Reputed mob boss caught in Chicago

CHICAGO – With a bushy, white beard, dark bags under his eyes and wild, long hair, Joey “The Clown” Lombardo looked little like the feared reputed mob boss who led investigators on a nine-month international manhunt.

Lombardo’s time on the lam ended about 8:10 p.m. Friday on a residential street in Elmwood Park, Ill., not far from his longtime home in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood.

“He did not resist, but he was not cooperative,” Robert D. Grant, special agent in charge of the Chicago FBI office said Saturday at a news conference. “He was a passive individual that seemed to be stunned that he had been found. … The agents had to approach the car, open the door, and assist him to get out.”

At the time of his arrest Lombardo was carrying a suitcase full of clothes, a large amount of cash and a wallet with his Illinois driver’s license and other people’s business cards, Grant said.

Federal prosecutors have charged Lombardo, 77, and more than a dozen others in a sweeping mob case that sprang from a federal investigation dubbed Operation Family Secrets. The case ties the men to 18 unsolved Outfit murders as well as loan sharking and illegal gambling charges spanning four decades, authorities said. All of the men are now in custody or have died.

Lombardo and Frank “The German” Schweihs also are charged with the 1974 murder of Daniel Seifert, a Bensenville, Ill., businessman who was scheduled to testify against Lombardo and others in a Teamsters pension fund fraud case.

Schweihs was a fugitive for eight months before being captured last month in a small town in Kentucky.

Lombardo had been moving every few weeks, staying with trusted Chicago-area associates in what officials called “spider holes.”

“He’s grown a lot of hair; he didn’t want to be caught,” Grant said. “Moving from place to place is very stressful, as Saddam Hussein will tell you.”

Lombardo was arrested while sitting in the front passenger seat of a 1994 silver Lincoln parked in an alley outside a home on North 74th Street, Grant said.

Investigators began closing in on Lombardo recently after attaining “pieces of information.”

“We were specifically looking for him,” Grant said. “We were not there for any other reason other than to find him.”

Grant declined to say what led investigators to Elmwood Park.

“Put it this way: We were interested in that particular location,” he said.

Lombardo spent Friday night at a Chicago police facility and was transferred to the Metropolitan Correctional Center on Saturday, authorities said. He is scheduled to appear in court Tuesday.