Dentist: Toothache led to mobster's arrest
By Jeff Coen | Tribune staff reporter
2:06 PM CDT, August 7, 2007
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E-mail Print Single page view Reprints text size: A toothache led to the arrest of reputed mob boss Joey "The Clown" Lombardo in January 2006, a dentist testified today.
Patrick Spilotro, a Park Ridge dentist and a brother of two men allegedly murdered by the Chicago Outfit, testified that his tip to the FBI led to the arrest of Lombardo, one of five alleged Chicago mob figures in the landmark Family Secrets trial.
In federal court today, Spilotro testified that he provided information to the FBI for more than two decades in a bid to catch his brothers' killers.
While a fugitive in 2006, Lombardo visited Spilotro's Park Ridge office to have a painful abscess treated, the dentist said.
When Lombardo returned for a follow-up visit, Spilotro told the FBI.
"They knew the exact time," he said. Lombardo was arrested in Elmwood Park the same day.
Spilotro said he had known Lombardo for decades, and had often questioned him about why his brothers were killed.
The bodies of Anthony and Michael Spilotro were found in a cornfield in Indiana in June of 1986.
Lombardo always told him that if he had not been in prison at the time the men were slain, it would not have happened, Spilotro said. But at Lombardo's first secret dental visit, the answer changed.
"I recall his words very vividly," Spilotro testified. "He said: 'Doc, you get an order, you follow that order. If you don't follow the order, you go too.' "
The star witness in the case, mob turncoat Nicholas Calabrese, has testified that he followed an order to kill the Spilotros along with a team of Outfit members.
Calabrese has said that the men were killed because Anthony Spilotro, who ran the mob's Las Vegas interests, was acting too independently and bringing too much heat.
Lombardo and four other defendants are accused of taking part in a mob racketeering conspiracy that allegedly included the murders of the Spilotros and 16 others.
jcoen@tribune.com
