In case’s final turn, Riverside businessman once targeted in murder plot found dead by FBI informant who helped save him
Riverside businessman Steven Campbell was always astonished at how close he came to simply vanishing without a trace.
A noted real estate mogul, he testified seven years ago in the sensational trial of an ex-cop and mob-connected hit man who plotted to kidnap, torture and dismember him, all in a bid to steal his property holdings. The would-be killer, Steven Mandell, was instead foiled by an FBI sting and sentenced to life in prison.
And Campbell’s life went on. That is up until last month when he was found dead in his home — of natural causes.
But the story doesn’t end there.
In one final twist, the man who called police to check on Campbell and later helped carry his body out of his house was none other than George Michael, the FBI informant whose daring cooperation helped save Campbell from the murder plot.
In the years after the trial, Campbell and Michael forged an unusual bond over the macabre scheme. With a shared interest in real estate, the two talked weekly, hung out at each others’ homes and attended barbecues together.
“We became very good friends,” Michael told the Chicago Tribune in an interview this week. “He always wanted to talk about the case. He was very grateful.”
It was that friendship that prompted Campbell’s daughter, who lives out of state, to call Michael on Feb. 27 after she hadn’t heard from her dad in several days. After Michael called police and met them at the house, officers went in through a window and found Campbell dead in a chair in the family room.
Campbell had a history of health issues and the death did not prompt any further police investigation. In fact, after conferring with the Cook County medical examiner’s office, police left Michael to make arrangements with a funeral home. He wound up waiting there for more than an hour before they came and took Campbell’s body away.
“It was surreal,” Michael said. “I had to call (his daughter) to tell her that her dad had passed away.”
An unknowing target
Campbell had no way of knowing it at the time, but in 2011 he was being stalked by a man some in the FBI considered one of the most dangerous mob-connected killers Chicago had ever seen.
A former Chicago cop, 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 his suit against the FBI alleging he’d been set up by an unscrupulous jailhouse informant. A judge, however, later threw out the verdict, and Mandell never collected a penny.
Manning disappeared from the Chicago scene for several years after losing in court. He married an elderly woman from Buffalo Grove and moved to Naples, Florida, where they lived in a retirement community next to a golf course, according to court records.
But Manning wasn’t done with Chicago. When he came back to the city, he had changed his name to Steven Mandell and quickly started looking for opportunities for a lucrative score. Campbell, who owned two dozen properties along Ogden Avenue and dealt largely in cash, was one of his earliest targets, according to federal prosecutors.
In 2011, Mandell and an accomplice, former cop and convicted jewel thief Gary Engel, began extensive surveillance of Campbell, watching for hours at night from a car outside Campbell’s residence, studying his comings and goings, and tailing him to restaurants, according to court testimony. They knew where his daughter attended school, when his cleaning lady came to the house, and spots where he was known to stash money.
That fall, Campbell found a mysterious handwritten note folded and stuck behind the storm door of his home. “Hi Steven, stopped by this morning,” the letter read in neat script. “Wanted to know your current thoughts about 8934 Ogden? Please give me a call. Thanks, Steve.”
Attached was a plain business card bearing Mandell’s name, which the businessman did not recognize. When Campbell called the number, the man who answered gave conflicting reasons for his interest in Campbell’s property, and also seemed to lie when explaining how he’d learned of Campbell’s home address, which Campbell kept closely guarded.
“With the number of errors and misstatements, it sufficiently raised my personal radar from yellow to orange,” Campbell testified in 2014. He put the letter in a Ziploc bag and brought it to Riverside police, who eventually turned it over to the FBI.
But even though he had become alarmed, Campbell was still oblivious to the real horror of what was being planned for him.
According to trial testimony, Mandell and Engel were going to pose as police officers to abduct Campbell, take him to a secret location and torture him until he handed over all his cash and real estate deeds. Then they’d kill him and dismember his body. They also talked about killing Campbell’s daughter if she tried to take over the properties after he disappeared, according to the trial evidence.
Campbell was just one victim in what Mandell and Engel allegedly hoped would be a string of similar scores. At the same time they were planning the Campbell killing, Mandell was also conducting surveillance on Anthony “Tony Q” Quaranta, a mob-connected strip club investor he planned to murder next, according to testimony.
Other potential targets included an owner of a grocery store chain, a shoe factory magnate, even a former federal prosecutor who had investigated Mandell.
But to get the plan up and running, Mandell needed an unassuming place to rent, a space that would not draw attention from cops or nosy neighbors that could be outfitted with a butcher table, industrial sinks and bone saws.
That’s where Michael came in.
An FBI asset
Michael, who dealt in real estate himself on the city’s Northwest Side, testified in the 2014 trial that he was introduced to Mandell in July 2012 at La Scarola, a popular restaurant on West Grand Avenue. At the time, Mandellwas having lunch with Albert Vena, a reputed Outfit boss, and several other alleged mobsters, Michael said.
Michael was no stranger to tough guys. He told jurors he’d gotten his start in the 1970s parking cars for the big shots at the old DiLeo’s Restaurant and Lounge at Central and Elston. But Mandell made him instantly uneasy.
“He said he was my new doctor and he would take care of all my problems,” Michael testified about that first encounter. “He was very excited.”
What Mandell didn’t know was that Michael, who had significant legal troubles of his own, had been working with the FBI for more than three years. Over the next several months, Michael secretly wore a wire for the feds and pretended to go along with Mandell’s plans.
“In the very first meeting he just simply showed me a picture of a home that was owned by Mr. Campbell,” Michael testified in 2014. “He just said, ‘I’m going to need your help with something.’ ”
At the direction of the FBI, Michael found Mandell a Devon Avenue storefront to rent and helped him revamp it into a veritable torture chamber where bodies could be drained of blood and chopped into pieces — a location they jokingly referred to as “Club Med.”
Michael recorded dozens of face-to-face meetings and phone conversations in which Mandell talked in gruesome detail about what was in store for Campbell, whom Mandell called “Soupy” in reference to the popular canned soup brand, according to testimony.
Mandell could be seen laughing on one recording as he described how his previous victims had come unglued before their deaths. He mimed a blindfolded prisoner, then drew a hand across this throat to signify a killing. And he seemed to have mirth in his eyes as he made moaning sounds describing the carnage he could inflict.
“Uhhhh please ... aaaaaaahhhh! It’s pitiful,” Mandell said on one recording played at trial that had been captured from a camera hidden in the cinder block wall of Club Med.
Campbell, meanwhile, was not told by the FBI about the investigation until the day before his kidnapping was to go down, and even then he was spared the violent details, according to trial testimony.
On the night of Oct. 25, 2012, an FBI agent borrowed Campbell’s hat and Hawaiian shirt and drove his car to Michael’s realty office on North Milwaukee Avenue, where the abduction was to take place, according to testimony.
Mandell and Engel were arrested as they pulled into the parking lot in an unmarked Crown Victoria outfitted with police lights and scanners. Inside the vehicle were zip ties, a bogus arrest warrant and pre-typed quit claim deeds for Campbell’s properties that they planned to force him to sign, the evidence showed.
A little more than a week after the arrest, Engel, a former Willow Springs police officer, was found hanged with a bedsheet at McHenry County Jail, where he was being held on the federal charges. His death was ruled a suicide.
Mandell, meanwhile, was convicted in the plot to kill Campbell, but the jury acquitted him in the separate charges involving Quaranta.
During Mandell’s 2013 sentencing hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Amarjeet Bhachu said Mandell’s attention to detail, from a “circular saw to take the big bones out of Mr. Campbell’s body” to “goggles so blood splatter wouldn’t hit him in the face,” made it clear that he’d participated in violent abductions before.
“I think the thing that really strikes one from listening to all the evidence in this case is the fact that (Mandell) actually takes pleasure — he takes pleasure — from hurting people,” Bhachu said. “He likes it.”
‘Aren’t you going to thank me?’
Because he was largely unaware of the murder plot, Campbell’s time on the witness stand at Mandell’s trial was short. Still, the case reverberated for the rest of his life.
Shortly after the trial, he granted an interview to WGN-Ch. 9 on the condition that his image was blurred. Asked whether his first thought when the FBI approached him was “holy cow,” Campbell quipped, “Something along that line. Holy something.”
“It’s a psychopath on the loose, you know,” he said about Mandell. “He definitely enjoys killing and if he gets paid along the way, that’s even better.”
Those who knew Campbell said that while he would sometimes joke about his brush with death, it had a deep impact.
“It affected him tremendously,” Clare Childs, a friend who’d managed one of Campbell’s clubs, told the Riverside/Brookfield Landmark. “He wasn’t very open with a lot of people before. Afterward you could count on one hand the people he trusted. It was very hard on him to put it mildly.”
Michael, meanwhile, told the Tribune that what disturbed Campbell the most was that his daughter could have been in danger.
“Mandell knew all about her,” Michael said. “He knew exactly what she looked like. Where she was. What she was doing. He was ready to scoop her up if he had to.”
Michael said he finally met Campbell’s daughter at her father’s funeral services earlier this month. He got there early and initially she didn’t know who he was. But when he approached her, she blurted out, “You’re George Michael aren’t you?” he said.
Campbell’s daughter declined to comment for this story.
Michael said he’ll miss reminiscing with Campbell about the case, which even in its darkest moments had touches of humor. He recalled how after the FBI first told Campbell about the plot, he thought Michael was going to participate in his murder too.
It wasn’t until a week after Mandell’s arrest that Michael was able to reach Campbell to explain.
“I called him and asked, ‘Aren’t you going to thank me?’ ” Michael said. “He said, ‘I thought you were a part of it.’ ”
“I said, ‘Oh I was part of it, all right. But not the bad part.’”
