General Chicago Outfit Info Dumping Ground

[Snakes]

Also, Funk, sorry I didn't answer your earlier question about the Pacella surveillance. I think I saw that on some court documents from IPSN. If I remember correctly, some of the other guys identified were James LaPietra, Michael Gurgone, Michael Talarico, and Toots Caruso. I'll post the link once I find it.

[PolackTony]

1962 CI stating that the Buccieri crew’s territory included a large chunk of the Near Westside as well as another territory farther West (presumably spanning the City and Cicero). From Tony Pine’s file.



Interesting that the informant didn’t think that Buccieri’s territory encompassed Taylor St. An associate of the Lucchese Family who worked closely with Chicago guys from the Cicero crew in the late 1990s told me that he understood their crew at that time to be called the “Taylor St Cicero” crew, which is how he refers to them (he also said that they answered at that time to “Big Mike”, obviously Spano).

Well that's new. Does he know more recent stuff about them?

The Ferriola/Infelise crew (of which Spano eventually inherited the remnants) was also at times referred to as the Taylor Street crew. This probably came about because Taylor Street was the geographic origin of the crew. Over time, the geographic influence of the crew changed and moved further west, eventually encompassing Cicero and many other far western suburbs, as well as Lake and McHenry Counties. As we also now know, the geographic influence of the crews was fluid, and other districts and neighborhoods changed hands upon death, imprisonment, or loss of power and influence among members. Although we have a general understanding of crews and their "home base" neighborhoods, there is still a lot that we don't know about who ran what at what time and who they reported to, as well as the extent of "shared" territory.

Yup. To be clear, other CIs in Eldorado’s file state that Buccieri’s crew encompassed the core Taylor St Patch and that Eldorado was a “nutcracker” for them with his main base of operations at Taylor and Ashland. What was interesting to me was that even circa 2000, a guy in the position to know still knew them as “Taylor St/Cicero” instead of just “Cicero”, as we tend to refer to them.

At least from Buccieri on, I don’t recall seeing any sources stating that any other crew had territory or even really any operations centered on Taylor St. Nick C stated later that the crew territories were a bit more fluid than people have perhaps assumed, but it does seem to me that at least since Buccieri, his guys and their successors were in control of Taylor St (despite guys like Battaglia and Daddono also being from that neighborhood).

Your last point is an important one. My belief at this point is that people have assumed that Chicago’s crews were more rigidly territorial than they actually were and have also assumed a much more strict continuity between later crews and territories and earlier dynamics than may have actually been the case.

[PolackTony]

Eldorado is one of those guys that seems to have been kind of lost in the shuffle and we don’t talk about him much. To be sure, he comes across as a real animal and not a very sophisticated guy. One of my favorite parts of his file was where the Feds put a warning in underlined text stating that extreme caution should be taken when approaching Eldorado, as he was “very strong” and would not hesitate to attack LE.

[Snakes]

One reason that the crew may have migrated further west is that that was where the money and clientele were. They also had more influence with local law enforcement and it was easier (for a time) to evade FBI scrutiny by basing more operations in the suburbs.

[Snakes]

Eldorado is one of those guys that seems to have been kind of lost in the shuffle and we don’t talk about him much. To be sure, he comes across as a real animal and not a very sophisticated guy. One of my favorite parts of his file was where the Feds put a warning in underlined text stating that extreme caution should be taken when approaching Eldorado, as he was “very strong” and would not hesitate to attack LE.

He eventually faded into obscurity. A guy like him has limited usefulness and it sounded like what influence he did have waned when Buccieri died. The FBI still had him as alive several years after his actual death, which tells me that he wasn't generally known or active in his later years.

[PolackTony]

One reason that the crew may have migrated further west is that that was where the money and clientele were. They also had more influence with local law enforcement and it was easier (for a time) to evade FBI scrutiny by basing more operations in the suburbs.

A major factor driving the movement of clientele to the neighborhoods, and particularly suburbs, farther to the west was the destruction of most of the Taylor St Patch. In the 50s-60s, large swaths of the neighborhood were seized by the City and demolished to make way for big "urban renewal" and infrastructure projects (the Eisenhower and Dan Ryan Expressways, the UIC campus, the Medical Center district, and the ABLA housing project complexes). The Taylor St that I knew as a kid in the 80s was a shell of its former self. Italians in Chicago interpreted the destruction of the Taylor St Patch as a move by the Daley administration to disenfranchise them, and I've seen it stated that people believed that the old neighborhood was destroyed by "the Irish" to keep Italians from ever being in a position to vote one of their own in as Mayor. Taylor St, of course, at least fared better than Little Sicily, which was almost completely wiped out for the huge Cabrini-Green projects (this was obviously a major factor in the slow but inevitable decline of the Northside crew, as by the 70s almost all of the Italians on the Near Northside had decamped to the NW Side and near suburbs). Of the old inner-city "port of entry" Italian communities, only Grand Ave and Chinatown/Armour Square remained mostly unaffected by these huge urban renewal projects, though by the 70s Grand Ave was in sharp decline also as the neighborhood rapidly became increasingly run-down and surrounded by high crime ghettoes.

[PolackTony]

Eldorado is one of those guys that seems to have been kind of lost in the shuffle and we don’t talk about him much. To be sure, he comes across as a real animal and not a very sophisticated guy. One of my favorite parts of his file was where the Feds put a warning in underlined text stating that extreme caution should be taken when approaching Eldorado, as he was “very strong” and would not hesitate to attack LE.

He eventually faded into obscurity. A guy like him has limited usefulness and it sounded like what influence he did have waned when Buccieri died. The FBI still had him as alive several years after his actual death, which tells me that he wasn't generally known or active in his later years.

Agreed. Obviously, they had their reasons for proposing who they proposed (which may be completely opaque and not obvious to us), but if I didn't know that Eldorado was made I'd have just assumed that he was an associate based on a lot of the intel for him. He's described repeatedly as largely just being a "muscle guy" and bonecrusher.

[B.]

What Tony heard from the Lucchese associate is A+ and very telling, that even guys on the lower levels had connections and reason to go there in recent decades. I'm certain a made member like Elmo Amarante didn't go to Harvey, Illinois, without some kind of contact with the local Family.

Tony's aware of this, but Bonanno associate Paul Ragusa was also identified by a very reliable source as having ties to Chicago "despite" the same source saying Ragusa prefers only to deal with Sicilians (his father was a major NYC zip). His family is from Bagheria so it makes sense.

[PolackTony]

What Tony heard from the Lucchese associate is A+ and very telling, that even guys on the lower levels had connections and reason to go there in recent decades. I'm certain a made member like Elmo Amarante didn't go to Harvey, Illinois, without some kind of contact with the local Family.

Tony's aware of this, but Bonanno associate Paul Ragusa was also identified by a very reliable source as having ties to Chicago "despite" the same source saying Ragusa prefers only to deal with Sicilians (his father was a major NYC zip). His family is from Bagheria so it makes sense.

I haven’t been able to confirm if he knew anything about Amarante (he was aware of other crews like Grand Ave at least, but didn’t work with or know any of those guys), but he was at least able to give me a perspective on ongoing NYC-Chicago ties from someone who lived them. In this light, it can be surmised that whatever Amarante was doing exactly, it wasn’t a one-off and it wasn’t likely anything close to NYC guys muscling in on Chicago territory. The guy I know was very matter of fact about these connections, to him Chicago is just another LCN Family like those in NYC (as he said, they were highly respected during his time working with them). When I commented on how the connections he mentioned were a big deal to people like us, he cut me off and was like “look, the connections are what it is”, i.e., those connections are what constitute the mafia and the Families are by nature all connected to each other.

Regarding the Ragusa stuff, as you know this was very important (and entirely unsolicited) confirmation of some of the patterns that I’ve tried to trace out in the Chicago zips thread. Someone who is from that world is very well aware of these ties and brought them up himself as worth noting. And as you know, he also pointed to some other connections to Chicago via Sicilian paesani networks, and was well-aware that a bunch of people from Partanna and neighboring towns in Trapani settled in Chicago following the Belice Earthquake in ‘68. Given what we know about Sal Catalano and Andrea Aiello having important drug links to Chicago, this confirmation goes to show that these, again, weren’t one-offs but rather reflected ongoing connections. As I stated above, there was a lot more going on than we’ve realized.

[Antiliar]

Just added the second release of the Nick Palermo FBI files to the FBI files section

[Waingro]

Anybody know who the Nick is that James Inendino is talking to here?

April 21, 1978, during a conversation, lasting several hours during the evening, with "Nick" on the premises of the Lady Cash Messenger Service, the defendant stated that "All my life, all my life, since I was old enough to steal and rob and kill, and do everything. What I got, clothing, money, cars, home, keeping her up, I got. Nobody ever give it to me." In the same conversation, the defendant told "Nick" that he would like to see "Nick" "have all of Waukegan. All of Waukegan . . . The booking, juice, all, everything illegal out there." In addition, the defendant stated that he would give $500,000.00 if someone could arrange for him to "stay on the street".

(6) On three separate occasions during April, 1978, the defendant and "Nick" engaged in conversations during which they expressed their intentions and hopes to bring improper pressure to bear on a federal judge in order to influence two criminal matters then pending against the defendant. This objective was to be accomplished unlawfully, with "Nick" acting as the defendant's agent.

[Snakes]

Anybody know who the Nick is that James Inendino is talking to here?

April 21, 1978, during a conversation, lasting several hours during the evening, with "Nick" on the premises of the Lady Cash Messenger Service, the defendant stated that "All my life, all my life, since I was old enough to steal and rob and kill, and do everything. What I got, clothing, money, cars, home, keeping her up, I got. Nobody ever give it to me." In the same conversation, the defendant told "Nick" that he would like to see "Nick" "have all of Waukegan. All of Waukegan . . . The booking, juice, all, everything illegal out there." In addition, the defendant stated that he would give $500,000.00 if someone could arrange for him to "stay on the street".

(6) On three separate occasions during April, 1978, the defendant and "Nick" engaged in conversations during which they expressed their intentions and hopes to bring improper pressure to bear on a federal judge in order to influence two criminal matters then pending against the defendant. This objective was to be accomplished unlawfully, with "Nick" acting as the defendant's agent.

Nick Keller, Jr. He was convicted along with Inendino in a federal juice loan case.

[funkster]

1962 CI stating that the Buccieri crew’s territory included a large chunk of the Near Westside as well as another territory farther West (presumably spanning the City and Cicero). From Tony Pine’s file.



Interesting that the informant didn’t think that Buccieri’s territory encompassed Taylor St. An associate of the Lucchese Family who worked closely with Chicago guys from the Cicero crew in the late 1990s told me that he understood their crew at that time to be called the “Taylor St Cicero” crew, which is how he refers to them (he also said that they answered at that time to “Big Mike”, obviously Spano).

Well that's new. Does he know more recent stuff about them?

Not sure. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to talk with him about it again. He spent a lot of time in Chicago in the 90s and said that he was not the only New York guy working there with Chicago guys. Says that NYC and Chicago guys today still know each other at the national level and have contacts with each other (not just the Genovese but all the NYC Families, per this source). He also opined that at least in the “late 90s to the early 2000s”, Chicago had as much or “more respect” within LCN “than New York” (his words), due to the fact that (up until that point) Chicago didn’t have any members who flipped and that the made guys were extremely secretive (“they only deal with their own people and no one else”, whereas NYC guys tend to be too out in the open and deal with too many people) and heavily invested in legit businesses. He likened Chicago to the Genovese Family in the above ways, and claimed that they were seen as having an equivalent status within LCN.

I can also tell you that the guys he knew with “Taylor St Cicero” were people that either I had never heard of or that none of us would’ve thought were anyone. Other stuff that he told me as well that I can’t share. I’ll say that there was a lot of stuff going on that none of us know about (something to always keep in mind with this subject).

Is this a source you’ve recently encountered? Curious if he is still an active associate. Trust him I assume?

[PolackTony]

1962 CI stating that the Buccieri crew’s territory included a large chunk of the Near Westside as well as another territory farther West (presumably spanning the City and Cicero). From Tony Pine’s file.



Interesting that the informant didn’t think that Buccieri’s territory encompassed Taylor St. An associate of the Lucchese Family who worked closely with Chicago guys from the Cicero crew in the late 1990s told me that he understood their crew at that time to be called the “Taylor St Cicero” crew, which is how he refers to them (he also said that they answered at that time to “Big Mike”, obviously Spano).

Well that's new. Does he know more recent stuff about them?

Not sure. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to talk with him about it again. He spent a lot of time in Chicago in the 90s and said that he was not the only New York guy working there with Chicago guys. Says that NYC and Chicago guys today still know each other at the national level and have contacts with each other (not just the Genovese but all the NYC Families, per this source). He also opined that at least in the “late 90s to the early 2000s”, Chicago had as much or “more respect” within LCN “than New York” (his words), due to the fact that (up until that point) Chicago didn’t have any members who flipped and that the made guys were extremely secretive (“they only deal with their own people and no one else”, whereas NYC guys tend to be too out in the open and deal with too many people) and heavily invested in legit businesses. He likened Chicago to the Genovese Family in the above ways, and claimed that they were seen as having an equivalent status within LCN.

I can also tell you that the guys he knew with “Taylor St Cicero” were people that either I had never heard of or that none of us would’ve thought were anyone. Other stuff that he told me as well that I can’t share. I’ll say that there was a lot of stuff going on that none of us know about (something to always keep in mind with this subject).

Is this a source you’ve recently encountered? Curious if he is still an active associate. Trust him I assume?

Relatively recently. Met through a mutual friend. He is to be trusted; this is a very serious guy and I’m being vague on purpose as it is someone who people on this forum will know of. He is no longer an active associate but retains contacts within the network and thus was in the position of being able to confirm that NYC and Chicago guys still very much interact (again, his perspective is that it’s all one “thing”).

[Patrickgold]

Not sure if this has been posted. Good article and video about an Outfit murder in 1987. Goudie actually went to Vegas and interviewed Renato "Ray" DiSilvestro who was an Outfit police officer and later went to Vegas to represent the Outfit there. Not sure if he still active or not. The video shows the interview with DiSilvestro.

https://abc7chicago.com/amp/charles-mer ... /12414911/