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Joey "the Clown" Lombardo looked perfectly at ease, gesturing and chatting with his lawyers. Dressed in an orange jumpsuit, he fingered his prison-issue wheelchair and joked about the new suit of clothes he would get to wear in court.
"Do I get a haircut too?" he asked with a goombah smile that would not have been out of place in the Sopranos and drew hoots of laughter from his entourage. But for a felon's jumpsuit and the manacled wheelchair, Lombardo could have been passing the time of day time in his local Starbucks on Chicago's Grand Avenue.
Dating back to the days of Bugsy Siegel who brought gambling to Las Vegas and Al Capone who flourished during prohibition, Chicago has been a city dripping in Mafia lore. Robert Kennedy apparently suspected Cuban-and Italian-American Mafia bosses from Chicago of working for the CIA and having a hand in the assassination of his brother after the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion. Two months after he said he would reopen the assassination case, Robert Kennedy lay dead on the floor of the Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel.
In The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, published last month, David Talbot raised questions about Mafia involvement with the CIA and Cuba. He spoke to more than 150 aides to the Kennedys, relatives of ex-CIA agents and anti-Castro exiles and ex-cons, concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald could not have worked alone.
Was the Chicago mob involved in the assassination of Jack Kennedy? Nobody knows, but Americans have a morbid fascination for grandiose conspiracy theories and everyday Mafia plots. Today as a landmark trial opens in the Chicago Federal Court, aficionados are braced for a summer blockbuster that will compensate, in part at least, for the gaping hole left by the ending of the Sopranos on TV.
Appearing this morning in the "Operation Family Secrets" trial will be America's most famous prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who made his name fighting wiseguys before taking on and winning against one of President George W. Bush's inner circle, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for obstruction of justice.
There will also be the flamboyant defence lawyers, shooting from the hip and wisecracking in court.
And there will be the defendants, all of them Mafia "senior citizens".
The crimes hark back to an age when the Mafia was in its heyday, running street crime, murder and extortion in cities like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Las Vegas.
They include the 1974 murder of a federal witness in his own factory. He was shot in front of his wife and 4-year-old son. In another murder a man's headless body was discovered bound inside an abandoned car that had been taken to the pound. Then in 1980 a Mafia killer and his wife were riddled with shotgun blasts on a lonely country road.
Now Lombardo, best known for his courtroom antics, is a 78-year-old invalid best known for courtroom antics. But his record as an alleged hitman, as set out in the federal indictment, is chilling.
At Christmas in 1973, according to Fitzgerald, Lombardo was the trigger man in the killing of a former policeman, Richard Cain, in a sandwich shop.
Lombardo's aim was to take over the pornography business in Chicago then run by Rubin Sternman. He firebombed his warehouse.
Among the eight defendants is Frank Calabrese Sr, another senior citizen who is accused of more than a dozen murders. Frank "The German" Schweihs, 77, is a reputed mob enforcer but has cancer and is so ill that the United States District Judge James B. Zagel ruled last week that he is not strong enough to stand trial.
Lombardo and at least four other defendants are accused of forming the backbone of the Chicago mob for much of the 1970s and 1980s. The accused headed some of Chicago's most feared neighbourhood mob crews: Lombardo ran the Grand Avenue crew; Calabrese the South Side crew; all under the orders of James Marcello, capo of the Chicago Outfit.
Indicted in 2005, the defendants face a rap sheet that includes racketeering, murder, obstruction of justice and running illegal gambling ventures on behalf of the outfit. Central to the case will be two of the American Midwest's most infamous murders which were featured in the 1995 movie Casino.
In June 1986, Anthony "The Ant" Spilotro, the chief enforcer of the Chicago mob in Las Vegas, paid the price of carrying out his own "hits" in Chicago without Lombardo's approval. He and his brother Michael were severely beaten and buried in an Indiana cornfield. The indictment accuses Marcello and others of murdering the brothers. Lombardo, Calabrese, Marcello and the other five defendants pleaded not guilty.
Many of the crimes took place more than 30 years ago and tracking down the accused and extraditing them has taken many years. Two defendants died of old age before jury selection even began.
As many US commentators on organised crime point out, the Mafia influence has shrivelled over the years. The organisation was broken by aggressive prosecutors such as New York's Rudolf Giuliani - now running for the Republican presidential nomination - in the 1980s, just as it past its zenith and Italian immigration into the US was surpassed by that of Colombians and other Hispanics. The real money to be made was in drugs and most of the Mafia families were no match for the ruthlessness of Colombian drug gangs.
Several of those charged in Operation Family Secrets have already entered a guilty plea to avoid a trial. One of them, Nicholas Calabrese, brother of Frank Calabrese, has admitted his role in 15 murders and is expected to be the prosecution's star witness in the trial.
Calabrase will testify that he has been in the mob since 1970, becoming a "made man" after committing an unspecified murder in 1980.
Michael Chitwood, a Philadelphia detective who investigated numerous organised-crime cases, said: "What you see now - in Chicago, in New York, in New Jersey - is not the mob of old. That's not to say there's no more organised crime. But there are no more tough guys."
But the fascination with the mob continues because while films such as The Godfather and TV series The Sopranos drew their inspiration from the mob, they also provided role models for hoodlums to emulate as well as flattering self-images.
Tim Adler's just-published Hollywood and the Mob observes of The Godfather: "It changed the way the Mafia regarded itself and, for many, rehabilitated gangsters into men of honour instead of what they really were - pig-ignorant, violent, sentimental goombahs."
But he sees The Sopranos as symbolic of the Mafia's decline: "By the 1990s, the mob had been pulverised from without and eaten away from within. The mob had grown sclerotic, its salad days long past. The Sopranos reflects this."
- INDEPENDENT
