Guess what I do for a living?

Joseph "The Clown" Lombardo

In a world gone “spla”, run by feebleminded dry-drunk oil-princes, bulwarked by Elmer Gantry and Elmer Fudd, one can perhaps be forgiven for looking for a little stability. A couple of square feet of firm terra on which to plant one’s feet. Things like...
...the Cubs will always blow it. Always, always, always.
...Chief executives will always be shocked – shocked! – as childhood friends, cronies and the guys that danced at their kid’s wedding are hauled off by the job lot for illegally scoring contracts that the Chief Executive’s lieutenants (again, just shocking) had rigged up for them.
...day or night, there will always be a killer blues band, jazz trio, hot dog stand and top shelf rib joint open somewhere in the Windy City, if you know where to look.

And Italian gentlemen of leisure with nomes de guerre like “Big Tuna”, “Hambone”, “Twan”, “The Clown” and “Joey Joe Joe Junior Shabadoo” (OK, I’m ripping one of those off from “The Simpsons”) always be perp walked in and out of the federal courthouse in the Loop.

We here all know who they are, where they like to eat and what they do for a living. We know that in the body of the story the Teamsters, trucking and Vegas will always somehow be mentioned. There will be a crusading federal prosecutor. At some point it becomes a comfort -- Chicago, the Stockholm Syndrome by the Lake: The cycles of the moon shall ever be fixed and unvarying, there will always be an England, and the lineal descendents of Scarface Al will always get a good table at La Scarola.

Clown missing from mob
Lombardo vanishes from regular haunts
By Ray GibsonTribune staff reporterPublished April 26, 2005

For more than 50 years, Joseph Lombardo has called the West Town neighborhood his home--at least, whenever he wasn't in prison. An early riser, he was often seen
since his 1992 release from prison riding his bicycle with a small cigar firmly planted between his lips.But when federal agents went to the 2200 block of West Ohio Street Monday morning to pick him up, Lombardo was nowhere to be found.Lombardo was one of just two of the indicted members of the mob not under arrest when the Operation Family Secrets charges were announced Monday afternoon.

Lombardo, 76, has known he has been a target for months. His attorney, Rick Halprin, has said Lombardo was being looked at as a suspect in the 1974 slaying of Daniel Seifert. Seifert was a Bensenville businessman scheduled to testify against Lombardo and others in a Teamster pension fund fraud case.Halprin has said Lombardo was at a Chicago police station at the time of the slaying."We will have to wait and see," Halprin said of whether his client would surrender.
...
Lombardo has done two stretches in federal prison. He was released in 1992 after serving 10 years on two separate federal convictions. He was convicted of conspiring to bribe U.S. Sen. Howard Cannon of Nevada for help in defeating a trucking deregulation bill and convicted in a mob scheme to skim $2 million from a Las Vegas casino.
...
Fuesel told Lombardo's wife that the agents were not going to leave, and Lombardo came out a half hour later and accepted the subpoena.But Monday morning, Lombardo was nowhere to be found.

Oops.