BRAZEN GANGLAND SLAYING
Tony Lombardo’s Loop killing revealed bloody rivalries
Mob leader Tony Lombardo died when he and his bodyguards yielded to the temptation to gawk at an airplane being hauled up the side of a Loop skyscraper during an early fall afternoon.
A crowd greeted the Chicago mobster and two of his underlings as they arrived at the intersection of Madison at Dearborn streets. All heads were bent skyward as workers lifted a small aircraft to an open window on the 11th floor of the Boston Store for a sales promotion.
Mesmerized by the sight on Sept. 7, 1928, Lombardo and his guards were oblivious to a pair of assassins waiting in a business across the street.
“I saw a man come from the doorway of the restaurant and run toward Lombardo’s back,” a witness told police, as reported in the Tribune. “I looked away for a moment and then came the shots and Lombardo fell and then every one started first one way and then another and the men with guns were running around the corner and policemen running toward the men who were shot.”
Lombardo was dead, and Joseph Ferraro, one of his bodyguards, was gravely wounded. “You’re going to die,” an assistant state’s attorney told him in Italian. “Who shot you?”
Ferraro shook his head, signaling his fidelity to omerta, the mafia’s vow of silence.
The other bodyguard, Joseph Lolordo, chased one of the killers, but a police officer grabbed him, mistaking him for an assassin because of the gun in his hand.
It was one of the most brazen mob hits of the bloody Prohibition era. The violence erupted shortly after Lombardo left his headquarters, the offices of the Italian-American National Union, on Dearborn near Madison.
Lombardo headed the fraternal organization, which was first known as the Unione Siciliana. The post was as dangerous as it was lucrative; Lombardo wasn’t the first president to end up murdered. Politicians vied for the influential group’s support, and underworld factions fought over it.
The previous year, automatic shotguns were discovered in an unoccupied apartment across from Lombardo’s Chicago home on Washington Boulevard. “So far as I know, I have no enemies who would want to kill me,” he told the police.
Nonetheless, Lombardo moved to Cicero. After his assassination, reporters went there to ask Lombardo’s wife about the shooting. They realized too late that they were breaking the news to her. She begged to know the details: How serious were his wounds? What hospital was he in?
“With much difficulty a phone call was put through to the Central police station, and the reply came back that he had been taken to the Western Casket company,” the Tribune wrote.
Because the Chicago Archdiocese refused to allow Catholic churches to be used for mobsters, Lombardo’s home hosted his funeral service four days later. Outside, groupings of flowers spelled out “T. Lombardo.” A floral heart towering over 8 feet framed the message “My Pal” and bore a card with the inscription, “From Al Capone.”
Capone, Chicago’s most infamous mobster, “held court in the backyard” during the service, the Tribune wrote. Lombardo was his trusted adviser.
“Look over the hoodlums out there and you may see some of the fellows we want for many murders,” a Chicago police commander said. “Lombardo was a dangerous fellow and there’ll be a lot of dangerous guys at his funeral.”
Though the service was in Cicero, Chicago police showed up. They searched cars for machine guns and patted down mourners.
“There’ll be no trouble taking pictures if you just take crowd pictures,” Capone told the press. “Don’t try to get any close-ups.”
A funeral procession 2 miles long brought Lombardo’s remains to Mount Carmel Cemetery in suburban Hillside. “A male quartet sang in Italian ‘Nearer, My God, To Thee.’ Then the mourners dispersed to go about their business of avenging the loss of their chief,” a Tribune reporter observed.
In the search for Lombardo’s killer, suspicions first fell on Lolordo, the bodyguard who survived the attack. He was interrogated during an inquest. “Lolordo might have been tempted by the pile of gold that undoubtedly would be paid for the murder of either Lombardo or Capone,” the Tribune reported an assistant state’s attorney as saying.
Previously, another mobster, Joe Aiello, had offered a chef $35,000 to put prussic acid, a form of cyanide, in soup intended for Lombardo and Capone.
But some cops said Lolordo was too tight with Lombardo to betray him.
Testing determined that the gun Lolordo was holding when a cop grabbed him after the shooting hadn’t been fired. Ballistics confirmed that another gun found at the scene delivered the fatal shots.
In any case, his fellow mobsters made Joseph Lolordo’s brother, Pasqualino, the new head of the Unione Siciliana. He didn’t serve long.
In January 1929, Pasqualino Lolordo “was slain in his home by three men who ate at his table with him and drank wine with him in his parlor, and who were seen by Mrs. Lolordo,” the Tribune reported. “Later when she was shown a picture of Joe Aiello the widow screamed.”
Aiello and Lombardo had been partners in a wholesale grocery business that provided sugar to bootleggers for making alcohol. But Lombardo’s ascension to president of the Unione Siciliana infuriated Aiello and led him to cut ties.
Aiello left Chicago for New York, with Capone’s men in pursuit, but in October 1930, he was back in Chicago. He gained control of the Unione Siciliana and kept a low profile. On Oct. 23, as Aiello was leaving his apartment on a rare occasion, hit men from a building across Kolmar Avenue opened fire with machine guns. The shower of bullets hit Aiello more than a dozen times.
About six months before Aiello’s death, Chicago police obtained a warrant to go after one of his associates, Frank Marlo, for Lombardo’s murder. But before Chicago authorities could find him, the hit man was discovered dead in Manhattan on Feb. 18, 1931.
“Whoever killed Marlo pumped seven bullets into his chest and mutilated his head as if they tried to scalp him,” the Tribune wrote.
On that grisly note, the hunt for Lombardo’s killer ended. No one was ever brought to trial; only suspicions remained. Capone, who controlled the South Side rackets and feuded with North Side mobsters, ordered the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929 in retaliation for Lombardo’s murder — or so it is believed.
Lombardo was responsible for changing the name of the Unione Siciliana to the Italian-American National Union and admitting non-Sicilian Italians. That surely pleased Capone, whose parents came from Naples on the Italian mainland. But it must have offended some of the Unione Siciliana’s old-timers.
Frankie Yale, the hoodlum president of the New York lodge, resented it, and he had an on-again-off-again relationship with Capone. Could Yale have ordered a hit on Capone’s adviser Lombardo before his own untimely demise?
In its reporting on Lombardo’s killing, the Tribune predicted: “It meant a war to the death between the most powerful Sicilian rulers of New York and Chicago.”
But when all is said and done, one thing is for sure: Lombardo’s murder remains as puzzling as it was on the day when he turned the corner of Dearborn and Madison and said: “Look at the airplane.”