The Washington Post reports:
Experts say the mob is alive and well in the town that was Al Capone's.The Chicago Way.
"People say, 'Look at how old these guys are on trial, it's a geriatric organization,'" said John Binder, author of "The Chicago Outfit."
"What you're seeing is just part of the organization," he said. "They're still doing gambling, they've still got some labor racketeering, they've got their hooks into some unions (and) they're still doing juice lending."
A few years ago, plans for a casino in the suburb of Rosemont were derailed amid concerns about mob ties in the village. And in the late 1990s, one of the nation's largest unions, Laborers International, publicly launched an effort to drive organized crime out of its Chicago District Council.
Jurors in the latest trial heard a secretly recorded tape of one of the defendants, Frank Calabrese Sr., talking about collecting "recipes," code for payoffs, in the late 1990s _ while he was behind bars.
"What the trial has made clear is even when they are in prison they continue to exert influence and control," said James Wagner, the head of the Chicago Crime Commission, who investigated the mob for years when he was an FBI agent.
And although the current trial's defendants are aging, others point out that the Outfit still has people ready to step in and take over for the old mobsters, known as "Mustache Petes."
