Playing The Field: Chicago Mafia Looks To Future, Preparing To Give Reins Of Outfit To Fmr. “Players,” Cicero Street-Gang AlumsMuch like the 42 Gang and the C-Notes of Chicago mob past, the 12th Street Players has substantially influenced the Outfit’s modern-day look and structure in more recent times, as a major section of the mafia in the Windy City is being run more like a high-functioning street gang than the sprawling, interconnected, and diverse racketeering enterprise that it once was, according to multiple sources on both sides of the law.
For all intents and purposes, the 12th Street Players are the present and future of the Chicago mafia, more ruthless gangsters and well-practiced thieves than deliberate, cagey racketeers. Over the last two decades, the Cicero-based 12th Street Players has served as a fertile Outfit breeding ground, “farm team” and feeder group to inject fresh blood into a once-aging, somewhat antiquated organization that in previous years was resistant to change and adding new members, several sources allege.
Between 2005 and 2010, then-Outfit boss Michael (Fat Mike) Sarno inducted more than two dozen men into the Chicago mob ranks, a good chunk of them one-time 12th Street Players and street-gang shot callers from Cicero and considerably more loyal to him and the Outfit’s Cicero crew than the mafia in general, per sources and law enforcement documents related to a number of probes into organized crime in the Chicagoland region.
Sarno was imprisoned in December 2010 on an extortion case and is currently in the middle of a 25-year stint as a guest of Uncle Sam, battling a variety of health problems linked to his weight that is alleged to have gone down to below 210 pounds right now after a peak pushing 350. The medical issues hasn’t slowed his duties as counselor-of-record to the Outfit’s Cicero crew and as he reportedly continues to receive a piece of gambling and loansharking profits and is sometimes leaned on to settle beefs, which he allegedly did with squabbling Cicero crew members in recent months, per sources and court filings.
Another batch of youngsters got buttons in Elmwood Park in the 2010s and along with Sarno’s boys in Cicero and the new lineage-rich acting leadership on the South Side, represent the new face of the Chicago Outfit, in the process of gradually assuming the reins of the organization from the aging OGs who have helmed the Outfit on a day-to-day basis for the last decade and a half. With Sarno’s counsel and pseudo-oversite from prison and his reputed underboss Salvatore (Sammy Cards) Cataudella as his boots-on-the-ground back-up mentor to the troops on Roosevelt Road, the 12th Street Player alums are now empowered at the highest levels of the Outfit, reshaping the Chicago mob’s image and way of doing business, according to sources.
The finesse of the DiFronzo era is long gone, claim these sources, replaced by raw, unabashed thuggery and a return to the organization’s street-crime roots. At the center of the “new mob’s” racket portfolio are the traditional staples of vast gambling networks, a robust narcotics-sales operations, shakedowns, juice loans and chop shops but conducted in a more aggressive, attack-first, then ask-questions-later manner.
Peppered into those endeavors are prostitution and pump-and-dump stock scams, internet pyramid schemes and Ponzis, as well as the 12th Street Players signature of old-school stick-ups, rip-offs, break-ins and burglaries. Besides the brute-force types ushered into the Chicago mob’s fresh-blood infusion of the past two decades, Cicero and Elmwood Park have also brought in more polished 21st gangsters with expertise in technology, white-collar and boardroom crimes and a portion of the initiates and their associates work for city municipalities in the area and exert great pull in political and police circles. There’s talk among Outfit brass of possibly merging Elmwood Park into Cicero crew in the following decade, after the older generation Elmwood Park buttons either retire or pass away.
The first major former 12th Street Player to gain notoriety in the Chicago media for his work in the Outfit was Paul (Paulie C) Carparelli busted for extortion and connected to Fat Mike Sarno, Sammy Cataudella and Chicago mafia don Salvatore (Solly D) DeLaurentis, per court records and FBI intelligence records. Carparelli, 57, copped a plea and did three years in the feds, walking free in 2019. A number of the 12th Street Players bigwigs of that 1980s-90s era have murders on their respective rap sheets, making it so their reputations precede them wherever they go. One of those 12th Street Player heavyweights, 48-year old Bobby (The Tasmanian Devil) English, the undisputed 90s’ era King of the Players, is in the last stretch of a 20-to-25 year state prison bid for the killing of an Illinois Lottery winner in a 2009 home invasion robbery in Rolling Meadows.
For an IDOC mugshot of English and an article go here...
https://www.lotterypost.com/news/229819
