Clown's humor lost on victim's wife, children
He wouldn't give them the satisfaction of a confession
Joseph "Joey the Clown" Lombardo is one of those mobsters who makes it easy to romanticize organized crime.
He has always conveyed a certain playful charm to the public, whether it was cutting an eyehole in a newspaper to hide his face while fleeing cameras at the courthouse or placing an ad to declare his intention to have nothing to do with the Chicago Outfit. His crimes seemed vague and distant.
I've been as guilty of it as anybody, getting a good laugh out of the way the old guy gave the slip to federal authorities when they went to arrest him a few years ago -- then as he hid out for months right under our noses here in the Chicago area.
I realized Monday it wouldn't have been as funny if I had known the family of Danny Seifert.
Seifert's widow and two sons stepped before U.S. District Judge James Zagel on Monday to read poignant declarations about the pain they have endured in the 34 years since masked men beat and shot to death the Bensenville businessman, just days before he was scheduled to testify before a federal grand jury in a union pension fraud case involving Lombardo.
Joseph Seifert said he was just a 4-year-old settling in to play with his matchbox cars and Fisher-Price garage when he saw the killers "chase my father like a pack of hungry animals" before shooting him, his last memory of his father being the sight of his body lying twisted on the lawn.
"I wonder if I ever said goodbye," Seifert said as he struggled to control his emotions while explaining the demons that have haunted his family every day since, most important the fear and the inability to trust others.
The demons caused his older brother, Nicholas, to leave home and drop out of sight for 15 years, and Nicholas admitted to the judge he often "felt like a coward" for not avenging his father's killing.
In the years after their father's death, Nicholas Seifert said, he and his siblings were treated as outcasts for the way their father died. Other kids made fun of them and didn't want to play with them, he said.
He would often walk from Bensenville to the cemetery in Elmhurst to spend time at his father's grave. Even now, he thinks about how his father never got a chance to advise him about money, business, girls, even how to tie a necktie.
Lombardo, 80, strained to hear them from his wheelchair, showing interest in what they had to say but not sympathy. His concern was for himself as he waited for Zagel to pass sentence for his 2007 conviction in the Family Secrets mob conspiracy trial.
Lombardo went to some trouble 34 years ago to establish an alibi in Seifert's murder, and it violated his sense of fair play that it wasn't going to keep him from spending the rest of his life in prison.
The geriatric mobster once reputed to be an Outfit boss rolled his wheelchair to the lectern before Zagel, then pulled himself to his feet to read aloud from a police report that placed him at a Northwest Side pancake house the morning Seifert was killed.
In the report, a Chicago Police officer stated Lombardo approached him in the restaurant to report his wallet had been stolen from the glove box of his car while he'd been having breakfast.
Lombardo said he went afterward to the secretary of state's office to renew his driver's license and read from an affidavit that placed him there as well.
He also had a statement from a private investigator, Anthony Pellicano, who later gained notoriety in Hollywood, swearing he had located the waitress who had served Lombardo that morning.
It was all very convenient. Lombardo called it "documented positive proof of my alibi," and in another day and time, it might have worked. But Lombardo wasn't allowed to present the evidence at trial.
"I was not given a fair trial," he grumped to Zagel.
Lombardo paid lip service to the Seiferts, saying he was "sorry for the loss then, I'm sorry for the loss now."
But he wouldn't give them the satisfaction of a confession.
"I did not kill Danny Seifert and had nothing to do with it, before, during or after," said Lombardo, who was tied to the crime most convincingly by a fingerprint found on a title document for one of the cars driven by the killers.
Zagel said he believes Lombardo felt he was "engaged in a kind of game" with authorities and drew satisfaction from playing it well, which sums it up nicely.
Then the judge provided some measure of justice to the family of Danny Seifert, sentencing Lombardo to life behind bars.