This is the reality in Chicago...media and LE rarely label things specifically "mob related" though most know it is. This is how the Outfit operates nowdays--in anonymity.

This was a good man and a great place to eat in Highland Park. He started with a little bakery in Cicero and worked his way up. A warm friend to many.


Chicago Tribune
Restaurateur's death shrouded in mystery
By Jason Meisner, Chicago Tribune reporter
May 2, 2013
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/suburbs/highland_park_deerfield/ct-met-restaurant-fire-death-investigation-20130502,0,4308534,full.story

Missing safe, new will signed days before house fire add to questions

Seven months after Giacomo Ruggirello died in a spectacular fire at his Highland Park home, his shuttered Italian restaurant a few miles away remains frozen in time.

The white tablecloths at Trattoria Giacomo are still set for dinner service, napkins neatly tufted in water glasses next to little bottles of olive oil. The night's specials are printed on a chalkboard, advertising eggplant Parmesan and whitefish al limone, traditional dishes of his native Sicily.

Only the remnants of red police evidence tape over the restaurant doors hint at the deepening mystery surrounding Ruggirello's death. The investigation has uncovered a number of suspicious circumstances — a missing restaurant safe, evidence of possible accelerants used in the fire and a will purportedly finalized by Ruggirello just days before his death disinheriting his daughters and leaving all his money to a friend in Italy.

Adding to the puzzle, lawyers for a former Chicago police officer accused in a bizarre plot to kidnap and kill a suburban real estate baron subpoenaed investigators for their records in Ruggirello's death, suggesting a connection between the two sensational cases.

The intrigue has rumors of mob involvement flying in the well-to-do north suburbs, where for two decades Ruggirello ran his trattoria out of an unassuming strip mall on Sheridan Road in Highwood. For months, residents have traded stories that Ruggirello owed money to unsavory characters, that his body was found without a head or hands, and that his furnace was worked on the night before the blaze.

"Just the other day I had a customer come in and ask me if I know anything about the mob hit," said Mitch Wasserman, who runs a gourmet kitchen and bakery next to Ruggirello's former restaurant. "It's been so hush-hush. We're all just left wondering."

Police have said almost nothing publicly about the case, still officially classified as a death investigation. But law enforcement sources confirmed to the Tribune that detectives were aware of claims that Ruggirello owed money to mob-connected figures and the fire was made to look like an accident. There are indications that the FBI has joined the probe.

The fire

It was shortly after midnight on a chilly September night when Ed Leving and wife Kay awoke to an eerie orange glow coming through the window shades of their home at Sherwood Road and Midland Avenue. They peeked out to find Ruggirello's small ranch house next door ablaze with embers shooting from the roof.

"It was like a Roman candle," Leving said.

The couple rushed outside in their pajamas and watched with neighbors as the roof caved in and firefighters tried in vain to keep the blaze from spreading to other structures.

The fire was so intense that it incinerated virtually everything inside, blackened trees near the street and melted Ruggirello's exterior air-conditioning unit. The next morning, a body believed to be that of Ruggirello, 61, was found burned beyond recognition. More than a month later, the Lake County coroner's office confirmed Ruggirello's identity through DNA.

Ruggirello had lived alone, worked late hours and kept mostly to himself, neighbors told police. He tended to herbs, tomatoes and flowers in an elaborate garden and took pride in his back patio, where he had installed a professional pizza oven and sometimes entertained guests.

Ruggirello's friend Raymond Geraci, a former Highland Park mayor, said that as soon as he learned of the fire that morning, he rushed to the restaurant and found the front door unlocked.

"I walked in and saw that the light was on in the office, and when I went back there, right away I noticed that there was a vacant spot on the table where his safe would normally be," he said.

There was no sign of forced entry, and nothing else of value appeared to be missing, including two cash registers in the dining room and adjoining deli, Geraci said.

Within hours, police had set up a crime scene van at the restaurant, and detectives were seen combing through the storefront business and dusting for fingerprints, business owners in the strip mall told the Tribune.

A similar scene unfolded at Ruggirello's burned-out house, where investigators stayed for days, neighbors said.

The will

Regular customers of Trattoria Giacomo knew Ruggirello as a hardworking owner who loved to pull up a chair and tell funny stories as the wine flowed. Barrel-chested, with a headful of thick, dark hair, he was charmingly old-school, friends said. He dealt in cash and preferred face-to-face talks, eschewing cellphones for years until they became essential to business.

He loved to cook, fashioning many of his Old World dishes from recipes handed down from his late mother, Giovanna. He sold take-home jars of homemade marinara sauce with her picture on the label.

But he also had a darker side at times, friends said. Franco Cavello, who had known Ruggirello since he moved from Italy in the early 1970s, said his friend sometimes angered people who accused him of cutting corners in business deals. He also had a quick temper and wasn't afraid to tell someone off if he thought he had been wronged.

"He could make you feel like a king one day, and the next day he'd make you feel like a peasant," Cavello said. "That was his personality."

In the weeks before the fire, Ruggirello seemed preoccupied. He had been ill for more than a year and was undergoing kidney dialysis. One friend who asked not to be named said Ruggirello was suddenly talking about selling the restaurant, paying off debts and retiring. And he was adamant about changing his will of just two years, the friend said.

Just 10 days before the blaze, court records show, Ruggirello left his entire estate in the event of his death to Vincenzo Governali, a boyhood friend nicknamed "Enzo" who had come for an extended visit last summer before returning to Corleone, his Sicily home.

"It is my intention to entirely disinherit my daughters," the will said.

As the estate's executor, Geraci searched unsuccessfully for the new will after the fire. No one knows if it was in the missing safe or destroyed in the blaze, but a copy had been filed with the Lake County probate court, records show.

In November, Geraci filed a petition with the court asserting that the original will was "missing, due to actions of a person or persons unknown," and that "a variety of documents and paperwork" had been stolen from the restaurant in addition to the safe. The petition estimated the value of Ruggirello's estate at $400,000.

In an interview, Geraci said he felt the timing of the change in the will and Ruggirello's death was a coincidence. Police told him the home fire may have been caused by a faulty gas pump in Ruggirello's furnace, he said.

"The only thing that gives me some pause was that the safe was missing," he said.

Family problems

Ruggirello's former wife, Lisa Galanos, still remembers the day the two met. Ruggirello, who at the time co-owned a bakery in Cicero, held up a loaf of bread and shouted to her from his car.

"He said, 'Hey, you want some bread and a ride to work?'" Galanos said in a recent interview.

She accepted the ride, and later they began to date. They married in 1979 and moved to Italy, but after the birth of their first daughter, the relationship soured. Galanos moved back to the U.S. and filed for divorce. But after Ruggirello returned to the States, they reconciled, remarried in 1983 and had a second daughter in 1985, court records show. However, Galanos filed for divorce again in 1989.

In her divorce petition, Galanos accused her husband of physical and verbal abuse and said he had a cocaine habit, according to the court records. Later she alleged he had fallen $11,000 behind on child support payments for daughters Danielle and Angela.

Ruggirello was not in his daughters' lives for much of their childhood. When he came back into the picture years later, his relationship with them was strained, the daughters told the Tribune. Much of it stemmed from his quarrels with their mother over what he thought should be a traditional Italian upbringing for their children, they said.

"He was just a very stubborn person. It was his way or no way," said Danielle Ruggirello, 32. "He wanted his daughters to marry Italian men, take over the family business someday."

Some frequent patrons of the restaurant said they could not remember Ruggirello ever talking about his daughters or ex-wife.

Claudia Rojas, the restaurant's de-facto manager who worked for Ruggirello for nearly 15 years, said she had heard him complain that the daughters came around only when they wanted money. When Ruggirello was sick in a hospital early last year, he lamented that his family did not come to see him, she said.

"He was in the hospital for two days, and no one checked to see how he was," she said.

Angela and Danielle Ruggirello acknowledged that they had differences with their father. Still, the sisters said they were surprised at being disinherited and find the will questionable for more reasons than its filing just days before his death. Angela's middle name was misspelled, and her first and middle names reversed. They also claim that the signature doesn't look quite like their father's.

And they wonder why he cut them out of his will without telling them. Yet the two have chosen not to contest the will in court.

"There was love there, but a lot of things we never got closure on with him," Danielle Ruggirello said.

Link to ex-cop's case?

Business had been sluggish the last night at the trattoria. Cavello, the longtime friend, said Ruggirello had invited him and several other friends over for a special dinner of grilled swordfish. They stayed past closing, watched Ruggirello lock up and said good night.

Rojas said she and the other restaurant employees who worked that night were interviewed soon after Ruggirello's death by local detectives, then weeks later by FBI agents. But no one has followed up since, she said.

Cavello said he had been at Ruggirello's home earlier that day watching soccer with his friend. When Ruggirello announced he was cold, Cavello simply turned the thermostat up to 72 degrees, he said he later volunteered to police. He never did any work on the furnace, contrary to the rumors, he said.

"I felt like they were thinking of me as a suspect,' Cavello said. "They said they want to check my house, my car, my computer. I say, 'Go ahead.'"

Then last month came a potential bombshell. Lawyers for Steven Mandell, the ex-officer awaiting trial in the alleged plot to extort, kill and dismember a Chicago-area real estate magnate, mysteriously subpoenaed Highland Park police for their records in the investigation into Ruggirello's death.

It was last October when federal agents had swooped in and arrested Mandell and an alleged accomplice as they prepared to abduct the businessman, who was known to handle a lot of cash, according to the charges. Prosecutors alleged that they planned to take the victim to a nearby vacant office space they called "Club Med," which had been outfitted with saws, handcuffs, zip ties and surgical instruments, as well as an industrial sink for draining blood. They intended to extort the victim of his cash and force him to sign over his real estate holdings, then kill and dismember him, prosecutors said.

In recent weeks, prosecutors moved to block the subpoena from Mandell's lawyers. In court papers, a Highland Park police commander revealed that the fire's origin remained undetermined but that a chemical analysis "may point to the use of an accelerant." The commander also said the restaurant burglary had "heightened our investigative awareness."

Police said that turning over their records could jeopardize the investigation, and that nothing about Ruggirello's death appeared to be connected to the charges against Mandell.

This week, U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve, who is presiding over Mandell's case, reviewed the police file privately in her chambers. On Tuesday she refused to force the police to turn the files over to Mandell's lawyers, saying they hadn't shown that the investigative file into Ruggirello's death was relevant to Mandell's charges.

Meanwhile, as the investigation drags on into Ruggirello's death, family members said they hope to send his ashes to Italy to be placed next to his mother's grave.

"There are so many things going on, so many stories (that) you don't know what to believe," said Galanos, his ex-wife.

Ruggirello's burned-out house was finally torn down in February. Pieces of scorched wood and crime scene tape can still be seen lying in the mud of the empty lot left behind. In the corner, some of Ruggirello's garden plantings are poking through, attempting a spring comeback.

Interesting article. So what's the real story behind this? Seems to imply some outfit involvement.

Very twisted and complicated story starting with the Michaels brothers (namely George Michaels) of Chicago...Armenian Bankers from Cicero who have been infamous in this city for a variety of stunts including trying to categorize their Lake Bluff mansion a "Church" just to get a tax break.

The Michaels brothers financed the Outfit through Citizens Bank and Trust, which I believe is now defunct. They financed everything from John Galioto's strip clubs like PoleCatz and BlackJacks and have also financed a lot of the property deals that Spina brothers property group does in the Patch to Jackie Cerone Jr.'s dumbfuck investments.

George Michaels is neck deep in this "Club Med" probe discussed in this story above about Giacomo. Another hood involved in the Club Med probe (the one who just killed himself in prison--Engel) was a former Willow Springs Cop (aka Outfit lackey) and I believe was in an Outfit burglary crew for years with Mario DeStefano's kid and William Handhardt.

Here is some more on the Club Med probe. If this investigation gets deep enough I would not be surprised to see the Michaels brothers "dissapear" especially if they are brought up on charges.


Chicago Sun-Times
Former Death Row cop set up killing chamber in latest plot: feds
BY KIM JANSSEN
Nov 28, 2012

He’s previously been known as Steve Manning and Etienne Duvalier.

And when the feds arrested him Thursday night, the disgraced former Chicago cop and onetime resident of Death Row was calling himself Steven Mandell.

But Charles Ford has a different name for the grinning, balding 61-year-old Buffalo Grove man who appeared in handcuffs before Magistrate Judge Geraldine Soat Brown on Friday morning, charged with plotting one of the grisliest Chicago crimes in recent memory.

“He reminds me of Satan,” Ford said.

It’s been 20 years since Mandell, a convicted jewel thief and fraudster who has made a career of confounding the FBI, was jailed on a charge of kidnapping Ford and another man in 1984 by posing as a DEA agent, then torturing them into handing over $55,000 next to an empty grave in a Kansas City cemetery.

Cleared on appeal — and awarded $6.5 million for wrongful conviction — he’s now accused of devising a similar but even more devilish crime in Chicago this week.

This time prosecutors allege Mandell and a crony, ex-Willow Springs police officer Gary Engel, also 61, were moments away Thursday night from abducting a businessman they planned to extort, murder and dismember in a custom-built killing chamber.

According to a gruesome federal criminal complaint, Mandell and Engel planned to pose as cops to “arrest” the unidentified victim, then take him to a place they called “Club Med” — an office they’d prepared with a giant sink to drain his blood before they chopped him up on a reinforced man-sized counter with saws and a butcher’s knife.

Before killing him, they intended to force the victim to give them cash and transfer millions of dollars worth of real estate into their control, it’s alleged. But the FBI was secretly recording them every step of the way and the victim was never in any immediate danger, according to the two-count complaint.

“My guy knows what he’s doing, he knows how to waterboard, do interrogation, psy-ops,” Mandell was allegedly taped saying of Engel just two weeks ago. In another chilling section of the complaint, Mandell is quoted as saying the wealthy victim he nicknamed “Soupie Sales” would “have a ski mask over his face. It’s going to be darkness.”

Mandell was so excited about the plot, according to court documents, that he claimed to be sexually aroused.

Both defendants were nabbed Thursday night with “prop” firearms and fake U.S. Marshal IDs they planned to use if they were stopped by real police officers on their way to their killing chamber, which had a specially-installed shower for the alleged would-be killers to clean up in, the feds say.

Engel, a Willow Springs cop in the 1970s who was also convicted and later cleared of kidnapping Ford, allegedly had handcuffs, while Mandell, a Chicago cop from 1973 to 1983, had a fake arrest warrant that appeared to name the victim as a criminal defendant.

After the arrests, agents searched “Club Med” and found a loaded .22 caliber semi-automatic pistol, ammunition, as well as saws, a butcher knife and multiple zip-ties suitable for use as restraints, the complaint says.

The FBI’s undercover operation could prove the decisive twist in its long-running battle with Mandell, who was sentenced to death in 1993 for the 1990 murder of trucking firm owner Jimmy Pellegrino, but freed on appeal after a judge ruled that both Pellegrino’s eerie prediction that Mandell would be his killer and jailhouse snitch recordings were improperly shared with a jury.

Mandell, who was also cleared of kidnapping Ford in Missouri in 1984, went on to convince a federal civil jury that he’d been railroaded by FBI agents Robert Buchan and Gary Miller. The jury awarded him $6.5 million in what was believed to be an unprecedented judgement against the FBI, but Mandell never saw a penny after another judge overturned the award, saying there was “significant, untainted and credible evidence” that Mandell had committed the crimes he was charged with.

Free since 2004 thanks to an effort championed by Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, he found himself back behind bars Thursday night after he was arrested in an alley outside the proposed abduction site, the feds say.

If his beaming, bemused expression was anything to go by as he sat wearing an orange jail jumpsuit next to the graying, wiry Engel in a federal courtroom Friday — Mandell wasn’t too flustered by his latest arrest.

Smiling at a TV reporter who waved a paper copy of the complaint at him before Judge Brown ordered him and Engel held in custody until at least next week, he appeared to mouth that the allegations against him are “BS.”

But the defendants’ arrest was heartwarming news for Charles Ford, who said he gave a federal deposition against both men in Kansas City about eight months ago.

His experience at Mandell and Engel’s hands back in Kansas City 1984 sounds just like what the pair allegedly had in store for their Chicago victim Thursday, Ford said.

“I was coming back from a nightclub when they said they were DEA and grabbed us, threw us in a car and put us in blinders,” Ford recalled Friday. “By the time I was in the car I knew something was wrong.”

Mandell had targeted him because he knew Ford — who has since gone straight — had drug money and wouldn’t go to the cops, he said, adding, “That’s his M.O.”

During their day-long ordeal, kidnappers badly pistol-whipped his pal, Mark Harris, who was also abducted, and “they told us they were going to kill us,” Ford said. “If we hadn’t given them money, they probably would have killed us.”

Harris was so scared during the interrogation that he defecated on himself, Ford said — an allegation that chimes with a section in the new criminal complaint. On Sept. 30, the complaint alleges, Mandell was secretly recorded simulating the cries of pain his victim would suffer while being extorted, joking that the victim would soil himself.

Ford said he knows better than most what Mandell is capable of, and about the unanswered questions that continue to swirl around the murder of Mandell’s father and the disappearance of several of Mandell’s associates. Still, he said, he’s shocked by the allegations in the case filed Friday.

“All the s--- he had to go through to get out of prison, I didn’t think he’d do it again,” Ford said.

“They’re old men now — they could die in prison.” he added. “But he probably thinks he’ll beat it.”

Confused, was this a hit or not?

wtf this is crazy

Very interesting- Spend time in Highland Park and Highwood.

Could the daughters and ex wife be involved in this? It wouldn't surprise me with daddy cutting them out of the will, and the talk about them only coming around to visit him when they needed money.... These kids who use their parents as ATM's is pathetic, the kids should be giving the parents money once they hit a certain age, that is atleast what I learned from my own father. My dad would give his old man money to go to the track or something despite my grandfather not even needing it, instead of hiting the old man up.

Well the daughters and ex wife were left out of the will, which they found odd. My theory? The Outfit did a favor for the Michaels brothers by taking this guy out. Perhaps their payment was that safe and his assets.

Any possibility that these Michael's brothers are somehow related to Jimmy Michaels family from St. Louis? You know the Syrian gangsters that all got blown up with car bombs during the Michael's vs. Leisure wars in the 1980's. Both Micheal's families obviously are OC connected. And, there has always been overlap between the Outfit and the Giordano Family.

what about the guy that got shotgunned in park ridge back in like 08" or some shit

white business owners typically don't get shotgunned after having breakfast

Didn't they think it was a mistaken attempt on Solly C?

Supposedly but sounded like a stretch...Solly C hadn't lived there for years. He's been in Westchester since the 90s I believe.

The Park Ridge shooting was very suspicious. An Outfit guy used to live in a house across the street where the innocent guy got hit. I was working with a buddy of mine at the time and the first thing he said when the story broke was "Sounds like a mob hit". Nothing ever came out about it. I remember a week after it happened the FBI held a press conference about it and they said if you smell something coming from a trunk it's probably the hitman who screwed up. Kinda funny saying that at a live press conference.

I wonder how many low key hits have carried out in the last 15 years.

Considering the weakened state of the Outfit I don't think the Sicilian Mafia can be ruled out. Giacomo Ruggirello suddenly left everything to his Corleonese friend. Why? Did he have a debt to someone in Corleone? There are a lot of details that we aren't privy to, and without knowing all the facts I don't think we can presume that the Outfit was involved if this was organized crime-related.

Ruggirello's bakery was first located in Cicero in the 1990s and he became very friendly with the boys there...specifically the Spano brothers, Solly D and others -- they frequented his bakery in Cicero and when he opened a restaurant in Highland Park they continued coming. Whether he was loaned money is another question, but my theory is that the Outfit was behind this.