Grandfatherly author says, 'Ask me about my mob stiffs'

Sitting on the couch in his Palatine home, gregarious great-grandfather James “Jimmy” Jack thumbs through the pile of photographs on the coffee table. The 82-year-old's eyes twinkle as a photo prompts him to tell a story with all the enthusiasm of one of his peers gushing about a grandchild's school photo.

But these photos ain't of no grandchildren.

“Those two guys in that trunk are Jimmy Miraglia and Billy McCarthy, the M&M boys,” Jack, a retired homicide detective, says as he studies the black-and-white police photograph featured on the cover of his new book, “The Last Dance: My life and times with the Chicago Mob,” which is in the last stages of production at publisher Xlibris Corp. and should be available soon.

“Did you see ‘Casino'?” Jack asks, recalling the gruesome torture scene in the movie about Las Vegas where a mobster's head gets crushed in a vise until he rats on his friend.

“That was McCarthy,” Jack says, “and it all happened in Chicago.”

Ah, memories of home.

“There's something appealing about the primal nature of an uncivilized world,” notes co-author Eldon L. Ham, who teaches at Chicago-Kent College of Law and helped focus a thousand pages of Jack's copious notes and memorable stories into one book.

“I took his picture, the ‘Big Stoop,'” Jack says, pulling out the mug shot of John “Big Stoop” Feracotta. Jack remembers arresting Feracotta “a couple of times” for assault and burglary. That was before Feracotta got whacked for botching the burial of mobster Tony “The Ant” Spilotro and his brother, Michael, Jack says.

Mention of the Spilotros leads to the story about a late-night run-in at the Panther Lounge, when Jack discouraged Tony Spilotro from making good on a threat “to cut my throat with a bottle.”

A high-school dropout, Jack used his older brother's identification to join the Merchant Marines at age 16. That got him away from the West Side neighborhood that spawned many of Chicago's mobsters.

“I grew up with a bunch of tough guys,” says Jack, whose father kidnapped his older brother and him from their mother. He later dumped them at St. Joseph's Orphan Asylum on 35th Street, where his mother and her family eventually found them.

“I was a poolroom junkie. I was playing seven-card stud rummy at 14,” Jack says.

Many people in Jack's circle grew up to be mobsters, victims of mobsters or officials fighting the mobsters, Ham says.

“All the guys, they went one way or another,” Jack says, rattling off the names of neighborhood kids who became thugs and murderers, corpses, respected judges and police officers, dirty judges and crooked cops, and, in the case of Jack's friend Jim Thompson, governor.

“The neighborhood was like that,” Jack says, recalling an uncle who worked for the mob. “I just happened to go my way. But thank God I went one way and not the other.”

Jack found healthier outlets, such as Golden Gloves boxing. He missed out on the 1948 Olympics when he lost a fight in Comiskey Park, but boxing did give him the curve in his nose and the skills he used to get the upper hand in later scuffles with mobsters.

“The best hit I ever took was from Frank Calabrese,” Jack says. Jack and his plainclothes police partner walked into an “outfit joint” called The Nest Lounge looking for the suspect in a shooting. Calabrese, now serving a life term in prison after his conviction on 13 murders, was a young tough then who took exception to Jack's looking around.

“What the (expletive) are you looking at?” growled Calabrese.

“Nothing much,” Jack answered.

Calabrese sucker-punched him.

“He really whacked me,” remembers Jack, showing the photos of his bloody mouth. Jack and his partner wrestled the goon outside and for a trip to the police station.

“I didn't know you were coppers,” Calabrese said.

“We're not coppers,” Jack corrected. “We're police officers.”

Calabrese wouldn't acknowledge Jack in the courtroom during the 2007 Family Secrets trial in Chicago. But co-defendant Joey “The Clown” Lombardo did. On trial for murder and other crimes that resulted in him being sentenced to life in prison, Lombardo chatted up Jack during breaks in the sensational trial. Although on different sides of the law, the two men grew out of the same environment and bonded through shared experiences, age and health concerns.

Jack holds up a thick stack of handwritten letters from Lombardo, who writes from his prison cell.

“I wouldn't trust him, but we're friends,” Jack says of his literal pen pal. “He beats around the bush. I say, ‘Joey, you're in denial.' I blast him. ‘You're up there testifying like a big mope,' I told him. He respects me. He knows good friends of mine.”

That's about to lead into another mob tale when Jack is interrupted by Nancy, Jack's wife for the past 46 years. She pricks Jack's finger to draw blood before giving her husband the medication he takes to fight brain cancer. The procedure takes Jack away from a lifetime of memories about jukeboxes and juice, wiseguys and rackets, shotgun blasts and bodies in trunks, murder and mayhem. The silence can't compete with Jack's tales.

“That's why he wrote the book,” Nancy explains. “Because everyone loves his stories.”