Remember to support the podcast with your venmo app at jenkslaw or go to the website and donate at www.ganglandwire.com.

Dean from Ireland just emailed and told me some great personal stories about his relative Danny Greene. Thanks Dean, and he made a suggestion that I do a show where I answer questions from wiretappers about myself and my career. So, I would be happy to do that. I have told some stories from my career and I have a few more to tell, some of them are not mob stories but run of the mill police stories. So, if you have questions about me and my career, email them at [email protected] or message them on facebook, or if you want to hear your voice on the podcast, call my phone at 816-931-3535 and leave your question.

What would you think if you read in the Chicago Tribune that an unknown assailant killed 4 suburban Chicago businessmen with a .22 pistol that in one elevator at one time?

Well, on Friday morning July 22, 1977, Jenny Lesick employee of U.S. Universal arrived at work about 7:30 AM. She found the elevator door propped open by a man’s leg. As she snuck a quick peek inside, she saw a mound of bodies covered in blood lying lifelessly on the elevator floor. She ran screaming across the street to a gas station for help. About the same time, Bruce L. Sherson of Mirro aluminum company arrived for work and forced open the elevator doors and found 4 dead bodies.  Police arrived shortly after and found the bodies of Joseph LaRosa 35 years old and his brother in law John Vische 32 years of age dead. LaRosa owned U.S. Universal which was a burglar and smoke alarm company. Alongside the bodies of LaRosa and Vische were two U.S. Universal employees, Donald Marchebanks, age 56, and Malcolm Russell, age 37.

Detective Rocco Rinaldi of the Chicago PD examined the scene and found that all the victims still had their wallets and jewelry. They found the right coat pockets of the company owner LaRosa,  Malcolm Russell and  Donald Marchebanks had been ripped open. They wrongly speculated that the killer was looking for something and found it before he got to the fourth man, John Vische. Investigators found that Joseph LaRosa and his wife were new residents a nearby suburb of Inverness and neighbors said they were a complete mystery. Other people in the building described this business as some kind of boiler room with lots of phones and the owners and their many visitors all seemed to drive expensive cars and wear lots of gold jewelry. Det. Rinaldi will soon learn that Malcolm Russell was under Federal investigation for telephone fraud from his involvement with a company called Steel Liquidation Services. He learned this company was not really an alarm company in the sense that ADT is an alarm company. This company was more like a pyramid scheme in which they sold a package to investors trying to set up their own alarm business. These investors, in turn, sold a package to individuals wanting to go into the alarm business at the retail level. They had an inexpensive motion detector alarm they sold in sales kits. The final buyer was sold many cases of these alarms after a sales instruction course. In order to set up this business, they had gone into business with someone in the Outfit and they were not kicking back any money.

On their last night of life, LaRosa, Marchebanks and Russell participated in one of their many sales seminars held in the evening hours because their marks were mainly working people trying to establish their own business. LaRosa’s brother in law, John Vische had stopped by and was leaving with the victims. What they did not know was that out in Las Vegas Tony Spilotro had taken on the job to kill them for their failures to kick back money to the Outfit. By this time, in 1977, Spilotro has taken up residence in Las Vegas to establish a Chicago style crime family.