Presidential Candidate Target of Mob Hitman Plot

Cleveland Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who is drafting legislation to ban civilian ownership of handguns, kept a pistol in his house after police learned of a Mafia plot to kill him during his tumultous stint as Cleveland's mayor during the 1970s.

Kucinich spokesman Andy Juniewicz said the congressman kept a pistol at home long ago, after police learned that a Mafia hitman had planned to shoot Kucinich as he marched in an October 1978 parade. Kucinich ended up missing the parade because he was hospitalized with an ulcer, but police feared subsequent murder attempts so they recommended that he keep a gun in the house, Juniewicz said.

Details of that plot were publicized during a 1984 Senate inquiry into organized crime activities. News accounts at that time suggested that Cleveland organized crime figures were frustrated that some of Kucinich's mayoral initiatives were thwarting their money-making plans.

Earlier in his career, Kucinich owned a starter's pistol that he kept to scare potential muggers, said his congressional spokeswoman, Natalie Laber.

He no longer owns either weapon.

Thanks to Sabrina Eaton

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Beef from Mobster Who Says He is No Beefer

Friends of ours: Mario Rainone, Nick Calabrese, Gerald Scarpelli, Lenny Patrick, Gus Alex

It's so nice to talk to loyal readers, even an angry reader who's spent the last 15 years in federal prison for being a notorious juice loan collector for the Chicago Outfit. But I'd prefer not being hectored on an empty stomach. All those blunt Paulie Walnuts vowels make me hungry.

"I think you want to talk to this guy right away," said the young fellow who answers the phone around here. "He wants a correction. He keeps talking about beef."

Beef?

"He insists that he's not a beefer and that you wrote in the column the other day that he's a beefer. 'Tell John I'm not a beefer,' he said. So I'm telling you."

What's his name? "Mario Rainone."

So I called him, out of respect for his ability to remain alive.

"I'm no beefer!" said Rainone, the Outfit tough guy who plead guilty to racketeering and extortion in 1992. "You keep saying I'm a beefer, and it's not true. You're ruining my life."

Ruining his life? What about mine? I was starving for the classic Chicago sammich, Italian beef with hot peppers on crusty bread. But he was using Chicago slang, employing the words "beef" and "beefer" to refer to a guy who complains about, then informs on, his associates.

"Enough is enough already!" he pleaded. "I got released 90 days ago. I don't know nothing."

Here's what Rainone was upset about. This week, I wrote a column about the upcoming "Operation Family Secrets" trial, involving top Chicago Outfit bosses and their hit men and 18 previously unsolved Mafia assassinations.

The case is largely built on the testimony of mobster Nick Calabrese, who beefed on his brother to the feds. But other mobsters have spilled their gravy on what they know, in other unrelated cases. And all these stories, cobbled together, have helped federal authorities develop extensive dossiers on the mob. Naturally, guys like Rainone are nervous.

"It's ridiculous," Rainone said. "I don't know nothing about 'Family Secrets.'
"

I never said you did.

"It's in the paper," he said.

Read it again. But he didn't, because he was upset, for good reason.

A few years ago, Outfit soldier Gerald Scarpelli told what he knew to the FBI. Later, Scarpelli strangled himself with plastic bags. In prison. So who wouldn't understand a man suffering from agita after beef?

Rainone's former supervisor, Lenny Patrick, another gangster, also beefed on his boss, Gus Alex, who years ago, according to news reports, put out a hit on my new friend Mario, who beefed on Patrick, which led to Alex.

It's confusing, but symmetrical, like that song, "Circle of Life," only think of it sung by Frank Sinatra instead of Elton John.

"I was locked up since 1990. I never testified," Rainone said. "Then you want to put my name in the papers with this. I never cooperated with the FBI. I have never been a witness. You know like I know, if a guy is going to beef, he is going to beef. But I didn't beef."

Yet according to news accounts, federal testimony, court documents and the FBI supervisor who worked on the Rainone case, Mario was a deluxe beefer with extra juice and peppers. "He's trying to rewrite history, and that's fascinating," said Jim Wagner, the FBI supervisor who interviewed Rainone and is now president of the Chicago Crime Commission. "He cooperated. Now he's putting out the word he never beefed? Obviously, he's feeling pressure."

After living a life collecting gambling debts the hard way, Rainone had an epiphany and decided to call the FBI. But instead of angels, he spotted two associates tailing him in another car. Outfit guys don't believe in coincidence. Rainone figured they weren't going to ask him for coffee and cake, not even poppy seed. He figured they were going to kill him.

So he flipped and told the FBI many things, and they put him on the phone with Lenny Patrick, and Patrick flipped on Alex. Then Rainone had another change of heart and tried to flip back again. He refused to testify in court. Yet by then, his beef was overcooked, and he did 15 years.

"In max penitentiaries," he said, "not those [easy] joints."

I asked about the two guys in the tail car, if their names were Rudy and Willie, and how he felt phoning Patrick with the FBI listening. "I've got no knowledge of that. It was all lies. I paid for my crimes, and I am not going to pay no more. I don't know those guys. I don't know none of them. This is ridiculous."

He also mentioned that it might have been a mistake to beef me on a column when I was hungry. "I shouldn't have called you. That's my mistake. Listen, I know that Friday's paper will be worse than Wednesday's," he said.

These days, Rainone said he's looking for a job, perhaps as a truck driver: "I'll take anything." But if he can't get a job driving trucks, perhaps he could ask a builder for meaningful, fulfilling work. Or you readers might know of something appropriate.

"All I want is to live a legitimate life," he said. And all I wanted was a legitimate lunch.

Thanks to John Kass

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Mob Enforcer Attends Stephens Funeral

Friends of ours: Sam "Momo" Giancana, Anthony "Jeeps" Daddino
Friends of mine: Don Stephens

The one and only mayor of suburban Rosemont, Don Stephens, was laid to rest Monday. The funeral attracted some of the state's top political figures. In this Intelligence Report: one mourner linked to the Chicago mob and the late mayor's fight to shed an unsavory image.

Since the day 45 years ago that Don Stephens did some business with Chicago's supreme outfit boss, Sam "Momo" Giancana, Stephens had been dogged by scurrilous suggestions that he was mobbed up.

To his death, Stephens denied connections to organized crime. But he never wavered in his personal commitment to one organized crime figure, a former outfit enforcer who Monday paid his respects to the friend who cut him a break.

As the flag-covered coffin of Rosemont's mayor was walked to a waiting hearse Monday, there in the crowd of onlookers was Anthony Daddino, a.k.a. "Jeeps." He was the only outfit-connected face recognized by mob-watchers.

In 1990, Daddino was sentenced to federal prison for collecting a mob street tax from porn shop operators on Chicago's North Side. At the time, Rosemont Mayor Don Stephens wrote to the judge asking for leniency for the outfit enforcer. "My connection with him -- I went to Leyden High School with him," said Stephens.

In Mayor Stephens' last interview the I-Team did with him in December, he remembered helping Daddino, despite knowing that people would be suspicious. When Daddino got out of prison, Mayor Stephens knew he would need a job. "I said, 'OK, I'll give you a job,' " Stephens told the I-Team. " 'A very low-level job,' where he inspected for building violations."

Monday at Stephens' funeral, Daddino remembered him. "That's what good friends do," Daddino said.

Despite decades of being dogged by innuendo, Stephens was never charged with any mob crimes, and in the early 1980s he was acquitted in the fraud and bribery cases that federal prosecutors did bring against him.

Governor Blagojevich Monday was joined by former Illinois governors Jim Edgar, Jim Thompson, Mayor Daley and House Speaker Mike Madigan. Absent was state attorney general Lisa Madigan who killed a casino license for Rosemont citing mob connections.

Thanks to Chuck Goudie

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2007 Summer Blockbuster to Feature the Chicago Mob

Friends of ours: Jimmy "The Man" Marcello, Frank "The German" Schweihs, Paul Schiro, Joseph "Joey the Clown" Lombardo, John Fecoratta, Tony Spilotro, Billy Dauber, Nick Calabrese., Mario Rainone, Gerald Scarpelli, Richard Cain
Friends of mine: William Hanhardt, Michael Spilotro

As president of the Chicago Crime Commission, former schoolteacher Jim Wagner naturally has an academic interest in the big upcoming "Family Secrets" trial of Outfit bosses and hit men accused of 18 previously unsolved murders.

Founded in 1919 by local business leaders to fight the Outfit's influence in local politics and law enforcement at the dawn of the Al Capone era, the Chicago Crime Commission continues that fight to this day. The commission, at chicagocrimecommission.org, is now developing two invaluable documents: a new organizational chart of the Chicago Outfit and an index, drawn from federal testimony, of Outfit-friendly Chicago businesses.

"Over the past several years, there has been an attempt to convince the public that the Chicago Outfit is passe, that it's dead," Wagner told me Tuesday in his office. "You've seen the same headlines that I've seen," he said. "But as 'Family Secrets' continues, the public will realize that the Outfit is very much alive, that they have incredible reach and power and that they're capable of unspeakable brutality, not only toward their own but to business associates."

There's more than academic interest at work here. Wagner, from a small Illinois farm outside of Newman, south of Urbana, became a teacher before he was recruited into the FBI, where he spent 30 years. He ran the FBI's Organized Crime section, which helped build cases against hit men like Harry Aleman.

Wagner also helped initiate the recent investigation of the Outfit's favorite cop, William Hanhardt, former chief of detectives for the Chicago Police Department. It was a secret investigation, run off-site because of Hanhardt's vast intelligence network, and it sent fear through City Hall and police headquarters when Hanhardt was charged. Hanhardt later pleaded guilty to running a nationwide jewelry theft ring, aided by intelligence from local law enforcement. By pleading guilty, he spared Chicago, and himself, a trial.

Wagner could not speak specifically about the federal case because he may be called as an expert witness. But he knows the history of the 11 reputed mobsters soon to go on trial. The list includes boss Jimmy "The Man" Marcello, mob enforcers Frank "The German" Schweihs and Paul Schiro, and overlord Joseph Lombardo, called Joey "The Clown," even though he stopped laughing awhile back.

Some of the killings include those of Michael and Anthony Spilotro, reproduced in graphic detail in the movie "Casino" with baseball bats in a ditch in an Indiana cornfield, though it turns out they weren't killed in the corn, but in a suburb after being lured to a meeting.

Also killed was John Fecoratta, who was in charge of hiding the Spilotro bodies that were found too soon. Later, he would go on a robbery of a bingo game where he must have felt like the guy at the crooked card game. He sat down, probably wondering which one of the losers at the table was the sucker, only to realize the sucker's identity, too late, in a brief moment of excruciating clarity.

And the Will County killing of hit man Billy Dauber and his mouthy wife, Charlotte, chopped to pieces on a farm road with automatic weapons fired from cars, including one presumably containing Calabrese. And so on.

One killing not on the list is that of Eugenia "Becca" Pappas, 18, shot to death around Christmas in 1962 after she had been dating Schweihs over the objections of her family. Missing for weeks, she was later found in the Chicago River by a tugboat captain.

Schweihs was brought in for questioning by Richard Cain, then the homicide chief of the Cook County Sheriff's Police, but Cain released him. Wonder why? Cain at the time was on the payroll of the late Outfit boss Sam "Momo" Giancana. Cain himself was assassinated at Rose's Sandwich shop on the West Side in 1973, and that killing also is touched on in the government's outline of the Family Secrets case.

Outfit killings haven't stopped.

Wagner says Family Secrets would not have been possible without Nick Calabrese. Others who have spilled include Mario Rainone, who then clammed up after a bomb damaged his mother's porch, and Gerald Scarpelli, who reportedly strangled himself with plastic bags in prison.

Their information, combined with Calabrese's statements, provides an inside look at the Chicago Outfit, which maintains itself through intimidation, vast political connections and supporters in local law enforcement.

"Obviously, Calabrese's cooperation was a significant development, a monumental development," Wagner said. "And you put his information together with what we've learned from other Outfit witnesses over the years, well, there's a treasure trove of information."

And you can read all about it, when the trial begins this summer.

Thanks to John Kass

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