Once, when a priest, Father Jim Kastigar, complained about treatment of Hispanics in the town—town officials had ordered a bank that flew a Mexican flag to lower it, and police allegedly would regularly shake down Mexican-Americans for money if they didn’t have a green card—he had his permit denied to hold the annual Way of the Cross procession, a Mexican Catholic tradition. Then the town closed down the church’s kitchen because, officials claimed, they were running a food business without a license. (A church youth group had been selling tamales.) And then the town cut off parking access to the public school across the street, which had always left its lot open for churchgoers on Sunday. “Cicero,” one resident said at the time, “is like the twilight zone.”
When I first met Boyle, he’d just come back to town, and his spirits were high. He referred to Loren-Maltese in terms that probably are best left out of print. “What do you plan to do?” I asked. “I’m applying for a building permit,” he said.
“No,” I tried to clarify. “What are you going to do to go after Loren-Maltese?”
He laughed. “Apply for a building permit.”
“I don’t understand,” I told him.
“I’ll mandamus them,” he said. He planned to sue them. Boyle was going to prick them every chance he got. When an Hispanic candidate challenged Loren-Maltese for reelection, the candidate was followed home from a party and arrested for driving under the influence. Boyle thought it was a setup, and so he filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the arrest reports. And he would show up at city council meetings, where he’d badger Loren-Maltese and address her as “Madam President,” drawing out the syllables, his voice mockingly reverential, as if she were a Third World despot. Once at a town meeting, he urged her to resign, to which she snapped, “Why don’t you shut up and let the people speak.”
When David Niebur, a former police chief, sued the town and Loren-Maltese for wrongfully firing him, Dave and Nadine appeared at every day of the trial, taking notes. Dave identified with Niebur, who had also taken on Cicero’s powers, and, like Dave, had suffered the consequences. Niebur had made the mistake of responding to citizen complaints about the town’s aggressive towing policy. The town had been towing roughly eighteen thousand vehicles a year, and shortly before Niebur had arrived, the town had awarded its sole towing contract—at five hundred dollars a tow, a lucrative deal—to a newly incorporated company that Niebur began to suspect had ties to town officials. The FBI apparently had similar suspicions, and Niebur soon was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury. Then Niebur caught one of the tow firm’s owners rifling through police records. Niebur turned over the department’s towing records to the state police and to the FBI.
One of the things that doesn’t go down well with Cicero’s establishment is assisting the feds, the penultimate outsiders. Niebur testified that the town attorney at one point said to him, “You’re not cooperating with those fuckin’ assholes, are you?” A few days later, Loren-Maltese fired Niebur and publicly called him “stupid” and a “nitwit.” Niebur also testified that when his belongings were sent to him, among them was a figurine of a police officer holding the hand of a lost boy. It had been a gift from his nephew. The head of the police officer had been twisted off and laid neatly next to the statue in the Styrofoam packing. Niebur, who had returned to his hometown of Joplin, Missouri, was awarded $1.7 million.
Within the year, Loren-Maltese was brought up on charges of pilfering more than twelve million dollars from the town, along with a troika of alleged mob-connected men and another former chief of police. It appears that all along, at least in the short time Boyle had been back, Loren-Maltese had been under investigation. She was convicted, and her attorneys pleaded with the judge for a lenient sentence, especially because Loren-Maltese was a single parent to her five-year-old daughter. But it was soon disclosed that Loren-Maltese had wagered a staggering eighteen million dollars in casinos, suggesting that she may well have spent more time gambling than she did parenting. The judge sentenced her to eight years and one month, and it was then that Boyle called me and left the second message, “ ‘Ding Dong! The witch is dead.’ ” And then in a voice meant to mimic Loren-Maltese’s, “ ‘I’m melting. I’m melting.’ ”
Boyle is now practicing law out of his home, except on Saturday mornings, when he runs a legal clinic at the town’s Democratic offices, a storefront along one of the town’s commercial boulevards. It’s a bare room, narrow but deep; Boyle meets with his clients in a cubicle in the rear. He invited me to join him one Saturday morning. His clientele, he told me, are a mix of old immigrants and new, a cascade of outsiders. They come to Boyle when they have nowhere else to turn, and while Boyle tries to keep an arm’s distance, he inevitably gets swallowed up by some of the stories he hears. He is, after all, an angry man, and so he can and does get angry on behalf of the people he represents.
Boyle’s first client is a forty-year-old political refugee from Lithuania. Valdos (he asked that I not use his last name) is dressed in a fire-engine-red shirt, black shorts, white socks, and loafers. He has a pink earring in his left ear. He looks like a working-class version of Liberace. He’s been in this country for thirteen years, and he buys and sells jewelry, which explains the magnifying glass hanging from his neck. Valdos wanted to purchase a two-flat, and one of his tenants, a white gentleman, hasn’t paid rent for six months; Valdos wants to know how easy it would be to evict him. Cicero, Boyle tells me, has a big problem with deadbeat tenants, usually white, who know that landlords will initially favor them over Hispanics. Urban nomads, they move from one apartment to the next, often getting six months of free rent. Boyle tells Valdos that for a hundred dollars plus the filing fees he’d help file an eviction notice.
Enriquez, who’s twenty-six years old and has been laid off as a delivery man for Miller beer, arrives with his father, Tony, who was the first Mexican-American precinct captain in the town. Enriquez tells Boyle his story. Six weeks ago, he says, he called the police because a gaggle of gang members loitering on his block pulled out guns. Three times that night, the police came, but each time the gang members had disappeared into the alleys and walkways. Enriquez admits he got a bit heated, and he said to one of the officers, “Why don’t you do your job, man?” Well, the other night, Enriquez goes on, he had dropped off a friend in an unfamiliar part of town, and to get home he drove down an alley, where he got stopped by that same officer. Enriquez didn’t have his insurance card, and so his car, a 1995 Buick LeSabre, was towed. Boyle asks for the officer’s name. Enriquez tells him. “Oh, shit,” says Boyle. “He ain’t never seen an Hispanic who he doesn’t think is a criminal. He’s a prick.” Boyle instructs Enriquez not to pay the seven-hundred-fifty-dollar towing fee since if he does he has to waive his rights to contest the claim. Boyle tells him that for a hundred dollars he can help him beat the charge. “You got the balls to do this?” Boyle asks. Enriquez hesitates. His wife works as a bank teller, and she needs the car to get to work. His father tells him he’ll lend his car to Enriquez. Boyle claps his hands. “Then we’re done. It’s the only way the shit stops.”
A twenty-seven-year-old Hispanic woman, Gabriella, who works for the Department of Public Aid, arrives with her seven-year-old daughter and her mother. She’s concerned that her father’s death from a blood clot could have been avoided if he hadn’t initially been wrongly diagnosed at a local hospital. Boyle tells her he doesn’t handle personal injury lawsuits. While they’re talking, they realize that Gabriella was taught by Boyle’s sister in seventh grade. And then Gabriella lays out her other problems. A black tenant hasn’t paid his rent for three months. “And the thing is,” Gabriella says, “my daughter’s father is black. I’m not the kind of person to put a copy on someone, but . . .” This reminds her that she wants to take her daughter to Mexico. Does she need the father’s permission even if he hasn’t seen their daughter in three years? she asks. Boyle tells her to bring in the rental agreement, and assures her that she can take her daughter t
o Mexico. Then her mother, who only speaks Spanish, reminds Gabriella that the city wants her to tear down her garage because it’s in disrepair. Boyle realizes they could go on. He leans over the circular table and in an uncharacteristically soft voice says, “Gabriella, I have an office full of people.”
Indeed, the waiting room is now so crowded, there aren’t enough seats for everyone. There’s a middle-aged Hispanic woman whose common-law husband kicked her out of the house for another woman and is now trying to get custody of their three sons. (“If I get that sonofabitch in court and don’t kill him it’ll be a miracle,” Boyle tells her.) There’s a construction worker whose wife left him two years ago and took their two young children; he wants to find a way to see them again. And there’s another landlord whose tenants are behind in the rent.
Boyle hollers out to someone to lock the doors. If he doesn’t, he worries, he’ll be here all day. He turns to me. “If I didn’t have Cicero,” he says, “I don’t know what I’d do.”
A few weeks later, Boyle suggests we meet for lunch at Freddy’s, a storefront Italian market on 16th Street in Cicero. Boyle orders for the two of us: fried pork sandwiches. He then buys lunch for two women, a court bailiff and a deputy sheriff. He tells me later that their favor might come in handy someday. We find a table on the sidewalk as an older man emerges from a van with the town’s insignia on the side. “Water department,” Boyle says to me. “Just another sleazy bag man for the mob.” The “sleazy bag man for the mob” walks by, and he and Boyle exchange friendly greetings. “Freddy’s is a neutral place,” Boyle tells me. “Good guys. Bad guys. Intellectuals. Thugs. Politicians. Cops. Freddy’s puts us all at our best.”
Freddy’s has been around since the 1940s, when it was owned by a Dutch man who named the restaurant after his father. Joe Quercia purchased it in 1973. He was eighteen, and only five years earlier had come over from Naples. Originally, it was simply a corner grocery store, but then Quercia and his wife, Anne Marie, whom he had met when she came in for a slice of pizza, realized that they couldn’t compete with the larger supermarket chains. And so the Quercias turned the place into a small specialty shop: everything Italian. Quercia makes his own pasta, as well as Italian ices (from natural fruit juices) and gelatos. He also makes arancine—ground meat and peas wrapped in cooked rice, then deep-fried for a few minutes. And he sells pan pizza by the slice, which has never been easy to find in Chicago.
In the 1980s, the area’s top mobsters ate here, including Anthony “Big Tuna” Accardo, an enforcer for Capone who later took over Chicago’s syndicate, personally controlling ten thousand gambling dens. (Though never convicted of any crimes, he had a fierce reputation; when, in 1977, six men burglarized his River Forest home, all of them were eventually tracked down and murdered, their throats slashed.) Meals at Freddy’s were never disturbed, however. “They never bothered me,” Quercia told me. “They always paid. Once I tried to offer a free lemonade to Joey Aiuppo [Accardo’s second in command] ’cause he brought me some doves and pheasants that he’d bagged hunting. But he insisted on paying. Always a gentleman.” Frank Maltese, Betty’s husband, came here almost every day for a lemon or watermelon ice when he was undergoing chemotherapy treatments. One incarcerated mobster so liked Quercia’s homemade Italian bread that he had his son smuggle slices into the prison stashed in potato chip bags.
Firefighters and police often get takeout here. While I’m eating with Boyle, a hook-and-ladder truck pulls up from Berwyn, a neighboring town, and one of the firemen runs in to pick up lunches for his colleagues back at the firehouse. “I don’t think they’re supposed to bring their trucks over here,” Quercia whispers. Boyle’s cell phone rings. It’s his wife, Nadine. She still worries that if she hasn’t heard from him it means he’s been arrested by the police. “I’m all right,” Boyle assures. “Love ya.” A retired Cicero police officer enters the store, and while he and Boyle don’t exchange greetings, they don’t holler at each other either—which, all things considered, is progress. A few weeks back, they had gotten into it at the town hall. “You’re nothing but a goddamn lawyer,” the retired officer had yelled at Boyle. “At least you didn’t call me a fuckin’ Cicero cop,” Boyle had yelled back.
Boyle recounts this exchange as the retired officer exits. They acknowledge each other with barely perceptible nods. “You know,” Boyle tells me. “I can’t even remember what we were arguing about.”
GT’s Diner
The world intersects at the corner of Lawrence and Kedzie Avenues, on the city’s northwest side.
The names of the commercial establishments read like an intercontinental guidebook. Within a three-block stretch, there is Raul’s Tire Shop and a Supermercado, there is Holy Land Baker and Jerusalem Food and Liquor, there is Jas Hind Grocery, New Seoul Optical, Thai Little Home Café, and Patricia Cowboy’s Fashion. More than half the people in this neighborhood, which is known as Albany Park, were born in a foreign country. This is America’s gateway, the port of entry for newcomers to this country. For small merchandisers, the biggest-selling item is phone calling cards. One establishment sells only calling cards. The local Volta Elementary School offers bilingual classes in Spanish, Gujarati, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Bosnian. Six clocks in the hallway are set to the times in Sarajevo, Lima, Jerusalem, New Delhi, Hanoi, and Chicago. Albany Park, one resident told me, “is the neighborhood for everybody else who doesn’t have a neighborhood.”
For half a century, this community of wood-framed homes, brick bungalows, and three- and four-story tenements was home to mostly Russian and Eastern European Jews. Then in the 1960s, Koreans moved in, and they became such a political force that Lawrence Avenue was given the honorary designation of Seoul Drive. Then immigrants from unraveling nations poured in, refugees from Guatemala and El Salvador, families fleeing the fragile Mexican economy, and then Laotians, Thais, Cambodians, and Filipinos fleeing the political instability of their homelands, and finally refugees from Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen. By this time, many of Albany Park’s original settlers had moved on. Temple Beth Israel first was converted into a Korean Presbyterian church and is now a Romanian Pentecostal church. Congregation Mount Sinai became, not without irony, the Beirut Restaurant. From Albany Park, it has been suggested, you can watch the world change.
The neighborhood has the feel of a small village, in part because the El runs at street level, like a trolley, making the community quite accessible. But it’s also because virtually everyone here shares a common journey: They have come to Chicago, to America, for a better life. And so an amalgam of ethnic and religious groups mingles in a manner unlike the city’s other more insular neighborhoods. At Thai Little Home Café, for instance, the owner, Oscar Esche, who is seventy-seven and has been in this country and this neighborhood since 1972, doesn’t serve pork since many of his customers are Middle Eastern and Muslim. The Cambodian Association on Lawrence Avenue is building a small memorial to the victims of the Khmer Rouge, and they are doing so with the financial and moral support of the Jewish community. Jewish leaders—some of whom grew up in Albany Park—have spoken with members of the Cambodian Association about how one moves on after the decimation of one’s people. And at the Albany Park Theater Group, teenagers from places as diverse as Poland and Cambodia come together twice a year to perform a play based on stories of those in the community.
Albany Park is also a place where America is celebrated, often in a rather self-conscious manner. Each Thanksgiving, Esche sets up a full turkey dinner in his backyard, as an offering to Abraham Lincoln. “In our culture,” Esche tells me, “you were brought up to pay respect to the king, so here we pay respect to Lincoln. He’s like one of our kings in Thailand who freed the slaves, King Rama V.” (In his restaurant, he displays a bust of Lincoln and a poster-size photo of this turn-of-the-century monarch.) Also, each spring Esche and his family—his wife, his wife’s sister, and his three children—drive four hours to Springfield to visit Lincoln’s tomb, where they kneel and offer thanks for w
hat they have.
Down the street from Esche’s restaurant is Mataam Al-Mataam, which is Arabic for “Restaurant–Restaurant.” Open twenty-four hours, it’s owned by Kamel Botres, who emigrated from Iraq in 1979. Botres, who is Catholic, had worked as a clerk for a private oil company in his homeland. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and then again when Saddam Hussein was captured, local television reporters descended on Mataam Al-Mataam, seeking reactions to what had just occurred halfway around the globe. In the case of Saddam’s capture, many of the customers—they come from throughout the Middle East and North Africa (though the young waitresses are from Venezuela, Romania, and Pakistan)—told reporters that they didn’t believe it was actually him. And even those, like Botres, who didn’t have any doubts that the United States had the right man were subdued. “People felt a little sorry. It was their president. You’d feel that way if it was your president,” Botres said. “There was nothing to celebrate.” He smiles as he tells me this. “I am an American in my heart,” he told me. “I can think how I want.”
I mention all this by way of introduction, to Ramazan Celikoski, the owner of GT’s, a diner located half a mile west of Mataam Al-Mataam and the Thai Little Home Café, just down the street from the Bohemian National Cemetery, where Mayor Cermak is buried. GT’s is a rather compact place—eight stools at the counter and five booths along the wall—and is situated at the end of a small strip mall, which also houses a Laundromat, a liquor store, and a pizza parlor. In the diner’s plate-glass windows hang five signs, all in different fonts and colors, one of them handwritten, each at a different angle. BREAKFAST one advertises. 3 EGGS, HASH BROWNS AND TOAST. $2.75.
Never a City So Real Page 10
