by Sam Giancana
17.
A Little House Cleaning
Return of the Wack
There have been over eleven hundred gangland slayings in the history of the city of Chicago. Sixteen Outfit murders took place between 1985 and 1990. Between 1990 and 1994 there were only four. Up until late 1999, following the edict issued by the Di Fronzo administration that discouraged violence for the sake of overall syndicate preservation, there had not been one. From that point forward, in a period spanning less than two years, there would be two.
When reports began to surface at the end of the decade that Jimmy Marcello had moved to the top of the The Outfit power base, it coincided with a return to the crime family’s old way of doing business. Talk of a developing rift between Di Fronzo and a jailed Marcello didn’t help matters. We were entering the twenty-first century, and the Chicago underworld was being ruled by two leaders with two very different philosophies when it came to discipline within the ranks. Whatever the problems in The Outfit hierarchy were, one thing was for certain: forty-eight hours before Christmas Day 1999, the peace that had been echoing throughout the Windy City streets for the past five years was about to be broken.
THE Outfit’s hit list of the early 1990s was somewhat unimpressive—at least in terms of cache and in comparison to the high-profile gangland slayings of the Spilotro brothers and mega-bookie Hal Smith at the hands of the Rocky Infelice crew for refusing to pay tribute during the late 1980s.
On November 6, 1991, burglar and jewelry fence Edward Pedote was killed inside a Cicero Avenue furniture store, beaten with a wooden table leg and shot in the face. In April 1992, Glen Devos, one of Pedote’s partners in an Outfit-backed burglary crew, was charged with the crime. Just over two weeks after the Pedote murder, Wallace Leiberman, an estate liquidator from the posh north suburb of North-brook and an associate of mob enforcer, Robert “Bobby the Gabeet” Bellavia, was found shot to death in Cicero. A year later in November 1992, Sam Taglia, an auto thief and convicted narcotic trafficker, was found in the trunk of his car, with two bullets in the back of his head and his throat slit. Albert Vena, an alleged Outfit soldier, was charged with Taglia’s murder, but was acquitted of the charges. Two years to the day of the Taglia killing, Giuseppe Vicari, a Sicilian mafia gambling lieutenant was murdered in his restaurant on North Harlem Avenue. Since the five slayings had all been of low-level hoodlums or associates and nobody of any significance in Chicago mob circles was put away for them, the murders made little more than minor headlines. (In the late ’90s, South Side mob lieutenant James “Jimmy Poker” Di Forti, was put on trial for and eventually convicted of the Outfit-related homicide of indebted associate William “Bill the Pallet Man” Pellham, but the murder itself had taken place in 1988.)
Then, for the next five years, nothing, not a single homicide attributed to The Outfit. The underworld went relatively silent—with the exception of the Bobby Cruz murder in 1997, the Michael Culter murder in 1998, and the Don Schemel murder in early 1999 that were each rumored to be mob related yet never confirmed as such—and street merchants were allowed to cross the Windy City mafia without paying the ultimate price. Recalcitrant wiseguys were now regularly let off the hook with warnings or simply banned from conducting whichever bread-and-butter activities they partook in instead of getting whacked. Whispers around town said The Outfit had gone soft. People began to think the mob in Chicago could be dead or at the very least on its last legs.
For some members of The Outfit, this type of innuendo didn’t sit well. They thought the crime family was losing respect and they wanted it back. In their mind, tongue lashings were no longer a sufficient deterrent, they wanted blood. One of those who wasn’t pleased with the syndicate’s newfound image was Jimmy Marcello, the alleged freshly installed boss of the Chicago mafia, who although imprisoned and serving out the remainder of a federal racketeering conviction was said to have replaced the semiretired John Di Fronzo. It is believed the first thing Marcello did in his new leadership role was to reenact old school enforcement tactics as a means of reinvigorating slouching Outfit morale. Now it was time to find somebody to be made an example as a way of demonstrating the crime family’s recently altered perspective. In December 1999, that somebody was found in Ronnie Jarrett.
A man with an array of valuable skills for a criminal, Ronnie Jarrett was a high-end burglar, truck hijacker, jewelry fence, enforcer, and loan-shark who hailed from the South Side. He broke in with The Outfit’s Chinatown crew in the early 1960s and eventually amassed a rap sheet that included over sixty arrests and thirteen convictions. His exploits became so notorious that in 1980 when actor James Caan, famous for playing über-gangster Sonny Corleone in the Oscar-winning movie The Godfather, was preparing for his role as a professional thief in an upcoming film project of his, he socialized with Jarrett and used him as a model for the character.
As his profile skyrocketed, he became a driver and bodyguard for Chinatown crew boss Angelo La Pietra, who quickly took a liking to the hulking, no-nonsense, yet eagerly ready to please Jarrett. However, the loyalty that so endeared him to La Pietra early on in his career, began to fade when La Pietra and John Di Fronzo decided that John “Johnny Apes” Monteleone, not Jarrett, would be his successor as caporegime of the South Side. Jarrett thought he deserved the leadership position and bristled at the notion of taking orders from Monteleone, someone he used to work with and viewed as an equal.
He kept his insubordinate behavior in check until after his mentor La Pietra died on May 28, 1999, but, in the following months, he let his actions and his mouth dig him a hole that he would never be able to climb out of. Without a tribute envelope being shuffled to Angelo La Pietra every month like it had in the past, Jarrett was instructed to start redirecting the payment to Johnny Apes. Doing what he was told, in the summer of 1999, Jarrett began meeting Monteleone on a monthly basis and handing him over a percentage of his rackets. There was only one problem—the envelopes Johnny Apes was receiving were significantly less thick than the ones La Pietra had been getting. Confronting Jarrett about the suspected indiscretion, Jarrett denied short-changing his new boss. Monteleone didn’t believe him.
Adding to his problems, at some point during the fall, rumors began filtering up to The Outfit administration that Jarrett was dealing drugs without kicking up his profits and bad mouthing the syndicate’s power structure, specifically John Monteleone, John Di Fronzo and Jimmy Marcello, to anyone that would listen. According to law enforcement reports, he didn’t think Marcello should have as much say as he did from prison, that Di Fronzo was too hands off with his leadership methods, and that Monteleone should be demoted. Already skating on thin ice as it was, the reports of his dabbling in narcotics and not sharing and his spewing such hostile remarks targeted at his superiors, proved to be the final straw. Ronnie Jarrett was set to become the first victim of an official mob hit in Chicago since 1994 and the final gangland homicide of the twentieth century.
It was a brisk and cool-winded early winter morning on December 23, 1999, and Ronnie Jarrett, in what would turn out to be an act of severe irony, was on his way to a funeral. Leaving his Bridgeport home at around 10:15 A.M., he said good-bye to his wife and kids and headed off for a nearby Orland Park cemetery where his cousin was being buried. Unfortunately for the entire Jarrett family, he wouldn’t make it there.
While walking the short distance from his porch to his car, which was parked on the street bordering his front lawn, he noticed a yellow Ryder rental truck driving toward him up his block. Most likely he didn’t pay it much mind, probably dismissing the vehicle as being used by a neighbor to move a piece of furniture. Turning his attention away from oncoming traffic, he put his head down and started to unlock his car door. Before he could make it behind the wheel, the yellow truck stopped a few feet from where he stood. A man wearing a black ski mask emerged from the front passenger seat, pointed a silencer-equipped .32-caliber pistol at Ronnie Jarrett, and unloaded six shots into his body. Three bullets struck him
in the head, one in the left shoulder, and two in his right arm. He was bleeding and unconscious before he even hit the ground.
With little worry about being recognized or apprehended, Jarrett’s assailant calmly returned to the truck, pulled himself up back into the passenger seat, and motioned for the driver to leave the scene. Moments later, as Ronnie Jarrett lay almost lifeless on the cold concrete of Lowe Street, the truck pulled into a nearby alley. Both shooter and driver exited the vehicle and were met by a dark blue Lincoln waiting for them. The driver went into the Lincoln’s backseat, removed a jug of gasoline, and doused the truck with it. Lighting a match, he flicked it into the truck and watched as it went ablaze. As the truck fire grew, the men got into the Lincoln and drove away.
Clinging to life, Jarrett was driven to Cook County Hospital. He underwent extensive surgery and was placed in a room in the hospital’s intensive care unit that was supplied with round-the-clock police protection. The FBI hoped that if he survived the hit, he would cooperate with them in trying to take down those in The Outfit that wanted him dead. Those hopes turned futile when on January 25, 2000, Ronnie Jarrett, a suspect in close to a dozen previous homicides himself, was pronounced dead from internal injuries sustained in his shooting. As of today, no charges have been brought in this case.
LESS than two years after the Jarrett hit, The Outfit’s hit parade continued. The ranks of the Chicago mafia were once again being disturbed. Somebody had to pay the price. Like in the case of Ronnie Jarrett, that price was murder.
In January 2001, John Monteleone died of natural causes. His passing left the post of South Side caporegime, the leadership slot he had held since Angelo La Pietra bequeathed it to him in the mid-1990s and the very same job Ronnie Jarrett felt slighted by being passed over for, up for grabs. Anthony “Tony the Hatchet” Chiaramonti, three years removed from serving a five-year federal prison sentence on a racketeering conviction and one of the most feared mob enforcers to ever walk the Windy City streets, thought he deserved the promotion. The Outfit’s administration thought otherwise. Feeling that Chiaramonti lacked enough balance in his personality and was too much of a wild card to hold the highly valued position, the job was bestowed on Frank “Toots” Caruso. Similar to the situation surrounding Jarrett in 1999, Tony the Hatchet was angered by the snub and began acting out against his bosses as a result.
Chiaramonti had been a significant presence in the Chicago underworld for over four decades, making his mark in mob circles throughout the city as a premiere loan shark and debt collector. The very mention of his name elicited terror and anxiety in anyone who had ever crossed his path. With a nickname deriving from his preferred weapon of choice when trying to intimidate those slow to pay what they owed, Tony the Hatchet quickly became known as the person to go to when any Outfit heavyweights needed difficult collections made on their behalf. This skill did wonders for his reputation, and he soon found himself immersed within the inner sanctum of the West Side crew ran by Joe Ferriola and Sam Carlisi. When Ferriola and then Carlisi became boss of the crime family, Chiaramonti figured it was only a matter of time, due to his close relationship with both, before he was elevated to a position in the syndicate hierarchy.
Overseeing all of Carlisi’s loan-sharking business, where he was alleged to charge an astounding 250 percent interest on all loans given out, Chiaramonti was indicted in 1992 along with the entire Carlisi crew on a slew of racketeering charges. Convicted and sent to prison in 1993, Tony the Hatchet was the first of those who went down in the highly publicized bust to gain his freedom, and in 1998 he resurfaced as a presence on the streets. Unfortunately for Tony, Carlisi, who people claim always had a soft spot in his heart for the notoriously antagonistic and violence prone Chiaramonti, died in prison in 1997, and his return to active duty in The Outfit was under the supervision of people that were not as partial to his antics.
Upon his release from jail, he was given authority of all loan-sharking operations taking place under the umbrella of the newly formed South Side crew and assigned to report to John Monteleone. He was also said to be given the responsibility of aiding Mickey Marcello in looking after the syndicate’s video poker business.
In an interesting shift of events, around April 2001, Tony the Hatchet was removed from Monteleone’s supervision and told to begin reporting directly to Anthony “Little Tony” Zizzo, another former Carlisi lieutenant who recently came out from behind bars after serving time. Zizzo was the primary liaison between the still-imprisoned Jimmy Marcello, the one-time number two man to the now-deceased Carlisi and the rest of The Outfit. There were rumors that Marcello and Chiaramonti didn’t get along and that Jimmy the Man arranged for Zizzo to supervise Tony in order to keep special tabs on him because he didn’t trust him. Whatever the reason, Chiaramonti started to chafe being under the collective thumb of Marcello and Zizzo, and when Monteleone died, he wanted his job. He didn’t get it.
Not receiving the bump up to captain status as he had anticipated sent Chiaramonti into a tailspin. His behavior became even more erratic than usual, and his overall demeanor began to increasingly rub his associates and those who worked under him the wrong way. Things got so bad that complaints of his undermining attitude and cantankerous mannerisms were brought to Zizzo and then through him to Marcello. Around this same time, there were also reports that Tony the Hatchet was upset with compensation and started bothering his bosses for a bigger percentage of the joker poker machines he was in charge of.
Things came to a head on the morning of November 15, 2001, at a Cicero pancake house where Chiaramonti took a breakfast meeting with Mickey Marcello and Frank Schweihs. Delivering orders from The Outfit brass to curb his insolent behavior and that he would not be granted his request for more video poker money, Marcello and Schweihs informed Chiaramonti that if he didn’t change his ways and begin to fly right, he was going to end up with the same fate as Ronnie Jarrett. He was also made aware that some money had come up missing from his last few joker poker tributes and that if it wasn’t repaid, he would be sanctioned by losing a piece of his loan-sharking racket.
Offended by the tone and content of the discussion, Chiaramonti became visibly agitated. An argument between him and his two dining mates ensued. Yelling at each other across the table, tensions escalated to the point where Tony the Hatchet got up and stormed out of the restaurant. Marcello and Schweihs followed him and the screaming match carried over outside into the parking lot. Garnering the attention of an FBI surveillance team stationed in an adjacent piece of property, Chiaramonti and Marcello got face to face, while Schweihs tried to intercede. Giving Marcello a hard shove that sent him flailing backward into Schweihs, Tony the Hatchet then got behind the wheel of his car, threw out a few more choice curse words, and sped from the scene in a state of fury.
The confrontation spelled the end of the line for Anthony Chiaramonti. It took another five days, but on November 20, just two days before Thanksgiving, all of Tony the Hatchet’s histrionics finally caught up with him. He had officially gotten too big for his britches, and The Outfit was ready to put an end to all of the problems they had with him the only way they knew how to—by killing him.
At approximately 6:00 P.M., the sixty-seven-year-old Chiaramonti pulled his black BMW into the parking lot of a Brown’s Chicken, a popular Chicagoland area fast food chain, in Lyons, Illinois. He got out of his vehicle and walked into the restaurant to use a pay phone. After finishing, he exited the restaurant and started to walk back to his car. Before he reached his BMW, a hunter green Chrysler minivan drove up and impeded his progress. A thickly built man wearing a Chicago Bears jacket got out of the passenger seat and walked up to Tony the Hatchet, requesting that he get in the van and leave with him. Tony refused, and the pair began to engage in a shouting match. In the middle of the heated exchange, the man tried to grab Chiaramonti and force him into the van against his will. But Tony the Hatchet broke free and ran back toward the entrance to the restaurant with his assailant in hot pursu
it. Catching up to his target in the restaurant’s vestibule, the hulking man in the Bears jacket pulled out a pistol and unloaded five shots into Chiaramonti’s head, chest, and neck and then fled.
Rushed to the emergency room at MacNeal Hospital in Berwyn, Anthony Chiaramonti was pronounced dead at 6:50 P.M. Following a twenty-one-month investigation jointly conducted by the Lyons Police Department and the FBI’s organized crime squad, in the summer of 2003, Robert Cooper, a thirty-nine-year-old Outfit thief and strong arm, was charged with the murder. In exchange for information he provided on the slaying, he was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. During an interrogation in the months leading up to the indictment, Cooper admitted to being the driver in the Chiaramonti hit, while implicating previously fast-rising South Side mob lieutenant Anthony “Tough Tony” Calabrese (no relation to Frank and Nick) as the shooter. Although he has yet to be charged with the Chiaramonti homicide, in 2008 Tony Calabrese was convicted on charges of armed robbery and assault and received a fifty-year prison sentence.
WHEN Jimmy Marcello emerged from his decade-long incarceration in the late autumn of 2003, he was well aware of the ongoing FBI probe into his present-day activities as well as murders he and the crime family were suspected of carrying out in years past. Due to the defection of Nick Calabrese to the government in 2002, The Outfit was under siege. Everyone even remotely involved in the mafia in Chicago was on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop and speculating when the FBI was going to come forth with their indictment. This pervasive climate surrounding the local underworld made Marcello resort to the low-key, bunker-style management techniques employed by Di Fronzo and Lombardo ten years before, instead of the aggressive and bloodthirsty leadership attitude he desired, exemplified by the Jarrett and Chiaramonti hits.