The Chicago Syndicate
The Mission Impossible Backpack

Friday, February 08, 2019

The biggest pizza festival in Chicago is this Saturday! #NationalPizzaDay

Chicago Pizza Party, Chicago’s largest pizza festival, will be held on National Pizza Day, February 9th, 2019, at the Ravenswood Events Center. Chicago Pizza Party will feature two sessions, three floors, over 60 pizza styles from 20 restaurants, a rooftop dessert lounge, local beer from Half Acre Beer Company, wine, signature cocktails, top local DJs, fun games and special guests. Be sure to check out Lou Malnati's Chicago-style Deep Dish Pizzas.

Additional sponsors include Clyde Mays Whiskey and BPong.com. Tickets can be purchased at https://www.eventbrite.com/chicago-pizza-party-tickets.


  • What: Chicago Pizza Party 2019
  • When: February 9, 2019, two sessions 1-5 PM (all ages), 6-10 PM (ages 21+) 
  • Where: Ravenswood Events Center, 4021 N Ravenswood Ave, Chicago, IL 60613

Thursday, February 07, 2019

Special Agent Elvin Hernandez, with Homeland Security Investigations, a Specialized Unit within Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is Honored by President Trump

The federal anti-trafficking agent invited to the State of the Union address by President Donald Trump helped take down brutal operations that smuggled women from Mexico into the U.S. and forced them into prostitution.

Elvin Hernandez is a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations, a specialized unit within Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He and his colleagues began targeting trafficking in Tenancingo, Mexico, a prostitution pipeline rife with crime and violence, in 2012. The final defendants of one crime family were sentenced last month to decades in prison.

Hernandez, who works in the New York office, was one the guests who sat with first lady Melania Trump. He was given a round of rousing applause when Trump introduced him, as he reddened and smiled.

At a recent briefing for Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on one of his major cases, Hernandez, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, said they targeted 10 organizations and dismantled all of them.

Trump has pushed the idea that human trafficking is a major reason why he needs $5.7 billion for a border wall, a request Democrats have flatly rejected. However, most trafficking victims cross through legal ports of entry, according the Counter Trafficking Data Collaborative, a global hub for trafficking statistics with data contributed by organizations from around the world.

Advocates say Trump distorts how often victims come from the southern border — the National Human Trafficking Hotline, a venture supported by federal money and operated by the anti-trafficking group Polaris, said there was a near-equal distribution between foreigners on one hand and U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents on the other. But advocates also say Tenancingo is a breeding ground for traffickers, where boys are groomed to be pimps, and women and girls are forced into prostitution, their families threatened with violence.

In total, Hernandez and his colleagues on the case brought down more than 80 defendants; rescued more than 150 victims including 45 minors; and reunified 19 children with their mothers.

One organization, the Rendon-Reyes family, smuggled young, poor and uneducated women into the U.S. from Mexico and forced them into prostitution throughout the U.S. Some of the women crossed the border illegally, and others were smuggled in using false birth certificates.

The traffickers manipulated the girls into fake romantic relationships. According to court documents, the suspects used “beatings, sexual assaults, forced abortions, threats to the victims, their families and psychological coercion.”

The women were forced into seeing as many as 45 clients in a day, according to documents.

Thanks to Colleen Long.

Thursday, January 31, 2019

Chicago Heights: Little Joe College, the Outfit, and the Fall of Sam Giancana

In this riveting true story of coming of age in the Chicago Mob, Charles “Charley” Hager is plucked from his rural West Virginia home by an uncle in the 1960s and thrown into an underworld of money, cars, crime, and murder on the streets of Chicago Heights.

Street-smart and good with his hands, Hager is accepted into the working life of a chauffeur and “street tax” collector, earning the moniker “Little Joe College” by notorious mob boss Albert Tocco. But when his childhood friend is gunned down by a hit man, Hager finds himself a bit player in the events surrounding the mysterious, and yet unsolved, murder of mafia chief Sam Giancana.

Chicago Heights: Little Joe College, the Outfit, and the Fall of Sam Giancana, is part rags-to-riches story, part murder mystery, and part redemption tale. Hager, with author David T. Miller, juxtaposes his early years in West Virginia with his life in crime, intricately weaving his own experiences into the fabric of mob life, its many characters, and the murder of Giancana.

Fueled by vivid recollections of turf wars and chop shops, of fix-ridden harness racing and the turbulent politics of the 1960s, Chicago Heights reveals similarities between high-level organized crime in the city and the corrupt lawlessness of Appalachia. Hager candidly reveals how he got caught up in a criminal life, what it cost him, and how he rebuilt his life back in West Virginia with a prison record.

Based on interviews with Hager and supplemented by additional interviews and extensive research by Miller, the book also adds Hager’s unique voice to the volumes of speculation about Giancana’s murder, offering a plausible theory of what happened on that June night in 1975.



Wednesday, January 30, 2019

Prosecution Rests Its Case and Joaquin Guzman Does Not Take the Stand in His Defense #ElChapo

The most common methods the drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera used to avoid imprisonment in Mexico was to either escape (which he did twice) or to not get caught in the first place. But now that the kingpin, known as El Chapo, is standing trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, his lawyers have been forced to mount an actual defense. As many had suspected, it emerged they did not offer one.

Mr. Guzmán’s case to the jury began at 9:38 a.m. when one of his lawyers, Jeffrey Lichtman, called to the stand an F.B.I. agent who explained his own small role in obtaining a piece of evidence that did not relate to the defendant. Mr. Lichtman also read aloud a stipulation, noting that for several years, his client was in debt.

Mr. Lichtman finished his presentation at 10:08 a.m. “And with that, judge,” he said, “the defense rests.”

It was clear from the beginning of the trial that little could be done for Mr. Guzmán who, after all, had been under investigation by American authorities for more than a decade. Complicating matters, he had also effectively confessed to being a drug lord in an interview with Rolling Stone two years ago. But Mr. Guzmán’s 30-minute jury presentation seemed particularly small compared to the monumental case prosecutors brought to a close on Monday. For more than 10 weeks, the government buried the defendant in a Matterhorn of evidence from 56 witnesses, including recorded phone calls of the kingpin doing business and intercepted messages of him, his wife and mistresses.

Mr. Guzmán’s courtroom troubles began in November from the moment Mr. Lichtman delivered his opening statement. In a bold move, he claimed his client had been framed for years by his partner in the Sinaloa drug cartel, Ismael Zambada Garcia, who Mr. Lichtman alleged had conspired with “crooked” American drug agents and a hopelessly corrupt Mexican government.

Two main problems emerged with this argument. One was that Judge Brian M. Cogan cut it short at the government’s request, stopping Mr. Lichtman in the middle of his speech by telling him that anything he had said was unlikely to be supported by evidence. The other was that the argument, even if true, did not exclude the possibility that Mr. Guzmán was a narco lord guilty of the charges he was facing.

During the trial, Mr. Lichtman and the two other members of Mr. Guzmán’s legal team — William Purpura and A. Eduardo Balarezo — largely spent their time attacking the credibility of the government’s 14 cooperating witnesses. Their efforts sometimes worked and sometimes did not. Most of the witnesses had also been previously charged with federal crimes and usually confessed to their misdeeds before the defense could bring them out.

Before the trial, the kingpin’s lawyers had mostly focused their attention on pointing out the harsh conditions of his confinement in the high-security wing of the Manhattan federal jail. Given Mr. Guzmán’s history of jailbreaks, he was kept for several months in isolation, forbidden to occupy the same room as his lawyers. Pretrial meetings were conducted — awkwardly at best — through a perforated plexiglass window.

In several motions, Mr. Guzmán’s lawyers sought to persuade Judge Cogan that such severe conditions had eroded their client’s right to adequate legal counsel under the Sixth Amendment. While the judge improved the circumstances slightly, he was mostly unconvinced that Mr. Guzmán’s constitutional rights had been violated.

Last week, intense speculation arose over whether Mr. Guzmán might take the stand and become his own star witness. But after days of conversations with his lawyers, he told Judge Cogan on Monday that he did not plan to testify.

Little is known about those conversations because of the protections of the attorney-client privilege. But after Mr. Guzmán addressed the court, Mr. Purpura told Judge Cogan that he and his partners had explained to their client the legal perils of undergoing cross-examination. Mr. Guzmán then decided not to testify “knowingly and voluntarily,” Mr. Purpura said.

The kingpin’s lawyers will have one more shot at persuading the jury Thursday when they deliver their summation. But even that will be severely restricted if the government has its way.

On Monday night, prosecutors filed a motion to Judge Cogan asking him to preclude the defense from arguing, as they did in opening statements, that Mr. Zambada, known as Mayo, had quietly conspired with Mexican and American officials to target Mr. Guzmán.

The prosecutors not only said the claim was “preposterous,” but also quoted back Judge Cogan words from the second day of the trial. “You can have two drug dealers, one of whom is paying off the government and one of whom is not,” he had said. “That does not mean the one who is not didn’t do the crimes.”

Thanks to Alan Feuer.

Thursday, January 24, 2019

The Big Con: Great Hoaxes, Frauds, Grifts, and Swindles in American History is Another Winner from @NateHendley

The Big Con: Great Hoaxes, Frauds, Grifts, and Swindles in American History, examines a broad range of infamous scams, cons, swindles, and hoaxes throughout American history―and considers why human gullibility continues in an age of easy access to information.


  • Explores figures such as "Yellow Kid" Weil, Charles Ponzi (from whom we get the term “Ponzi scheme”), Orson Welles, and Frank Abagnale, among others
  • Provides insight into human nature―gullibility being one aspect of it―throughout the ages, addresses the power of rumor and legend, and identifies the social conditions that have allowed some scams and hoaxes to flourish
  • Presents information that can serve academic research projects as well as fascinate and entertain general readers
  • Features the original stories behind the Hollywood movies The Sting, Catch Me If You Can, Argo, and American Hustle


In addition, The Big Con: Great Hoaxes, Frauds, Grifts, and Swindles in American History, looks at scams and scammers such as Bernie Madoff, online romance fraud, the Nigerian Prince email, disaster fraud, pyramid schemes, medical fakery and other forms of deceit.

Learn about the tricks of the conman trade and how old scams continue to flourish under new guises. Also learn how to avoid being duped by fraudsters.

Very readable. The Big Con is one of those books that you can pick up and start reading anywhere. There is an extensive bibliography at the back for further reading suggestions. Mr Hendley has done sceptics a genuine courtesy by assembling the history of frauds, cons, scams and hoaxes into one beautiful volume.” –The Miramichi Reader

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