August 20, 2019 — Cancer-stricken Chicago mafia enforcer Charles (Chuckie the Electrician) Russell didn’t make it to his sentencing in federal court on weapons violations. The 70-year old mob heavy was supposed to be sentenced this fall but died in hospice care last week, out of prison on a medical bond since 2018. Russell’s brother-in-law is Grand Avenue crew capo and alleged Outfit street boss Albert (Albie the Falcon) Vena. During his prime, Russell was one of Chicago’s most prolific thieves, a feared debt collector and a reputed hit man. FBI and Chicago Crime Commission documents have listed Russell as a member of the Outfit’s Grand Avenue regime dating back to the 1970s. In December 2016, Russell was arrested by an undercover ATF agent when he showed up at a downtown Chicago deli in the South Loop to purchase eight weapons, including a sub machine gun and an AK-47 assault rifle. The agent had infiltrated Russell’s inner circle in the months before the bust and recorded the convicted murderer and sex offender bragging of killing a man (homicide probe ongoing), pulling off 2,000 burglaries throughout his career in the mob and his intention of using a blow torch to get a future robbery victim to open his safe. “Nothing gets my juices flowing like putting a gun to someone’s head, taking their stuff and making it mine,” he bragged to the undercover agent at a Wicker Park restaurant and tavern in late 2016. Last year, the sadistic Russell pled guilty to a single firearm offense. He was granted a bond to await trial at his girlfriend’s suburban Chicago home because of his battle with late-stage prostate cancer. He had been locked up for 24 months. Back in the spring, Russell entered a hospice program. Russell’s longtime girlfriend is a niece of famed Chicago mobster Tony (The Ant) Spilotro, the Outfit’s representative in Las Vegas during the 1970s and first-half of the 1980s. Albie Vena is married to her sister. Spilotro and his younger brother Mike were heinously slain in June 1986 — strangled, beaten and stomped to death in a Bensenville neighborhood. The Spilotro brothers were part of the Grand Avenue crew. Russell was convicted of a murder in 1973 and served two decades in prison for a gruesome sexual assault. In 1992, he raped a woman and threw her out of a second-story window. He was paroled from his rape case in 2011 and is suspected of committing hundreds of burglaries and shakedowns in his final years. Vena, called the most dangerous man in the Chicago underworld, has been the focus of a federal racketeering and murder probe for the last six years.
