Nov. 14--Shortly before his 2012 arrest in a plot to kill and dismember a suburban businessman, Steve Mandell was secretly recorded telling an associate how the time they'd both served in prison had earned them the stripes they needed to get the grisly job done.
"The point is: It's you and me," Mandell told his accomplice, Gary Engel, in a recording revealed for the first time in a court filing Friday. "You did 20 years. You're not too impressed by these guys anymore, right? I did 14. Death row. I'm not impressed by all these mustache guys. You and me."
Prosecutors say Mandell's message was clear: He and Engel had a license to kill, and no one had the power to stop them.
"Spending more than a decade in prison for murder -- on death row no less -- had no deterrent effect on this psychopath," Assistant U.S. Attorney Amarjeet Bhachu wrote in a filing asking a federal judge to sentence Mandell to life behind bars.
Bhachu told U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve a life term was needed to ensure that "the public no longer faces a threat from this evil man."
Mandell, 63, a onetime Chicago cop, is scheduled to be sentenced next month for plotting to kidnap, torture, kill and dismember Riverside landlord Steven Campbell. In his February trial, a federal jury acquitted him of a separate plot to kill an associate of a reputedly mob-connected strip club.
Years ago Mandell -- who then went by the name Steven Manning -- had been sent to death row for the drug-related 1990 slaying of a trucking firm owner. After his murder conviction was overturned on appeal, he won a landmark $6.5 million verdict in a lawsuit against the FBI. A judge, however, later threw out the verdict, and Mandell never collected a penny.
Mandell's attorney, Francis Lipuma, asked St. Eve in a filing this week to sentence Mandell to as little as 12 years behind bars, arguing that he'd been sent to death row by overzealous agents and prosecutors who decided to frame him for a murder he didn't commit.
Lipuma objected to a pre-sentencing report that stated that Mandell was a suspect in at least five other unsolved slayings. He also asked the judge to consider instead Mandell's service in the military decades ago as well as his age and allegedly deteriorating health.
The case against Mandell unfolded in October 2012 with a dramatic arrest outside the Northwest Side office of George Michael, a former banker and real estate mogul who pretended to go along with the plan to outfit a Devon Avenue storefront with an industrial sink, butcher table and other equipment needed to drain Campbell's body of blood and chop it to pieces.
Michael was secretly wearing a wire for the feds, and the storefront -- which Mandell dubbed "Club Med" -- had been outfitted with a hidden FBI camera, leading to dozens of hours of undercover recordings in which Mandell and Engel discussed with apparent glee the gruesome job of chopping up Campbell's body.
Engel, who years ago was convicted with Mandell in a Missouri kidnapping plot, hanged himself in his jail cell shortly after he and Mandell were arrested, authorities said.
In his filing, Bhachu said that Mandell made it clear in his conversations with Engel that the Campbell murder was to be just the first in what he hoped would be a string of lucrative extortion plots.
At one point, Mandell told Engel that Club Med could be their "place for the next year, unless we can find something else better," the filing said.
Bhachu also said that without Michael's cooperation, Mandell might never have been caught.
"It would have been extremely difficult to detect Mandell's participation in this crime absent the fortuitous fact that Mandell approached the wrong person -- George Michael -- to assist him in luring Campbell from his home," Bhachu said.
Last year, prosecutors alleged that Mandell tried to arrange Michael's murder while he was locked up at the Metropolitan Correctional Center and awaiting trial. Since his conviction he's been held in solitary confinement at the federal Loop jail under conditions normally reserved for terrorists and convicted mob bosses.
Mandell was also accused of sending inappropriate letters from the Metropolitan Correctional Center, including one to Highland Park police. While details of that letter have not been disclosed, Highland Park was the site of a 2012 fire that killed restaurateur Giacomo Ruggirello.
The blaze was labeled a possible arson, and last year Mandell's lawyers mysteriously subpoenaed records about the investigation.
jmeisner@tribpub.com
Twitter: @jmetr22b
