In this episode, Gary takes a deep dive into the ruthless life of Mad Sam DeStefano, one of the most brutal enforcers in organized crime history. A notorious loan shark tied to the Chicago Outfit, DeStefano’s reputation for violence and torture made him a feared figure—even among his fellow mobsters.

Born in 1909 in Illinois, DeStefano’s criminal career began early, leading him from street gangs to the infamous 42 Gang and eventually into the Outfit ranks. His path to power was paved with violence, intimidation, and a sadistic pleasure in collecting debts through extreme methods. From his days as a political fixer to his reign as a feared loan shark, we uncover the chilling techniques he used to maintain control, including stories of his soundproof torture chamber and psychological manipulation of victims.

We also explore his relationship with Tony Spilotro, the mentee who would eventually play a role in his demise. As DeStefano’s erratic behavior and grotesque acts pushed him further into instability, his allies turned into enemies, sealing his fate in a brutal execution.

Join me as we revisit the twisted legacy of Mad Sam DeStefano, a man who thrived on fear but ultimately fell victim to the same violent world he helped create.

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Transcript

[0:03]Introduction to Mad Sam DeStefano

[0:00]Well, hey, all you wiretappers, welcome back to the studio of Gangland Wire. I have an old show that I did like seven or eight years ago, a long time ago, and I haven’t retouched this guy since. So I went back in and looked at it and did some new stuff and re-edited it. So I have the story of Mad Sam DeStefano, who was a Chicago outfit loan shark collector. I’ll tell you what, wait till you hear this guy’s story. A lot of you may have heard of him. He’s pretty well known, been pretty well reported on. But this guy is, he is what we call affectionately a piece of work. So settle back and listen to the story of the life of the most brutal loan shark collector and loan shark that probably ever was that I know about. He liked to torture. This guy is Sam, Mad Sam DeStefano. And I’d heard of Mad Sam. Of course, all you guys up in Chicago know about Mad Sam. He was kind of the guy that taught Tony Spilotro all the tricks of the trade on being a gangster. He was one of the first guys that Spilotro was given, was sent to his crew or Spilotro joined his crew. But Mad Sam, we’ll tell you a little bit about the history of Mad Sam. Mad Sam was born in 1909.

[1:21]And he would go on to become a big-time loan shark and a political fixer and a sociopathic killer for the Chicago outfit. I heard of, there’s a guy a lot of you all know, a Chicago, former Chicago-based FBI agent named William F. Romer Jr. He wrote several books on the mob that a lot of people cuss and discuss and argue about whether he was telling the truth or making stuff up. But regardless what you think of Bill Romer, he did know Chicago Outfit better than anybody. And he considered DeStefano to be the worst torture murderer in the history of the United States. He said that this guy was a mentally unstable and sadistic person that was used by the Outfit as an enforcer and a juice loan collector. Sam, Mad Sam, was born in Streeter, Illinois.

[2:09]His father was a laborer named Sam DeStefano Sr. His mother’s named Rosalie. Both of them had been born in Italy and immigrated to the United States in 1903. So Mad Sam was a citizen. He was born here in 1909. His dad was kind of an up-and-comer in a way. He started out as a laborer and worked in a coal mine downstate in Heron, Illinois. They had some labor-related turmoil, but I looked it up. It was the Heron Massacre. A bunch of union members killed a whole bunch of strikebreakers down there, And then the company brought in some thugs to beat up the union people. So he just got out and went up to Chicago and moved into Little Italy on the west side of the loop down there and around Taylor and Western, I think. Looking at Mad Sam, one of the earlier reports about his criminal activity was in 1926. He would have been about 17 or 18 years old. He was arrested and turned over to the Niles Police Department, which is a suburb of Chicago, as being a fugitive for breaking out of jail. He joined a gang. It was called the 42 Gang.

[3:19]1927, July the 1st, several hundred of these West Side gang members showed up threatening violence against a police sergeant for arresting DeStefano and for shooting DeStefano’s associate, Harry Casgrove. So he had established a reputation by the time before he was 20 years old, really, and had people following him and looking up to him. Started out with a charge of rape.

[3:44]Early Crimes and Rise to Infamy

[3:45]Best I can gather, DeStefano and another gang member, Ralph Orlando, had lured. Actually, they had waited outside a movie theater and found a 17-year-old girl walking home alone. And they forced her into an automobile and drove her to a garage where she was sexually assaulted by several other gang members.

[4:05]Orlando and DeStefano were found guilty of this crime. Now, he got a lighter sentence because the police, for somehow the police were called. I don’t know how, some neighbor must have heard the girl screaming or something. Police were called, and they burst in, and they arrived before DeStefano had the opportunity to rape the girl. So he had a much lighter sentence. He only did three years.

[4:28]He was a member of the 42 gang sometime during this time, which was the junior varsity, if you will, for the Chicago outfit. Many young guys in Chicago graduated from the 42 gang to join the outfit. And one of the most famous ones was Salvatore Sam Giancana, or Momo. They call him Momo.

[4:46]The press coverage that the 42ers had gotten for all their different crimes had captured the attention of the outfit. And particularly Al Capone, they were used to do burglaries and fence their property for them and help in the bootlegging. They need a lot of people to drive trucks and guard truckloads of beer and help establish enforcement around speakeasies and set up speakeasies and gambling games. They’d hire them for runners and truck drivers. They were a little bit out of control, all these young guys, but they did have their uses. It was probably one of the more highly skilled of these young guys. And he had a reputation as a, his early reputation was a skilled wheel man. And I don’t mean a motorcycle officer. If you remember, we had that whole conversation about whether you’re the getaway driver or you’re a motorcycle officer for the Kansas City Police Department. So he was not a motorcycle officer. He was a getaway driver and he was known to be calm under pressure. He quickly became a protege of Tony, Joe, Anthony, Joe “Batters”Accardo and Paul the Waiter Rica, who were some of the early bosses after Al Capone and Frank Nitti. Giancana would bring a number of his 42 gang members, like Mad Sam, into the outfit, and he would go on to become actually the boss of the outfit by 1957.

[6:06]He will later kind of have to abdicate and travel to Mexico, and he will eventually be killed, but that’s a whole other story. He’s the one that brought Mad Sam DeStefano from the 42ers into the big time.

[6:18]DeStefano himself soon became involved in bootlegging and gambling. In 1932, he was wounded by a policeman during a grocery store robbery. Later that year in August, after that, DeStefano appeared at a hospital in Chicago’s west side with bullet wounds, which refused to explain. So he was getting around, but this was, he was in his early 20s in 1933. He must have been part of a robbery crew because in 1933, DeStefano was convicted of a bank robbery up in New Lisbon, Wisconsin, and sentenced to 40 years in the penitentiary. Well, the political fix must have got put in because within eight years, his sentence is commuted by the governor, and he’s released in December of 1944.

[7:04]DeStefano returned to prison in June 1947 for possessing counterfeit sugar ration stamps. During the war, they had to ration tires, gasoline, and sugar in particular, and I think meat was rationed too. What these guys would do, DeStefano was working, And when he got out of the joint in 1944 at the end of the war, he was working in a place where they did printing. And we had access to printing facilities and started printing up counterfeit sugar ration stamps and selling to people. He got popped for that, went back to the penitentiary. And this was a good penitentiary term for him. He was sent down to Leavenworth, and there he met outfit members Paul, the waiter Rica, and Louis Campagna. When he came out in 1947, he must have got their attention, and he probably made sure everybody was safe, and he was kind of a bad actor, so he was a tough guy. After he was released, he immediately got a civil service job with the city of Chicago in the garbage dumping foreman. And by 1952, the fix for him getting that job must not have stuck or he probably created a lot of trouble or wasn’t showing up or something because city officials discovered that he had omitted his criminal record from his application. They didn’t prosecute him, but I think he lost his job at that time.

[8:22]Loan Sharking and Political Fixes

[8:23]During the 1950s, he went on to be a full time outfit loan shark operator. He started out using stolen money from his days as a bank robber and loaning out money at loan shark rates. He was really a businessman. He started investing in Chicago real estate. If we’d invested in Chicago real estate in the 1950s and just hung on to it, we’d have done pretty good. That was his thing. By the 50s, DeStefano really became one of the outfit’s main political fixer. He found city officials, judges, policemen. He was paying off. He would brag that there wasn’t any case he couldn’t fix and started offering his services out to the other mob guys.

[9:06]His fees, I understand his fees for doing things like fixing a robbery case was $800. An assault case, he charged $1,500 for. I guess he was like a lawyer. He had a flat fee. You know, if you come to me for a traffic ticket and you tell me it’s, you know, like in Kansas City, I say, okay, that’ll be $150. And then I’ll give me in the fine. I’ll tell you what the fine is as soon as I go down and get the ticket reduced to a non-moving violation. So I guess it was $1,500 to fix or take an assault case on. He actually, actually, it fixed first degree murder cases. He did one for $20,000. I think this probably came out later in his life, probably when they did Operation Grey Lord up there.

[9:45]DeStefano’s arrangements with the police were so routine that sometimes corrupt police officers would just take their suspects by DeStefano’s house and then he’d pay off the cops. The suspects would then, even if they didn’t have any money, they would be put on, that would become a juice loan. And then DeStefano would have them on the hook for a juice loan, a high interest loan rate. Say if he paid off the cops, gave the cops a thousand bucks and they’d owe DeStefano a thousand bucks. Plus they’d have to pay him about, you know, like 300% interest every month on that. You know, that just extended his loan sharking activities. And by the 1960s, he was known as a leading loan shark in the Chicago outfit, which is that Chicago is a pretty big place and they have a huge, big outfit. By the 60s and 70s, really, Chicago had the biggest organized crime family in the United States, single family. Now, if you put all five families in New York City together, you would have a bigger family.

[10:49]Brutality and Torture Tactics

[10:44]But Chicago is a single family with a single boss, had the largest one in the United States. His loan shark’s victims were not only these criminals and small-time criminals and some larger-time criminals that didn’t have any money, needed money, also politicians and lawyers. He was charging 20% to 25% a week in interest. He would accept any high-risk debtors like drug addicts or businessmen who had already defaulted on other debts.

[11:09]But it’s claimed that the reason DeStefano would do that because he enjoyed it when they didn’t pay on time. He had a soundproof torture chamber built into his basement, and he liked to bring those guys down there. So don’t be borrowing any money from Mad Sam, a guy called Mad Sam. If you do, don’t go over to his house. Don’t pay me. I like that because then I’m going to put you down in my basement and torture you for a little bit. That’s why I’ve got that acetylene torch down there. You don’t want to know what you do with the torch. We’ll get on to the vice later on. He’d been known to kill debtors who owed him small sums just so he’d scare others into paying their debts. And this guy, here’s another thing. This guy was canny. This guy was really canny. He would give his loan shark victims, or shall we say, clients, his debtors, he’s the creditor and his debtors, or loan shark victims as the law enforcement would call them, he would give his debtors presents, like a gold watch with his name engraved on the back of it. If he ended up killing the victim, accused of it, he could say, well, no, why would I kill him? Look how close I was. He was wearing this gold watch that I gave him, and it’s got my name inscribed on the back of it. That’s how much he liked me. Guy was devious, wasn’t he?

[12:23]He was kind of an interesting looking guy. I’ve seen pictures of him. He wears black, thick black horn-rimmed glasses. Kind of looks like a high school teacher or something. A nerd, you know. People believed he couldn’t see without him. But in fact, those were just a cover. I mean, this guy was, he just lived a criminal’s life. Seemed like it was more than just business. He got a certain amount of pleasure out of it, it would appear to me.

[12:48]Normally, the outfit would not have probably had anything to do with a guy like this. He was, and he earned, here’s the thing, is he earned them a great deal of money because every time he made a score, Giancana and Tony Accardo made a score and they even invested some of their own money into his loan sharking operations. You see, that’s, that’s one thing that they’ll do. They’ll say, Hey, you got some money. Let me put it on the street for you. You’re the loan shark. And I got an extra 10 grand, 10 grand. I’ll give you 10 grand. Then you, at your job, you’ll know these different people that loan money. And you’ll, you’ll say, okay, this will, I’ll give you 10 for 15.

[13:23]I’ll give you, you know, 20 for 30. And the understanding is you got to pay the next paycheck in a week or so. You got to give me back 30 bucks. And so then you’ll pay me. You’ll take a little piece of that for making the loan. And I put up the money and then I’ll get the bigger piece of the bigger, the interest rate on that. What Jim kind of was doing with him, they were putting, you know, $50,000 on the street and he’d have to keep track of that separate. This guy, he knew the, he knew the about sending a message. We got a story a little bit later that’s unbelievable that what he did. He even went after newspaper reporters. There was a Chicago Tribune reporter named William Daughtry who wrote a negative story about him. And DeStefano laid in wait for him outside when he got off the paper one day and he assaulted him. He chased him. He had a gun in his hand and he threatened to shoot him and threatened his family. And when Daughtry ran away from him, he broke the windows on his car. That’s when he started getting his name of Mad Sam.

[14:23]The Bizarre Life of Mad Sam

[14:23]And everybody on the streets that were around him, knew anything about him, had knowledge that he was bizarre and crazy. And it just kind of keeps getting worse. Called the Lemon Law of a bad car. It keeps going bad and they can’t fix it. Well, he bought one of those. It’s a brand new car. Rode all over and said, this is a lemon. So everybody would know that this car was a lemon. And he also hung grapefruits all around it. I guess lemons weren’t big enough. So he hung grapefruits on it and wanted everybody to know. But this is a mob outfit dude who’s doing that kind of stuff. I can’t believe they didn’t go ahead and kill him early on. Here’s another thing he does. He likes to pretend like he’s a lawyer. And he always wants to be his own lawyer. One time in the early 60s, he was arrested with another fellow for forgery. And at their trial, he acted like he was a lawyer for both of them. And he demanded to know the names of all employees in the state’s attorney’s office and the sheriff’s office so they could be called as witnesses. He liked to represent himself and make all kinds of crazy demands. Another time, he was so confusing that nobody in the courtroom even knew what he was talking about. He’d do stuff like he walked up to the jury and he says, have you ever seen an elephant? He turns to the judge and he says, I plead guilty. And then he turned back to the jury and he said, Something’s come to light that I had not known before.

[15:50]It was a disorderly conduct case. It was a small-time case. He might not have represented himself. It had been something with some serious jail time as disorderly conduct. So the jury found him guilty and fined him $100. Some of the people around him claimed that he would tell his compadres that it was his dream in life to own a pig farm so he could feed his victims to pigs. He claimed he even drove to pig farms just to watch them for hours. I mean, this guy, he was, as I said before, a half a bubble off a plum, or probably a whole bubble off of plum.

[16:22]Hogs, are they vegetarian? Maybe they eat slop. Here’s another. There’s an informant who will end up going in the program and talking about DeStefano, and he claims that one time DeStefano got mad at his wife. Her name was Anita. He took out his gun. He put the end of the barrel in the mouth and then told her to reach out and pull the trigger, and she wouldn’t do it. And finally, he just started laughing and then would go out and tell his,

[16:53]FBI Encounters and Public Antics

[16:48]mob buddies over and over again, this same story about how he would, how he did that. This Bill Romer we talked about, FBI agent Bill Romer. Agents often would just show up at these mob guys’ houses, just knock on the door and just say, how you doing? Just stop by and talk to them just to see, you know, shake them up or maybe somebody would have some trouble and they’d be there at the right time. They’d say, okay, here’s my lifeline. I’m in big trouble and here’s my lifeline. But anyhow, he was assigned to go to DeStefano’s house periodically or go find DeStefano and talk to him and just question him a little bit. And usually those guys just say, you know, I’m not talking to you. He’d go over to the house and DeStefano would walk down the stairs in his pajamas, but he would have his penis hanging out while his wife was serving the agents coffee.

[17:38]And another interesting thing, the agents would remark that coffee had kind of a funny taste to it. They didn’t really like the coffee, Sam claimed the coffee was made from special Italian coffee beans. Rover claims that he found out later just to find I’d been peeing in the coffee before they brought it in to the agent. When I was a policeman in uniform and I was around people that were giving me anything to eat, I wouldn’t take it unless I saw him do it. I saw him fix it. Like, I did not go into a restaurant and just order a meal. I never, ever would, unless I knew the people that were working there. It was kind of the, they put the dysfunction and dysfunctional relationship, didn’t they?

[18:18]Or the dis and dysfunctional relationship, man. It’s amazing what people do to stay married. Sometimes he was in a little drug dealing caper with a bad Chicago cop named Tommy Dorso. Dorso started telling people that he once saw DeStefano roll around on the floor with spit running from his mouth. And he was yelling and begging Satan to show him mercy, screaming over and over again. I’m your servant, command me. So he was even like, that’s one, another rumor about him. He was a Satanist and worshiped Satan. So he was possessed by the devil. I don’t know. I mean, this guy was, he was a piece of work. Here’s one of the worst ones, one of the craziest ones, the stories that I found. He was mad at his wife. He went out and he’s in his car and he sees a guy walking down the street. He kidnaps a guy. He forces a guy into his car at gunpoint. He takes a guy to his house and he forces the man at gunpoint to have sex with his wife for some imagined or real grievance that he had with some problem he had with his wife. Afterwards, supposedly, the man went to the nearest police station, reported the incident. But I don’t think anything happened over that. I think probably they wouldn’t even believe him. And if they did, it was Mad Sam. So what the hell? He was described as a highly emotional. What do you think? Highly emotional, temperamental individual. The FBI reports the extremely egotistic and concerned with his own personal appearance.

[19:42]He’s a total nutcase. The walls of his home were lined with mirrors so he could continually watch his reflections in those mirrors as he walked around. He said he could be crying in one minute and laughing the next. He used to like to say if he hadn’t been framed for that rape when he was 17, he would have been the president of the United States. He brought his brothers, Mario and Michael, into the business. Mario was a good mob guy. They said he was almost as sick as Mad Sam,

[20:17]Family Ties and Dark Secrets

[20:10]But he was and we’ll find out some about Mario later on to let you know he is a sick dude. But his brother Michael was kind of soft and he ends up being a heroin addict and and weak and can’t do anything. And he knew too much in the outfit. Some probably a card over probably Giancana called got a hold of Mad Sam and said, you know, you got you got to do something about your brother. He’s he’s weak. He’s a heroin addict. He’s an embarrassment, and he knows too much now. And September the 17th, 1955, Chicago police got a call about the location of a fresh, what we call a fresh body. It hadn’t been sitting there for a long time in a car’s trunk.

[20:56]They make the call, and when they find it, they find Michael was shot in the body but not in the head. And what was interesting in the autopsy, when they started looking at the body had been recently bathed and cleaned up and some of whoever the anonymous caller was made sure that the body was found before it went into any kind of decomposition. So the supposition, of course, is Mad Sam did this himself and he wanted to preserve, make sure the body wasn’t all messed up. So when they had the funeral, they could have an open casket funeral for his family. One of the two most famous crimes that he’s suspected being involved in, and one is pretty well known, there’s a loan shark, weighed 300 pounds. His name was William Jackson. They called him Action, Action Jackson. Jackson was up and was called by the FBI to come up to Milwaukee. You know, Milwaukee is just a hop, skip and a jump north of Chicago. And he had to meet with the FBI up in Chicago, or up in Milwaukee. I guess he didn’t tell any of his mob bosses he was up there, and someone happened to see at the federal building, and they were assuming that he was sneaking off to start ratting people out, and he knew a lot. He was a loan shark under our boy, Sam DeStefano. DeStefano used somebody else probably and called Mr. Jackson to the Chicago meatpacking plant, and he was met by a crew who then took him into custody, shall we say, hung him up.

[22:23]With a meat hook impaled up inside of his rectum. And they started working out on him. They kept this guy alive for three days. They smashed his knees with a sledgehammer. They worked over his body with a blowtorch. They beat his genitals with a, and they used an electric prod on it. And finally he died from his injuries and they stuck him in the trunk of a Cadillac car.

[22:46]You know, a Cadillac Eldorado was maybe the only car that was big enough to

[22:51]Infamous Murders and Tortures

[22:49]put Action Jackson in and hold him. There are several famous photos out there on the internet of this and there’s one of that show his his shall we say his testicles and they’re just swollen up to the size of of grapefruits hanging down there between his legs it’s probably the meat hook was on a winch that came down closer to the ground and then they could hook it in there and then then pull it up man i tell you what the and 300 pounds all hanging on that just that right there’d be enough to kill you and you know the the the sad thing about this he didn’t he didn’t he wasn’t ratting anybody out he wasn’t snitching they killed him for nothing really unfortunately they did unfortunately for mr jackson he he’s wishing he would have snitched and gone into witness protection program so to get for being a stand-up guy i guess that might have been what happened is he finally just okay i did hoping they’d go ahead and kill him and then then they got madder and continued to torture him mad Sam was just getting off on it more than likely. Now remember the movie.

[23:50]Casino. And at the very beginning of it, the Joe Pesci character has got a guy’s head in his vice and he’s screaming at him to tell him something and he’s tightening the vice on him. You remember that? Well, see, the Joe Pesci character, God, I can’t all of a sudden, I know that name as well as I know my own, but he was, the character was based on Tony Spilotro, who was in Las Vegas at that time. And back in the early days when Tony Spilotro got going, if you remember, I said last time that Mad Sam had taken Tony in and mentored him. And he was one of his juice loan collectors. And there were two guys, the M&M brothers, they called them Billy McCarthy and Jimmy Moralia. And they were tough guys. Well, these guys, the M&M brothers, they both owed juice loans to Mad Sam. So Cardo reaches out to Mad Sam and says, okay, you know, these guys, you got to do something about them. He had the three collectors working for him at the time. and Mad Sam gave them the job of taking care of this. Charles Nicoletti, Phil Alderiseo, that’s Milwaukee Phil is what they called him, and Tony Spilotro. They found Billy McCarthy and kidnapped him. They started torturing him to find out the name of his accomplice. I think they already knew it, but they wanted to verify for sure it was Jimmy Moraglia.

[25:06]Spilotro put his head in a vice. He truly did this. I think maybe Frank Culotta even has, he wasn’t there, but he helped set him up. Tony Splilotro told the story to Frank Culotta later on, and Frank told the authorities whenever he’d went in the witness protection program. And Spilotro actually helped set one of them up to got him to go meet some of these guys someplace. While Spilotro’s got his head in the vice, he’s asking him who his partner was. A lot of that, one of his eyes popped completely out of its socket. And at that point in time, he told his accomplice’s name. Now, shortly after that, they found Jimmy, the other of the M&M brothers. They found Jimmy and just immediately killed him. Now, it’s known on the streets that Matt Sam was not happy about that. He wanted to bring him in and torture him for a little bit. Spilotro did tell people about it, and he told this to Frank Cullotta also. He said, boy, he said, Spilotro was impressed by Nicoletti, Charles Nicoletti’s reactions. as Spilotro’s cranking the vice tighter and tighter. And when the eye pops out, he tells his buddy Frank Cullotta about Nicoletti’s reaction. He said, man, this is a heartless guy. He said he was eating pasta when Billy’s eye popped out. And this is a tough world, man.

[26:27]Cullotta also told the authorities after he came into witness protection about a time he was with Mad Sam.

[26:37]The End of Mad Sam

[26:32]And Frank wants to go talk to a lawyer who he doesn’t think is doing right. And Mad Sam goes along with him. And all of a sudden, Mad Sam just goes crazy and starts yelling and screaming at the lawyer and said that if you don’t take care of the guy on this case like he said he would, he said, I’ll do it. Then he started calling him names and grabbing him and threatening him. And then he zipped down his pants and just started peeing on the lawyer. The lawyer’s like shaking his boots by them. And Mad Sam stops and Colada says, the lawyer actually says, thanks for not killing me as they walked out. There’s another one where he didn’t kill the guy, But he humiliated the shit out of him. One of his collectors, a guy named Peter Capoletti, ran off with $25,000 that was actually, he got it from a loan shark victim from a debtor. He got to $25,000 and he’s supposed to take it to Mad Sam and he ran off with the money. He wanted to go farther than Wisconsin. He went to Wisconsin. Yeah, it’s kind of a hideout for those mob guys in Chicago as it’s so close. They don’t want to get too far from home.

[27:35]Mad Sam, he sets up a deal. There’s a restaurant. He chains him to a radiator in the back of this restaurant and tortures him for three days. He likes that three-day thing. There’s a banquet. At the end of this three days, there’s a banquet going on out front with a bunch of this guy’s relatives out there at that banquet. And Capaletti is in the back, and he’s begging him, said, kill me, please.

[27:58]And supposedly, he said, I’m on fire. And DeStefano said, OK, we need to put that fire out then, don’t we? So he had a couple of his guys drag. He’d been using the blowtorch on him. He dragged a severely burned Capaletti out in the dining area where the man’s family was at this banquet and then forced them to all pee on him in use in it in order to put the fire out, shall we say. Following the banquet, authorities report that the family paid back the $25,000 in stolen money. Well, November 1963, the year I graduated from high school, actually, DeStefano has a violent argument with a guy named Leo Foreman, who’s a real estate agent, and one of his collectors. He works for him. Foreman won’t take any crap off DeStefano, and he physically throws him out of his office, but then he knows he’s in trouble. So he goes into hiding. He gets Tony Spilotro and another one of his loan collectors.

[28:54]Thugs that are working for him, to go get a hold of this Leo Foreman and said, you know, boss said bygone let bygones big bygones and and come on back all’s well let’s kiss and make up so he gets taken in by this and sam’s brother mario if you remember i mentioned the one brother that killed michael but mario was a pretty decent uh outfit guy himself was tough enough was up for the job and he was he was up for several jobs they used his home and foreman went to his home thinking that he was gonna meet up with bad sam and they were gonna patch everything up, But once they got there, they got him down in the basement of Mario DiStefano’s home. He was grabbed and Mario and a guy named Chucky Crimaldi and Tony Spilotro tied him up and they started beating him up to soften him up a little bit. They knew Mad Sam was on the way. Of course, they they beat him on the head and knees and nuts and everything with a hammer. And they but they didn’t want to kill him. And finally…

[29:58]When Mad Sam got there, he used an ice pick and stabbed him about 20 times. Crimaldi, who was a witness of this and later turned government witness, said that Di Stefano screamed and giggled as he told Foreman, I told you I’d get you. Greed just got you killed. Foreman was pleading for his life, and finally Di Stefano shoots him repeatedly in the buttocks. He didn’t shoot him in the head or in the heart or vital organs. He shoots him in the buttocks just to cause him more pain. Crimaldi said that DeStefano just watched, and the rest of Spilotro and Crimaldi watched this. Crimaldi was the one talking, watched Foreman bleed and whimpering for a while. And then they started torturing him with a butcher knife. They started cutting chunks of flesh out of his arms until finally he dies during this time. They turned this Chucky Crimaldi, and so Tony Spilotro and Sam and Mario DeStefano were indicted for the murder of Leo Foreman.

[30:54]Crimaldi’s going to testify against him. You know, there’s a co-defendant testifying against you. Mad Sam’s making a circus of the proceedings, acting as his own attorney as usual. This is one where he has some kind of an operation, like a hernia operation, and he pulls up his shirt and shows the jury all his stitches and scars and stuff. He is just goofy as hell. No statute of limitations on murder, and they didn’t turn Chucky until 1972. It’s kind of how that works. More than likely, when they turn like that, they figure that they’re next up on the hit list, so they better go in. Well, by this point in time, even the outfit just says, you know, this guy’s too nuts. We got to do something about him. They end up getting out on bail. When Sam comes into court, some of the preliminary hearings, he would demand to speak through a bullhorn.

[31:44]He would appear at the courtroom in pajamas. He’d have them hauling men on his stretcher. He would do long-winded rants. He would do things like try to, he would yell stuff like the investigators that are doing this are colluding with Joseph Stalin. And of course, he was alienating the judge and the jury. And that was a huge, really a high-profile event. And Spilatro and his brother, you know, he was hurting them because they were also on trial for this whole deal. With the approval, it had to be with the approval of Giancana and Anthony Accardo, his own brother Mario and Tony Spilotro devised a plan to keep him quiet for good. You know, this Chucky Carmaldi has gone in the witness protection program and he’s testifying against him. And without Chucky Carmaldi, they probably will walk on it. Sam, they all got a case. Upfit says, this guy’s acting so crazy and drawing so much attention, they’ve just had enough. And they’re saying, we got to do something about him.

[32:41]So if you remember, we suspect Mad Sam killed his other brother, Michael, or had him killed and probably killed him or took part in it. Now his own brother, Mario, and Tony Splatro are making plans to kill Mad Sam. Because they said, you know, it’s been reported that this Mario was, he was just as mean and cruel and sadistic as Mad Sam. He just wasn’t crazy about it. They tell him that they found where Chuckie Crimaldi is being hidden by the authorities that they paid off the policemen who are guarding him. Sam was ecstatic. He was thinking about the fun he’d have exacting some revenge on Mr. Camaldi, the stool pigeon. Mad Sam and Mario, his brother Mario and Tony Splatro all get together and the time comes, they tell him they’re gonna come and pick him up and they’re gonna go, they know where Chucky is being held. Mad Sam is out in his driveway in his garage waiting for him to come up.

[33:38]Mario drives up in the driveway with Tony Splatro. I walk up to him and into the garage, and as soon as they get close to him, Mario steps aside, and Tony Splatro’s got a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun. He’s been hiding underneath his coat. He just pulls up and fires both barrels at him. First shot blew off Mad Sims, one of his arms, and the second one hit him full on the chest, and he was dead before he hit the ground. April 14th, 1973, Mad Sam is no longer, but his skills, of course, were passed on to Tony the at Spilotro.

[34:15]Now, Spilotro and his brother, Mario, ended up getting acquitted in this Leo Foreman murder trial. And after that, the rest is history with Spilotro. I’m not sure what happened to Mario, the other brother. Mad Sam gone, Crimaldi might have laid everything off onto Mad Sam and minimized on Spilotro. You never know how these deals come down. Plus, if this was the case I’m thinking of, Tony Spilotro and several other Chicago outfit people were acquitted in murder trials in Chicago because they just bought off the judge. Here’s what the judge would do. Spilotro’s attorney would ask for a bench trial, not a jury trial. Judge would approve that. The prosecutor can’t ask for a jury trial. If the defendant doesn’t want one, he wants to be tried by a judge. They bought off the judge, and Tony Spilotro bought off the judge on at least one murder trial. This may have been the murder trial that he bought off on. I was thinking it was a murder trial on killing the M&M twins,

[35:11]Legacy of Violence and Warning

[35:10]but it might have been this one. Or maybe he bought him off on both of them. Anyhow, that’s the story of Mad Sam DeStefano. And this isn’t a serial killer, but he’s damn close to it. He’s no Bob Berdella. He didn’t hold them for three days and stick carrots up their butt.

[35:26]But he held them for three days and beat their genitals and stick. Well, he did. Actually, he sticked a hook up that one guy’s butt and hauled him up and held him up there. So he is just as bad as Bob Berdella. For money, there is no explanation for a family like this or people like this. You imagine what their childhood must have been like? I’ll bet their dad was one mean sucker. All right. Gets us to the time when I’d make my public service announcement. If you have a friend or relative who has a problem with drugs or alcohol, make your first call to First Call. Call 816-361-5900 or go to their website, www.firstcallkc.org. Vincent Salano. I’m the advice of my lawyer. I respect where you choose to answer that question. As my truthful answerer may tend to incriminate me. May tend to incriminate me. May tend to incriminate me.