Joey “the Clown” Lombardo and several alleged Outfit compatriots go on trial this week in what may be the last housecleaning of the oldtime Chicago mob. This profile was published in the October 2005 issue of Chicago magazine, before Lombardo was nabbed in Elmwood Park. We have enhanced it (links!) for your enjoyment, and split it into three parts. Today is part one.
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THE LOST DON
By Steve Rhodes
At 6 a.m. one Monday last spring, nearly 100 FBI agents fanned out to serve arrest warrants on a handful of men thought to be connected to 18 of the most gruesome unsolved gangland murders in Chicago since 1970. Teams of agents found most of the suspected wiseguys in their suburban homes or hangouts. Two were arrested in Lombard, including James “Jimmy the Man” Marcello, thought to be the current boss of the Chicago mob, otherwise known as the Outfit. Agents nabbed Marcello’s brother, Michael, at his home in Schaumburg. Nicholas Ferriola, son of the late reputed mob boss Joe Ferriola, was apprehended in Westchester. Others were arrested in Hillside and Western Springs. Frank “Gumba” Saladino was discovered dead (of natural causes) in a Kane County motel room where he had been living. A retired Chicago police officer accused of acting as a mob mole while he was on the force was located in Arizona.
At a press conference that day, Chicago FBI chief Robert Grant touted the significance of the roundup, the result of a federal investigation called Operation Family Secrets. “While there have been many successful investigations during the past quarter century resulting in the arrest and indictment of high-ranking members of the Chicago Outfit,” Grant said, “never before have so many in lofty positions in the Chicago mob been charged in the same case.”
The man in perhaps the loftiest position, however – the one thought to be most intimately familiar with Chicago mob matters, and the final link to the Outfit’s glory days of Tony “Big Tuna” Accardo, the infamously mobbed-up First Ward, and organized crime’s glittery reign over Las Vegas – that suspect could not be found.
At age 76, Joey “The Clown” Lombardo was on the lam.
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Posted on June 18, 2007