Murder in Canaryville

by Jeff Coen

  Another notable federal case in the area was the one against the On Leong Chinese Merchants Association. The organization was accused of running what amounted to a full casino in Chinatown, and paying off Chicago Outfit members and Chicago cops to do so. Police regularly raided the group’s building in the 1980s, finding upper floors blocked with gates that could be opened when gamblers buzzed in to play fan-tan and other games of chance. In April 1988 operators buzzed in an undercover FBI agent named George Ng, who spoke fluent Chinese and played along with everyone else after buying $500 in chips. Ng came back the next evening with another agent and a search warrant, and a federal complaint was filed that same year.

  When the case got to trial, a former national president of On Leong testified the organization paid $12,000 a month in street taxes to run games in Chicago. That bill was negotiated with none other than hit man Frank “the German” Schweihs, a man so feared even by other mobsters that they instructed their loved ones not to hesitate to call for help if they ever spotted him around their homes. He was known as a henchman for Joey the Clown and the Grand Avenue street crew. He and Lombardo went on the lam after the Family Secrets indictments came down but were later captured. Schweihs was arrested hiding out with a girlfriend in Berea, Kentucky, but died of natural causes before he could be tried along with his coconspirators.

  In the On Leong case, the former president Yu Lip Moy testified he set up one meeting with Schweihs through a gangster in Pittsburgh, saying, “I told him I wanted to come down to talk about our problem I had with Italian people in Chicago,” according to the article then newspaperman John Gorman wrote on the case for the Chicago Tribune.

  Angelo LaPietra had originally wanted to run his Italian American club on Twenty-Sixth Street as a gambling den as well, with LaMantia in charge, according to court records, but he later decided to use it for meetings instead. By 1986 it was not only being bugged and having its phones tapped but was under regular surveillance, with FBI agents noting who was coming and going as they watched. It had been raided at least once, according to one court filing, with LaMantia and another man seen trying to dispose of slips of water-soluble paper. Some of the slips were recovered, however, and they carried the results of wagers and were saved as evidence.

  Investigators also continued interviewing confidential sources, who were giving up the goods on LaMantia and the Italian American club. One said he knew that characters including LaMantia, James LaPietra, Nick “the Stick” LoCoco, and Chicago alderman Fred Roti met there to discuss business and that it was a drop location for money from illegal activity. There were several phones there, the source told the feds, including one private line used to discuss juice loans and gambling. That’s the one the feds targeted for their wiretap.

  Another source told investigators he often took part in a craps game run by mobsters on the club’s second floor. Federal authorities noted in their paperwork that another potential witness, identified as “Eric Smith,” had linked that second man and LaMantia to a dice game held near the Hungry Hound Restaurant.

  At the time, the innocuously named Mr. Smith also was deep into other work for the government, an effort that would tear a hole in the fabric of how Chicago thought about its court system. But all that would be revealed later.

  Meanwhile, during 1986 and ’87, federal records show that the taping effort had extended to a phone line at the LaMantia home on South Shields, the same residence where Martha DiCaro had been shot a half decade earlier. Angelo LaPietra’s house in Berwyn also was targeted, and the effort was richly successful. The federal government captured more than a thousand calls going to and from the homes and the club, they reported in court papers, including more than two hundred allegedly involving Shorty LaMantia.

  In one recorded telephone call from Angelo LaPietra to the club, he talked about a “captains meeting” to occur there on a Tuesday night, May 5, 1987. The FBI agent who wrote an affidavit on the matter stated that it was apparent from the conversation that LaMantia and James LaPietra ran the meeting and that the gatherings occurred on a regular basis. In the September 2, 1987, affidavit, a confidential source was quoted as stating that meetings took place at the club for the purpose of discussing Outfit business and were attended by organized crime members and associates. He stated that those normally in attendance included James LaPietra and Shorty LaMantia.

  What was captured on federal recordings were snippets of players in the organization chattering on about the minutiae of running a gambling ring:

  Did ya, did you get it?

  I got ’em, delivered ’em, I got to go collect now. I’d like to grab Yooko. He still owes me, that son of a bitch.

  Well, why didn’t ya?

  Where am I going to get him? Is he working tonight?

  Yes.

  Maybe I’ll stop in after I drop you off.

  It was a morass of jabbering about who owed who what and who would be collecting it and who wanted to put more on which basketball game or horse race, but investigators were able to piece things together.

  Some of the messages were clearer:

  You tell him, we want ours and I don’t give two fucks what you do, tell him that other guy is going to come see ya and he’ll want this motherfucker the next day, you do what you have to … you are too fuckin’ nice to him in his fucking car you know how much money he owes us. You tell this fuckin’ Jew ain’t nobody could ever be, be more replaceable. Have Kurt … knock the shit out of him. We don’t get shit, I can’t knock that fucking figure down, take another fuckin’ year and a half. I don’t understand it. Well, fuck this motherfucker.

  It would take another few years for Shorty LaMantia to be indicted. But when the case hit in 1993, the Twenty-Sixth Street crew was charged as a criminal enterprise within the Chicago Outfit, in a document that outlined years of activity and read like a sweeping account of illegal gambling across Bridgeport and Chinatown. There were even references to old-school “wirerooms,” where bettors could call in and get information on odds for horse racing and sports and place wagers.

  “Defendant Joseph Frank LaMantia, also known as ‘Shorty,’ was one of the lieutenants or assistants to the boss of the enterprise,” the indictment read. “In that capacity he supervised others that were in charge of various income-producing activities of the enterprise. At times he collected ‘street tax’ payments, resolved disputes, and received reports of accounts as to the income producing aspects of at least a portion of the enterprise.”

  A collection of players and associates were caught up as well, including LaMantia’s stepson, Aldo Piscitelli, known on the street as “Shorty Junior.” A man named Joe Wing, or “Joe Eng,” supervised the day-to-day parts of the business in Chinatown, reporting to Piscitelli.

  Angelo LaPietra sat at the top of the food chain of the conspiracy, which the government said went back to at least 1978. And the enterprise they laid out was Mob 101, with various elements of the business propping up other parts in a circle of crime. Gambling was at the center, supported by juice loans, which were collected on under the threat (and delivery) of violence. Different branches of the organization paid street taxes to the mob to operate at all, effectively narrowing the margins for those closest to the action. Using the organization’s bookies was a bad deal to begin with, according to the feds. A loss meant losing the amount of the bet, usually taken on credit, plus 10 percent, while a win brought in just the agreed wager. The juice loans, often taken out to cover losses, cost the mob’s customers 5 percent a week, or 260 percent a year.

  LaMantia was the overall manager, the feds said, while Piscitelli operated like a deputy of sorts. He recruited bettors, controlled the betting lines, and used a “clearing” system to maintain records.

  “This system enabled certain participants in the business to call other participants in order to obtain the bets received by the particular clerks up to that point in the day, to determine the volume of betting activity, to establish a safe location for the maintenance of
the bookmaking records other than the wire room locations and to insure the continued existence of the records in the event that wirerooms destroyed the day’s receipts because of law enforcement raids,” the feds wrote.

  Prosecutors had clearly relied on the work to make the recordings and surveil the ring in the late 1980s, as they rattled off a dozen locations where they had monitored wire rooms or where bets could otherwise be placed. Among them were LaPietra’s Italian American club and the aforementioned local tavern.

  The indictment included specific references to meetings that made it clear LaMantia had been watched for quite some time. “On or about July 1979, defendants Joseph Frank LaMantia and Aldo John Piscitelli, met with an individual at the corner of 26th and Princeton, Chicago, Illinois, for the purposes of recruiting said individual as a wireroom clerk” was just one example.

  One man with the last name of Gallo had been brought before the grand jury and lied about the gambling, the government alleged, even including a few lines of that questioning. “There are a number of tapes from a wiretap at [the local tavern] where an individual identifying himself as Gallo … was placing bets and calling the man on the other end of the phone Pap or Paps, Pappy,” a questioner said. Who was that?

  “I don’t know” was the answer.

  “There are phone calls from approximately the ninth of July of ’88 to the first of August 1988. You did not make any phone calls placing horse bets with anyone?”

  “No sir.”

  Clearly not everyone was going to be eager to testify against the ring connected to the LaPietra organization, but prosecutors were going forward anyway. They also made clear they would attempt to seize proceeds from the gambling LaMantia managed, putting a price tag on it of approximately $500,000. LaMantia ultimately would not challenge the government’s evidence, choosing instead to plead guilty to several of the counts against him, including racketeering and extortion, in 1996. He was sentenced to five years in prison.

  In 1997, LaMantia was still listed among influential mob figures by the Chicago Crime Commission. The group put out a report that year called “The New Faces of Organized Crime,” which detailed the structure of new Russian organizations and so forth. But many of the faces were clearly old. The Chicago Outfit then had three main wings divvied up by geography. LaMantia was listed on a flowchart under “additional members” in the wing that controlled the South Side and Northwest Indiana, listed just under the name of Rocco Infelise in the mob hierarchy.

  “More so than any other criminal organization, the Chicago Outfit relies on protection from an ‘unholy alliance’ between the mob, corrupt police officers and corrupt public officials to survive and perpetuate itself. Without this cooperation, the Chicago Outfit would cease to exist,” the group wrote, noting there were some seventy made members of the group at that time.

  “Individuals who are identified as members of a particular crew do not necessarily know each other. They are aligned with supervisors who ultimately answer to the higher ranking members of each crew, and the leaders of The Outfit in general. Off the street operations are permissible by anyone in the organization. Any person who is paying street tax to organized crime is referred to as ‘spoken for,’” the commission reported. “The Chicago Mob of 1997, like generations before them, is like a serpent that sheds its skin. Its present appearance may be different but, beneath the surface, it is the same dangerous beast.”

  The commission’s description was prescient in some ways. It was ten years before the Family Secrets convictions gutted Outfit leadership. Some defendants in that case argued, apparently truthfully, that they didn’t know other defendants who had been caught up in the same sweeping conspiracy case that attacked the mob as a criminal enterprise with independent moving parts.

  Chicago organized crime figures are infamous for coming up with ailments during their court proceedings in an attempt to gain sympathy or allowances from judges, walking into court with canes or neck braces or casts that tend to disappear when they leave the courthouse. So some might have rolled their eyes in 2002 when LaMantia’s lawyer, the venerable Ed Genson, filed a motion asking the court to terminate parts of LaMantia’s supervised release because he had a heart condition and cancer. The heart condition was one of the main reasons he had pleaded guilty in the first place, Genson wrote, and LaMantia had grown too sick to make it to the probation office.

  But in this instance, the claims of ill health appear to have been bona fide. LaMantia died just months after his request was filed.

  His influence would be felt for at least a few more years. The feds raided about a dozen taverns in Bridgeport in 2009, looking to crack down on video poker machines, before they were legalized in the state. At the time the machines could be played for secret payouts from boxes of cash kept under some bars and controlled by Outfit associates.

  “Authorities believe the video poker machines, which produce illegal payouts, tie back to the operation of the late Joseph ‘Shorty’ LaMantia, a top lieutenant in the Twenty-Sixth Street Crew, which operates in Bridgeport and Chinatown,” Chicago’s NBC 5 News reported in the wake of the raids.

  LaMantia wasn’t there to see the last parts of his gambling business ebbing away. As for his son Rocky, he had his own list of problems.

  At the time of the Bridgeport raids, Rocky LaMantia was in state prison. He had never reached his father’s criminal status, but his name, if nothing else, kept him on the Outfit’s periphery in the minds of some investigators. He had at times slipped into a life of crime, though perhaps without the “organized” part.

  In 1995 he was arrested for possession of a firearm, a file that drew special attention from Sherlock because he wanted to know: What firearm? The gun used to shoot Hughes obviously was never recovered, and neither was the one used to kill Martha DiCaro, for that matter.

  It was April 26, 1995, when a radio call came in about a man with a pistol in the 2900 block of South Federal. When police rolled up, a juvenile appeared and said a guy had gone into an apartment holding a weapon. The cops knocked on the door and found a man and a woman inside. The man was Rocky LaMantia, who would be arrested by the end of the encounter. His occupation in the paperwork was listed as “truck driver.”

  The officers explained why they had been called there, according to a police report, and the woman told them the gun was in a suitcase, pointing to it.

  “[Officers] removed the gun from the suitcase and unloaded it,” the report states. “The owner of the apartment told officers that the arrestee entered the apartment with the gun and told her to put it up for him.”

  But nowhere in the report did the officers note the make and model of the gun, which is what Sherlock was looking for. Could it have been a .32 revolver—the kind of weapon believed to have been used in both the Hughes and DiCaro murders? There was no record of the confiscated gun anywhere else either, and the pistol was probably destroyed.

  Later in 1995 LaMantia was arrested for driving around the West Side impersonating a police officer with an accomplice. The pair would act like they were making arrests and then rob those they took into “custody.” LaMantia apparently needed the money, filing for personal bankruptcy the same year, at age thirty-six.

  LaMantia’s robbery scheme made the Chicago Sun-Times. “Marquette District patrol officers arrested the two about 7:30 PM May 23 after they spotted a gray 1987 Lincoln two-door traveling in reverse in the 3100 block of West Roosevelt Road and pulled it over,” the paper reported a detective commander saying. They had an eighteen-year-old in the back of the car who told police he’d been robbed of cash. LaMantia served a year of home confinement.

  Years later, LaMantia was back in the paper, this time linked to the scandal-plagued Hired Truck Program. Sun-Times reporters Tim Novak and Steve Warmbir had exposed fraud in the program in a series of stories dubbed “Clout on Wheels.” The upshot was that city hall was hiring private companies to provide dump trucks for city jobs at hourly rates. Perhaps not surprisingly, some
of the companies had mob ties, many of the companies appeared to be making campaign donations to get in and stay in the program, and lots of trucks were sitting around doing nothing. Much of the contract money was flowing to companies linked to the Eleventh Ward, which includes Bridgeport. LaMantia’s Dialex Trucking reportedly made more than $400,000.

  Federal authorities were all over the scam, and charges soon followed. The ensuing scandal was politically damaging to then mayor Richard M. Daley, who had placed reputed mob bookie Nick “the Stick” LoCoco—who also had been linked to Shorty LaMantia’s club—in charge of the program as an employee of the Department of Transportation. LoCoco was charged with secretly owning a truck that made money off of the program, but he died in a fall from a horse in 2004 before he could be tried. That sounds like a euphemism, like the time Frank the German was recorded telling an associate that someone had gone to open a hot dog stand in Alaska, but it was apparently true. A fire official in the town where it happened told the Tribune the horse had stopped suddenly and LoCoco didn’t.

  Dialex Trucking eventually disbanded, but years later, state records still listed a onetime company officer with the same last name as Aldo “Shorty Junior” Piscitelli, and an address at what had been the LaMantia home on South Shields.

  Three years later in the summer of 2007, more bad press. Reporters noticed the jowly Rocky LaMantia hanging out at the Family Secrets trial, sometimes in the courtroom and sometimes in the hallway. He wasn’t a defendant; he told some onlookers he was researching a book. But instead of writing it, he was arrested that fall for taking part in the robbery of a pawn shop on Roosevelt Road, a ramp away from the Dan Ryan Expressway in the South Loop.