by Sam Giancana
A free man for the first time in ten years, Lombardo’s primary goal was to keep as low of a profile as possible while still being able to take care of his duties for The Outfit. He took a job at a furniture upholstery business and then at a West Side tool and dye shop and tried his best to stay off the government’s radar. It was a daunting task, to say the least. When FBI surveillance teams cruised his territory, he was easily found with a cigar clenched between his teeth, tending to his garden, doing maintenance on his automobile, or enjoying a meal at his favorite Italian restaurant, La Scrola on Grand Avenue. However, despite his continued presence in the community, law enforcement was hard-pressed to build another case against him. It appeared, at least for the time being, Lady Luck was back on his side.
Upon Tony Accardo’s death in May of 1992, Lombardo, then sixty-three years old, was appointed to take his place as the crime family’s consiglieri. With the exception of two incidents, Lombardo was able to keep his name out of the newspapers and his wrists out of handcuffs for over a decade. First, in 1993, his driver, Christopher “Christy the Nose” Spina, was fired from his job working for the city as foreman of a sanitation yard as a result of spending portions of his workday chauffeuring The Clown around town (Spina would later be reinstated in his job by a judge and allotted back pay for his dismissal). The second incident was when Joseph Jr. was kicked out of the Teamsters Union in 1998 for his alleged associations with the mob.
Then in 2003, signs began to indicate that his time out of trouble with the law would be short lived. The FBI showed up one morning at the tool and dye shop where he worked and requested a hair and saliva sample in an attempt to match his DNA to a ski mask recovered in the abandoned getaway car used in the 1974 Danny Seifert murder. They also warned him of a potential murder plot thought by the government to have been hatched by then Outfit heir apparent, Jimmy Marcello, to remove any possibility that Lombardo would deal himself out of any future charges brought in the nearly thirty-year-old Seifert homicide. For the next two years, Lombardo went about his day-to-day routine unfazed—walking his dog, Fluffy, around the neighborhood, counseling old and young alike in the community on any and all problems that were plaguing them, and holding court at La Scrola or Carmine’s on Rush Street. It appeared to the naked eye that he had not a care in the world. And then the other shoe dropped.
Imprisoned Outfit hit man, Nicholas “Nicky Breeze” Calabrese, began cooperating with the FBI in 2002, and with the information he provided authorities, Joey Lombardo found himself indicted in 2005 on murder and racketeering charges. The extensive pretrial procedure in the landmark case took over two years, leaving The Clown with a lot of time on his hands. Known as a man of action, he could do little but wait, stewing in his cell following his detention, biding his time until his trial was to begin, and being forced to contemplate the very real possibility of never walking the streets again as a free man.
“Joey is a throwback,” said Jim Wagner, former FBI agent and one-time president of the Chicago Crime Commission. “He learned the game from some of the best the city of Chicago has ever had to offer. There aren’t a lot of people like him left. He was groomed by the likes of Accardo, Aiuppa, Cerone, and Bucceri to take The Outfit into its next life. They taught him how they did business, and he was a good student. He liked his nickname and enjoyed playing the whole Clown thing up to the press and the police. But, believe me, deep down the guy is no clown. As a street figure, he’s as dangerous as they come and a lot smarter than he wants people to believe. When he got out of prison back in the nineties he was smart to not jump into the boss’ seat and start playing godfather. Hiding behind the scenes, letting others do much of the heavy lifting served him well. He had a nice run. But on the street, the law is almost always going to catch up with you no matter how good of a criminal you are. I think he knew that, yet still chose to live his life in The Outfit for better or for worse.”
4.
A Darker Shade of Pail
The Daniel Seifert Murder
The murder of Daniel Seifert was one of the most tragic of the eighteen gangland slayings charged in the Family Secrets trial and one of the most horrible of Joey Lombardo’s crimes. Of the nearly two dozen killings as part of the 2005 indictment, Seifert’s was one of only two murders of someone not personally involved in any underworld activities. He was merely a young and aspiring entrepreneur who happened to befriend and eventually go into business with the wrong people. By the time he realized he had gotten in over his head and that his business partners were likely to get him into scalding hot water, it was too late. Seifert became a pawn in a game of cover your ass or else. And when that game is played with members of the mafia, people die. Plain and simple. Furthermore, if you are a meek and harmless person like Daniel Seifert was and the people you are playing the game with are hardened criminals and higher-ups in one of the most powerful and lethal crime families in the world, you are certain to be the one that ends up dead. And that’s exactly what happened.
Small in stature and always sporting a goatee to commemorate his one-time identity as a self-proclaimed beatnik, Seifert, was born and raised in the greater Chicagoland area. In the mid-1960s, he lived with his wife in suburban Elk Grove and worked as a carpenter. He had previously owned and ran a fiberglass factory that had gone bankrupt. While doing carpentry work in 1967, Seifert struck up a conversation with a customer about how lucrative an industrial plastics and fiberglass business could be. The owner of the house was a man by the name of Irwin Weiner, a local bail bondsmen and top-tier Outfit associate who was known to dabble in a number of mob-affiliated trades.
Within months, Seifert was being bankrolled by Weiner and Outfit boss Milwaukee Phil Alderesio in a plastics business known as the International Fiberglass Company. A few years later, Weiner sold his interest in the company to Tony Spilotro, Joey Lombardo, and Frank Schweihs and the group of wiseguys started using the business as a hang out spot. Things were going so well that in 1969 Alderesio, Lombardo, Weiner, Spilotro, and another Outfit figure named Ronald “Ronnie the Balloon Head” De Angelis, helped finance another business with Seifert—this time with the aid of $1 million loan from the mob-controlled Teamsters pension fund—in Deming, New Mexico, called the American Pail Company.
As it turned out, Lombardo, Weiner, Spilotro, and company, despite their designations as silent partners, were not all that silent. They used the businesses as a front for their own underworld activities, specifically taking out loans on the companies’ credit as a means of illegally lining their own pockets with cash they didn’t intend to pay back. Before he knew exactly what was going on, Seifert was in bed with some very dangerous people.
Despite being portrayed by law enforcement as a ruthless and cunning mafia enforcer, Joey Lombardo could be quite charming and affable. These personality traits were one of the reasons Seifert was caught totally off-guard when the nefarious behavior of his partners began to come to light. Over their time of doing business together, Lombardo and Seifert became quite close. They dined and vacationed together, and it’s alleged that Seifert’s son Joey was named after Lombardo. It’s said that Lombardo even babysat for the Seiferts. By 1972, however, it was obvious to Seifert and his wife, Emma, that Lombardo, Weiner, and their friends were really gangsters and probably not the best people to be doing business with. Emma Seifert advised her husband to sell his interest in International Fiberglass and he did. With American Pail having gone under, the Seiferts thought they were free from the mob. They weren’t.
In late 1973, Seifert’s seedy business connections finally caught up with him. The FBI began nosing around and asking questions about the company and its finances. Seifert, who didn’t have anything to hide, began answering them. By early 1974, he went in front of a grand jury and told them everything he knew about his Outfit-affiliated partners in the then-defunct American Pail Company. Soon Lombardo, Weiner, Spilotro, De Angelis, and Allen Dorfman, the gatekeeper to the robust union pension fund the mafia often used to f
inance business opportunities, were indicted for attempting to defraud the Teamsters of $1.4 million in connection with American Pail.
A major problem was on the horizon. When The Outfit found out Danny Seifert had turned government witness, the syndicate as a whole was forced to immediately go into damage control mode. Joey Lombardo and Tony Spilotro knew that if their former partner got up on the stand during their trial, they were both finished, most likely destined for a lengthy prison sentence. This was no laughing matter, even for a clown. Although he considered Seifert a close friend, Joey Lombardo wasn’t about to let him send him up the river. In his mind, there was only one solution: kill Danny Seifert.
For a murder contract to be issued on Seifert’s life, Lombardo had to get it sanctioned by Tony Accardo. This put Accardo in a precarious position. Unlike other similar situations that had arisen in the past, this would not be an easy decision for The Outfit don to make. On one hand, he knew the killing of ordinary citizens was bad for business. Accardo thought, like many of his mob boss brethren, that law enforcement could tolerate gangsters murdering other gangsters to a certain degree. But when regular civilians and non-wiseguys began getting shot down in cold blood, it attracted negative attention and public outcry. It was the kind of behavior that caused the police to want to take down the mafia even more than they already did.
On the other hand, Accardo was a pragmatist and knew how much he and the entire Outfit had to lose if the government proved their case against Lombardo and his associates. Specifically, he knew that the case put The Outfit’s entire investment in Las Vegas and all the millions and millions of dollars they were receiving from the skim directly at risk.
As often happens in life, in the end it was money that ultimately did the talking. A large portion of Accardo’s yearly net income came from money being siphoned from the many casinos that had been built via pension fund loans and whose count rooms, in turn, became open bank vaults for mobsters like The Big Tuna, who arranged those loans. Seifert’s testimony would put the entire skimming operation in jeopardy and would almost certainly end up taking copious amounts of cash out of Accardo’s pocket. After it was all said and done, Accardo, despite knowing that the murder would bring the ire of the government down upon him and his crime family more fiercely than ever before, signed off on the hit.
With the trial three months away, Seifert, fully aware his life was in danger, began carrying a gun. Without him, the government had no case and those indicted were likely to skate on the charges. Signs were everywhere that the mob wanted him dead and he knew it. He also knew The Outfit would stop at nothing to accomplish their goal. In late September 1974, Emma Seifert told Danny she saw Joey Lombardo driving up and down their street and sitting in the parking lot of her husband’s new fiberglass factory. No longer on speaking terms with her and her husband, Emma was certain Lombardo was either trying to intimidate them or case the locations for a possible kill opportunity. Shortly after Lombardo’s unwelcome drive-bys, Ronnie Seifert received a phone call from The Clown, who advised him to “straighten out” his older brother Danny or else.
At approximately 8:30 A.M. on September 27, 1974, Seifert, his wife, and their four-year-old son, Joey, arrived at the office of his new business, Plastic-Matics Products, located in a small industrial park off Foster Avenue in Bensenville. The Seiferts sent their other two children, Nicholas, ten, and Catherine, eleven, off to school that morning, but young Joey was feeling under the weather so they decided to bring him along for what they thought would be a typical day at work. Unfortunately for the Seifert family, the day would be anything but typical.
When the three of them reached the modest headquarters of Danny’s recently incorporated plastics company, Emma began to prepare a pot of coffee and Danny ran back down to the parking lot to retrieve a vacuum cleaner he had forgotten in the car. Alone in the office with her son, Emma was startled by two assailants in ski masks, who barged through the backdoor brandishing pistols and handcuffs.
“This is a robbery,” one of the men shouted.
“Where is the son-of-a-bitch? ” the other one asked.
Emma screamed to try to warn her husband of the pending danger, but it was no use. As Danny came back through the office’s entrance he was struck in the head by one of the weapon-wielding men and tumbled to the ground in agony. It took very little time for him to realize his life was in the balance. The Outfit had dispatched a hit team to finish him off.
Running to her desk, Emma tried to find the gun Danny had stashed there. However, before she could get the gun, one of the masked gunmen grabbed her and ushered her and Joey into the bathroom, telling them not to worry, this will be over fast.
A shot was fired, but Danny was able to get away. Leaving Emma and Joey alone in the office lavatory, the pair of gunmen sprinted toward their fleeing target. With his wife, child, and several other people in neighboring offices watching from the window, Seifert ran from one end of the industrial park to the other, thinking he could get away from his assailants by taking refuge in a connecting building. This was not the case, as another member of The Outfit hit squad was there waiting for him and shot him in the knee. Wounded and frightened, Seifert fell to the ground. While Seifert was still on his hands and knees, the assassin moved in to finish the job, putting his shotgun to the back of Seifert’s head and pulling the trigger. Danny Seifert died instantly. The Outfit had solved its problem.
AFTER the bloodshed, the execution squad fled to two waiting vehicles that were stationed in the parking lot waiting for them. One was the getaway car, the other a “crash car,” or “trail car,” used by mob hit men to run interference and aid in averting capture by disrupting any attempts to follow the shooters. Speeding from the scene in a Dodge Charger and a Brown Ford LTD, the group of assassins headed to a suburban Elmhurst Pontiac dealership. Abandoning the LTD and piling everyone into the Charger, their hurried departure from the dealership caught the eye of two Elmhurst policemen sitting in a nearby cruiser, who began to pursue the vehicle. A short high-speed chase ensued. The hit team successfully eluded the cops by ducking into a residential area of interconnecting subdivisions in the neighboring town of Northlake. The job was complete. The Outfit breathed a collective sigh of relief. The mob’s prized possession, its stranglehold over the Teamsters pension fund, was safe. At least for the time being.
According to FBI reports, the Charger was stored in Outfit member Nicholas “Buddy” Ciotti’s garage before it was destroyed. In spite of accomplishing the goal and eliminating what had become a significant thorn in his side, Outfit boss Tony Accardo was displeased about the way the hit went down. It was exactly what he had feared—too extreme, too high profile, and too much of a mess left behind. Informants would later tell the FBI that Lombardo and Spilotro were ordered in front of Accardo to answer for their behavior and were given a stern tongue lashing for their antics.
Seifert’s heinous slaying dealt the government’s case a devastating blow it would not be able to recover from. Minus Seifert’s testimony, the case fell apart and all the defendants were acquitted. Over the years, however, more extensive information came out, implicating Lombardo, Spilotro, and others in the vicious mob murder, and it was included in the eighteen killings charged in the 2005 Family Secrets indictment.
In her testimony at the trial, Emma Seifert said she believed that Joey Lombardo was one of the masked gunmen who stormed into her husband’s office and ushered her and her son into the bathroom. She claimed she could identify him by the way he moved. Turncoat Nick Calabrese testified at the Family Secrets trial that he was informed by one of the assassins himself that the five men who took part in the top-priority mob rubout were Lombardo, Spilotro, Joey Hansen, James “Jimmy the Lapper” La Pietra, and Frank “Frankie the German” Schweihs, with Hansen delivering the head shot that killed a dazed and bleeding Seifert. Furthermore, a witness identified Tony Spilotro as driving one of the escape vehicles that sped out of the factory parking lot.
T
he bottom line was that Danny Seifert, a father of three young children and not yet thirty years old, was dead—brutally slain so that villainous and cold-hearted men like Joey Lombardo and Tony Spilotro could avoid incarceration and The Outfit could maintain a stronghold over a union pension fund. For Seifert’s wife and children, there was little solace to be taken. It was an insurmountable price to pay to benefit people and a crime syndicate that had such minimal regard for human life in the face of illegal profit.
5.
Desert Don
The Ant Makes His Move to Vegas
Whereas Danny Seifert didn’t mean to get so heavily entrenched in mafia business, Tony Spilotro knew what he was getting into and what the consequences could be all too well.
Las Vegas had been a mob cash cow since the 1940s when notorious wiseguy, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel was sent out west by the New York mafia to create an environment that would become a continuous waterfall of illegal profits for organized crime syndicates across the country for nearly fifty years.
In 1971, The Outfit’s primary liaison in Vegas, Marshall Caifano, was on the outs with the organization’s leadership. Sent to Vegas in the mid-1950s with an edict to keep a low profile, Caifano, a career criminal who was tapped to lead The Outfit’s regime in the desert by former don Sam “Momo” Giancana, had developed a reputation as someone who was unable to stay in the shadows. Caifano, known to his peers as “Johnny Marshall” or “Johnny Shoes,” was loud, incorrigible, and apt to make a scene whenever and wherever he felt like he was being slighted.
This type of behavior had become very bothersome to the powers that be in Chicago, and by the start of the 1970s, with Giancana out of power as well as out of the country, the table was set for Caifano’s removal. The Outfit wanted their interests in the sand-filled oasis—primarily in the form of tens of millions of dollars being illegally siphoned from hotel and casino profits in an operation known as “The Skim”—looked after with as little fanfare and controversy as possible.