Inside FBI file of Chicago Outfit boss Joey 'the Clown' Lombardo
CHICAGO (WLS) -- For decades, Joey Lombardo was a court jester, pulling pranks and pratfalls, as he fought to stay out of prison for everything from extortion and labor racketeering to loan sharking and murder.
In the end, he died a solitary and isolated 90-year-old man inside the nation's tightest penitentiary, the SuperMax in Colorado. The FBI file on Lombardo stated the obvious: He was a lifelong hoodlum who thought he had the last laugh.
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An early mugshot of Joseph Patrick Lombardo set the bar for his public personality. Even though "the Clown" nickname stuck, in Chicago Outfit circles, Lombardo preferred the nickname "Lumpy," as a reminder of what he liked to leave behind on the skulls of those he beat up.
Over the years, even the hoodlum himself appeared tattered in some official photos, but he always managed upward mobility in the mob. He eventually took a seat at the table with top Chicago mobsters, which was memorialized in a photo known as the "Last Supper" picture.
In this first installment of a larger FBI file on Lombardo, there are early references to his criminal life, circa 1960s, when he was routinely arrested for illegal gambling and assorted mob rackets, including jewel heists.
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In 1964, a police report stated mob informants feared for their lives and would not testify against Lombardo, who, according to one record, would "frequently carry weapons."
The FBI files say Lombardo became named in an "anti-racketeering" case in 1970, the very same year the landmark federal Racketeering Influenced and Corruption Organizations law went into effect, making Lombardo one of the first targets of the now well-honed RICO Act. He was under round-the-clock FBI surveillance.
Among the names mentioned in Lombardo's file was Daniel Seifert, a father, husband and ex-business associate of Lombardo's, who crossed the hoodlum and was shot dead because of it in 1974.
Lombardo went down in the Feds' Operation Family Secrets case, and his life term became a death sentence. The career Outfit boss died at the SuperMax, his Clown days long gone.
Seifert's murder was one of 18 previously unsolved Outfit hits pinned on Lombardo and other Chicago mob bosses convicted in the Family Secrets case in 2007.
Some of the most important words about Lombardo were not in the file.
"In the end, we are judged by our actions, not by our wit or our smiles. In cases like this, we are judged by the worst things we have done, and the worst things you have done are terrible," said James Zagel, the late federal judge who sentenced Lombardo to life.
