April 24, 2020 — Chicago mafia elder statesman Marco (The Mover) D’Amico died this week at the age of 84. D’Amico served as a top advisor and official consigliere to longtime Outfit don John (Johnny No Nose) DiFronzo, who passed two years ago of a dementia-related illness. DiFronzo took power in the Chicago mafia in the early 1990s. D’Amico and Johnny No Nose both hailed from the Outfit’s Elmwood Park crew and were known as seasoned old-school gangsters of the first order, in addition to being shrewd businessmen in the white-collar world and making millions of dollars legitimately. While DiFronzo was low-key and more deliberate in his demeanor, D’Amico was a partier and famous in Windy City mob circles for being a man about town on Rush Street in his swinging heyday. His reputation for fast living gave way to D’Amico’s nickname, the Mover, as in “mover and shaker.” D’Amico was indicted in November 1994 in U.S. District Court on a slew of racketeering counts. The feds hit him with the full Monty so to speak: bookmaking, loansharking and extortion dating all the way back to the late 1970s. Per the indictment, D’Amico ran “executive card games,” (high-stakes poker for high-rollers), and sponsored crews that robbed competing games, including one that planned to knock-off a purported “million-dollar game” in the resort town of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. He pleaded guilty in the case and did ten years in prison. D’Amico was released in the summer of 2005. Spending the final years of his life in the Chicago suburb of Westchester, D’Amico gave counsel to Johnny DiFronzo and his brother “Greedy Petey,” and often delivered messages to capos across the city. FBI surveillance squads followed D’Amico to meetings with higher-ups in the Grand Avenue, Cicero and Elmwood Park crews on numerous occasions in the first half of the 2010s, according to an U.S. Attorneys Office memo distributed in 2017. The memo mentions D’Amico briefly being sidelined from his consigliere duties when the Outfit went through a regime change from DiFronzo to the organization’s current reputed boss, Salvatore (Solly D) DeLaurentis.
