Federal agents armed with warrant raid Melrose Park police station

Federal agents armed with a search warrant raided the police station in suburban Melrose Park on Thursday, an FBI spokesman said.

"We did have several agents there this morning," FBI spokesman Ross Rice said. The raid, he said, was part of an ongoing investigation but he declined to give details. He also declined to say what the agents were looking for and what, if anything, they found. "No arrests have been made and no charges have been filed," he said.

U.S. attorney spokesman Randall Samborn declined to comment.

A woman who answered the phone at the west suburban police station said that Chief Vito Scavo and his lieutenants were not immediately available to answer questions. The suburb has figured in a number of high-profile criminal cases in recent years. Former Melrose Park Mayor C. Augustus Taddeo pleaded guilty in 1999 to extortion and tax fraud and was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison.

In recent years, a federal investigation of illegal electronic gambling devices controlled by the mob found that many were installed in Melrose Park taverns and strip joints. And the FBI said recently that the mob has a street crew based in the suburb. The suburb was also the site of the first raid by federal agents in October 1998 on an Illinois drivers license testing station operated by then-Secretary of State George Ryan's office. It was the beginning of the Operation Safe Road investigation of bribes exchanged for drivers licenses and political corruption in the Ryan era.

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Junior Gotti's Last Jab

A federal jury is set to begin deliberating the fate of John "Junior" Gotti after hearing a last word from his lawyer who argued yesterday that the once-powerful mob leader hung up his gangster hat so long ago he can't be convicted. Defense lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman claimed Gotti renounced the mob and defied his father when he pleaded guilty to unrelated racketeering charges in April 1999 and then harkened back to the secretly taped words of the late John "Dapper Don" Gotti.

"We've heard from John's father that Gottis don't plead guilty. They fight, fight, fight," Lichtman said.

Facing a string of charges that span the 1990s including the 1992 kidnap-shooting of radio host Curtis Sliwa, Gotti has hung his hopes on convincing jurors he exited the mob prior to the five-year statute of limitations. But Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael McGovern told jurors they should disregard Gotti's claims that he's a changed man.

"The evidence in this case has shown nothing could be further from the truth," he argued. "As recently as 2002, he was continuing to stuff his pockets."

Prosecutors normally get the final word at trial, but Manhattan Federal Judge Shira Scheindlin gave Lichtman the rare chance to respond in light of Gotti's unusual defense, which requires him to actively prove he renounced the Mafia.

Gotti, 41, is facing up to 30 years behind bars if convicted. He listened sullenly from the defense table and rarely lifted his gaze as his lawyer and the prosecutor sparred and interrupted each other with constant objections. Lichtman has claimed the 1999 plea and Gotti's subsequent six years in prison show "John ended his criminal dealing with the mob and should be acquitted of these charges." The lawyer noted that the only evidence linking Gotti to mob business in recent years came from the testimony of star witness Michael "Mikey Scars" DiLeonardo a former Gambino capo and an admitted killer and liar.

"There are no tapes, there are no letters, there are no cards, there are no bugs," Lichtman said. There were also no visits from any high-ranking members of the Gambino
crime family, other than Gotti's uncle Richard.

In the prosecution team's attempt to show Gotti's ongoing involvement in the mob, they have accused him of three criminal acts between 1999 and 2002. These include allegations that he asked DiLeonardo to return some machine guns and to repay an old $50,000 loan-sharking debt. Gotti also allegedly asked for a meeting with DiLeonardo's lawyer to convince his pal to plead guilty in an unrelated case, but DiLeonardo refused to arrange it.

Thanks to Kati Cornell Smith

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Prosecution presents closing argument in Junior Gotti racketeering trial

New York was buzzing about Gambino crime boss John Gotti in the spring of 1992, and radio host Curtis Sliwa didn't hide his disdain for the ''Dapper Don.'' Calling the boss ''America's No. 1 drug dealer,'' Sliwa infuriated the late mobster's son and protege, John A. ''Junior'' Gotti, a federal prosecutor said Tuesday as the younger Gotti's racketeering trial drew to a close.

Junior Gotti ''didn't respond like an ordinary citizen,'' Assistant U.S. Attorney Joon Kim said in his closing argument. ''Instead of engaging in public debate, Gotti responded to Sliwa's words in the Gambino family native language: violence.''The younger Gotti sent thugs to beat Sliwa with baseball bats, Kim said. But Sliwa didn't shut up, so two mobsters were sent to pick him up in a stolen cab, Kim said. As Sliwa struggled to escape, a hitman opened fire, leaving the Guardian Angels founder weak and bleeding in the back seat, Kim said. Sliwa escaped by throwing himself out the cab window but other Gambino family rivals were not as lucky, Kim said.

Defense attorneys claim Gotti, 41, had nothing to do with Sliwa's shooting and other attacks and quit the mob after a 1999 conviction. But Kim called that argument ''simply nonsense,'' saying Gotti was ''a man who used his name to get to the top of this criminal enterprise ... a man who used his position in the family to line his pockets with millions of dollars in illegal money.''

Gotti met with gangsters and plotted crimes after his purported renunciation of the mob, Kim said. Gotti's alleged role in the Sliwa attack is part of charges that could send him to prison for 30 years. Gotti's attorney was to begin his summation today.

Thanks to Michael Weissenstein.

John "Junior" Gotti ran the Gambino crime family like it was his own "government" and thought nothing of using violence to settle scores even against the media, prosecutors charged yesterday. "He believed he was special, for after all he had become the street boss of his own government . . . the Gambino organized-crime family," Assistant U.S. Attorney Joon Kim said in closing statements in Manhattan federal court. "Instead of engaging in public debate, Gotti responded in the Gambino crime family's native language: violence," Kim said.

Gotti is facing up to 30 years behind bars if convicted of racketeering charges, most notably for allegedly orchestrating the 1992 kidnapping of radio host Curtis Sliwa in a bid to silence him. At the time, Sliwa was on a crusade against Gotti's father, John "Dapper Don" Gotti, and had branded him "America's No. 1 drug dealer."

"John Gotti Jr. did not like what Curtis Sliwa was saying one bit. He did not like that Curtis Sliwa called his father a gangster, a drug dealer," Kim told the jury. "Like he did so many times, he sent his underlings to do his dirty work for him," the prosecutor said, and recounted Gotti's allegedly chilling order to kidnap Sliwa and put him in the hospital.

"I want it to be personal. I want him to know we had our hands on him and we could do this any time. He's getting personal. I want to get personal," Kim said, quoting Gotti. Sliwa was picked up in a stolen cab as planned, but the plot went awry when the radio host was shot twice by Gotti's co-defendant Michael Yannotti, according to prosecutors.

"He would be dead if he didn't somehow leap out the window of a speeding cab," Kim said of Sliwa, who described his ordeal from the witness stand in the month-long trial. Gotti also is accused of raking in a fortune through securities fraud, extortion of the construction industry and loan-sharking. Gotti's defense will present its closing arguments today.

Thanks to Kati Cornell Smith

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Sam Giancana coming to TNT

The world is apparently one step closer to seeing the story of former Oak Parker and Chicago Outfit leader Sam Giancana portrayed on television. The Hollywood Reporter reported last month that cable network TNT has confirmed it is in development for an as-yet-untitled film project based on Giancana's life, headed by Mark Wolper and Warner Bros. Television. It was announced last August that Dimitri Logothetis and Nicholas Celozzi II had acquired the rights to the movie from Giancana's daughter Francine after seven years of effort. Francine Giancana DePalma is Celozzi's cousin. In a press release last August from Celozzi and Logothetis's production company, Acme Entertainment, the pair referred to the Giancana’s life as a "real life 'Sopranos.'"

The six-hour mini-series will reportedly tell the story of "Momo" Giancana's rise from a Little Italy, born-and-bred street thug to leader of the powerful Chicago Outfit. At the height of his power, Giancana hobnobbed with the likes of John F. Kennedy and Frank Sinatra, and ran the Chicago mob's operations out of the old Armory Lodge on Roosevelt Road in Forest Park.

Giancana was arrested some 70 times and served two prison sentences early in his criminal career. He was also jailed for contempt of a federal grand jury in 1965 after refusing to testify. After getting out, he "retired" to Mexico, but Mexican police unceremoniously arrested him one morning in 1974 and deported him to the U.S. He was subsequently unceremoniously shot six times in the head while he cooked his favorite sausage dish in the basement kitchen of his comfortable Wenonah Avenue bungalow on July 19, 1975.

Thanks to the Oak Park Journal

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New sentencing ordered in Cicero fraud case

Betty Loren-Maltese to be resentenced in fraud case.

Suburban Chicago Cicero's former town president and five others must be resentenced in the $10.6 million fraud case that sent them to prison, an appeals court ruled Thursday. Former town President Betty Loren-Maltese could get the same eight-year sentence she's now serving for swindling the suburban community, a stiffer one or a lesser one under the ruling.

A three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that U.S. District Judge John F. Grady, who presided over the three-month trial, made an error in imposing the sentences. The 15-page opinion written by Judge Richard A. Posner said that after Grady calculated the amount of the loss at $10.6 million he wrongly rounded the number down to below $10 million.

Under federal sentencing guidelines, the greater the loss the harsher the sentence. Grady's decision cut 10 months or more off the sentences.

Grady said he rounded the number down by $600,001 because it was merely an estimate and an estimate could be unreliable. "But unless he thought the estimate biased, he had no basis for rounding down any more than he would have for rounding up," the appeals court said.

Loren-Maltese, 55, was sentenced in January 2003 for presiding over a scheme in which millions of dollars were paid to an insurance consultant and siphoned off by the defendants. They used the money to buy a horse farm and a golf course among other things.

Federal guidelines that require longer time in prison for bigger monetary losses were mandatory when Grady imposed the sentences on Loren-Maltese and her co-defendants. But a U.S. Supreme Court decision has since made them advisory only and freed judges to impose sentences outside the guidelines as long as they are "reasonable." That means, the appeals court said, that Grady could impose the same sentences over again and they would most likely be upheld.

The appeals decision was a victory for federal prosecutors who have spent years investigating the small, blue-collar suburb just outside the Chicago city limits that has been known as a haven for corruption since the 1920s when Al Capone made it the hub of his bootlegging empire.

The appeals court affirmed all of the convictions and brushed aside defense arguments that they should be set aside. The court said attorneys for Loren-Maltese were wrong in claiming that she was unfairly convicted because she got little out of the scheme personally beyond increased health insurance coverage.

After the verdict, one juror was quoted in a published report as saying that co-defendant Michael Spano Sr.'s alleged mob ties had been discussed in the jury room. But the appeals court dismissed a defense claim that Grady should have held a hearing to determine if the jury's deliberations had been tainted by mention of Spano's alleged ties. Federal prosecutors have said Spano, now in prison, is the head of the Cicero mob.

Thanks to Mike Robinson.

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