“It’s curtains for you, Lotten!”

Mark Lotten knew his death was close as he walked into the mob’s meeting and was immediately cornered by the boss, Mickie. Lotten had been spying on the mob for the cops. Like Al Capone’s accountant before him, Mark was the financial record keeper who squealed and got caught. “De ding is, Marco, you get to choose how you want to die.” All fifteen mob members laughed.

“I dink you should drown him. Swim with deh fishies.” Mark Lotten was a former cop who went undercover to bring this mob to justice. But luck ran out on him. “Lotten” was his real last name, but the mob knew him as “Marco Luna.” He tried to prepare for his death. He had already written his will and given it to his wife and prepared for everything he had provided for her and his two boys.

Six hours later, the entire mob members tied Mark up and drove their way to the local marina near San Francisco Bay where they rented an old run-down yacht. “Boss, who’s gonna pay for it?” one of the gangster’s asked. “It’s comin’ out of Mark’s account!” Micki exclaimed, laughing hysterically. Everyone else in the mob felt obligated to laugh like their boss or they might suffer the same fate as their victim.

Mickie and only four of his henchmen stepped onto the cheapest yacht they could buy. One of the goons brought a deep pail and another who was tall and strong heaved a large sack of pre-mixed cement and a jug of water. As they put the cement and water down, Mickie turned on the yacht and guided it out of the port to an area a few miles out to sea.

The goons poured the cement and water together in the pail. As it began to get harder, Mickie pushed Lotten next to the pail and forced his feet in. After fifteen minutes, the concrete became too hard for Mark to move his legs and feet. “Are you ready to die?” Mickie asked the condemned man.

Mark looked ahead with a stoic face and said nothing as he prepared his soul for death. For months he knew his death was coming and he was ready to meet His Maker. He looked down at the water which waited for him seven feet down. Mickie and two of his men lifted the heavy pail filled with concrete and Mark in it and threw it overboard.

“Bombs away!” Micki yelled laughing. Mark fell into the water feet down and sunk quickly. The mobsters looked down for a few seconds making sure they couldn’t see him. Satisfied that Mark wouldn’t be a problem anymore, they chatted a minute, congratulating each other. Mickie turned the boat around driving it one hundred feet away closer to the marina. Then they saw large bubbles rising from the ocean. To their astonishment, they saw Mark’s head rising to the surface. Within seconds, Mark’s entire body was seen rising quickly to the surface, moving quickly up through the water. His feet were still weighed down in the pail. The gangsters were immediately spooked as they watched him rising up from the water, moving at least fifteen miles an hour on top of something huge and dark beneath Mark.

“Wh-what is that thing?” One of the thugs said as he saw Mark had landed on the bridge of a large nuclear submarine. As they stared at Mark standing on the bridge of the sub, their eyes opened wide in disbelief. Yet, Mickie wasted no time pulling out a machine gun that was resting on a chair next to him. He opened fire, trying to aim at Mark, but couldn’t get a bead on him since the entire sub was moving quickly upward.

But U.S. naval crew inside the sub heard the pinging of the bullets.

Believing their sub was under attack, two or three members of the crew received immediate orders to launch a torpedo at the “thug boat.” Within a minute a torpedo was launched. When the thugs saw the torpedo moving directly toward them, they knew they were doomed. Right before being blown to kingdom come, they saw Mark staring at them, smiling from a distance, extending his middle finger.

Why have your morning coffee at a chain? When you can have a “taste of the mob” at Caffe Palermo. Housed in a building formerly owned by Al Capone, the Chicago mob boss himself. You will find posters of “Blackstone’, the Vito Brancato PBS film about the original plan to assassinate JFK in Chicago. A plan originated by Sam Giancana, retribution for the Kennedy administration’s stance on organized crime. Chicago natives Vito Brancato and producing partner J. Kenneth Ezra have a big stake in this little mob coffee shop. Why? Because it’s authentic. In these modern times of computers, internet, and plastic surgery what a breath of fresh air to walk into a Coffee Shop where former owner Al Capone kept a business. With a cute Italian momma’s homemade cannoli’s and fresh espresso it’s tucked away in the notoriously mob influenced cities of Cicero and Berwyn, Illinois. If you’re lucky, you’ll have your order prepared by the filmmaker himself, when he’s not filming.

But it goes further than that; these producers seek authenticity in their film ventures as well. “Blackstone” was a short film produced to basically put the “street rumor” into reality. Once some media outlets heard about it, they insisted showing it “as is” on PBS. J. Kenneth Ezra producer says his pride wasn’t broken when asked to release it. “Ok, we make this short film, it’s based on a lot of research and some uncorroborated first hand accounts close to the action. But we insisted that this is just a short. Plus Brancato is a perfectionist and would rather have the full length feature film to show” Nonetheless, PBS loved the realism and obvious truth in the characters, even if we will never know if Giancana really put the hit into action. However, information to confirm such findings is surfacing. In her upcoming book, JFK and Sam: The Connection between the Giancana and Kennedy Assassinations, Antoinette Giancana claims her father, the late Chicago mafia boss, ordered President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Can you get closer than that to the story? Then how did Vito Brancato and J. Kenneth Ezra get this information. Ezra uses his hands to explain, “Being in Chicago, you are around a lot of people that know a lot of people that heard from a lot a people some things.” Other than those “people” recently released information may corroborate the story.

Brancato calls Blackstone “historical fiction” – real characters and events woven with fictional ones to give his story an eerie sense of possibility. For even more “realism” Brancato intercut archive footage of Kennedy at the Blackstone Hotel in the fall of ’62 during the film’s climactic scene. “I can remember growing up on the north side of Chicago, my grandfather and his old Italian buddies in their black pants and white dress shirts, sitting in front of the corner store trading stories from the old country,” recalls Brancato.

Why the coffee? Well, Ken has combined coffee and movies also. Ken is so committed to authentic films he played the part of groom and volunteered to work the craft-service table on the set of “After Freedom”, winner of the Pasadena Film Festival audience award. Director Vahe Babian’s beautiful real story about Armenians adjusting to life in Los Angeles. “If it’s true, real and authentic, I want to part of it. Even if I have to literally serve coffee to everyone on the set. Being part of Brancato’s film continues my journey of authenticity”

Blackstone will be Brancato’s third feature. It is a “fictional” tale of a botched assassination attempt on JFK in Chicago prior to that fateful day in Texas. Brancato hopes to parlay the potential success of Blackstone into King of the Bandits, which he labels “a legitimate epic, a cross between “The Godfather” and “Braveheart”. Bandit is the incredible true story of Sicilian freedom fighter Salvatore Giuliano who rose to national prominence and influenced Italian and American politics following World War II.

J. Kenneth Ezra has worked his way up to producing a package of 10 movies. In the remake of the independent “The Right thing” (see trailer at http://www.razorfilms.com), his partnership with director and writer Brancato gives us an authentic modern viewpoint in the Chicago mob scene. Blackstone gives us a historical viewpoint into the Chicago mob influence. And King of the Bandits an old country authenticity.

Good luck guys,

How do you say it authentically fellas? Ciao!

Alphonse Capone was born in 1899 in Brooklyn, and completed his schooling through sixth grade. Then he joined the street gang led by Johnny Torrio, of which Lucky Luciano was also a member. As a teenager he worked as a bouncer in Torrio’s Brooklyn brothel and saloon, where he was slashed in the face by an irate customer, leaving him with the large scar which gave him the nickname “Scarface”. In 1920 Johnny Torrio moved to Chicago to go to work for his uncle Big Jim Collisimo, and Torrio brought Capone along. With the advent of Prohibition illegal alcohol became the big new mobster industry. In the struggle for control of this profitable business Torrio and Capone murdered Jim Collisimo, and eventually also murdered all of the rest of the opposition standing in the way of their liquor monopoly. In 1924 their murder of Dion O’Banion, the head of Chicago’s North Side Irish mob, led to an all out war which nearly resulted in Torrio’s death. Torrio decided to return east, so he turned his business interests over to Al Capone.

Capone now was 26 years of age, and he controlled an empire of crime worth over thirty million dollars. His chief rackets were illegal liquor, prostitution, and gambling. He had over a hundred employees, with a weekly payroll of $300,000. He had a flair for publicity and became a Chicago celebrity, cheered by an admiring public when he attended ball games or concerts. However, he still had enemies. In 1926 survivors of the O’Banion gang sent a machine-gun squad to Capone’s headquarters in the Lexington Hotel and fired over a thousand rounds; yet Scarface managed to escape intact. The infamous 1929 St. Valentine’s Day massacre of rival Bugs Moran’s gang sent corpses to a Chicagoland hospital and caused a public outcry which forced the Federal government to take steps to shut Capone down. This is when Eliot Ness came to Chicago with his squad of Untouchables.

Eventually Capone was sentenced to eleven years in the Federal Prison at Atlanta. In 1934 he was transferred to Alcatraz, the high-security prison in San Francisco Bay, notorious for its holes (tiny cells in which prisoners were beaten). Prisoners were forbidden to speak, whistle, or sing except during three minutes twice a day at morning and afternoon recreation periods. Entering Alcatraz with his usually arrogance, Capone was put in the hole for extended periods three times – twice for breaking silence, and once for trying to bribe one of the guards for information about the outside. Also, other prisoners made attempts on his life, including a stabbing which sent him to the hospital.

The beatings and scares, as well as the advancing syphilis which he had contracted in his youth, eventually snapped Al Capone’s mind. He would crouch in the corner of the cell and babble in baby talk to himself. He would compulsively make up his bunk bed over and over. When he was released from prison in 1939 he retired from public view and, eschewing Chicagoland assisted living, he moved to a mansion located in Miami Beach. The following eight years his mind wavered between lucid and psychotic. He died in 1947 of a brain hemorrhage, and his body was brought back to Chicago, and is today interred in Mt. Carmel Cemetery.

Eliot Ness is known as the man who got Al Capone, a reputation that followed him throughout his life and exists today in films such as The Untouchables, books such as Torso and Chasing Eliot Ness and the television series The Untouchables from the early 1960s. But was Ness really the man who put Capone behind bars?

What many people do not know is that the main business of Al Capone was beer. He had breweries all over the city of Chicago during prohibition. Although alcohol was illegal under the Volstead Act during this time, bootleggers created what was known as bathtub gin and booze was imported illegally from Canada and other countries. Beer was brewed in breweries, many of them right in the Chicago area and was a big money maker for the man they called Scarface.

Eliot Ness was 27 years old when he started out in his task trying to catch Capone. He had been with the Treasury Department as a prohibition agent for two years at which time he earned a reputation for being honest. While other agents routinely took bribes in order to look the other way, Ness felt it was his duty to do the job he was hired to do. A job that paid less than three thousand dollars a year.

Taking on the biggest gangster in Chicago who, through the money made through his illegal activities such as beer, gambling and prostitution, was able to buy up most of the city, including the mayor Big Bill Thompson, was no easy task for Ness. Knowing that he could not trust anyone in Chicago to help him, he hired outsiders who formed the team that became dubbed The Untouchables in 1930. The moniker came from a reporter after Ness, who knew how to use the press to his advantage, spoke openly about being bribed by Capone.

Although Big Al, as he was often called, went to prison for income tax evasion, for which he eventually pled guilty after trying to bribe the jury pool, Eliot Ness was instrumental in getting the mobster behind bars. During his breweries raids, he and his men would confiscate records and submit them to the Treasury Department. The accountants at the department picked up on the income tax evasion.

Eliot Ness had did hit Capone with five thousand violations of the Volstead Act. However, these were thrown out because of the plea. The prohibition agent also made a substantial dent in the bootlegging activities, particularly the regarding the breweries, in Chicago.

Al Capone – also known as one of Chicago’s most notorious gangster chiefs – had a vast number of retreats and vacation spots where he could unplug from his extremely busy life of murder and mayhem and enjoy a little peaceful R & R. These include St. Paul MN, Hot Springs AR, as well as some lesser known hideouts where he could maintain his anonymity such as French Lick IN, Brookfield WI, Olean NY, Lansing MI, Dubuque IA, and Johnson City, TN. But one of Scarface Al’s all-time favorite stomping grounds were much closer to his home, in Kankakee, since Kankakee Illinois hospital was well known to Chicagoans looking for a good time. Kankakee County’s towns had the reputation in the 1920’s and 30’s as being wide open fun spots where anything went.

The Kankakee County motto was “Just an hour from Chicago, but a world apart.” According to Jorie Walters, a researcher at Kankakee County’s Museum, there is not much written documentation of Al Capone’s influence in the area, but everyone knows the real truth. Walters’ information was gathered from books, history columns in the Kankakee Daily Journal Newspaper, oral histories, and from old museum files. She says that some of the local dives which were owned or frequented by Scarface Al include Bradley Illinois’ Hawaii Motel; a safe house in L’Erable on the Iroquois River which was extremely well fortified against unexpected and unwanted visitors; Nel Clark’s, a brothel in Kankakee which is now called the City Tavern; The Sahara Restaurant on Kankakee’s Fifth Avenue; and the Radeke Brewery, also in Kankakee, which was secretly owned by Al Capone in the 1920’s and 30’s. Kankakee was also the hometown of Fred Burke’s moll. Burke was Capone’s leading enforcer who planned and executed the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in 1929 against Bugs Moran’s gang.

Another of Scarface Al’s favorite hangouts was the Miami Gardens near Peotone Illinois hospital, which was both a bar and brothel in Prohibition Days and is called Edwin’s bar now. Scarface Al had the reputation of being the foremost sampler of the wares he purveyed in his brothels. The Miami Gardens had high, ornate ceilings made of tin, and there was a secret garage with room for twenty automobiles in the basement of the building which is scarred with bullet holes in its walls. It is rumored that gangland executions were carried out in this hidden garage. Another favored hangout was Club 54 Restaurant near the Manteno Illinois hospital (just south of Manteno where Governor’s Highway meets 500E). This restaurant was actually a brothel.

The Lexington Hotel, located on the corner of 22nd St. and Michigan Avenue on Chicago’s South Side, was the headquarters and nerve center of Al Capone’s bootlegging and racketeering empire. Behind the innocent-looking closets of sheets and hotel uniforms were secret doors to stairways leading to dozens of rooms, such as the shooting gallery where Capone and his gangster cronies practiced their aim. Other secret passageways led to Capone’s own medicine chest, and to taverns and bordellos connected to one another by hidden tunnels. Other tunnels led to hatches on the Levee which provided routes of escape for mobsters fleeing from raids by police and rival gangs.

The Lexington Hotel was originally built in 1892 with design by architect Clinton Warren, who had also designed the Congress Hotel. The Lexington was rather hastily constructed of brick and terra-cotta, in order to accommodate the masses expected to come visit Chicago for the World’s Fair in 1893. President Benjamin Harrison once gave an address from the balcony to a huge audience in the street beneath. Al Capone moved into the Lexington in July, 1928 and, registered officially as “George Phillips”, he occupied the luxurious 5th floor suite of rooms. Capone’s office had a view of Michigan Avenue.

In the lobby an armed gunmen in a hotel uniform carefully watched all the front doors, and other guards armed with machine guns patrolled the floors above. From here he directed his far-flung and highly profitable illicit operations until October, 1931 when he was escorted from the hotel to prison. The pinnacle of Al Capone’s success – and also the harbinger of his downfall, was the St. Valentine’s Day massacre of 1929, which effectively wiped out the last of Capone’s gangster competitors, but also brought the wrath of the public and federal government (who sent Eliot Ness to the rescue) down on his head.

Al Capone reputedly had some vaults on the lowest levels of Lexington Hotel where he had stashed his loot away. These vaults were so well-hidden that even Capone’s nearest associates didn’t know where they were. In the 1980’s, after the Lexington’s glory days were long since past, a woman’s construction company looked into the possibility of restoring the Lexington Hotel. Researchers exploring the crumbling ruins of the hotel located sealed rooms where the hidden Capone fortune reputedly reposed.

In 1986 Geraldo Rivera, the well-known TV talk show host, took a live national TV audience to the spot in his immaculate shirt uniform for a modern-day treasure hunt. IRS agents were also in attendance in anticipation of their share of the loot. Rivera’s crew blasted through the 7,000 lb. concrete wall which was thought to be the secret hiding place of Capone’s fortune … but when the smoke cleared, only an old sign and a few empty bottles were found. If there had once been a fortune there, it had long since been taken away.