Chicago – Fourteen reputed Chicago mob figures were indicted Monday on charges of plotting at least 18 murders, including the 1986 hit on the crime organization’s top man in Las Vegas, Tony “The Ant” Spilotro, who was buried alive in a cornfield.
Those indicted included 63-year-old James Marcello, identified by FBI officials as the leader of organized crime in Chicago, and longtime mob leader Joey “The Clown” Lombardo, 75. A manhunt for Lombardo was underway in Chicago.
“The mob takes a hit today,” U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald told reporters in announcing the indictment.
Spilotro, a Chicago mob enforcer, ruled Las Vegas in the 1970s and early 1980s. The badly beaten bodies of Spilotro, 48, and his brother Michael, 41, were found buried in an Indiana cornfield in 1986, eight days after they were last seen alive.
Joe Pesci played a character based on Tony Spilotro in the 1995 Martin Scorsese movie “Casino.”
Prosecutors described the racketeering indictment as one of the most far reaching in the history of Chicago. The charges resulted from an investigation that was code-named Operation Family Secrets and was aimed at clearing unsolved mob hits.
The indictment alleges that 11 of the 14 defendants were involved in a murder conspiracy dating back to 1970 and that seven actually murdered someone or agreed to commit murder. The three remaining defendants were charged with other crimes.
Prosecutors said all of those charged were connected in some way to the Chicago mob. Among those charged were two retired police officers accused of informing one of the suspects about possible mob members who were helping federal investigators.
Federal prosecutors did not say who killed whom and they would not comment about the timing of the indictment after decades of investigation.
“This is the first investigation that I can recall and indictment I can recall that involves so many murders, which really go to the heart of what the LCN (La Cosa Nostra) is, a bunch of murderous thugs,” said Robert Grant, agent in charge of the FBI’s Chicago office.
Agents in Illinois, Arizona and Florida began rounding up the defendants early Monday. The agents found one defendant dead, apparently of natural causes, authorities said. Two of them, Lombardo and alleged mob enforcer Frank “The German” Schweihs, 75, were missing and classified as fugitives.
