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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

I'm trying to write less and less about organized crime but this is worth showing you

 The guy in this film is Mad Sam DeStefano, a true lunatic and murdered. Not a member of the Chicago mob.....he ran his own operations but paid the Outfit to operate, he was truly dangerous and crazy. Mobsters were afraid of him, which isn't good. Mobsters tend to murder people who operate outside the law and who scare them.

Below is some stuff I wrote about him years ago.














(Chicago) DeStefano, Sam: AKA Mad Sam. (Chicago)  Gangster. Like most of the hoods that controlled the Chicago mob in the 1950s through the 1970s, DeStefano came out of the 42 gang, but unlike most of the other members of the gang, DeStefano wasn’t born in Chicago’s little Italy. Rather, he was born and raised in middle class surroundings in southern Illinois and moved to Chicago while he was a teenager.

There was little doubt in law enforcement or underworld circles that that DeStefano was completely insane. Rogue cop Tommy Dorso, told the FBI, “DeStefano is not normal. Mentally, physically or spiritually... and he knows it.”   Dorso went on to say that he once saw Mad Sam roll on the floor, spit running from his mouth, begging Satan to show him mercy and screaming over and over again, “I’m your servant, command me.” [1]

In the basement of his expansive home at 1656 North Sayre Avenue in Chicago, DeStefano had a complete, soundproofed, torture chamber. On the wall was a wooden cabinet where DeStefano kept his weapons of choice, razor sharp ice picks, with which he used to stab his victims in the groin and ears.   When a Chicago restaurant owner named Adler fell behind in his payments to DeStefano’s juice operation, Destefano kidnapped him off the streets, dragged him to his basement and stabbed him with his ice picks, killing him and then dumping his body in a sewer drain a few blocks from his house.  Police found the body was that in the spring, the sanitation department was trying to unblock the sewer, which had backed up and yanked out Adler’s body, which was perfectly preserved in the ice.

On September 26, 1955, DeStefano was called at his home by a syndicate hood and told to take his brother Michael, a known drug addict, out of a Cicero casino where he was causing a problem. DeStefano went to the casino, took his brother out to his own car and shot him in the head five times. Then he drove his brother’s dead body to their brother Mario’s house, in Cicero, where he stripped the body of its clothing, scrubbed it clean, dressed it in new clothes, put the body into a car, drove it to a street corner in Chicago, went home and phoned the police and told them where the body could be found.

The mobs leadership over looked DeStefano’s madness because he produced enormous amounts of money for the mob. In the mid 1950s, when mobsters considered loan sharking beneath their dignity, DeStefano leaped into the business and cornered the market. The bosses, Ricca, Accardo and Giancana, invested one hundred thousand in DeStefano’s loan business and got a return for ten times that amount.

It was the murder of Leo Forman that brought DeStefano down. Forman, a commercial real estate broker, was also one of DeStefano’s collectors.  One afternoon in 1963, DeStefano was in Forman’s office and there was an argument, which ended with Forman throwing DeStefano out of his office.   A few days later, DeStefano ordered gangsters Tony Spilotro and Chuckie Grimaldi lure Forman out to DeStefano’s brother’s house in Cicero. Once he was there, Forman was beaten and carried down to the basement where DeStefano was waiting, a hammer in his hand. He hammered in Forman’s knees, head, crotch and ribs, stabbed him with an ice pick twenty times and then shot him in the head, killing him. They dumped the body in a trunk of a car and left it on the end of an empty street.

Ten years went by, but in 1973 the FBI turned Chuckie Grimaldi into an informant. Based on the evidence he provided them with, federal warrants were drawn up for the arrests of Spilotro, Mad Sam DeStefano and his brother Mario, for the murder of Leo Forman.

At the pre-trial, DeStefano defended himself and turned the entire proceedings into a circus. But the government had its own tricks. It would offer DeStefano immunity for his testimony. That was enough. The order was issued from the bosses to kill DeStefano.

Tony Spilotro and DeStefano’s own brother, who had been given the contract to murder Sam DeStefano, pulled into DeStefano’s driveway on a bright and beautiful Saturday morning. DeStefano was in the garage. When he saw the car pull in, he lifted up the garage door and waved Mario and Spilotro inside. When they were within a foot of DeStefano, Spilotro lifted a shotgun out from under his coat fired two rounds into DeStefano killing him. Several months later, Spilotro and Mario DeStefano were acquitted of all charges in the Forman killing.



[1] Chicago Police Intelligence Report