Corruption-fighter can finally shout "Bingo"!

April 29, 2002

BY MARK BROWN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

In an era of legalized riverboat casinos, charity bingo would seem the quaintest form of gambling.

The image persists of little old ladies sitting sleepily around tables until they leap to their feet to yell "BINGO" when nudged by a seatmate. How sweet.

In real life, charity bingo is an intense keep-on-your-toes competition played by men and women of all ages--although mostly by older women--who juggle multiple cards while filling any lulls in the action by purchasing handfuls of instant lottery tickets known as pull tabs. Not much sweet about it.

On occasion, this real bingo has also held an attraction for certain criminal elements in Chicago--guys who look upon any form of gambling as part of the family business with special opportunities for exploitation.

It's been more than seven years since Vern Lukowicz tried to convince me and others that those elements were back in business as operators of the Grand Palace Bingo Hall in Northlake.

But it wasn't until last Thursday that a federal grand jury got around to indicting 10 men who prosecutors contend were responsible for skimming more than $3.2 million in profits from the bingo operation.

In all those intervening years, the system let down Lukowicz. And, I'm sorry to say, so did I.

The indictment didn't say so, but federal investigators have long been trying to prove that some of the $3.2 million was siphoned off by reputed Chicago mobster Jimmy Cozzo for a luxury hotel-casino he was operating on the Caribbean island of Curacao.

Cozzo's son Philip was among those charged in the indictment, as was William Shlifka, a slimy character who was an investor in Cozzo's casino and who was convicted of being a City Council ghost payroller while the bingo scam was still in full swing. Another indictee was Steven Mariani, an employee of the Illinois Industrial Commission.

The Cozzos, Shlifka and Mariani were all big players in the New Republican Organization of Chicago, a nefarious political group aligned for a while with former Cook County Democratic Chairman Ed Vrdolyak and ex-Sheriff James O'Grady. Some other New Republicans who had a role in the bingo games were not indicted, sorry to say.

Lukowicz didn't know specifically about the muscle and the political clout when he started trying to shut down the Grand Palace, but he knew he was dealing with tough folks who might not appreciate his interference. He stuck his neck out anyway.

Lukowicz wasn't a cop. He was just a retired wood patternmaker trying to help his parish school at St. John Vianney Catholic Church in Northlake.

Lukowicz ran the church's weekly bingo game, which at one point netted $100,000 annually for the church's elementary school.

That was before the Grand Palace opened in 1994 and began luring away bingo players from area churches and VFW halls with 11 games a week and seemingly unlimited opportunities for side gambling with pull tabs and raffles, both of which are supposed to be strictly regulated.

The Grand Palace was a sham on its face.

Eleven posts or auxiliary organizations of the Italian-American War Veterans had materialized out of nowhere to apply for individual bingo licenses. Each licensee is entitled to conduct just one bingo game weekly, but by pooling the Italian-American War Veterans licenses at one location, the Grand Palace was able to offer more amenities than its competitors.

The indictment contends the Italian-American War Veterans were the victims of the scam because the $3.2 million should have gone into the coffers of the organizations for the benefit of their members.

That's probably true in some technical, legal sense, but in reality, the Italian-American War Veterans groups were part and parcel of the charade, choosing to look the other way at the very least in exchange for whatever crumbs were thrown in their direction, which, after all, was found money for them. Several of the group's leaders who took a more active role were charged in the indictment.

No, the real victims were St. John Vianney and other legitimate bingo licensees in west Cook County who couldn't compete with the crooked operation over at the Grand Palace. St. John Vianney eventually had to cease its bingo game.

Lukowicz didn't just sit back and watch it happen, though. He went to his legislators. One staunchly defended the hoodlums. The other got the Illinois Revenue Department to investigate. Lukowicz went to the newspapers and got me to poke around.

He even helped arrange for me to play bingo one evening at the Grand Palace in 1995, an eye-opening experience that gave me the sensation that I was witnessing some sort of make-work program for over-the-hill thugs.

On numerous other occasions that summer, I'd stop by to figure out who owned the last cars in the parking lot at closing time, when the only action was in the back room where the receipts were counted. (I always wondered how the person with the TOLLWAY license plate got to be such a big bingo player.)

But I never came up with enough to put a story in the paper. In the face of Lukowicz's continued appeals, I tried to prod the state Revenue Department to do something, but eventually word came back that there was an ongoing federal investigation and they didn't want to interfere. So I backed off.

Even when it leaked out a few years later that federal agents had been conducting electronic surveillance in the Grand Palace's back room and that a grand jury probe was under way, no action was taken to close the place.

On Sunday, three days after the indictment, it was business as usual at the Grand Palace, with two sessions of bingo on tap.

Lukowicz is 75 now but is still going strong and can't understand how the Grand Palace survives.

"It's really sad that they can get around the law that way," he said Friday. "I'm glad somebody's caught up with them. But what I would like to see done is the thing closed down permanently."

That seems like a reasonable request. We shouldn't let him down any longer.