A DIFFERENT KIND OF LOVE STORY FOR VALENTINE’S DAY
A different kind of love story for Valentine’s Day
It was love at first sight. As if the heavens opened, the sun broke through the clouds, and bluebirds sang their morning song.
Pauletta Overbeck was smitten by a stranger.
Why she felt the immediate emotional attachment wasn’t exactly clear to her. Not even many years later.
“I don’t know, I can just now feel him standing next to me,” she said, speaking about it in 2015 as she sat in a quiet room at the Sacred Heart Convent in Springfield.
It was easy to believe her. Who dares doubt a century-old Dominican nun?
Rewind to 2003. An anti-gambling activist, Sister Pauletta was 88 at the time. That was when she fell, chastely, for an ex-Chicago Mafioso 33 years her junior. “I just wanted to hug him,” she said.
His name was William “B.J.” Jahoda. Physically imposing, he looked like a cross between the old actors Karl Malden and Walter Matthau and had the panache of a Damon Runyon.
For years, Jahoda had been the genius behind the Chicago mob gambling enterprise run by Ernest “Rocky” Infelise. Jahoda set the odds for the sports betting business that netted the Outfit millions of dollars in the late 1970s and 1980s. He drove men to their deaths. Robert Plummer and Hal Smith were independent bookies who ran afoul of the Outfit and paid for it with their lives. Jahoda didn’t kill them. He just, on Rocky’s orders, delivered them.
Tired of the life and worried that he, too, could fall victim to Infelise’s deadly rule, in the late 1980s Jahoda flipped. He became a government witness and wore a wire. And he was not just any witness. His testimony was responsible for the conviction of 19 Chicago mobsters.
“I don’t believe that I’ve had any witness, in fact, I know I have not had any witness that has been as successful in providing a firsthand view of how people truly involved in organized crime take society’s laws and human life so cheaply,” the late Mitchell Mars, then a federal prosecutor, said at Jahoda’s sentencing in 1993.
U.S. District Judge Ann Williams agreed and spared Jahoda prison time for his crimes.
Jahoda joined the federal witness security program, which gave him a new identity and sent him, for his protection, far away from home. It was during that exile that, ironically, he became a