Former cop accused of pondering which Chicago Outfit strip club owners he should kill
Former Chicago cop Steven Mandell was secretly taped making a business decision, the feds say.
Which of two Outfit-connected strip club owners should he kill?
On one hand there was the “strong guy,” with alleged direct mob ties.
On the other, the feds say, was the “strong guy’s” associate, a pal with no criminal background.
Each had his merits as a murderee.
If he killed the strong guy, the pal
would be so scared he would “s--- all over himself,” making it easier
for Mandell to take over the strip club without police getting involved,
Mandell allegedly reasoned in September, 2012.
But “as you balance,” Mandell was
allegedly recorded saying, if the pal survived, his clean criminal
history meant he would be “on solid ground” if he went to the cops.
It would be smarter to murder the pal
“and his old lady at their house” while their children were at school,
he allegedly decided.
The strong man would “get the message more so than the reverse,” he was recorded telling a confidant.
The calculating coldness with which the
notorious Mandell, 62, allegedly selected his potential murder victims
and expressed a willingness to go “balls to the wall” in a fight with
the Chicago Outfit were detailed for the first time in court papers
filed over the Christmas holidays.
Even by the standards of the former
Death Row resident’s wild life story, the latest filing contains
chilling revelations that seem ripped from the pages of an over the top
Hollywood script.
Mandell — who has done several stretches
behind bars since he quit the Chicago Police Department in 1983 and was
sentenced to death in 1993 for murder, only to have that conviction
eventually overturned on appeal — is due to stand trial in February for a
pair of more recent grisly murder plots, including the plot to kill the
strip club owner.
He allegedly planned to seize the
unnamed strip club by calling the “strong man’s” wife after murdering
the strong man’s pal and warning her to tell her “----ing punk-ass
husband to leave this situation alone or else.
“Cause, I’ll show you what Elmwood Park
really looks like,” he allegedly added in an apparent reference to the
west suburban Outfit crew. “I can get really get nasty.”
Mandell was then allegedly caught on
camera making a throat-slitting gesture and adding that the strong man
and a lawyer who was associated with him might defecate on themselves
when they heard what had happened to the pal and his wife.
The recent filing reveals that the feds
were so concerned about Mandell using his police counter-surveillance
skills that they tracked him by helicopter in October 2012.
A day before he was arrested, agents
were watching from the sky as Mandell entered a shopping mall parking
lot, made “furtive movements” then lay on the ground and fixed a
tracking device to his girlfriend’s car, prosecutors say.
The device, later recovered from the
car, had previously been used by Mandell to track the strip club owner’s
wife, the feds allege.
The feds say they plan to use Mandell’s
willingness to lie to his 82-year-old wife about his girlfriend as
evidence he can’t be trusted.
Mandell, who’s also accused of plotting
to extort then kill a businessman in a purpose-built torture chamber in a
second but unrelated plot, and of trying to arrange the murder of the
feds’ key informant from behind bars since his arrest last year, denies
all charges.
A number of his close associates, including his father, have either been killed or gone missing over the years.
His codefendant in the latest plots, former Willow Springs cop Gary Engel, 61, hanged himself in prison last year.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/24617835-418/feds-say-ex-cop-caught-on-tape-pondering-who-should-he-kill.html
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