Agree to disgree. I agree that there wasn't necessarily competition. I know that each crew was/is known for their specialty & that they've always (for the most part) functioned together in relative harmony. I just don't see Carlisi (or Solly D at present) would give a shit what accardo/difronzo wanted.

I cannot speak on Grand Avenue's relationship with Chinatown. I'm sure Vena didn't believe Mandell would actually go through with anything.

I believe I know exactly where this "club med" is located though.

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

Sounds like mandell is calling a vena a pussy.

Feels like alot of these guys are just running around taking whatever opportunity comes to hand . Is it fair to assume whoever has the most firepower and muscle is sort of top dog with weaker groups of outfit criminals either staying out of the way or being preyed upon. This guy didn't think much of targeting other outfit connected people.

This Mandell character is beginning to sound like a modern day Mad Sam

Mandell sounds like an idiot...good to see guys like Vena have some common sense

Crazy, just crazy.

Mandell found guilty.

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.

This story has some video.

So we have another name...Robert Pannozo.

82 year old wife and a torture chamber

weird guy

Im not 100% positive, but I believe this "club Med" (lol) is located near Devon & Central, in the Edgebrook/Wildwood neighborhood on the Northwest side. A fairly wealthy/affluent white neighborhood. The strip where I believe it to be located is one of the quaintest, most wholesome in the city. Day-cares, libraries, churches, many family friendly establishments, etc. And right in the middle of it all......"club Med"

You wanna see what Elmwood Park really looks like?

Yeah, Edgebrook is a very nice area.

"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."

So someone else was wearing a wire at the original meeting? Not Michael? A rat in the midst?

I assumed Michael was the one wearing the wire.

I didn't know he moved to Chicago after Wham

^^lol

Michael was wearing the wire. They're implying that someone else was wired as well.

I guess it's possible the authorities placed a wiretap in La Scarola?

Interesting that they wouldn't let Mandell's attorneys to go into it/ask about it.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if La Scarola & the back of City Pool Hall were wired up.

Then again, they're most likely bullshitting with that statement just to keep guys on their toes. Very typical.

I maintain they were bullshitting when they claimed to allegedly have a top figure(made guy) under their thumb & wired up for years.

Its interesting that it was Pannozo and Vena who introduced Michael to Mandell.

Highly doubt Mandell is calling Vena a pussy but my guess is Outfit is sticking to their stables of shy, gambling, maybe dabble in stolen goods and steering clear of higher risk crimes and criminals in the area are largely just doing what they want with little fear of reprecussions from the Outfit. Sounds like they want to just make money, keep a low profile and stay out of jail, which is pretty smart these days.

The Outfit has always made a ton of $ in shy business, but curious how dominant they are in gambling today. Big books require alot of manpower

It says that Michael wasn't wired up until AFTER the La Scarola meeting. So someone was wired up during the meeting that wasn't Michael.

What I find strange and extremely interesting is that they taped the meeting but did not reveal who recorded it or how it was recorded and wouldn't allow people to review the recordings.

Question is- how do they know something was recorded?

You think some more indictments are gonna come down from this if thats true. If they do what kind of activity do you think it will be for?
My guess is probably its gonna be a bit of gambling and probably some white collar stuff.

I'm sure more and more now that they have La Scarola bugged, just like other known mob spots.

Here is an article that mentions now FBI and NYPD wiretapped different part of the Genovese's Triangle Social Club. I know different city and different family, but the authorities know the common hangouts and can bug a place instead of just a person.

I'm guessing La Scarola, Gene & Georgetti's, etc are all bugged.
I have a vague memory of a place like Billy Goat Tavern or some other city hangout being wired because so many politicians went there for lunch (this was about 20 years ago or so).

I'm sure many of those places search for bugs regularly

Don't know the ins and outs of the law, but it's odd that it was the FBI that was the lead in this. Why not CPD? Wonder if the Outfit involvement is more than we currently know.

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."