Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [44]
Indeed, the waiting room is now so crowded, there aren’t enough seats for everyone. There’s a middle-aged Hispanic woman whose common-law husband kicked her out of the house for another woman and is now trying to get custody of their three sons. (“If I get that sonofabitch in court and don’t kill him it’ll be a miracle,” Boyle tells her.) There’s a construction worker whose wife left him two years ago and took their two young children; he wants to find a way to see them again. And there’s another landlord whose tenants are behind in the rent.
Boyle hollers out to someone to lock the doors. If he doesn’t, he worries, he’ll be here all day. He turns to me. “If I didn’t have Cicero,” he says, “I don’t know what I’d do.”
A few weeks later, Boyle suggests we meet for lunch at Freddy’s, a storefront Italian market on 16th Street in Cicero. Boyle orders for the two of us: fried pork sandwiches. He then buys lunch for two women, a court bailiff and a deputy sheriff. He tells me later that their favor might come in handy someday. We find a table on the sidewalk as an older man emerges from a van with the town’s insignia on the side. “Water department,” Boyle says to me. “Just another sleazy bag man for the mob.” The “sleazy bag man for the mob” walks by, and he and Boyle exchange friendly greetings. “Freddy’s is a neutral place,” Boyle tells me. “Good guys. Bad guys. Intellectuals. Thugs. Politicians. Cops. Freddy’s puts us all at our best.”
Freddy’s has been around since the 1940s, when it was owned by a Dutch man who named the restaurant after his father. Joe Quercia purchased it in 1973. He was eighteen, and only five years earlier had come over from Naples. Originally, it was simply a corner grocery store, but then Quercia and his wife, Anne Marie, whom he had met when she came in for a slice of pizza, realized that they couldn’t compete with the larger supermarket chains. And so the Quercias turned the place into a small specialty shop: everything Italian. Quercia makes his own pasta, as well as Italian ices (from natural fruit juices) and gelatos. He also makes arancine—ground meat and peas wrapped in cooked rice, then deep-fried for a few minutes. And he sells pan pizza by the slice, which has never been easy to find in Chicago.
In the 1980s, the area’s top mobsters ate here, including Anthony “Big Tuna” Accardo, an enforcer for Capone who later took over Chicago’s syndicate, personally controlling ten thousand gambling dens. (Though never convicted of any crimes, he had a fierce reputation; when, in 1977, six men burglarized his River Forest home, all of them were eventually tracked down and murdered, their throats slashed.) Meals at Freddy’s were never disturbed, however. “They never bothered me,” Quercia told me. “They always paid. Once I tried to offer a free lemonade to Joey Aiuppo [Accardo’s second in command] ’cause he brought me some doves and pheasants that he’d bagged hunting. But he insisted on paying. Always a gentleman.” Frank Maltese, Betty’s husband, came here almost every day for a lemon or watermelon ice when he was undergoing chemotherapy treatments. One incarcerated mobster so liked Quercia’s homemade Italian bread that he had his son smuggle slices into the prison stashed in potato chip bags.
Firefighters and police often get takeout here. While I’m eating with Boyle, a hook-and-ladder truck pulls