U.S. prosecutor retires after 43 years fighting Chicago mob, corruption Gary Shapiro Assistant U.S. Attorney Gary Shapiro worked at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse in Chicago. He's retiring after 43 years on the job. (Chris Sweda, Chicago Tribune) By Jason Meisner, Chicago Tribune contact the reporter CrimeHomicidePensionsPension and WelfareInternational Brotherhood of TeamstersJane ByrnePatrick Fitzgerald
Chicago's top federal prosecutor, Gary Shapiro, retires after 43 years fighting mob, corruption. Gary Shapiro, who is retiring from fighting the mob and corruptions, is described as a 'prosecutor's prosecuto As a young federal prosecutor, Gary Shapiro was just days from trying his first big Chicago mob case in 1974 when masked men burst into a Bensenville plastics firm and fatally shot Danny Seifert in front of his wife and young son.
At the time, Seifert was the only witness linking Joey "The Clown" Lombardo to millions in missing Teamsters union pension funds. His brutal murder forced prosecutors to abruptly drop all charges against the notorious Outfit lieutenant, and a short time later, the remaining defendants were all acquitted at trial.
While the loss stung, it had a hidden lesson for Shapiro: If you stick around long enough, you just might get another chance.
More than three decades later, Shapiro was there in 2007 when the elderly boss was finally convicted for Seifert's slaying as part of the landmark Family Secrets case that landed Lombardo and other Outfit leaders behind bars for life.
"In the end it all comes back," Shapiro, 68, told the Tribune as he wound up a remarkable 43-year career last week.
Shapiro said it was going after people like Lombardo that kept him from ever thinking about trying a potentially more lucrative career in private practice. Whether it was investigating organized crime or terrorism or gangs, he always felt that at the end of the day he might be "doing some
"How can that not be a great job?" he said.
Since 1998, Shapiro served as top assistant to a succession of U.S. attorneys — Scott Lassar, Patrick Fitzgerald and Zachary Fardon. And for more than a year before Fardon took office last year, Shapiro filled in as interim U.S. attorney.
Known as a "prosecutor's prosecutor," Shapiro graduated from the University of Texas School of Law in 1971 and cut his teeth with the Chicago Strike Force, a unit separate from the U.S. Attorney's Office designed to attack the mob's iron-fisted influence on many aspects of business and politics.
"The mob then had power, real power and control in virtually every area you could think of, whether it's law enforcement or the judiciary or local politics or even national politics," Shapiro said.
Nowhere was that influence more prevalent than Chicago, where the Outfit was centrally organized and had deep-seated relationships with political figures that stretched back generations, Shapiro said. Also key to the mob's power was the nation's unions and their massive pension funds.
Shapiro's strike force got a breakthrough in the early 1980s with the successful prosecution of Teamsters President Roy Williams, its pension fund manager Allen Dorfman and several others for conspiring to bribe then-U.S. Sen. Howard Cannon to kill proposed legislation to deregulate the trucking industry
Williams later became the highest-ranking Teamsters official ever to testify against the mobsters who controlled the pension funds, leading to convictions against bosses in Chicago, Milwaukee, Kansas City and Cleveland.
"That was the beginning of the end for them," Shapiro said of the Outfit's national influence. "But it took a couple of decades more of us targeting the various factions of the Chicago family, the various crews ... ultimately concluding with Family Secrets."
Shapiro said the Outfit today still makes money in rackets like gambling and extortion, and there are active investigations that he declined to elaborate on. But the mob's heyday is clearly over.
"There is no question their influence over politics, the police, the judiciary and the unions has been drastically reduced," Shapiro said. "That doesn't mean it's gone away."
Through the years, many of the cases Shapiro worked seemed to be straight from the movies.
William Hanhardt, the former Chicago police chief of detectives, was convicted in 2001 of running a mob-connected theft ring that netted more than $5 million in diamonds and gems over 20 years.
Shapiro said authorities had suspected for years that Hanhardt was in bed with the mob but had nothing they could use in court.
In the late 1980s, when word got out that Hanhardt was in line for a promotion, the FBI and federal prosecutors went to top officials in Mayor Jane Byrne's administration to try to persuade them to put a stop to it, but he was "promoted nonetheless," Shapiro said.
And then there was Robert Cooley, a former Chicago cop and crooked lawyer who one day in 1986 called up Shapiro and said he needed to talk. Cooley wound up wearing a hidden wire for three years, recording crime bosses and politicians as they rigged everything from felony cases to zoning decisions and state law.
"It was pretty astonishing. This never happens," Shapiro said. "People usually get flipped because we catch them doing something. But we had nothing on him."
