History in Belmont Cragin

Anthony Spilotro (also known as “Tony the Ant”) was a particularly vicious member of Chicago’s famed criminal organization known as “The Outfit.”  He was raised with his six siblings in a home at 2152 North Melvina Avenue in Belmont Cragin.  Anthony dropped out of Steinmetz High School in the early 1950s and quickly established himself as a local criminal and street thug.  He soon came under the influence of a loan shark named “Mad” Sam DeStefano, who recruited him into the Cosa Nostra and gave him his earliest opportunities to conduct mob hits, a skill he refined over the course of 22 suspected murders spanning the next two decades.  Among other mob-killing highlights, Spilotro was implicated in the murder of Chicago real estate agent and “juice collector” Leo Foreman, who was brutally tortured with hammer blows to the head and knees and had chunks of his flesh removed with an ice pick before being shot repeatedly in the buttocks.  Spilotro also allegedly killed Billy McCarthy and Jimmy Miraglia (in what was dubbed the “M&M Murders”).  To get information from McCarthy before killing him, Spilotro reputedly placed McCarthy’s head in a vice and turned it so hard that one of his eyeballs popped out.  This particularly gory incident served as the inspiration for a similar scene in the 1995 movie “Casino,” starring Joe Pesci.  In due course, karma caught up with Tony the Ant.  Sometime in 1986, Tony and his younger brother Michael were savagely tortured and beaten in a DuPage County hunting lodge before being dumped in a makeshift grave along Highway 41 in northwest Indiana.

In 1917, a Chicago immigrant from Italy named Antonio Pasin began building wooden toy wagons.  By 1923, he had formed the Liberty Coaster Company and begun producing the “#4 Liberty Coaster” from wood and steel.  Before long, he had created perhaps the most famous (and certainly the longest-running) toy in American history – the “#18 Classic Red Wagon.”   Dubbed the “Radio Flyer” in 1933 (Mr. Pasin liked the futuristic connotation), this little red wagon has been a ubiquitous part of playgrounds across the United States and Canada ever since.  In April 2004, the Radio Flyer company, which is headquartered at 6515 West Grand Avenue, shuttered its remaining domestic manufacturing operations and outsourced all remaining production to China.