Rumors Tie Mobsters to Stained Glass Church Windows North of Chicago

Amid the monks and saints depicted in a stained glass window at St. Peter Catholic Church in Antioch appears a car wheel, headlight and a wrench that have baffled parishioners.

For years they have speculated that the three-panel windows were somehow tied to Chicago mobsters who spent summers in northeastern Lake County around the time the church was dedicated in 1930. The gangsters were proud of their cars, had money and may have wanted to atone for some of their sins by donating to a church.

Mary Leonard, director of religious education for the parish, looked through church archives and even contacted the company that created the windows, but she hasn't found anything that proves a mob connection. "But it makes a really good story," she said.

What we do know about the windows is that they were made by Rambusch Studios of New York, according to Leonard. The company sketched out the glass iconography with the Rev. Francis Morgan Flaherty. The windows were then crafted by a stained-glass studio in Munich, Germany.

Church records don't indicate who paid for the windows. But painted at the bottom of the three-panels above the choir loft, it reads: "In memory of Harry Martin, Patrick Quilty and Margaret Quilty." It's unclear who they were or if they had a say in the window design.

Antioch and its lakes used to attract Chicago residents and tourists. During the summer, church attendance swelled at the first one-room Catholic church built in 1897 on Victoria Street in Antioch. A tent was needed to accommodate the faithful during summer Masses, Leonard said. Out-of-towners likely contributed to the $250,000 needed in 1930 to build the stone St. Peter Catholic Church on Lake Street.

Could Chicago Prohibition-era gangsters have attended Mass and cut a big check? There's no evidence of it, but reportedly Al Capone hung out in Fox Lake, and gangster Bugs Moran played golf in Antioch.

Adding another layer of mystery to the windows is that the central figure is clearly St. Patrick, not St. Peter, the parish's patron saint. The figure is holding a staff with a shamrock and is standing on a snake. (Pious legend credits Patrick with banishing snakes from Ireland, though post-glacial Ireland never had snakes.)

The St. Patrick iconography could be a tribute to the church's past. The one-room Catholic church in Antioch was a mission church of St. Patrick in Wadsworth until 1909.

We'll probably never know for sure if mobsters paid for the windows, or if the car references were the result of artistic license by the pastor or a German window builder.

"I see some parishioners pointing it out to their grandchildren, and they tell other children," Leonard said. "If nothing else, it interests them in the church."

-- not that we want them to be looking at the back of windows while Mass is going on."

Thanks to Ryan Pagelow

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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.
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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

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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

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