Who's your favorite clown?

Friday the 13th turned out be even unluckier for Chicago wise guy, Joey "The Clown" Lombardo. The feds arrested Joey Friday night after he had evaded an international manhunt nine months on the lam.

Joey was a made guy who fled his West Side neighborhood shortly before the FBI showed up at his modest bungalow to arrest him last April for 18 unsolved murders dating back more than 30 years. The sting was part of a multi-year, FBI investigation called "Operation Family Secrets" that nabbed 14 aging Chicago mobsters on an assortment of RICO, extortion and murder raps.

The news of Joey's arrest was a disappointment to many Chicagoans who cheered Joey's flight from justice, hoping that he was sucking down some fruity tropical drink on a beach somewhere in South America while being fanned by topless native beauties. During his nine months on the run, Joey wrote several long amusing letters to a federal judge proclaiming his innocence and offering to take a truth serum, provided that FBI and ATF agents did the same. Full of spelling and grammatical errors, Joey apologized saying that, "Englush was neber my bist sobjeck."

If you grew up in Chicago, you likely have your own happy childhood memories of the Mafia, whether it was finding a gun ditched in your back yard, gaping at the gangsters' mansions in River Forest and Oak Park, or having a distant relative who was "connected." In addition to being the nation's fattest city, Chicago is the cradle of organized crime.

For example, during high school I worked at a mob-owned Dairy Queen. The mob didn't actually own the franchise, but the building and property were owned by a Mafia button-man named Tony who rigged slot machines in Vegas. The franchise owner, Dennis, was terrified of Tony who had a habit of dropping by unannounced during our busiest times when customers were lined up outside around the building. He'd take Dennis to the back of the store and shake him down. Dennis would often emerge with a black eye or blood dripping down his face, but nobody thought anything of it. We also got paid in cash and I seriously doubt if anything was deducted for social security or state taxes. Fortunately for Dennis' teenaged employees, Tony never visted at closing time after Dennis had gone home, and we'd be locking each other in the freezers or making scupltures out of the soft-serve ice cream.

Growing up in Chicago's northwest suburbs, it wasn't unusual to see some poor schmuck light on his juice loan payments sitting in the back seat of a black caddy surrounded by goons, or guys dressed in Armani suits idling by pay phones, sauntering to and from their luxury cars in the middle of the day when most kids' fathers were at work.

Joey became boss of the Chicago outfit in 1975, after Sam Giancana was whacked in his basement while cooking sausages. For years, Joey entertained us with his antics ranging from broad daylight-mob hits to cutting up in court by peering out of masks made from newspapers, earning his nickname "the Clown." Many of Joey's feats have been fictionalized in movies like "Casino."

My boyfriend grew up on Chicago's West Side just two doors down from Joey on Ohio Street. He said it wasn't uncommon for Joey to come bursting out of his house in his boxer shorts and a Dago T, shooting a .38 into the air when the neighborhood kids were making too much noise playing outside. Joey's crew would also send the kids down the street to buy "clinchers," which were big, mushy, 16-inch softballs that they'd smack 450 feet to the end of the block with baseball bats that had no doubt been used to bash guys' brains into puree. Ocassionally, Joey would drive down the street at 100 mph, park his car in front of his house, and run inside leaving the car door wide open, not to emerge for several weeks.

Once when my boyfriend was about nine, he and his friends were playing in the alley, when Joey marched out of his house in his satin bathrobe and Italian leather slippers, and held two guys at gunpoint while he made them clobber each other with bricks.

Despite these incidents, their neighborhood was safe and relatively crime free. Joey didn't tolerate any shit. When my boyfriend's uncle, Chops, a popular bartender at the neighborhood Italian joint, got into trouble with gambling and someone shot a bullet through my boyfriend's grandma's window, Joey graciously helped his grandma take out a second mortgage on her building where all her extended family lived. He put Chops on a payment plan so Joey's associates wouldn't break Chops' legs.

Poor Chops passed away at a ripe old age on New Year's Day. This past year while Chops was in a nursing home, I'd take my boyrfriend's mother to visit him. After Joey went on the lam, Rose, who is hard of hearing, would probe Chops about Joey, screaming, "DIDN'T JOEY THE CLOWN WANT TO KILL YOU ONCE," arousing the attention of the six or seven nurse's aids smoking cigarettes in the day room.

Joey served a lengthy prison sentence and vowed never to go back to the joint after the FBI showed up at his garage 18 months ago to take a DNA sample from inside his mouth. Joey has since been linked to whacking Alan Dorfman, a mob lawyer who was rumoroed to have been flipped by the feds in 1983, gunning Dorfman down in the parking lot of the Purple Hilton in Lincolnwood at 2:30 in the afternoon. Joey was also said to have been present when Vegas point man, Anthony "the Ant" Spilotro and his brother Michael, were beaten nearly to death in a basement in Bensenville in 1986, then buried alive in an Indiana cornfield in their underwear. A farmer found the shallow grave a few days later plowing his field, and the headlines of the then, Rupert Murdoch-owned Chicago Sun-Times screamed, "THE MOB BOTCHED IT."

A strand of hair found inside a discarded black ski-mask used in a 1974 mob hit on a local businessman, has since been linked to Joey through the magic of DNA. The feds had egg on their faces when they sheepishly reported that Joey was no where to be found after they showed up at his house to arrest him, claiming that they didn't have the manpower to monitor all the wiseguys under investigation in Operation Family Secrets, "24/7."

Joey was arrested sitting in the passenger seat of a friend's Lincoln in an alley in Elmwood Park, just a few miles from his Ohio Street bungalow. Since then, the feds have been acting like they caught Osama Bin Laden, who they said would have a better chance of making bail than Joey the Clown. Touting Joey's capture as a major blow to "the Outfit," they've compared Joey's hiding places to "spider holes," but I'd hardly call a house in Elmwood Park a "spider hole." He was hiding right under their noses these past nine months, while they turned the world upside down looking for him.

The FBI is just stupid and misguided, grabbing easy "popcorn" headlines by pursuing aging gangsters lucky enough to have surivived their many decades in Chicago's La Costra Nostra to become old men crapping in their Depends. Going after a dozen or so depleted gangsters who should have been put away 30 years ago for ruining thousands of mom-and-pop businesses extorting outlandish payments for waste pickup and protection, and filling chuckholes on the Kennedy Expressway with oatmeal, is a lot easier than pursuing big, mean motherfucker gangbangers whose crimes are far more brutal in their totality, with ties to international terrorism. So much for homeland security, I guess.

Joey now sits in a federal jail, a cement anvil-shaped building in downtown Chicago with slits for windows. It's too bad that Chops couldn't have hung around a few weeks longer, so he could see Joey's latest mugshot of him looking like a homeless person with long, greasy hair and a scraggly beard, unlike the reputed mob leader and sociopath that he was during his prime.