Jurors have heard testimony about a Judas kiss like the one Michael Corleone gave his brother Fredo in The Godfather.
They've heard about mobsters initiated as "made guys" by getting their fingers cut and having holy pictures burned in their bare hands in secret ceremonies. And they've heard about how those who crossed the "Chicago Outfit" sometimes ended up in the trunk of a car.
The city has been witnessing its biggest mob trial in years, involving five men in their 60s and 70s accused of crimes ranging from loan sharking to 18 murders. Closing arguments are expected to get under way early this week.
The trial has lifted the curtain on the secrets of the mob -- as it was decades ago. Most of the allegations date to the 1970s and 1980s.
But what about today? Experts say the mob is alive and well in the town that was Al Capone's.
ALIVE AND KILLING
"People say, `Look at how old these guys are on trial, it's a geriatric organization,'" said John Binder, author of The Chicago Outfit.
"What you're seeing is just part of the organization," he said. "They're still doing gambling, they've still got some labor racketeering, they've got their hooks into some unions [and] they're still doing juice lending."
A few years ago, plans for a casino in the suburb of Rosemont were derailed amid concerns about mob ties in the village. And in the late 1990s, one of the nation's largest unions, Laborers International, publicly launched an effort to drive organized crime out of its Chicago District Council.
Jurors in the latest trial heard a secretly recorded tape of one of the defendants, Frank Calabrese, talking about collecting "recipes," code for payoffs, in the late 1990s -- while he was behind bars.
CONTROL
"What the trial has made clear is even when they are in prison they continue to exert influence and control," said James Wagner, the head of the Chicago Crime Commission, who investigated the mob for years when he was an FBI agent.
And although the current trial's defendants are aging, others point out that the Outfit still has people ready to step in and take over for the old mobsters.
"They're still there, there's still young guys coming up," said Jack O'Rourke, a retired FBI agent who also spent years investigating the Chicago mob. "And they're still powerful enough to kill guys."
Still, the Chicago Outfit is showing its age, say some who have studied it.
`JUST LOCAL THUGS'
"The Chicago mob used to be big time, and now it's just local thugs like Tony Soprano," said Gus Russo, author of a best-selling book about the Chicago mob titled The Outfit.
"There's no doubt they still have some cops on the take, some lawyers, a judge here and there and labor unions. But now they are just a local mob," he said.
Chicago's mob probably lost some of its power because many of the illegal activities it once made money from are now legal, like casinos and state-run lotteries.
In addition, Russo said: "They had pornography, and now that's big business."
"They've still got the sports betting," O'Rourke said. "They've controlled that forever and it is illegal."
But even that business has changed, O'Rourke said, because they way they collect the money has gotten a bit more genteel than in the old days.
"Now with the gamblers, they don't get tough any more and extort them," he said. "Instead, they're saying, `You can't play any more.' To the gamblers, that's worse than getting beat up."
MISSING WITNESS
Even though some of its influence may be waning, the trial suggests the mob can still pull off the kind of tricks that made it infamous. After rumors that he would testify, reputed mobster Anthony Zizzo vanished last year. Then in January, a deputy US marshal was charged with leaking information to a reputed mob boss about the travel plans of a key government witness.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion