Cosa Nostra News

"I’m like an old-time general. They’d better give me some stars.” -- Giuseppe (Joey the Clown) Lombardo, caught on wiretap The Clown He was The Clown, but he was an intelligent clown who read the Wall Street Journal. (FBI agents who knew Joey the Clown Lombardo were amazed by his business and financial acumen.) He also embodied such an extreme paradoxical nature, he almost shouldn't have existed. “[H]e was no clown; he was a deadly killer,” Bill Roemer, the late FBI Outfit investigator, once wrote. “I believe he filled up a cemetery or two," Michael Corbitt, the former corrupt police chief, now deceased, who spilled secrets in a best-selling book once said of Lombardo. Some in law enforcement even found positive feedback to offer. "It’s kind of refreshing to have people like Joey Lombardo out there,” Peter Wacks, a former FBI agent who once helped put Lombardo away said when the mobster lammed it for the family Secrets case. "There are...

UPDATED Joey (the Clown) Lombardo, the wisecracking jokester who was am ong the Chicago Outfit’s most colorful, and deadly, figures , asserts his innocence and decries repressive prison conditions in a letter written in his supermax cell in Florence, Colo. Joey the Clown Lombardo In the letter, which was released this week, Lombardo, nearly 90, writes that his body and memory are both failing. (He’s withstood treatment for throat cancer and has had his gall bladder removed and stents put in.) Sentenced to life in prison about a decade ago when he was convicted in the landmark Operation Family Secrets trial, Lombardo once again claims he was wrongfully convicted and asks U.S. District Chief Judge Ruben Castillo to appoint him a new lawyer. In the letter, reportedly his first public correspondence since his sentencing in 2009, he notes: “My mind comes and goes. All my teeth are out and waiting for the prison to give me false teeth … over 3 months no false tee...

No this is not Javier Bardem; it is "Joey the Clown" Lombardo. We have always been fascinated by Chicago Outfit member Giuseppe Lombardi -- aka Joseph Patrick “Joey the Clown” Lombardo Sr. (born January 1, 1929), who is serving life in prison. Gus Russo indicated  Lombardo may have been the boss or part of a panel of bosses. However, the nice, neat and likely extensively inaccurate Wikipedia entry notes that from 1999 to 2007, "Joey the Clown" Lombardo was consiglieri. Actually, we have seen that title attached to Lombardo in many other stories. Let's say he was a "high-ranking" member and be done with it.

Johnny No Nose.... This has been quite a year for the Chicago Outfit, which saw an historical transition in July in terms of the guy in the big seat.  Johnny “No Nose” DiFronzo , suffering from health problems, was replaced. Meanwhile, Gangland News noted that The Chicago Outfit has been facing a full-court press from law enforcement involving the  FBI  and the Cook County prosecutor's office. Four members of the Outfit's Cicero crew were recently convicted on federal extortion charges. Frank Orlando and Robert McManus  lost at trial on charges of conspiring to extort money for Mark Dziuban, then vice president of sales for American Litho, a printing company in Carol Stream.

Robert Panozzo, 54, Paul Koroluk, 55, Panozzo's son, Robert Panozzo, Jr., 22, Maher Abuhabsah, 33, and Koroluk's wife, Maria Koroluk, 53. Members of a drug-dealing street crew tied to Chicago’s Outfit got their product by posing as police officers to gain access to Mexican Cartel stash houses, which the mobsters then pilfered for drugs. According to the Chicago Tribune , the Mafia crew consisted of four men who are part of the Panozzo-Koroluk Street Crew. The men were known to utilize violent methods, once slicing off the ear of a reported cartel member who lied to them during one robbery. The Outfit-tied crew members were arrested Thursday after investigators set up a sting operation in Chicago’s Hegewisch neighborhood. Robert Panozzo, 54, Paul Koroluk, 55, and Maher Abuhabsah, 33, and Panozzo’s 22-year-old son, Robert Panozzo, Jr., were held without bail in Cook County bond court Saturday.

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