Chicago Outfit Bank Robber Captured After 14 Years of Fooling the FBI

How do you duck the FBI? Carmine Jannece did so since the early 1990s by staying close to home.

Jannece was part of the biggest bank robbery in Michigan history, right across the lake in Saugatuck, a favorite vacation retreat for many Chicagoans.

Jannece is now 80 years old, on the lam since he was in his 60s, might still be living off the proceeds of one very lucrative bank robbery.
Story continues below
Advertisement

In July 1991. a movie, " Point Break," was playing at Chicago-area theatres about a gang of robbers who stick up banks while wearing rubber masks of ex-U.S. presidents.

Late that summer, inspired by the film, federal agents say a four-man Outfit burglary crew from Chicago arrived in the quaint town of Saugatuck. The mob holdup men were led by veteran Chicago burglar Bobby "The Beak" Siegel, a cousin of the infamous founder of Las Vegas' Bugsy Siegel.

Saugatuck businessman Larry Phillips was driving by the bank. "I went around the one corner and I met a car, and there were three guys in it and they all had face masks on," he said.

The crime syndicate crew had come to hit the only bank in town and pulled it off by diverting the city's only squad car with a 911 call about a phony car accident across town.

One woman was working as a bank teller that day. "Three men came dashing through the front door and pushed me onto the floor, and the other two men grabbed the other bank officer and took him into the vault," said Patricia Diepenhorst, teller.

They ran out with nearly $360,000 in cash with Carmine Jannece driving the getaway car back to Chicago. In 1994, Jannece, Bobby "The Beak" Siegel and their two cohorts were indicted for that robbery and a string of stickups in Florida.

All but Jannece were arrested and convicted.

Jannece became a fugitive, wanted by the FBI here in Chicago; in Michigan and in Florida.

He managed to throw FBI agents off his trail by changing him name from Jannece to Senese and, according to family members, for the last 14 years, lived right out in the open on the Northwest Side, ironically between two banks above a strip mall with his alias right there on the mailbox with bills arriving every day for him and his car parked out back, registered in the slightly altered name.

Jannece outlasted the fugitive run of his boss, Joey "The Clown" Lombardo, who managed only nine months before the FBI found him. Jannece's son says his father told him he was exposed when he tried to renew his driver's license.

"I've been wondering about that for years and years, if they'd ever find him," said Diepenhorst.

Surprisingly, the FBI made no announcement of the February arrest. At first, a spokesman denied knowing anything about Jannece. When pressed, they declined to discuss with the I-Team why it took 14 years to bring him in.

Jannece last month pleaded guilty to having stolen a car in Holland, Michigan to use as the getaway car, acting as a lookout and agreed to cooperate with the government. He is free on bond.

Jannece's lawyer told the I-Team he was sorry but had no comment. Neither did the U.S. Attorney.

The aging bank robber is scheduled to be sentenced in July. He could help his situation if he told authorities the whereabouts of stolen bank funds or jewelry or testified against mob bosses who are expected to face indictment later this year in the second leg of the operation family secrets trial.

Reported by Chuck Goudie

Tweet

Honoring Fallen Agents Who Fought Crime Plus the Mob

The sun was blinding in a dry sky over Chicago, reflecting hard against the new Chicago FBI headquarters, and against the several hundred people gathered for an outdoor memorial service to remember those who died in the performance of their duty.

The low-key and tasteful ceremony, an annual memorial service instituted a few years ago by Robert Grant, the special agent in charge who runs the FBI's Chicago office. So there were bagpipes and drums, a color guard, the families of the dead, wives, daughters, sons, and the names read of the 50 special agents across the country who've died, beginning with the first.

The first of the FBI's dead was named Edwin G. Shanahan. He was killed in Chicago, on Oct. 11, 1925, by a car thief with an automatic pistol.

The FBI had asked me to say a few words, so I stood up at the lectern Friday, looked out over the crowd, and I heard my own voice. I realized how puny and foolish words are, how thin they are, how inadequate to measure such sacrifice. I realized the only words that counted were the words of the survivors, the spouses and the children of slain FBI personnel. That hard sun bounced off the starched shirt collars of hundreds of FBI agents and support personnel, and against their sunglasses, the American flag.

It bounced especially hard off the cellophane-wrapped flowers, held loosely by Jane Lynch. Her husband, Special Agent Michael James Lynch, was one of four FBI special agents killed in a 1982 plane crash while working a bank fraud case in Ohio. Agent Lynch left a son and three daughters.

"President Reagan called the day after my husband was killed," Lynch told me at the reception after the ceremony. "My son wasn't there. He was 9 years old then, and I was so distraught, and I asked the president if he would call back to speak to my son.

"The president called back the very next day. And he told my son how important his father had been to this country. How important the bureau was to the country. I wanted my son to have that," Lynch told me. "I wanted him to have that understanding."

During the ceremony, there was another speaker: Tom Bourgeois.

He's been out of FBI for a few years now. Those of you who follow cases may know him as the retired boss of the FBI's organized crime section. Bourgeois began the case that took down the Chicago mob, that case against the Outfit called "Operation Family Secrets."

And those of you who understand the reach of the Outfit know that it infects politics and local law enforcement, and that FBI agents like Bourgeois and those who followed him are often the only shield between decrepit warlords and the rest of us.

Bourgeois' father was one of the FBI agents killed in the line of duty, in a 1953 shootout with a murder suspect in Baltimore.

"He was 35 years old, had been in the FBI for 13 years. Among the offices he served was Chicago," Bourgeois said. Bourgeois was 2 years old. One brother was 4, another was 6 months old when their father died.

During that shootout, Bourgeois' father mortally wounded the fugitive suspect. In the hospital, he was told that the suspect had been killed.

"May God have mercy on his soul," Bourgeois recounted his father as saying. "And those were my father's last words. Last words of compassion and forgiveness . . .

"Out of necessity, my brothers and I grew up learning about our father from stories that others told," Bourgeois said. "I learned that he loved his family. He loved his country. He wanted to make a difference. There were a few family photos, ones where my mother looked happier than I had ever seen her." His father's name was Brady Murphy.

Years later, his mother remarried, a woman alone with three boys to raise, and she found a good man named Henry Bourgeois, a decorated fighter pilot who had flown with the Black Sheep Squadron in World War II. He adopted those little boys and gave them his name and raised them as his own.

"For the families of these fallen heroes, the 50 we honor were our parent, our spouse, our brother, our sister and our good friend. For all of us, they gave their lives while performing their duty and are forever part of the brick and mortar of the FBI," Bourgeois said.

"Many of us have come and gone. We've had fine careers in law enforcement and made great contributions to the bureau. But these good people—the 50 we honor today, have never left."

I've spent years studying government, watching politicians pretend that public service is about using government to make themselves rich. They're the takers. There are so many of them. They take everything, and pay media mouthpieces to convince the rest of us that taking is part of the natural order. But there are those in law enforcement, like the FBI, who don't enter public service to take. They make a career to give. Sometimes, they give more than they can afford to give. And we should never forget it.

Thanks to John Kass

Tweet

Rule 53

Andy Austin has dedicated the past 40 years to a life in crime.

Neither notorious suspect nor mob mole, she has played her part in the era’s highest profile cases—John Wayne Gacy’s among them—as Channel 7’s courtroom artist, with her sketches appearing on the nightly news. Her new book, Rule 53, takes its title from the federal statute that prohibits photography or the broadcasting of courtroom proceedings, and in it, Austin trades in the colored-pencil portraits for a captivating blend of trial transcripts, reporting and personal musings on the war waged daily between right and wrong.

An artist during the helter-skelter ’60s, Austin felt the action was not in painting “rotten oranges and apples in a makeshift [dining room] studio,” she says, but in the streets where momentous political, racial and sexual upheavals were under way. She wanted to exchange her still-life existence for the allure of trials.

When the artist assigned to the Chicago 8 conspiracy trial had another assignment, the young, normally shy Austin sensed her breakout moment and announced her talent to Channel 7 reporter Hugh Hill. She was hired on the spot and learned on the job. She nearly walked away from it, though, after a string of politically charged, occasionally violent cases left her rattled. But an ABC colleague, the late Jim Gibbons, lured her back. It was during one of the biggest cases of her career, the 1980 trial of serial killer Gacy, that she began keeping her courthouse journals.

“What I heard every day was so gruesome,” says Austin, “that I started writing just to preserve my sanity and keep my head together.”

Rule 53 spotlights ten trials and several posttrial proceedings, including the Chicago 8 fiasco, two Chicago mob prosecutions, the gangland El Rukns, corrupt judge Thomas Maloney and infamous mob hit man Harry Aleman. When we spoke with her, she was neck deep, sketching the most notorious case in recent memory: the Tony Rezko trial. While Austin sees courtroom drama as “the great bazaar of American life,” the book reads most clearly as a morality play, with the court holding center stage and hosting a fascinating cast of lawyers, low-lifes and once-high-fliers.

Occasionally, Austin herself plays a role in the show. She drew the attention of several defendants, including Abbie Hoffman, who slipped her a note wondering, “What’s a good-looking girl like you doing in a corrupt society like this?” A henchman of the El Rukns once warned her while she sketched a defendant, “You draw his wife, he breaks your legs.” (She wisely refrained.)

The transcripts’ cinema-verité style makes for a gripping portrayal of courtroom drama. The El Rukns and Maloney trials are particularly vivid page-turners and incisive feats of distillation and narrative drive. Austin continually creates riveting personality portraits of defendants, judges and prosecutors. A dead-on sketch of 1970s style reads: “Those were the days of roaring bad taste…when politicians wore enormous pinky rings and cufflinks, mobsters wore black silk shirts under white ties and a well-known Irish-American defense lawyer sported a bright Kelly green suit.” Austin also has razor-sharp hearing, ever on the snoop for telltale clues, like the repartee between lawyers: “What are you here for?” and the reply, “Just shit, what else?”

True to Austin’s calling, Rule 53 provides a balanced reenactment of a tumultuous period in Chicago’s legal life that seems more faithful to the issues and players involved than the episodic take of daily journalism.

“I don’t feel much moral outrage,” says Austin, of her time spent next to criminals. “I must say that political corruption is beginning to disgust me after having covered the Ryan and now the Rezko case.”

Thanks to Tom Mullaney

Tweet