A Chicago home on West Town’s Ohio Street that belonged to reputed mobster Joey “The Clown” Lombardo sold, six months after hitting the market in August.
The three-flat – a popular design in Chicago, typically with three units, one per floor – where Lombardo first moved into with his wife, Marion, in 1951, sold on Feb. 25 for $600,000, Crain’s reported. Joe and Marion divorced in 1991, but he continued to live in the building and it was his known address when he was sentenced to prison in 2009. Prosecutors claimed the divorce was a way to hide assets. Lombardo died in a maximum-security prison in 2019 at the age of 90.
The Ohio Street property with a two-car garage was listed for $800,000 in August but subsequent price cuts brought it down to $665,000 by the time Mike Galvin, the developer who bought the building, put it under contract last month.
(Century 21 Affiliated)
“We’re going to preserve the aesthetic of the interior,” said Galvin. The top-floor apartment has red flocked wallpaper, vertical red and white stripes on the walls of the foyer, and a black-and-white checkerboard hallway floor.
The interior retains many design choices from the 1970s when Lombardo was one of the two men said to be running the Chicago crime syndicate’s business in Las Vegas.
(Century 21 Affiliated)
The home had been in Joe Lombardo’s extended family since at least 1925. Marion Lombardo and the couple’s daughter Joann are the owners of the building, according to the most recent public records, Crain’s reported. Joann Lombardo died in 2015. Fermin Perez, a Century 21 Affiliated agent, who represented the seller, said the building had been occupied by family only.
Lombardo, who was arrested and acquitted 11 times by the age of 32, was given the nickname “The Clown” by the press because of his habit of making crazy faces in his mugshots. In the 1980s, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison after being convicted of bribing a US senator from Nevada, skimming $2 million from the proceeds of the Vegas casinos. Lombardo was convicted of multiple crimes including murdering a federal witness in 2007, 33 years after the crime actually took place. Lombardo, who died 10 years into a life sentence, proclaimed innocence in his letters in his final days.
“I am Positively Not Guilty of all charges in the indictment,” Lombardo wrote, according to ABC7 Chicago reporter Chuck Goudie. “I rest my case Judge.”
[Crain’s] – Connie Kim