By The Beachwood Personal Luxury Services Affairs Desk

The following press release announcing Eilat Limousine’s acquisition of Genesis Limousine and the personal luxury services this limousine company can provide, may be of interest to your audience. Any editorial comment or mention that you may give this press release would be greatly appreciated.
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EILAT LIMOUSINE OF NEW YORK ANNOUNCES PURCHASE OF GENESIS LIMOUSINE INTERNATIONAL NETWORK, INC.
Dateline: June 28, 2007 . . . Brooklyn, NY
Contact: Doron Guez
Phone: (718) 253-1500
E-Mail: dorong@eilatlimousine.com
Web Address: www.eilatlimousine.com/
BROOKLYN, NY – June 28, 2007 – A well-known limousine service in New York called Eilat Limousine International announced today that it has acquired Genesis Limousine International Network, Inc. The acquisition was effective June 1 and will combine two very popular personalized luxury services into one.

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Posted on June 29, 2007

Dear Lake Forest:

Can’t we all just get along? You have to admit it’s ironic when an exclusive, wealthy suburb passes a rule to exclude even many of its own wealthy citizens. I refer, of course, to the new Lake Forest beach protocol so interestingly reported in the Chicago Tribune by Susan Kuczka, which restricts about a quarter of the mile-long beach to adults only. Even the children of Lake Forest, it seems, are not good enough for Lake Forest.

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Posted on June 26, 2007

Joey “the Clown” Lombardo and several alleged Outfit compatriots go on trial this week in what may be the last housecleaning of the oldtime Chicago mob. This profile was published in the October 2005 issue of Chicago magazine, before Lombardo was nabbed in Elmwood Park. We have enhanced it (links!) for your enjoyment, and split it into three parts. This is Part 3. Here are Parts 1 and 2.
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THE LOST DON/By Steve Rhodes
Shortly after he was paroled from a federal penitentiary in eastern Pennsylvania in 1992, Lombardo placed an ad in several Chicago newspapers. “I never took a secret oath with guns and daggers, pricked my finger, drew blood or burned paper to join a criminal organization,” the ad said. “If anyone hears my name used in connection with any criminal activity please notify the FBI, local police and my parole officer, Ron Kumke.”
While the ad played like a joke, it was probably a calculated, if odd, strategy undertaken by Lombardo. “My belief, based upon information known to us through sources, was that when he came out of prison his most important goal was to never go back to prison, not necessarily to become known as the head of Chicago organized crime, says the Gaming Board’s Jim Wagner. “And so, in order to accomplish his first goal, he wanted to stay in the background as much as possible, not get a spotlight on him, and I think that’s why he put the notice in the newspaper. But, beyond that, we still had sufficient source information that we believed that regardless of his protestations, he was in fact in charge.”

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Posted on June 20, 2007

What the hell is wrong with you? And I don’t mean your prostate cancer.
Did you really think everyone in town would simply accept that you’d be gone for three weeks for a “routine medical procedure” – and no one could know why because it was “personal” and “private”?
Apparently that’s exactly what you thought, or your people wouldn’t have stonewalled the press until Sun-Times reporters found out about your cancer from other sources.
Thoughtful long-term planning is obviously not your strong suit. Still, let’s consider the implications of your strategy. By your logic, mayors, governors and senators could be mysteriously disappearing right and left for secret face lifts, tummy tucks, breast enlargement, and you-know-what enlargement. (I presume since you consider “prostate” too embarrassing to say out loud,you would positively cringe at the other word that begins with ‘p’.)

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Posted on June 20, 2007

Joey “the Clown” Lombardo and several alleged Outfit compatriots go on trial this week in what may be the last housecleaning of the oldtime Chicago mob. This profile was published in the October 2005 issue of Chicago magazine, before Lombardo was nabbed in Elmwood Park. We have enhanced it (links!) for your enjoyment, and split it into three parts. Part 1 is here. This is part 2.
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THE LOST DON/By Steve Rhodes
For a while, though, everything clicked – not only in Vegas but in Chicago. Problems had a way of disappearing. In 1974, for example, the U.S. attorney here charged Lombardo, Spilotro, and Dorman, among others, in a fraud scheme involving a $1.4-million pension fund loan to the American Pail Company, a sham enterprise unwittingly fronted, in part, by Daniel Seifert, a 29-year-old Elk Grove Village businessman. The FBI suspected that Lombardo and his pals were more interested in using the loan to line their pockets than to make pails. Word of Seifert’s cooperation with the federal probe leaked out, leading Lombardo to ask Accardo for permission to eliminate him, according to Bill Roemer’s 1995 book Accardo: The Genuine Godfather.
Despite Accardo’s professed aversion to kiling private citizens, he told Lombardo to “take him out,” according to Roemer.

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Posted on June 19, 2007

Joey “the Clown” Lombardo and several alleged Outfit compatriots go on trial this week in what may be the last housecleaning of the oldtime Chicago mob. This profile was published in the October 2005 issue of Chicago magazine, before Lombardo was nabbed in Elmwood Park. We have enhanced it (links!) for your enjoyment, and split it into three parts. Today is part one.
*
THE LOST DON
By Steve Rhodes
At 6 a.m. one Monday last spring, nearly 100 FBI agents fanned out to serve arrest warrants on a handful of men thought to be connected to 18 of the most gruesome unsolved gangland murders in Chicago since 1970. Teams of agents found most of the suspected wiseguys in their suburban homes or hangouts. Two were arrested in Lombard, including James “Jimmy the Man” Marcello, thought to be the current boss of the Chicago mob, otherwise known as the Outfit. Agents nabbed Marcello’s brother, Michael, at his home in Schaumburg. Nicholas Ferriola, son of the late reputed mob boss Joe Ferriola, was apprehended in Westchester. Others were arrested in Hillside and Western Springs. Frank “Gumba” Saladino was discovered dead (of natural causes) in a Kane County motel room where he had been living. A retired Chicago police officer accused of acting as a mob mole while he was on the force was located in Arizona.
At a press conference that day, Chicago FBI chief Robert Grant touted the significance of the roundup, the result of a federal investigation called Operation Family Secrets. “While there have been many successful investigations during the past quarter century resulting in the arrest and indictment of high-ranking members of the Chicago Outfit,” Grant said, “never before have so many in lofty positions in the Chicago mob been charged in the same case.”
The man in perhaps the loftiest position, however – the one thought to be most intimately familiar with Chicago mob matters, and the final link to the Outfit’s glory days of Tony “Big Tuna” Accardo, the infamously mobbed-up First Ward, and organized crime’s glittery reign over Las Vegas – that suspect could not be found.
At age 76, Joey “The Clown” Lombardo was on the lam.

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Posted on June 18, 2007

By The Beachwood Amplitude Affairs Desk

The following press release announcing MetaGeek’s release of a new Wi-Spy Spectrum Analyzer, may be of interest to your audience. Any editorial comment or mention that you may give this press release would be greatly appreciated.
METAGEEK(TM) RELEASES WI-SPY(TM) 2.4X SPECTRUM ANALYZER
NAMPA, ID – JUNE 14, 2007 – The 2.4 GHz band is getting crowded, so you need better wireless networking tools to quickly resolve interference issues. That’s why we here at MetaGeek have been working feverishly on Wi-Spy(TM) 2.4x, our second generation Wi-Spy with three times the frequency resolution, three times the amplitude resolution, and twice the amplitude range of our original Wi-Spy.
With the higher resolution and improved amplitude range of Wi-Spy 2.4x it is now even easier to identify wireless signals that could be causing interference with your Wi-Fi networks. With Wi-Spy 2.4x, “now you’ll know, and knowing is half the battle.”

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Posted on June 14, 2007

By The Beachwood Left Lane Affairs Desk

The following press release introducing Left Lane Drivers of America, a website dedicated to reminding slow drivers to get out of the left lane, may be of interest to your audience.
SLOW DRIVERS – MOVE OVER: GRASSROOTS CAMPAIGN PRODS SLOWPOKES OUT OF LEFT LANES
CAMAS, WA – JUNE 12, 2007 – Enough with slow drivers in the left lane!
“As traffic gets increasingly congested, it’s time for citizens to reclaim the left lane,” says J.A. Tosti, spokesman for Left Lane Drivers of America, a grassroots effort to get slower traffic to move right.
“More and more these days, you find slow drivers in the left lane, causing no end of headache and frustration to those of us who have places to go and people to see. Some of these offenders are timid and tentative, some are completely oblivious to what’s going on around them, and some are self-appointed ‘hall monitors’ regulating what they alone have determined to be proper driving speeds. Whatever be the case, it’s time for us raise the awareness level and trumpet the message, ‘If you’re not a Left Lane Driver, get out of the left lane!'”

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Posted on June 12, 2007

Date Taken: 06/05/07
From: North Loop
To: Albany Park
The Cab: Was filled with miniature hookers who stumbled from the backseat and blocked the door while their pimp paid the fare. After pushing past them I discovered they were actually three fashionably dressed eleven-year-old girls and an exhausted father. I was astonished when I saw the cab’s leather seats. I wondered for a moment if it was fine, Corinthian leather. An enormous amount of black rubber sheeting covered the floor and the excess bulged from below the drivers’ seat. A “U” shaped slice had been cut into the back seat divider. White synthetic filaments fanned out of it and made a tiny Santa beard. A picture of the illegal Chicago Olympic torch logo was pasted onto the Plexiglas divider. The cab smelled like – nothing. Sweet, unexpected nothing.

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Posted on June 7, 2007

By ML Van Valkenburgh

Well, it’s been a few weeks since I left Chicago and drove halfway across the country to Florida, land of my birth. My last stint in Chicago lasted three years, in increasingly crappy apartments, but with increasingly great friends, all of whom I miss very much. (You know who you are, except Andrew, who doesn’t have a computer, so someone pass it along to him, will you?)

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Posted on June 6, 2007