Crook CountyKenny witnesses American Airlines Flight 191 crashing out of O’Hare Airport killing everyone on board and reveals a newfound purpose. Things take a dark turn when a girl disappears and Ken takes matters into his own hands. The Turf Wars rage in the streets of Chicago.
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Previously on Crook County, Kenny got some new orders, so.
Not only working and running whorehouses, I'm doing occasional hits on the site, all right ordered hits.
And we met a new boss.
Big Fat Pollie. He always gave me my assignment.
Kenny's twin brother, Rich revealed an abusive childhood.
I remember eating dog food because I was so damn hungry. You know, some of the torture stuff I wouldn't. I never speak of it ever.
And remembers Ken as a troubled kid.
You could see why he could be an enforcer because he just had that mentality, very violent mentality.
My name is Kyle Tequila. Welcome to Crook County.
There was up evil in the synding in the outfit. At that time.
The clubs were being taken over by different factions drugs.
There was a there was a big turf war for drugs.
There was a lot of upheoval at that particular time, so I was able to backdoor my shit out at that time.
Episode six. Fire in the Sky.
They're reporting this afternoon on the worst commercial air disaster in the United States commercial aviation history.
There was a plane that went down in Chicago at DC ten that I actually witnessed.
This plane going out.
At o'hairfield, Flight one ninety one, American Airlines bound for Los Angeles. The account of possible disaster victims is ranges from two sixty three up to two hundred and seventy nine, some as high as two hundred and ninety.
In nineteen seventy nine, the tragic crash of American Airlines Flight one ninety one.
Shocked the hew Hill is now in position at o'harefield to give us our first direct on the scenes report.
You're standing at the oasis on the Toll Road overlooking the seed of this crash. There are no survivors, No survivors.
Ken was leaving a shift at the club and stopped to pump gas at a station near O'Hara Airport when he witnessed the plane make a cartwheel in midair and nose dive into the ground shortly after takeoff.
Many rescue vehicles leaving the area, more coming in fighting rush hour traffic to get there. Just an unbelievable sight. Hundreds of people milling around wishing that they could help, wanting to help.
I'm sure, but the heat is.
So intense from the smoldering wreckage it's almost impossible to get close to some of the areas of the plane that are left.
The scene left an enormous impression on Kenny's mind, and over the course of the next few months, an idea began to form that maybe one day he could be a firefighter.
It's just like I saw all the fire trucks, the police, everybody converging in on this.
I'm like, Dad, I'd be a cool job, dude.
They are still taking bodies out every few minutes. The firemen are still here. All of these emergency emergency personnel quite dedicated to the task, highly professional people, but of course touched by the emotion of this this day and this night.
So I just did a little bit of research. And back then research he had to go to a library, you know. So I did a little of a research, and I knew I did not want to be in the outfit of my whole life. It's just I just knew I didn't want to do that. And even though I was on natural but I just simply didn't.
Want to do it.
But it was only an idea, and a crazy one at that. He was deep in the outfit and there was no way they would ever let him go. So he put it behind him and went back to work.
But I always knew, and this is kind of a and this is kind of bizire, but I always knew that the less I knew, the better chance I had of surviving. Now we flipped that coin. I'm doing hits, all right. You know that's knowing too much. So I'm in the mode of, you know, don't get nosy, don't ask questions.
Do your job and go home.
However, I guess the people that are attracted that business and are in their business are not There's no paper trail. And back then it was strictly papers, no computers, and I had strictly paper. And if you didn't have a paper trail, you didn't exist. These people were living, they were tangible, They ate, they breathed, they did bad.
Things, but they didn't exist.
Everything was done with cash, you know, Like I said, you walking to a goddamn car dealer and nineteen seventy nine and buy a fucking Coop Deville for twelve thousand dollars cash, because that's all they wanted was cash. And no one's asking any fucking questions. You know, I'll give a fuck who this guy is. Here's your application, Well, I mean, whatever you're filling out there, use whatever fucking name you want. You know, I got that cash in my hand, baby, it's just packed right there. So it's a cash world. No one's asking questions now that you can never do that now, that's impossible.
You can't.
You can't live like that now.
And you can't get away with the stuff that we got away with.
Now it would be impossible.
I asked Chicago Tribune reporter Jeff Cohen to weigh in on this general period in the outfit.
To Chicago in the seventies and the eighties, you're still dealing with the leftover organization of basically the Compone era. At that time, it was still very kind of a top down organization. You still had major bosses, You had the Tonyocardo characters who were running the outfit. And it was that leftover organization, the organization that came out of prohibition and was able to gain a foothold in Chicago by having tentacles that went into government and went into the police department and went into unions that allowed them to sort of operate with impunity, and they weren't afraid of law enforcement because a lot of times they had the good enough control of law enforcement that they didn't really need to be fearful of that, and so that let them expand into basically almost all manner of life in Chicago. There were certain neighborhoods where you couldn't even open up a hot dog stand without getting some kind of the permission and or street loan from somebody who would then have a piece of that business going forward. So you had money moving through the city at all levels that they controlled through legitimate businesses and definitely through illegitimate ones.
As the years dragged on, the image of the plane crash still haunted him, and he found himself no longer able to suppress the urge to move on from the outfit.
Yeah, the reason I was the reason I remember that plane crash so much is because that's when I decided I wanted to be a paramedic firefighter. You know, I figured that's my career. Now, I'm going to do this because I don't want to do what I'm doing. Everybody that worked in that business, that was their career and their minds, that's what they were going to do forever. I knew that that's just that's just not going to happen. It's just it can't happen.
Ken had made up his mind and put a plan in place to eventually leave the outfit. With his current responsibilities taking up most of his time, he knew it would take years to finish all the classes required to get his paramedic license before he could even begin to look for a job, but none of that would even matter without the approval of the higher ups, which he knew was impossible. So he went back to his old boss, Mickey, the maid guy, who first saw potential in a young kid who had robbed his nephew and offered him a place in the outfit.
I was young, I still had a chance to get out, and he's kind of liked me, and he knew that would not be a look life for me, so he kind of encouraged me on the side to just you know, go ahead, get your education, all right.
But so he was like a mentor.
Yeah, he was like a fucking fu mentor.
So yeah, yeah, I mean he was like, you know, I mean I looked at him like a dad.
Yeah.
I asked Jeff if he's ever heard of anything happened like this before someone getting out of the mob.
I have a couple of friends who, as you know, everybody in Chicago kind of knows somebody who knows somebody kind of thing where there were these two sons and their dad was a Chicago police officer and also basically like the sub boss of Kimiski Park. So all the concessions going in and out of Kimiski, they controlled it, and they would skim it and take money out.
Of the ballpark and blah blah blah.
So they allow some of that to happen for the reason that you said, I think in episode one where somebody who has value who's going someplace, they allow them to kind of do that because they think it's something that they can use in the future. So when I heard you tell that story, I was like, Yeah, that's kind of a thing they let They let some people go.
So, with the green light from Mickey Ken hit the books, I.
Start studying to be an EMPT paramedic. All right, I get my EMT. I could take the fire department test anyway. Anyway, So I go through that trade. I am working in the outfit, and I'm studying to be an EMPT because I want to get out of a fire department. I want a career, I want to get out of this business.
But he was still years away from passing any tests, and I still had a job to do managing the club, and that responsibility came before all else.
So I remember working the front door of the whorehouses and studying my EMT bush. While I was working the front door at the whorehouses, I distinctly remember that they thought I was nuts. You know, what the fuck you want to do that for? Let's go out and party, you know, I just told them, listen, I got.
More important shit to do.
Okay, more important to me, so and I think they respected that. So I think they impressed the bosses too, you know, because I wasn't.
I wasn't doing what everybody was doing. I was trying to move on.
Part of that responsibility included hiring new girls, and one new girl in particular, lit a fire and Ken that almost cost him everything. Over the years, while Ken was working the club, he had seen hundreds of girls come in and out of the business. Some lasted longer than others, but many of them would be there one day and gone the next. It seemed to be the nature of the trade. But every now and then a girl would show up that seemed different than the rest, somehow out of place in this cruel, dark world they occupied. One of those girls was named Honey.
Honey. Honey was my girl, you guys, Honey was the best man Like, we just hit it off. I can't explain it.
Just one of those people you could sit on and talk with and just have a conversation for hours without even having to think about what you're going to talk about. Or he could just sit there and talk about nothing and feel just as comfortable.
Just as safe, as peaceful as having a great conversation.
She was just one of those people who I felt really, really comfortable with, and she felt very, very comfortable with me.
She must have been special because Ken was breaking one of the cardinal rules of the business. Never get emotionally involved with the talent.
We would date. I dated her.
I feel like, I'll be honest with you, I think I fell in love with her. I really do.
I think I fell in love with that girl. I asked him what she looked like. Yeah, kind of short.
I don't know, maybe five four little baby doll cuts, you know, short bangs, you know, down the sides of the cheeks, back of the cheeks, and then cropped up on the neck. You know, just I don't know what they call them, baby dolls. I used to call them baby doll cuts.
She wore red lipstick drove me insane. Red lipstick drives me insane. She wore it all the time.
And she had those sparkling, beautiful eyes, so you could swim in them.
I could just dive go swimming in her eyes. And that smile. Man, that got me every fucking time. It's a great girl.
Ken knew he would need to tread carefully with Honey, but the attraction was too strong. They were lovers and friends and would spend many nights confiding in each other.
She would and I would come to work, you know, stressed out because I was in school a lot, and I you know, I knew I had to work of late shifts and you know, it's tired. But I'd walk in the door and she would be waiting for me. Man, she was always so loyal, and there she would just I'd see that big smile on her just, you know, just everything went away, all the bad stuff went away.
But Honey wasn't the only woman in Ken's life.
I was seeing Honey when I was dating your mother, Kyle.
We weren't married. We were dating, and we.
Would for quite a period there, just like all people when they first start dating. Maybe not all people, but in our particular case, we would break up for a time and then get back together. Would break up for a time, get back together, and for a couple of years there. Your mother and I broke up, and that's when I did a lot of this mobster work. We did a lot of it when she was when I was broken up with her.
I asked my mom what she remembers about these years if.
We got married when we were engaged at nineteen and twenty, I would have been divorced at twenty two. But the relationship kept coming back, back and forth back. It was like we would break up and he would see people and I would see people, and we would be like in a bar at the same time. He was somebody and I was somebody. But it kept going on for eight years.
The simple fact is Holly was a civilian, an innocent, and not a part of this life. So Ken continued to keep a wall up between his two worlds, but Honey was on the inside, and he could be himself around her. With Honey, there was nothing to hide.
She was one of a kind.
I don't think I met anybody ever like her, even even your mother, who I got along.
I loved your mother.
I still love your mom, but it was just it was a difference. It was different, I think because we were both doing that stupid work.
She was a horror I was running a whororhouse. You know.
I think I think we had that little thing in common. She was a soulmate, you know, almost like a soulmate, like a companion. We both escaped together, us together. Yeah, I was her escape and she was my escape, absolutely, yeah.
And there was certainly a lot to escape from during this period in the Outfit. The growing popularity of cocaine in America had given rise to powerful and violent drug cartels, which led to intense warring among rival organizations with origins from all over the world competing for the same Chicago turf. There were gun battles in the streets, an attempted takeovers of Outfit businesses all across the Chicago Land area.
There was a couple of attempts to take over the clubs.
There was a Russian group of Russians, maybe Ukrainians, maybe Georgians, I don't know, Eastern European and they were coming into to take over the clubs, not just ah, not just the club I was working, but the clubs in that whole area there. And dude, I don't know what is going on here, I really don't. They just appeared and yeah, yeah, it was a fucking gun battle that broke out. I mean I remember, I remember yanking my peace and coming right out of right right over the top of my desk and just.
Unloading, just unloading on the mouth.
The guy that was talking doing all thought. I just filled him up full of lead. His whole face was loaded up, and I don't think the guys were expecting that. So they pulled their pieces, but they left, They turned around and ran.
They didn't stay.
And I don't know why they could have had me because I was I only had a couple of shots left and then I had to make a phone call. We had to get them out of there. So some people came and wrapped them up in clear plastic. I don't know why clear plasts, but he was clear plastic for him, cleaned up the mess and took him where they took him, put some buried them some foundation somewhere because we had construction companies.
We would pay to.
Put our bodies into foundations that they were working on nothing no no residential stuff, but all commercial stuff.
And they were on the payroll and they got paid.
You know, it'd be a it'd be a midnight poor you know, they put the lights up and bring a truck out and midnight poor.
They'd be pooring a concree we at two o'clock in the morning and we'd be dropping bodies.
So yeah, I mean everything was pre arrange, you guys. Guy's got to realize it's a business man. It's a business And a lot of people had their fingers in the pie, all right, so called legit people and so called not legit people.
All right.
Everybody had their fingers in the pie. Everybody was getting a piece, all right. And that's what kept the piece, because everybody was getting a piece.
Sixty seven year old Roy Williams, head of the powerful Teamsters union, guilty on all counts. Fifty nine year old Allan Dorfman of suburban Deerfield, guilty on all counts. Dortmund of Chicago, insurance executive and former consultant to the Teamster's pension fund as close ties to the crime syndicate. Fifty three year old Joseph Joey that Clowned Lombardo Lombardo of Chicago, guilty on all counts. Lombardo has been identified by federal investigators as a high ranking member of the Chicago crime syndicate. Lombardo, who had never been convicted.
Of him The nineteen eighties was a tumultuous time for organized crime in America. The FBI had ramped up efforts to fight corruption and the mafia stranglehold on local governments, labor unions, and law enforcement.
Forty five year old Thomas O'Malley, a former Chicago policeman, guilty on all counts. Messa and the other four defendants face up to fifty five years in prison.
Unprecedented cooperation across major federal agencies led to many high profile prosecutions of mafia bosses, corrupt government officials, and crooket cops all over the country.
The message from this jury is quite clear and that at least in this district, but that conduct charged in the indictment, when proven by the government, will not be tolerated.
On top of all this, the turf wars were still raging.
There was up evil in the outfit at that time. The clubs were being taken over by different factions. Drugs, there was a there was a big turf war for drugs. There was a lot of up evil at that particular time.
All this chaos was taking its toll on the power structure of the organization, and a feeling that this could be the beginning of the end permeated the outfit.
The Chicago Outfit had, especially in the seventies and eighties, still almost like a corporate type of structure, where you had you had a singular boss, you had almost like a board of directors, guys who were close to him who would go and make some of the key decisions. And then underneath them you would have people at the coppo level or people running individual street crews, and then under them you might have lieutenants who were kind of like their their bosses on the street.
You would direct you know, groups of six, seven, eight made guys who are really in the organization, and then beneath them they might have all sorts of different associates and operators who were a part of the organization but not plugged into that level, but they would still do the bidding of crew members or especially a street crew boss. So you had this kind of corporate hierarchical structure, pyramid type structure. And so when you have a conspiracy case that kind of chops the head off the snake. The organization tends to sputter and scatter.
People at all levels of the outfit and or panicking. Some turned government informant and entered witness protection. Other staged bold robberies or assassinated high level operatives.
The whole way that the outfit operated, which was to try to be in the shadows. Nobody really knows what's going on, kind of directing things behind the scenes. That started to become impossible when surveillance got so much better. They're sort of traditional struct sure just kind of became possible to run without bringing major, major heat, and so it just kind of it crumbled into looser groups.
They were turning on each other and fear and bodies were dropping. Nobody knew what would happen next, and nobody was safe.
Eventually, Paul started taking a leg in the honey and there wasn't a whole hell of what I can do, man, But you know, she was a pro, so she.
Did what she was supposed to do.
He was hitting on her, physically abusing her, and you know, we talked about it, but there was nothing I can do, and there was nothing she could do.
He was you know, he's a.
Made guy, he's a boss, but he was out of line doing that. You're not supposed to do that in our business. You're not supposed to do stuff like that. So he was fucking up. Made guy or not, he was fucking up man. And eventually it was going to catch up to him.
But the abuse continued, and Kenny Helpless could only watch as it happened.
Then one day Honey disappeared. He disappeared off the map. She was there one day and gone the next. And I fucking knew that fucking fat, greaseball bastard I had something to do with it. I didn't give a fuck at that time. I was angry. I took care of that bastard myself.
Ken could never prove what actually happened to Honey. In the same way it's possible that Pollie was involved in her disappearance. I suppose it's just as possible that she simply ran away from the abuse and is still out there somewhere. I have no way of knowing the time. Ken had his suspicions, and he made his choice, and he would deal with the consequences if they came.
I have some heat on me for a while for nothing ever happened with that. Nothing ever happened with that. They weren't worried about me at that time. There was a lot of changes going on, so I was able to back door out.
And I knew that, so I backdoored out of that shift. Perfect timing for me.
Maybe it was because of all the turmoil taking place at that time, or maybe Kenny just got lucky. Either way, it seemed he had dodged a bullet. So he continued his studies and looked forward to the day he could leave this hell behind.
I don't know what happened to her. I miss her, you know.
She was quite a girl, man, and now a new problem had just walked in the front door and put a gun to Kenny's head.
I'll split your fucking head open again because I'm fucking stupid.
I don't give a fuck about jail. That's my business, that's what I do.
Tony Splatchro came in and I recognized him. I know who he was.
In the movie Casino, Joe Pesci played him just so he got an idea what.
A guy is.
Tony the ant Spilatro was a feared enforcer who rose to great power within the outfit.
I never talked to him before, and I never introduced to him before, but I know who he was.
He was a legend. Basically an asshole, but a legend.
In the seventies, he was sent to Las Vegas to head up the organization's ambitions in the growing casino industry.
I don't know whether you notice or not, but you only have your fucking casino because I made that possible.
He was famous for a short stature and even shorter temper.
Little guy. I don't know why he was such a beast. He was little, Oh grease ball.
Wait the fuck you get off talking to people about me behind my deck, going over my head your fucking warrant.
Don't ever go over my fucking head again.
You mona fuck are you? He was violent and unpredictable, but ultimately successful in racking up huge earnings for the outfit. He was greedy and ambitious. He ran a gang of thieves who would break into hotel rooms, wealthy estates, and jewelry stores. Murder rates in Vegas had spiked to unprecedented levels since his arrival.
Man by the name of Tony Spilatro has attracted the attention of law enforcement officials, some of whom thinks Palleatro is the most cunning and dangerous member of the crime syndicate.
By the end of the nineteen seventies, Spilatro would become a loose cannon and his illegal antics were becoming public knowledge and attracting heat from local and federal law enforcement.
Spilatro would eventually be linked to as many as twenty five mob related killings witnesses died.
In December of nineteen seventy nine, the Nevada Gaming Commission officially blacklisted Spilatro, which legally barred him from entering any of the state's casinos, the very ones it was his job to oversee. He would spend the next several years going back and forth from Vegas to Chicago, wreaking havoc and asserting his dominance wherever he could.
So he came in and wanted to take over the clubs. He was going to take over the clubs. He stuck a gun right in my fucking head. He says, I'm taking over these clubs, and I says, okay, these are your clubs, because I was gonna have I was just gonna end up working for him anyway.
I didn't care who random clubs.
Just let me finish my job so I can finish school, get a job, and I don't care who.
I work for at that point.
But Ken never saw Tony again, and he never did end up taking over the club, but his reign of terror continued. In nineteen eighty three, around the time he stuck a gun to Ken's forehead, he was tried for the brutal murder of two Chicago gang members.
He was acquitted. There were at least fifteen other arrests, not a single conviction. Law enforcement officials had yet to beat Spilatro in court. A longtime Chicago mob observer reported.
Some predict Tony will take a big fall someday, but it hasn't happened yet. So far, Spilettro has lived a charmed life.
But that charmed good luck was soon coming to an end. In nineteen eighty six, the outfit had had enough of Tony the ant Spilatro and his crew, and orchestrated a mass hit of nearly a dozen mobsters, including Tony and his brother Michael, a hit made even more famous by its brutal depiction in the movie Casino.
He Found him and his brother The found him in Indiana, all baseball batted up, buried in a shallow grave in Indiana.
With dozens of crime figures from Chicago, New York and other cities recently convicted or indicted, there may be a shortage of mob men available who could run Las Vegas's rackets as profitably and as efficiently as federal authorities believe Spilatro did.
You couldn't asked for better timing to get out of the outfit than what happened there, with all the chaos that was going on.
You know, I was already in for eight nine years.
By then, so I knew that was my cue, and I took it, and I was gone.
I was gone.
Next week on crow County.
Just when I think I'm getting away from the shit, I'm covering up thirty fucking cops who are out there murdering fucking people and a million fucking years that I ever think that's gonna happen. I mean, I mean, who even thinks of shit like that?
Crook County is a production of iHeart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV in association with Common Enemy. All episodes are written, produced, and hosted by me Kyle Tequila. Executive producers are Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay. Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set. Main title song is called Crush by the band Starry Eyes. End credit song is called Aloha, also by the band Starry Eyes. Sound mix by Cooper Skinner. Thank you to Orren Rosenbaum and the excellent team at UTA for their support, and to my fearless attorney Wendy Bench for her guidance. To stay updated on all things Crook County, follow us on all socials at Crook County Podcast, or leave us a voicemail by visiting crookcountypodcast dot com. For more podcasts like Crook County, search Tenderfoot TV on your favorite podcast app, or visit Tenderfoot dot tv. Thanks for listening. The story continues next week.
Polls, frings, Fist Experience
