks who were trying to collect money owed to them that people were betting at the boats," Wagner said.

While the Chicago Outfit is not as violent as it used to be, it still manages to bump off those it wants to keep silent or punish, Wagner said.

Two very public and brutal executions took place several years ago, reminiscent of the 18 now charged in the trial.

In 2001, Anthony Chiaramonti was gunned down in Lyons. In 2000, mobster Ronald Jarrett was shot to death in Bridgeport.

As recently as August 2006, mobster Anthony Zizzo disappeared, never to be seen again. While authorities can't prove Zizzo is dead, "there was some speculation that because of some of his associations with some of the defendants, that he might be subpoenaed" in the current trial, Wagner said. But as convincing as he thinks those arguments are about why people should still care about the mob, Wagner has one he thinks is even more convincing.

"For gosh sakes, 18 murders is a huge number ... even if it happened a long time ago," he said. "People should be outraged. ... They ought to be happy that, finally, these men are being brought to justice."

Thanks to Rob Olmstead

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Sin in The Second City

Friends of ours: James “Big Jim” Colosimo

Karen Abbott started her first book scouring microfilm of the Chicago Tribune at the University of Georgia library. The sister of her great-grandmother had disappeared during a trip to Chicago soon after the two emigrated from Slovenia in 1905, and Abbott, an Atlanta-based journalist, was curious about the city and times that had claimed her. Her research led her to the Levee, Chicago’s red-light district, where many missing women were said to have ended up, and then to Ada and Minna Everleigh, madams of the infamous Everleigh Club. “It’s cheesy,” says Abbott, who spent three years writing Sin in the Second City, released this week by Random House, “but I came to think of them as family. I have pictures of them hanging up in my house right now.”

Little is known of the Everleighs’ background. They claimed descent from Kentucky aristocracy but are believed to have come from a Virginia family hit hard by the Civil War. Simms was their real name; Everleigh—a pun—was assumed, as were, the women insisted, their southern accents. “Just piecing together their whole background,” says Abbot, “they were ingenious in how they learned to present themselves.” After running a brothel in Omaha, the women moved to Chicago in late 1899 to establish a high-class bordello.

Ada and Minna bought a retiring madam’s mansion at 2131-2133 S. Dearborn and put out a call for women interested in work free from pimps, abuse, and indentured servitude. Madam Vic Shaw, the sisters’ greatest business rival, kept a professional whipper on staff.

The Everleighs hired women who were attractive, experienced, and drug- and alcohol-free; the minimum age was 18. Younger sister Minna instructed them in charm and culture, covering subjects ranging from literature to the art of seduction. She dressed them in couture and dubbed them the Everleigh butterflies.

House rules were strictly enforced under threat of immediate expulsion: no picking pockets, no knockout drops and robbery, and no boyfriends. The girls also had to pass monthly examinations for venereal disease. They were paid well and those dismissed were easily replaced from the Everleighs’ long waiting list of candidates.

To stay open the sisters had to placate crime lords and politicos alike. Ike Bloom, who fronted a sleazy Randolph Street dance hall, set a sum of ten grand a year for protection by the likes of Chicago Outfit founder James “Big Jim” Colosimo. “Tribute” was also paid to First Ward aldermen Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna and “Bathhouse John” Coughlin.

Visiting the Everleigh was an experience available only to the elite. The parlors were lavishly furnished with paintings, sculptures, a perfume fountain, a gold-leaf piano, and solid gold spittoons. Clients could enjoy rare wines, string orchestras, and fireworks. The dining room served gourmet fare. “A lot of the patrons came just for the meals,” Abbott says. “The girls were almost a side attraction.”

By most accounts the sisters were high-hatted and tough as nails but had hearts as gold as their gilded parlors. The soft-spoken Ada was considered the brains of the operation—she balanced the books and was responsible for hiring; Minna socialized in the parlors with guests and was known for her sass. “I wish I could be more like her,” says Abbott. “To not care what anybody thinks ever is sort of liberating.”

Entrance was by referral letter only, and clients were expected to spend a minimum of $50 per visit or face banishment (a three-course meal could be had for 50 cents at the time). High-profile guests included Prince Henry of Prussia, who made a special stop at the Everleigh during a visit to Chicago in spring of 1902. “It was more of a gentleman’s club,” says Abbott. “The cachet of being able to go there, just because they turned down so many people. It became an exclusive badge of honor just to be admitted.”

Occasionally the house was caught up in scandal. When Marshall Field Jr., son of the store founder, was found shot at his Prairie Avenue home on November 22, 1905, rumor spread that one of the Everleigh butterflies had done it. The coroner’s report backed the official story—that he’d shot himself while cleaning his hunting weapon—but gossips insisted he’d been wounded during a visit to the club the previous night and smuggled back home by the sisters.

Unlike earlier Everleigh narratives like Charles Washburn’s Come Into My Parlor, Abbott’s account devotes a lot of space to the progressive politics of the era. The number of women who worked outside the home jumped from 3,100 to 38,000 in the 30 years between 1880 and 1910, she says: “Everybody was freaking out about women entering the workforce in such large droves, leaving their rural homestead and entering the big city.” Not all of them found legitimate work, and when women started disappearing the nation was gripped by a white slavery panic, fueled by anti-immigrant sentiment. The only way a good white Christian girl could become a whore, Americans were convinced, was if she was seduced, drugged, and sold to a brothel.

Religious reformers descended upon the Levee, preaching and pamphleteering in an attempt to shame patrons and “save” the district’s women. The Everleigh sisters referred to these late-night missionaries as “firemen” and welcomed them to the house to talk to their girls. None of the butterflies were said to have shown any interest in leaving.

Abbott says the Reverend Ernest Bell started preaching outside the brothels in 1902 after he was propositioned in front of the Chicago Theological Seminary. He admonished the district’s sinners to repent despite being bashed and gassed by Levee pimps. “If I were a novelist I wouldn’t have been able to name him Ernest,” Abbott says. “I think he really believed in what he was doing and his motives were true and good and upright. He really believed he was saving women from Satan’s clutches.”

Others reformers, like Clifford Roe, an assistant state’s attorney, jumped on board to further their own political interests. “I think Roe was a bit more Machiavellian and manipulative with the facts,” says Abbott. He developed a side business lecturing and writing books with sensational titles like Panders and Their White Slaves.

The white slavery scare was also used as an excuse to attack the non-Protestant immigrants pouring into the country. Both Bell and Roe pointed the finger at foreigners in their condemnations of theatrical agencies, dance halls, and ice cream parlors. “Shall we defend our American civilization, or lower our flag to the most despicable foreigners—French, Irish, Italians, Jews and Mongolians?” Bell wrote in his 1910 book Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls.

Chicago prosecutor Edwin Sims fought prostitution in Chicago and was the inspiration for the Mann Act of 1910, also known as the White Slave Traffic Act. “I am determined to break up this traffic in foreign women. It is my sworn duty, and it should be done to protect the people of the country from contamination,” he told the Tribune in 1908.

“Some of the things the federal officials were saying I had to read twice,” says Abbott. “Like ‘War on Terror,’ they had their political talking points and they used them very effectively to manipulate the public and push their own agenda forward.”

Mayor Carter Harrison II, who usually turned a blind eye to illegal goings-on in the Levee, was eventually forced to reckon with the reformers’ growing political power. In 1911, after a friend from outside Chicago showed him “The Everleigh Club, Illustrated,” a leather-bound brochure with national distribution, he ordered the brothel’s closure.

Gradually the other brothels, dives, saloons, dance halls, gambling parlors, and opium dens of the district were also shuttered. On July 24, 1933, workers tore down the building that once housed the Everleigh Club, “heedless of the fact that they were wiping out one of the most lurid chapters in Chicago history,” according to a Tribune report from the time.

Although rooted in ignorance, the white slavery panic did give women, who were still a decade from suffrage, a rallying cause. “Through the end of it they started having hearings about women’s wages, [asking] how can a girl work in a factory for six dollars a week and not be expected to supplement her income doing nefarious things?” says Abbott. “The white slavery scare was a chance for [women] to insert themselves in political discourse.”

Meanwhile books like Roe’s, which included scenes of terrified harlots escaping brothels in flimsy negligees, made sexuality an acceptable topic of conversation. “Those narratives were like porn for puritans, but it was the first time people could discuss that, in a way, and not be considered untoward,” Abbott says.

As for the Everleigh sisters, after just over a decade doing business in Chicago, they’d amassed a million dollars in savings—$20.5 million today, Abbott estimates—and even more in jewelry, art, and Oriental rugs. They changed their name to Lester and moved to New York, where they bought a brownstone on the Upper West Side and founded a poetry discussion group with local ladies who knew nothing of their past. Minna died first, on September 16, 1948, at the age of 82. Ada lived until 95, dying January 6, 1960, in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Thanks to Dan Kelly

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