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Re: Outfit strip club owner plot
[Re: funkster]
#763722
02/14/14 06:53 PM
02/14/14 06:53 PM
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Joined: Jun 2013
Posts: 2,111 New Jersey
Dellacroce
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FBI informant who made secret recordings testifies at kidnap trial February 12, 2014|By Jason Meisner | Tribune reporter
Chicago real estate mogul George Michael was lunching with several reputed mobsters at a popular Near West Side restaurant in 2012 when he was introduced to a tall, well-dressed man who took an immediate liking to him, offering to help with the seemingly endless litigation involving a suburban strip club.
“He said he was my new doctor and he would take care of all my problems,” Michael testified Tuesday about that first encounter with Steve Mandell at La Scarola on Grand Avenue. “He was very excited.”
What Mandell – and undoubtedly the alleged mobsters at the table -- didn’t know was that Michael had been working with the FBI for more than three years.
Soon after the La Scarola meeting, Michael was wearing a wire on Mandell, a former death row inmate who had long been an elusive target for the FBI. Over the next two months, Michael recorded dozens of face-to-face meetings and phone conversations in which Mandell allegedly talked in detail about separate plots to kidnap, extort and kill a suburban businessman and murder an associate of a mob-connected Bridgeview strip club.
Michael’s long-awaited testimony is at the center of Mandell’s trial that got underway Tuesday at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse. Michael, a beefy ex-banker who runs a realty office on the Northwest Side, barely glanced at Mandell as he took the witness stand in the afternoon. For much of his testimony, Michael calmly kept his arms crossed in front of him as he listened to a question, then leaned forward into the microphone to answer in his baritone voice.
Mandell, dressed in a dark suit jacket and dress shirt, peered at Michael from the defense table, at times resting his cheek on his fist, his head cocked to one side.
In his opening statement earlier Tuesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Amar Bhachu painted Mandell – once known as Steve Manning -- as a sadistic, calculated killer who had outfitted a vacant Northwest Side storefront he jokingly referred to as “Club Med” with industrial sinks and other equipment needed to drain a body of blood and chop it into pieces.
The kidnapping target was identified for the first time in court Tuesday as Steve Campbell, a Riverside resident who owns numerous rental properties along Ogden Avenue, mostly in nearby Brookfield.
When agents raided Club Med on West Devon Avenue on the night Mandell was arrested, they found a meat cleaver, a .22-caliber pistol and Ambien sleeping pills that they were going to use to sedate Campbell, Bhachu said.
Mandell’s attorney, though, told jurors that Mandell will testify in his own defense that his allegedly lurid plots were “just talk.”
Spielfogel told jurors that Mandell was just “flinging BS” with Michael, trying to figure out a way to make Michael think he would help him move Polekatz strip club associates Anthony “Tony Q” Quaranta and Dimitri Stavropoulos out of the picture so Michael could collect in a pending civil suit.
“Is that noble? No. But does it make him a murderer? No, it does not,” Spielfogel said.
The undercover recordings capture a sometimes amusing glimpse of the city’s current criminal underworld. The code language Mandell used was straight out of mob movie central casting. He referred to Stavropoulos as “the guy from the Parthenon restaurant” because of his Greek heritage and used the fictitious names “Louis Linguini” and “Sammy Salami” to describe two mobsters.
In the several recordings played for jurors Tuesday, Michael and Mandell bantered about their connections to the Chicago Outfit, joking about “wannabe” gangsters who drive BMWs and drink designer coffees. They also griped about squeamish mob bosses worried about drawing the attention of law enforcement.
In one phone call from September 2012, Mandell told Michael he’d gone to reputed Outfit crew boss Albert Vena – one of those at La Scarola when Michael and Mandell were first introduced -- for a blessing to murder Stavropoulos, but Vena had balked at opening “a can of worms.”
“He (Vena) says, ohhh, you know. (Expletive) all over himself,” Mandell said, according to a transcript of the conversation. “...I don’t need that. If you’re gonna think that way, you’re never gonna get anything done.”
jmeisner@tribune.com
Twitter @jmetr22b
"Let me tell you something. There's no nobility in poverty. I've been a poor man, and I've been a rich man. And I choose rich every fucking time."
-Jordan Belfort
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Re: Outfit strip club owner plot
[Re: funkster]
#764340
02/18/14 12:53 PM
02/18/14 12:53 PM
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Joined: Mar 2013
Posts: 902
ChiTown
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Re: Outfit strip club owner plot
[Re: funkster]
#765060
02/22/14 01:58 AM
02/22/14 01:58 AM
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Joined: Jul 2013
Posts: 840
funkster
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Re: Outfit strip club owner plot
[Re: funkster]
#765069
02/22/14 07:45 AM
02/22/14 07:45 AM
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Joined: Jun 2013
Posts: 2,111 New Jersey
Dellacroce
Underboss
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Guilty verdict born of a dinner meeting
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Video: Former officer expected to testify By Jason Meisner, Tribune reporter 3:00 am, February 23, 2014 The story behind the bizarre trial of Steven Mandell and his plot to murder and dismember a businessman began at a quiet table at a popular restaurant on Chicago's Near West Side.
It was July 2012, and real estate mogul George Michael was lunching at La Scarola on West Grand Avenue. At the table was Albert Vena, a reputed Outfit boss, and several other alleged mobsters. A friend brought Mandell to the table and introduced him to Michael, and a relationship was born.
What unfolded over the next three months, culminating in Mandell's sensational arrest that October, was "so chilling, so grim ... it's almost stunningly hard to believe," as one federal prosecutor said in court.
Mandell, a former Chicago cop who was once on death row, was convicted Friday on charges he plotted to kidnap, torture, kill and dismember a suburban businessman. The jury acquitted him, however, in a separate plot to kill an associate of a reputedly mob-connected strip club. Mandell faces up to life in prison.
Michael secretly wore a wire for the feds and pretended to go along with the plan to kill Riverside landlord Steven Campbell. Michael found Mandell a suitable space to carry out Campbell's torture and murder — a Northwest Side storefront that Mandell referred to as "Club Med" — and had contractors outfit it with an industrial sink, butcher table and other equipment needed to drain the body of blood and chop it to pieces.
The undercover recordings made by Michael, as well as conversations caught on FBI cameras at Club Med, gave Mandell's trial the feeling of something out of a Quentin Tarantino movie. There was snappy dialogue, a cast of foul-mouthed underworld characters and moments of dark humor.
Jurors seemed to be stunned at times as they listened to Mandell and his alleged accomplice, Gary Engel, joke about mutilating Campbell before they killed him. Much of the action played out on a giant screen in U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve's darkened courtroom as jurors watched hours of video of Mandell and Engel making final preparations for Campbell's kidnapping. They laid out saws, knives, a meat cleaver and Ambien pills in case they needed to put Campbell to sleep. A chessboard was set up to pass the time.
The jury heard the two quibble over the workmanship of their torture chamber, with Engel pointing to the plumbing and exclaiming in a clipped Chicago accent, "What the (expletive) is this (expletive) abortion?" Engel hanged himself in his jail cell soon after his arrest.
Also featured was a 30-minute video from an infrared camera mounted on an FBI spy plane. An agent in the plane circling high over Arlington Heights followed Mandell as he placed a tracking device on a girlfriend's car and tossed what amounted to a killer's "to-do" list inside a garbage can in a secluded suburban park.
On the last day of testimony, some jurors cracked smiles as they listened to a series of phone calls Mandell made to his 82-year-old wife from a Loop federal jail after his arrest. Mandell told her to find her Nissan that he'd left parked near Campbell's home, instructing her in a cooing voice several times to "throw away" the trash in the car, explaining, "You need all your space for your groceries."
A frustrated Mandell could be heard trying to give his wife directions to the car as she wrote them down. "Just go to Joliet Road!" Mandell shouted.
"Oh my God, I'm telling you," she replied. "Ah, slow down!"
The jury also convicted him of obstruction of justice.
The trial offered a short course on the current state of the Chicago Outfit and included names like "Little Guy" Vena and Robert Panozzo, the convicted burglar who Michael testified introduced him to Mandell during that lunch at La Scarola.
One part of Michael's testimony went barely noticed amid the lurid charges against Mandell, but it undoubtedly caught the attention of the people who dined with Michael that July day at La Scarola. The FBI recorded the meeting, though the tape was never played during Mandell's trial and his attorneys were barred from delving into how or why it was made.
After the verdict was handed down Friday evening, U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon called the case "extraordinary" and praised the work of the FBI and federal prosecutors in taking a dangerous figure off the street.
Robert Holley, the special agent in charge of the Chicago FBI, acknowledged that Michael's role in the case was significant, but he stopped short of praising him for wearing a wire.
"Yes, there was a risk to him for his involvement in this case, but he did what he needed to do," Holley said.
"Let me tell you something. There's no nobility in poverty. I've been a poor man, and I've been a rich man. And I choose rich every fucking time."
-Jordan Belfort
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Re: Outfit strip club owner plot
[Re: Dellacroce]
#765070
02/22/14 08:00 AM
02/22/14 08:00 AM
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Joined: Feb 2014
Posts: 78
JJB
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Re: Outfit strip club owner plot
[Re: funkster]
#765328
02/23/14 11:48 PM
02/23/14 11:48 PM
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Joined: Feb 2014
Posts: 15
cmoss
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Wiseguy
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Here's the link I forgot: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/last-great-mafia-social-club-gets-clipped"The 1966 wiretap, though, yielded nothing of value during the 60 days detectives monitored calls. Future attempts to bug the club--by both the NYPD and FBI--also delivered disappointing results. Gigante and Co. assumed their storefront was always bugged, and acted accordingly."
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