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.