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InvisibleveggieM

Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 17,538
Former drug kingpin's life fit for film? [IL]
    #8599819 - 07/06/08 04:28 AM (15 years, 10 months ago)

Former drug kingpin's life fit for film?
July 6, 2008 - Southtown Star

If John Cappas' life were a movie, he'd be played by a young Stallone-type. He'd wear his hair in a bouffant mullet, drive a custom turbocharged 1988 Corvette and date Heather Locklear.

He'd sport oversize Porsche sunglasses and a sleeveless muscle T like he owned the look. His guys would wear jackets with his name on them and carry Uzis, and they'd laugh at all his jokes, even the ones that weren't funny.

Everyone in the restaurant would get $100 from Cappas, just for being in the same room with the notorious 21-year-old cocaine kingpin of Chicago's Southwest Side and suburbs - and he'd love it, absolutely love every single minute, knowing that just three years out of Marist High School everybody was looking at him while he gave society the finger.

If you're 35 or older and you lived in the Southland in the late 1980s, you know Cappas' life isn't a movie. Not yet, anyway.

It's a real life, with real consequences - a 15-year stretch in federal prison, two suicides and an incalculable trail of suffering.

But to hear him tell it, that's sometimes hard to remember.

"I ain't beat down by a long shot," Cappas says over a plate of veal parmigiana at Rocco's Little Italy, a restaurant in a Tinley Park strip mall. He knows the waitress, of course.

Now 42, he's been out of prison for four years. He says he's sorry, that he wouldn't want any kid to follow in his footsteps, that his is a cautionary tale.

But he's still got the sparkle in his eye, the ego, the easy charm, the $5,000 Bulgari wristwatch, the $80,000 Audi with the license plate "JC BMF" (think about it) and a handful of "business opportunities," including his life story, to promote.

"Be nice to me," he says with a smile. "Believe me, there's enough people out there that hate me already."

That much is true.

Kingpin

Before there was "Goodfellas," before gangster rap was a household term, before "Grand Theft Auto," before the crack epidemic spread across America, Cappas was white suburban America's nightmare.

Fresh out of a good, Catholic high school, he had dozens of young South Siders working for him, distributing throughout the region the cocaine he brought in from Florida, using MAC-10s to intimidate customers and foes and to make sure they got paid.

At its peak, his operation was netting him $25,000 a week. Sometimes, he says, he got so tired counting stacks of money on the kitchen table that he had to stop and go to bed. He reveled in his outlaw status, living in a Lockport mansion, showing off on his speedboat, buying his girlfriend, a onetime Playboy model, a silver-fox fur coat and a diamond necklace that spelled out "SPOILED BRAT," taking holidays in exclusive resorts, buying a Rolex, two snowmobiles and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, rolling up at nightclubs every weekend with his crew in stretch limos.

"The media and the feds came after us because we weren't the black kids from the city," he says. "All of us came from good homes out here, and we had choices in life."

Eventually, the whole sorry mess would have been forgotten as the big joke Cappas and his crew seemed to treat it as - even the alleged death plots against rival dealers - if two Chicago cops' kids said to owe Cappas money for cocaine hadn't taken their own lives with their fathers' service revolvers in the stairwell of Mount Greenwood Lutheran Church.

Though Cappas was never charged in connection with the deaths of recent Marist High School graduates Christopher Mandel and Michael Riordan, prosecutors blamed him, and a judge agreed, saying he had "at least in two instances, caused death."

Those wounds still run deep in Mount Greenwood.

Many of those with reason to despise Cappas have died of old age. Of those who survive, many prefer not to remember. Mandel's and Riordan's mothers didn't want to add their voices to this story.

And his alma mater, Marist, has declined Cappas' offer to return and tell students about his mistakes, Cappas says.

Denial

There are two John Cappases: the casually racist ex-gangster who boasts of his former associations with mob figures and views his sordid past with amused detachment, and the penitent sinner who says blacks protected him in prison, who's eager to prove his humanity.

To this day, he denies direct responsibility for the deaths of Mandel and Riordan, saying that although his underlings had sold them cocaine, he knew neither boy, adding "nobody knows why those kids committed suicide."

"Every kid that got addicted to drugs back then, that was my fault," he says. "I know that for the rest of my life, people will blame me for what happened to those boys.

"I'll always remember my dad telling me, 'You're going to jail soon,' but I told him, 'I'm a first-time offender, I'll be out in a few years.'

"I thought I knew everything. ...

"What are you gonna tell the toughest kid in the neighborhood when he's got $5,000 in his pocket?"

Inevitably, Cappas' brazen behavior - and the law - caught up with him. When one of his dealers was stopped for a traffic violation in Palos Heights, Cappas arrived on the scene and offered the cop, Michael Zaglifa, $333 cash to drop the matter.

Instead, Zaglifa arrested Cappas and searched his car, finding an illegal weapon and a notebook with the phone numbers and details of his entire operation.

As quickly as it rose, Cappas' empire crumbled. Most of his gang turned against him, cutting deals with prosecutors in return for shorter sentences.

But even when the federal arrest warrants followed, Cappas found a way to thumb his nose at the authorities, spending a weekend on the run before turning himself in to leggy WBBM-TV reporter Giselle Fernandez. Famously, he partied on camera with Fernandez on a pal's speed boat on Lake Michigan and stopped for pizza with her before finally giving himself up to furious U.S. Marshals.

Fernandez, who was never forgiven by her rivals for what they considered an unethical scoop, left town soon after, became a national news anchor and ended up on "Dancing With The Stars."

Cappas wisecracked his way through his trial, spat at an FBI agent, yelled, "I have a black belt!" at the judge and got 45 years.

"America is at war with itself," Judge Charles Kocoras told him. "You're part of the enemy."

Locked up

Prison, Cappas says, changed him forever.

Under federal guidelines, he was eligible for low or medium security incarceration, but he angered enough important people that they put him in a "level 6" prison, with the worst of the worst in Lewisburg, Penn.

He was offered protective isolation but turned it down, knowing that many would be watching a young man with a long sentence to see if he made a deal. He didn't. "People still come up to me and say, 'Thanks for keeping your mouth shut,' " he laughs.

"I was the youngest kid in there," he says. "It was brutal. Thank God I knew how to fight."

Cappas, who started out making collections for the mob and idolized the Italian gangsters in his Oak Lawn neighborhood, got his first lesson in inmate survival from cellmate Frank "The German" Schweihs, an Outfit hitman.

Schweihs, who is back under federal indictment and awaiting trial in Chicago, told him then, "Stay away from drugs, stay away from (homosexuals), stay away from gangs and you'll stay out of trouble."

"It was good advice," Cappas says. "But I got in trouble anyway."

There's a prison story he likes to tell kids when he's visiting Chicago's Juvenile Detention Center or the Indiana Youth Release Center to offer up his story as a cautionary tale.

"We were sitting on church pews watching 'Beaches,' the Bette Midler movie, when I heard a sound a couple of rows in front, like someone was choking on their popcorn," he says, mimicking the sound. "I looked up and there was a big ... guy with a belt around the guy in front's neck, then another guy stabbed him three times in the heart.

"I heard the knife and I heard the blood.

"When the wardens came, the guy, who was already serving a life sentence, said, 'I stabbed him - he owed me money for heroin and that's all you need to know.' But the guy who choked him said, 'Wait a minute, I'm not letting you take all the credit for my work: I held him down.'

"That was the point when I thought, 'Boy, are we in jail with some dumbasses.'"

Regrets

Cappas, by any account, used his time inside more productively. Released in 2003 (his sentence was reduced on appeal), he'd earned a degree in culinary arts and bachelor's degrees in psychology and business. He wrote hundreds of letters, including many to the cops who locked him up, about his plans.

One wall of his Tinley Park condo - the kind of bachelor pad Christopher Moltisanti of "The Sopranos" might pick out, complete with decorative Samurai swords, giant TV and a recurring Batman motif - is covered in certificates and awards he won in prison.

There's one funny, macabre, strangely poignant photo among the framed mementoes of his prison life: a picture of a gaunt Cappas, in chef's whites, with a chef's hat and two medals around his neck, standing behind a giant marzipan Halloween cake he baked, complete with a marzipan graveyard, marzipan ghosts, marzipan skeletons, a marzipan scarecrow, marzipan pumpkins and a frosted haunted house framed by a marzipan picket fence.

The cake is the kind of intricate project a grade school child might spend hours on. But in the photo, Cappas is a grown man of 30.

"For a short while, we lived like kings, but if someone offered me those three years for the 15 I spent inside, I'll take the clean 18 every time," he says.

"People say I should have done more time, but how would you like it if, for 15 years, every time you picked up the phone, the person at the other end was crying?

"I saw these weak guys in there at visiting time, bitching and complaining to their families, about the food, about this, about that, but I never did. I wasn't going to make my family do my time with me, so I told my mom, 'It's like a holiday camp in here!'

"But I watched her get old from behind bars, and I'll always regret what I did to my family, the shame I brought on them."

Life outside

Cappas came out of prison a muscular, ambitious 38-year-old determined to make up for lost time.

The world had moved on.

Soon after his release, he recalls, his sister asked him to fetch her a latte.

"I walked into Starbucks, and I looked up and saw this list and I couldn't figure it out - I had to call her up and hand the phone to the girl behind the bar. I never knew ordering coffee had gotten so complicated."

He got a job selling cars for Bob Watson Chevrolet in Harvey. He was good - good enough to earn the nickname "the closer" and to buy his condo.

"Hey, I had sales experience," he jokes.

A couple of years later, he moved to Gateway Chevrolet on the North Side, where he is sales manager, specializing in sub-prime car loans. (Cappas says, "We give people with bad credit a second chance.")

"I make a good six-figure income," he says, handing his pay slip over, pointing to his year-to-date earnings on the bottom line.

"Don't say how much I make, or it could cause problems," he protests, unconvincingly. He's on target to make nearly $150,000 this year, a fraction of what he was making 20 years ago, but, he says, "I can look myself in the mirror and go to sleep at night knowing I didn't steal it, that I earned an honest buck."

It's a cliche to say of gangsters and drug dealers that their entrepreneurial skills, properly harnessed, would make them successful in any industry.

But in Cappas' case, the cliche is probably true.

He boasts that after speaking to troubled kids at an Indiana halfway house, the warden told him he could have a career in public speaking, and that a Las Vegas hotel manager who judged one of his prison cooking contests offered to set him up in a restaurant.

When his phone rings (his ringtone is a piece of dialogue from the gruesome Spartan battle movie "The 300" - Cappas is of Greek descent) it's invariably his colleagues, asking for his help sealing a deal. And he proudly rattles off details of deals he's recently engineered like a Wall Street trader, all of the sudden speaking a different language of percentage points, money down, terms, profit margins and takes.

"When all the other sales guys wanted the weekend off, I was the guy who would go the seminar to learn more," he says. "I work hard, I still start first thing in the morning and I'm still the one who sets the alarm at the end of the day."

He has dreams of opening a restaurant, or of helping a buddy launch an alternative fuel cell business, and he'd like to start a charity to help troubled children, to make amends for his former sins.

He wants to marry his girlfriend, "a beautiful Greek girl" he says, but her parents won't allow it.

"They know who I am, and they hate me," he says. "We keep breaking up because I don't want to prevent her from having a family of her own, but then she's crying in my arms, and what am I going to do?"

His 'movie'

Cappas has always been a devoted archivist of his own notoriety.

He keeps scrapbooks of photographs of him in his pomp, of the newspaper articles chronicling his downfall, of the letters of thanks he has received since turning his life around.

And in his last six months behind bars, he wrote his autobiography, which he hopes will be published and made into a film.

The book will contain revelations about police and mob figures who helped shape his rise, he hints.

He's trying to get Fernandez, with whom he remains friendly, to lend her name to the project.

He isn't sure who he'd like to play him, but he thinks Mark Wahlberg would be a good fit.

"I don't really care, though," he says. "As long as it gets made."

It's almost impossible to look at Cappas' life without comparing it to the movies.

Is he best understood as Ray Liotta at the end of "Goodfellas," a washed-up schlub, living the same dreary suburban existence as the rest of us after a stint behind bars?

Or is he still defined by his former hero, Al Pacino in "Scarface," a terrifying drug dealer who stops at nothing to get what he wants?

Or could he be an older Pacino in "Glengarry Glenn Ross," the slick salesman who knows what his customer wants to hear?

Cappas, doubtless, would prefer a more sensitive portrayal.

Real life is sadder, less glamorous and harder to resolve than a two-hour flick.

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