Family Affair

by Sam Giancana

  RELEASED from a decade-long prison stretch at almost the exact same time that Tony Accardo’s death rocked the Chicago underworld, Joey Lombardo’s timing proved impeccable. Without missing a beat, The Clown is alleged to have stepped into Accardo’s role as Outfit consiglieri. Like the Big Tuna, Lombardo would end up carrying just as much clout, if not more, than the family’s boss.

  Accardo’s passing also happened to coincide with the indictment a short six months later of then-Outfit don Sam “Wings” Carlisi on racketeering charges. This development left yet another leadership spot that had to be addressed. The name most law enforcement sources say heeded the call of duty was John Di Fronzo—even though some in the know insist that Lombardo took the syndicate’s number one spot. Di Fronzo was a longtime lieutenant from Elmwood Park, who had been named a caporegime in the mid to late-1970s. It’s believed by most in law enforcement that No Nose Di Fronzo was selected as the Outfit’s new boss in early 1993 when Carlisi was jailed as a flight risk while awaiting trial.

  John Di Fronzo was born on December 13, 1928, to Michael and Dores Di Fronzo, both immigrants from Italy. He dropped out of Wells High School in the eleventh grade and took his first arrest for petty larceny in May of 1946. Di Fronzo, who was running errands for Jackie “The Lackey” Cerome as early as sixteen years old, spent two years in the U.S. Army as a paratrooper and received an honorable discharge in 1948. Returning to Chicago, he got his start in major underworld activities by being a part of a burglary and hijack team that called itself “The 3-Minute Gang” and pulled cartage thefts and jewelry and fur heists across the city. Eventually, he became a driver and bodyguard for Cerone, helping him run several West Side loan-sharking and gambling operations.

  He earned the moniker “No Nose” at the age of twenty-one during a 1949 robbery of a Michigan Avenue department store when he lost a portion of his nose, depending on who you ask, either by jumping through a glass window trying to avoid being caught by the law or by being shot by a policemen while fleeing down the street. Marrying his wife, Rosemary, on December 29, 1950, he adopted her son from a previous marriage, Michael, and the couple had one son of their own, Joseph, in September of 1951. During his career in The Outfit, Di Fronzo has been arrested more than twenty-five times.

  In late 1993, less than a year into his tenure as godfather, he was convicted for trying to extort a California-based Native American casino and sent to federal prison. At his farewell dinner, which took place at Agostino’s on North Harlem Avenue the night before he left Chicago to serve his sentence on the West Coast, he dined with fellow reputed Outfit members Pat Marcy, Marco “The Mover” D’Amico, Donald “Donnie the Sponge” Scalise, John “Little Jackie” Cerone, Jr., and his younger brothers and top lieutenants, Joe Di Fronzo and Peter “Greedy Petey” Di Fronzo. Serving just over twelve months in a California prison, he was released in late summer 1994 when the conviction was overturned on appeal.

  Since returning to the streets of the Windy City following his brief stint behind bars, a majority of mob watchers agree that it has been No Nose who sits atop the mountain peak as overlord of the Chicago mafia. He has stayed mostly free of legal hassles after being sprung from federal prison but rumors of pending indictments, none of which have come to fruition, have hounded him over the last decade. During the 2007 Family Secrets trial, he was implicated in the murder of the Spilotro brothers, yet avoided being charged in the case.

  Besides stabilizing the syndicate after Accardo’s death, Di Fronzo is also reputed to have led a foray for the Chicago mafia into a previously taboo terrain—narcotics. It’s not that drugs had never been sold in The Outfit before, just that it had never been sanctioned from the top before. Keeping a safe distance from the actual street sales of drugs, throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium, Outfit lieutenants are believed to have been given newfound authority by mob administrators to begin financing narcotics transactions with the area’s African American, Asian, and eastern European criminal groups and biker gangs. Joe Di Fronzo, the youngest of the three Di Fronzo brothers, served a federal prison sentence for marijuana trafficking.

  The most significant change of protocol made by the new regime led by Di Fronzo and Lombardo, was the decision to minimize The Outfit’s dispersal of violence as a deterrent to those who break the rules. Feeling the murders and beatings that had once been a syndicate calling card was bad for business and invited too much exposure for the crime family as a whole, orders from the top were now to dispatch stern warnings instead of the physical thrashings of before. The use of violent behavior would be applied only as a method of last resort.

  Eerily similar to modus operandi employed by Tony Accardo during his forty-six years in charge of The Outfit, John Di Fronzo displays an extremely low-key demeanor and knows how to stay in the shadows, avoiding the spotlight at all costs. A virtual recluse, No Nose is not a fan of nightclubs or fancy restaurants but rather is described by people who know him as a homebody who enjoys the exclusive company of his family and only a few close friends. He has numerous real estate holdings—said by law enforcement to reach close to a dozen of properties, including 12.2 acres of land in Melrose Park and vacation homes in Florida, Wisconsin, and McHenry County—and alleged ownership interests in big money-makers D&P Construction, a waste hauling and construction business, and J&K Ventures, a recycling materials company. Di Fronzo has also always been said to hold ownership in several car dealerships, Elmwood Park Motors, Northwest Dodge, and Irving Park Chrysler-Plymouth amongst them. Always a man of habit, for close to forty years No Nose could be seen meeting with his driver and top proxy Eugene “Lefty” Cacciatore for breakfast at Gene’s Deli in Elmwood Park every morning at around 7:30 A.M., until Cacciatore’s death in 2000.

  Overly cautious in his movements, he speaks to very few Outfit members and associates face to face. The FBI believes he issues orders primarily through his brother Pete Di Fronzo, a captain who reputedly commands mob affairs in No Nose’s old stomping grounds of Elmwood Park, and Marco D’Amico, a former crew leader himself and one of the don’s closest advisors. Much like Accardo before him, Di Fronzo is a fan of having a “street boss” to oversee day-to-day Outfit affairs on his behalf. The extra layer of protection between him and the street suits the notoriously hands-off boss well. Upon taking the reigns, Di Fronzo named South Side capo John Monteleone the syndicate’s street boss and then upon Monteleone’s passing in 2001, tapped Joe Andriacchi for the position. No Nose also utilizes an underboss: First, he allegedly appointed former Carlisi confidant Alphonse “Al the Pizza Man” Tornabene, who held the job until he went into a brief retirement around 2002 when he is alleged to have selected Andriacchi to replace him. Tornabene’s absence from the Outfit administration was less than lengthy and he allegedly returned to fill the role of Family consiglieri in 2005 upon Joey Lombardo’s indictment.

  Di Fronzo is said to be very conscious of the Outfit’s national profile too, making sure to be on good terms with other American mob powers. Until his death in 2002, Frank “Frankie the Horse” Bucceri, brother of one of No Nose’s original underworld mentors Fifi Bucceri, acted as Di Fronzo’s intermediary with the other La Cosa Nostra factions, such as the crime families in New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, and St. Louis. Even before ascending to capo and eventually street boss, John Monteleone was believed to be the syndicate’s liason with the Milwaukee family, and Rudy Fratto, close relatives of former Midwest mob kingpins Luigi “Cockeyed Louie” Fratto and Frank “Frankie One Ear” Fratto, is alleged to be in charge of all Outfit affairs in Iowa. Joey Lombardo’s right hand man, Jimmy Cozzo, was reputed to be the Family’s representative to the Cleveland mafia from the 1960s until his death in 2007.

  “Johnny Di Fronzo is very low key in terms of the public, but in Outfit life, he’s assertive in his authority, and everybody knows to defer to him,” said Jim Wagner. “He’s not flashy or someone who feels the need to tell people who and what he is. If you didn’t know him personally or through busin
ess and you met him, you’d never suspect who he was. When I was in the bureau, you would always be able to find him every morning at one of his dealerships, sitting behind his desk with a paper and a cup of coffee. He keeps a tight inner circle and talks Outfit affairs with only one or two people, mainly his brother, Pete. Although he tries not to look the part of a crime boss, he plays it very successfully. And the way he acts and conducts business is a big part of that.”

  Joe the Builder, Lombardo’s first cousin and a partner of both The Clown and No Nose in a robbery crew they were all a part of during their early days working in the local underworld, was a natural fit as Di Fronzo’s number two man. Andriacchi replaced a deceased Vince Solano as captain of the North Side in 1992, and some Windy City mob prognosticators speculate that by the turn of the century, he actually ascended past Di Fronzo to become The Outfit’s don and still holds that position today. Most likely, however, The Builder, holds the dual role as the syndicate’s street boss and underboss.

  Three years younger than his cousin The Clown, Andriacchi was born on October 20, 1932, and got his nickname by gaining a foothold in the Chicago area construction industry in the 1970s and 1980s and using it to The Outfit’s great advantage—a feat that impressed the mob and aided him in building leverage for himself, which he was able to parlay into a swift climb up the syndicate ranks. He opened Aunt Sarah’s Restaurant in River Park, which he used as a headquarters, and for a good portion of the ’70s and ’80s it was known as a popular Outfit hangout. Like Lombardo and Di Fronzo, Andriacchi is a low-key personality who knows how to generate cash for the mafia while not making waves. Unlike Lombardo and Di Fronzo, for the most part he has been able to avoid the ire of the law. Except for a prison bit he served between 1968 and 1971 for a burglary conviction, Andriacchi has stayed out of jail and avoided arrests and indictments in his time moving up The Outfit ladder.

  Rumored to hold a silent ownership interest in the widely popular Rosebud restaurant chain, The Builder can often be found many nights of the week holding court on Rush Street. When he’s not at Carmine’s, a flagship establishment of the Rosebud chain, he can usually be seen down the street at Rosebud’s on Rush or at the posh and popular Tavern on Rush.

  AS the twentieth century came to a close, things at the top of the Chicago underworld became even more foggy than they already were. Reports from sources in law enforcement and on the street began to circulate that Jimmy the Man, an imprisoned capo from Cicero, had taken John Di Fronzo’s place as boss of The Outfit. Whether this was true or it simply meant that Marcello, who also went by the monikers “Little Jimmy,” “Jimmy the Driver,” and “Jimmy Lights,” was being put out into the fray as a front boss to further shield No Nose from FBI scrutiny is still not known. What is known is that at the same time as this alleged shift of power, the violence that had for the most part disappeared on the local streets during a majority of the Di Fronzo regime returned.

  Whether this change in the way of conducting business can be directly attributed to Marcello’s rise in stature is still up for discussion. But after several years of no murders taking place in The Outfit, in less than two years, there were two very high-profile slayings that re-established the crime family’s authority.

  JIMMY Marcello was born exactly one week after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, on December 13, 1941, and grew up on the city’s West Side. The offspring of a Irish mother and a Sicilian father—Salvatore “Sammy Big Eyes” Marcello, who was also a member of The Outfit and eager to set the foundation for his son to follow his lead into a life of crime—at the age of nineteen, he went to work for the city of Chicago in the Streets and Sanitation Department via one of his father’s connections. In the early 1970s, Sammy Marcello, a one-time lieutenant and close friend of Sam Giancana, was killed while making a street tax collection. Jimmy was devastated, and it is rumored that he might have played a role in the retribution slaying of his dad’s killer just a few months later.

  Employed by the city for thirteen years, in 1973, around the same time as his dad’s homicide, he quit his job at Streets and Sanitation and started loaning out money. A quick study in the loan-sharking racket, Marcello was soon making a nice profit, and his skill at the trade gained him and his business the attention of The Outfit. Going to work for Joe Ferriola’s crew in 1975, he was quick to make a reputation for himself as an expert shakedown artist, displaying an uncanny ability to make extortion victims part with their money with little hesitation or hassle.

  Eventually all of Marcello’s hard work in building up his mob profile paid off, and he was accepted into Ferriola’s inner circle. By the late 1970s, he had moved his way up the food chain until he became the driver and right-hand man to Sam “Wings” Carlisi, a valued Outfit lieutenant who got his nickname by being the syndicate’s primary messenger of news, decisions, and orders to other La Cosa Nostra crime families across the country.

  Due to his close association and friendship with Joe Ferriola, Carlisi was on a fast track to power in the Chicago mafia. Becoming tight with Carlisi and hitching his career prospects in The Outfit to him was the best thing that could have ever happened to Jimmy Marcello. As Sam Carlisi’s star in the Windy City underworld rose to meteoric heights, so did his. When Joe Ferriola became boss and selected Carlisi as his underboss, Marcello basically became the third most powerful gangster in Chicago, getting a promotion to captain status and being given authority over Dupage County.

  The most significant feat accomplished in Jimmy the Man’s early rise to power was his ability to take the syndicate’s video poker business to an entire new level of profitability. The business was started in the 1970s by Outfit bigwigs Hyman “Red” Larner and Carmen and Salvatore Bastone and it developed into an immediate international cash cow, with Larner and Bastone taking their business to the Carribean. But by the late 1980s the joker poker racket had began to stagnate in and around Chicago. With a posse of mob soldiers at his disposal, over the next few years Marcello rejuvenated the floundering business with new machines, updated technology, and a lot of street muscle. In the 1990s, if you were a bar or working-class restaurant in the Chicagoland area, you most likely had a video poker machine there. And odds are it was put there, in one way or another, by The Outfit, and specifically those working for Jimmy Marcello. As The Outfit made its way to the start of the new millennium, the all cash business, which at one time had been a mid-level money maker for the crime family generating nowhere near the level of profits traditional gambling would, had become one if its largest rackets.

  Indicted in December 1992 along with his mentor Sam Carlisi on charges of racketeering, and convicted and jailed a year later, Marcello’s run on the streets came to a temporary halt. However, despite being locked behind bars in a federal prison in Milan, Michigan, he still carried some serious weight in The Outfit. While Marcello was in prison, word began to spread in the late 1990s that Jimmy the Man was on his way to the top of the mountain in the Chicago mob, the hand-selected heir apparent to The Outfit throne. In the fall of 2001, the Chicago press started to report that he was the newly anointed boss of the local mafia. Gaining his release from incarceration in 2003, a free man for the first time in ten years, Marcello took his much-anticipated spot in The Outfit hierarchy. If he wasn’t the syndicate’s overall don, then at the very least he was its street boss, helping reputed underboss Joe Andriacchi watch over day-to-day affairs and calling a great deal of shots.

  What Marcello didn’t know was that although he was in the process of reacclimating himself to the outside world, getting comfortable in his new job as mob royalty, any long-term career aspirations were dead in the water before he even stepped foot out of his Michigan jail cell. In the years leading up to his release, the FBI, with the aid of turncoat and former hit man Nick Calabrese, had started building an epic case against The Outfit, and Jimmy Marcello, its reputed new boss, was one of its main targets.

  Certain that Marcello was still maintaining a good piece of control over thi
ngs going down in the Windy City, issuing orders and such from behind the barbed-wire walls in Milan, the feds decided to watch him as closely in prison as they had while he was on the streets. This meant paying special attention to his phone calls and visits, which were both recorded via federal prison policy. They hit pay dirt. Marcello was caught on tape talking about a variety of incriminating things, including the Spilotro brothers’ murders, leaks in law enforcement, and his attempt to pay Nick Calabrese’s family $4,000 a month as a safeguard against him becoming an informant—a venture that obviously proved futile.

  Walking out of the Milan prison gate in November 2003, Jimmy Marcello was a marked man. The media, who had been speculating on his leadership status in the mob for quite some time, wanted a story, and news cameras were there to meet him at his home on the day of his return. The FBI, insistent on its belief that he had taken part in gangland murders in the past and that he was still commanding Outfit affairs from his jail cell, wanted him back in prison. They would soon get their wish. After enjoying less than two years of freedom, Marcello was indicted for his role in three murders, one attempted murder, and various charges of racketeering in the April 2005 Operation Family Secrets case and was returned to prison, where he has remained ever since.

  THERE are a few things that are known for certain about the modern-day Chicago Outfit. First of all, although the crime family’s power has been far from wilting, its numbers have been facing a steady decline. A syndicate that once boasted close to two hundred made members had been whittled down to under a hundred, and probably closer to between fifty and eighty, when the curtain came down on the last century. As a result, the approximately seven crews that had made up its organizational structure for over sixty-five years were condensed into just four. The former Elmwood Park and Rush Street crews were consolidated into one and re-named “The North Side Crew.” When west suburban boss Anthony “Tony Tracks” Centracchio died in August 2001, his crew was merged with Joey Lombardo’s Grand Avenue/Ogden Crew and re-named “The West Side Crew.” The Twenty-sixth Street/Chinatown crew absorbed the south suburban crew and all territory residing south of the Eisenhower Expressway and in northwest Indiana—area’s previously looked after by a then-ailing Tootsie Palermo—and was re-christened “The South Side Crew.” Finally, all activities taking place in Cicero, Melrose Park, and Lake County came under the umbrella of one all-encompassing crew.