Last week, I put the spotlight on the bad boys buried at Mount Carmel Catholic Cemetery. Lest you think only gangsters rest in peace there, I’m going to change gears and share the story behind the beautiful Bishops’ Mausoleum, located in the center of the cemetery.

Informally called the Bishops’ Mausoleum, the full name is the Mausoleum and Chapel of the Archbishops of Chicago. It was built between 1905 and 1912, at the order of Archbishop James Quigley (who is interred inside of it).

Archbishop Quigley chose architect William J. Brinkman to design the Mausoleum. The son of German immigrants, he supervised the construction of Chicago’s Masonic Temple, a skyscraper that was the world’s tallest building at the time of completion in 1892.

Brinkman also designed several churches, among which are St. Josaphat’s, St. Michael’s in South Chicago and St. Mary’s in Buffalo Grove. He was one of the three architects involved in the design of Our Lady of Sorrows Basilica.

Here’s an odd postscript about Brinkman, who died before the Mausoleum was completed. His decapitated body was found on train tracks near 73rd Street in February 1911. Contradictory evidence prevented an inquest from determining a clear reason for his death or a finding of murder. Was it suicide or was he pushed onto the tracks?

Brinkman’s funeral was held at St. Leo’s Church on 78th Street, a church he had himself designed in 1905. His death remains unsolved.

Archbishop Quigley chose Aristide Leonori, noted for his 1899 design of the Mount St. Sepulcher Franciscan Monastery in Washington, D.C, to handle the mausoleum’s interior. Leonori reportedly relied heavily on marble and mosaics to give the chapel a Roman look while still referencing Celtic, Nordic and Slavic saints in the design so it would reflect the archdiocese’s many ethnic groups and national churches.

I wish I’d been able to see the inside of the Bishops’ Mausoleum, but it was tightly locked up.

The most famous of this group of two bishops, two archbishops and three cardinals is Cardinal Joseph Bernardin (1928-1996). He was much beloved in Chicago and considered by many to be a candidate for the Papacy.

As the son of Italian immigrants, Bernardin had early ambitions to be a doctor but later chose the priesthood. Ordained a priest of the Diocese of Charleston in 1952 (which covers all of South Carolina), he served there 14 years.

In 1966, Pope Paul VI appointed now Monsignor Bernadin titular Bishop of Ligura and Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Atlanta. His episcopal consecration took place that same year and at only 38 years of age, Bernardin became the youngest bishop in America.

Over the next years, Bernardin ascended in rank and prominence. Following the death of Cardinal John Cody of Chicago in 1982, Pope John Paul II chose Archbishop Bernardin to lead the Archdiocese of Chicago.

On Nov. 20, 1996, after a battle with pancreatic cancer, Cardinal Bernardin joined his predecessors in the Bishops’ Mausoleum. He visited there a few months before his death to choose a crypt. Choosing one next to Cardinal Cody, he remarked, “I’ve always been a little left of Cody”.

Located very close to the south gate is the grave of a young bride who did not possess the infamy of a gangster or reverence of a Catholic Cardinal. But her story has made her almost as famous in some circles.

For many years, rumors and ghost stories have abounded about the Italian Bride of Mount Carmel Cemetery. I found a fantastic article by Adam Selzer, who has a blog called Mysterious Chicago. He spent considerable time finding the truth amid the sensationalism. While some of the legend is faulty (such as the assertion that she died on her wedding night), the basis of it appears to be true.

Julia Buccola and her mother, Filomena, came to Chicago from Palermo, Italy in 1913, joining Julia’s siblings Joseph, Henry and Rosalia. Filomena’s surviving descendants said the death of her own husband in Italy had left her a bitter woman who depended a a great deal on her children.

According to Selzer’s article, Julia married Matthew Petta in 1920. Her death certificate reveals that she died in childbirth almost exactly nine months after her wedding. Two days later, she and the baby were buried in the same plot at Mount Carmel Cemetery, near the south gate. She was only 29 when she died.

Julia’s husband remarried a few years later and moved away. In the years after Julia’s death, Filomena moved back and forth between Chicago and Los Angeles (where son Henry and his family now lived).

Five years after Julia’s death, Filomena claimed she was having terrible nightmares in which her daughter demanded to be let out of her grave. Being a rather demanding mother, she pressured Henry into having his sister dug up. Having become a successful designer of women’s clothing, he could afford it.

Six years after her death, Julia Buccola Petta’s casket was exhumed and opened. You can see it in the photograph installed on the new monument that was placed there after she was reburied. Julia looks amazingly, uhm, fresh for having been underground for all that time.

So why did Filomena go to all that trouble? Some think it wasn’t nightmares at all but that she wanted a new, more elaborate monument to take the place of Julia’s much smaller gravestone. Son Henry grudgingly ended up paying for that as well. Since Filomena’s name is on it not once but twice, perhaps she was looking for a little bit of attention herself.

Some people have claimed to see a woman in white visiting Julia’s grave. I didn’t see anybody during my visit. But it was broad daylight on a hot, humid day so that’s not surprising.

There’s one more resident of Mount Carmel that I want to talk about. He’s buried in the far Northwest corner of the cemetery, not far from Sam Giancana’s mausoleum. His grave is marked by a simple flat stone that took me a little time to find.

I first became aware of Dennis Farina from the 1986 NBC TV show Crime Story. My Dad was a huge fan of classic 60s automobiles and the show was set in that era, so he watched every episode. Farina played hard-bitten Chicago cop Lt. Mike Torello.

I found out years later that Farina was as a cop in Chicago’s burglary division for 18 years before becoming an actor. He began working for director Michael Mann as a police consultant, which led Mann to cast him in a small role in the 1981 film Thief. He left the Chicago PD in 1985 to become an actor full time.

Two of Farina’s best-known movie characters are Jimmy Serrano, the mob boss from Midnight Run, and Ray “Bones” Barboni, a rival criminal to Chili Palmer in Get Shorty (for which he won an American Comedy Award). Farina also played FBI Agent Jack Crawford in the first Hannibal Lecter crime film, Michael Mann’s Manhunter. He was good at portraying rough and tough characters but had great comic timing as well.

Having battled lung cancer, Farina died in July 2013 from a pulmonary embolism. Michael Mann told the Chicago Tribune, “He was the best guy on the planet. And he was a lot more than a nice guy. He had the charisma and the ability as a storyteller and raconteur to hold your interest. He appreciated the fullness, the roundness, of human life.”

Because Mount Carmel has so many monuments featuring portraits of the deceased on them, they will be the focus of next week’s blog post. I hope you’ll come back to see them.

Today’s post is Part I of the final installment of my Chicago Cemetery Adventure. Having visited Rosehill, Bohemian National and Graceland, I saved Mount Carmel Cemetery for last.

Getting to see Mount Carmel Catholic Cemetery was an unexpected gift. My son was eager to visit a Lego exhibition at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle. Out of habit, I looked to see if there were any cemeteries nearby and my eyes lit up when I saw Mount Carmel was about 20 minutes away. So after dropping off my fellas at the Arboretum, I headed over.

Consecrated in 1901, Mount Carmel Catholic Cemetery was the first cemetery to be opened in the western area of the Archdiocese of Chicago. At about 214 acres, Mount Carmel combined operations with Queen of Heaven Cemetery (which is across the street) in 1965.

There are more than 226,275 graves/family mausoleums at Mount Carmel and about 800 people are interred there annually. In all, the cemetery grounds contain over 400 family mausoleums. Many families are of Italian descent.

I freely admit that I wanted to see Mount Carmel’s main claim to fame, the grave of notorious gangster Alphonse “Al” aka “Scarface” Capone. Not because I think Prohibition-era mobsters should be glamorized but because of the impact they had on Chicago at that time in history.

Born Alphonse Gabriel Capone in 1899 to Gabriel and Theresa Capone in Brooklyn, N.Y., Al quit school in eighth grade. Later, he was a Five Points Gang member who became a bouncer in organized crime premises (such as brothels).

In his early 1920s, Capone moved to Chicago. He became bodyguard and trusted friend of Johnny Torrio, head of a criminal syndicate that illegally supplied alcohol. The group, which came to control the Southside of the city, became known as “the Outfit”.

Torrio retired after North Side Gang (more on them later) gunmen almost killed him, handing control to Capone. Capone expanded the bootlegging business through increasingly violent means, but his mutually profitable relationships with Chicago Mayor William Hale Thompson and the city’s police meant Capone seemed safe from law enforcement. His notoriety also gave him some measure of public popularity.

But after the infamous Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, Capone’s image was tarnished and he came under FBI scrutiny. He was eventually convicted of tax evasion in 1931 and ordered to serve 11 years in prison, some of it spent at the Atlanta Penitentiary.

Capone died in 1947 in Miami but not in a hail of gunfire. He contracted syphilis in his youth and thought he was cured when it went into remission, so he never sought treatment. During his incarceration, the disease ate away at his mental capacities. His final years were spent at his Palm Beach mansion and he died of a stroke brought on by his late-stage syphilis.

After a wake in Miami, Capone’s body was sent to Chicago for burial. He was first buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery but after his mother’s death in 1952, he was moved to Mount Carmel (along with his father and brother Salvatore) in hopes a change in location would stop the vandalism to his gravestone. You can read more about that here.

Deeper into Mount Carmel you can find two of Capone’s bitter enemies, Henry Earl J. Wojciechowski (better known as Hymie Weiss) and Dean O’Banion. As a Polish-American, Weiss was a petty criminal who befriended Irish-American O’Banion. With Weiss and George “Bugs” Moran, O’Banion established the North Side Gang, which eventually controlled rum running, bootlegging and other illicit activities in northern Chicago.

Unlike the Outfit run by Torrio and later Capone, the North Side Gang was made up of Irish, German and Polish criminals. Ultimately, clashes between the two groups led to both the death of O’Banion and Weiss. In 1924, after personally insulting his arch rival Angelo Genna, O’Banion was shot and killed inside his own flower shop, Schofield’s, by Southsiders John Scalise and Albert Anselmi.

In October 1926, Capone sent his best hitmen to Weiss’ headquarters on State Street, O’Banion’s old flower shop. Two gunmen hiding in a nearby rooming house opened fire with a sub-machine gun and shotgun at Weiss and his three associates as they crossed the street.

On the other side of Mount Carmel you can find the mausoleum of the Giancana family. It’s the final resting place of Salvatore “Mooney Sam” Giancana. Among his other nicknames were, “Momo”, “Sam the Cigar,” and “Sammy.” He was the son of Sicilian immigrants.

Sam Giancana joined the Forty-Two Gang, a juvenile street crew headed by boss Joseph Esposito. Giancana soon developed a reputation for being an excellent getaway driver (he was wheel man for Capone at one time), a high earner and a violent killer.

After Esposito’s murder, in which Giancana was allegedly involved, the 42 Gang became an extension of the Outfit. Gangsters like like Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti (also buried at Mount Carmel), Paul “The Waiter” Ricca (buried across the street at Queen of Heaven) and Tony “Joe Batters” Accardo (buried at Queen of Heaven) took notice of Giancana and in the late 1930s, Giancana became the first 42er to join the Outfit.

After doing some prison time in the early 1940s, Giancana set out to take over Chicago’s illegal lottery gambling operations, specifically those in the city’s mostly African-American neighborhood. Through a brutal string of events, including kidnappings and murder, he and his associates got control of the numbers racket, increasing the Chicago Mob’s annual income by millions of dollars.

When Accardo stepped down as head of the Outfit in the mid-1950s, Giancana took his place. By 1955, he controlled the gambling and prostitution operations, narcotics trafficking, and other illegal industries in Chicago. He later told an FBI agent that he “owned” not only Chicago, but Miami and Los Angeles as well.

In 1965, Giancana went on trial for refusing to testify before a Chicago grand jury investigating organized crime and was sentenced to a year in jail. After his release, Giancana lived in self-imposed exile in Mexico until 1974. Extradited by Mexican authorities to testify before another grand jury, he was given immunity from federal prosecution and appeared before that jury four times, but provided little information worth using.

Giancana was then called to testify before a U.S. Senate committee investigating Mafia involvement in a failed CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. Before he could testify, Giancana returned to his Chicago home on June 17, 1975. Two days later, Giancana was shot once in the back of the head and several more times up through the chin with a .22-caliber pistol while cooking sausages and peppers in his basement.

While many theories exist as to who killed him, no one was ever arrested in connection with the murder. Some think it was someone Giancana knew that he let in the house because he himself could not handle spicy foods and may have been cooking them for a friend.

Next week in Part II, we’ll visit a bride who died young, noted Chicago bishops and a beloved American actor. You won’t want to miss the rest of Mount Carmel’s story.

Last week, I shared the history behind Graceland Cemetery’s origins and spotlighted a few of the more eye-catching monuments. This week, we’ll continue that theme and make a few new discoveries.

After photographing the massive Kimball monument, I noticed that behind it was a rock monument with a man’s profile on it. As is often the case, I took a picture because I thought it looked interesting and would look up the name later because it sounded familiar.

Later, I learned that Louis Henri Sullivan (1856-1924) is considered not only the “father of skyscrapers” but the “father of modernism” in the architectural world.

Born to immigrant parents in Boston, Sullivan entered MIT at 16 by completing not only high school early but skipping past his first two years of college studies by taking a series of exams. He worked with noted architects Frank Furness and William LeBaron Jenney (also buried at Graceland) before going to Paris for a year of study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts.

It was Sullivan’s work from 1883 to 1895 when he partnered with engineer Dankmar Adler (1844-1900) that his career took off. Adler oversaw business and construction aspects of each project while Sullivan’s focus was on design.

Along with a young draftsman named Frank Lloyd Wright, the team completed many architecturally significant buildings such as the Chicago Stock Exchange, the Wainwright building in St. Louis, Mo., the Guaranty Building in Buffalo, N.Y. and New Orleans Union Station (demolished in 1954). Before demolishing the Chicago Stock Exchange in 1972, Sullivan’s grand arch was removed and installed at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Instead of imitating historic styles, Sullivan created original forms and details. Older architectural styles were designed for buildings that were wide, but Sullivan was able to create aesthetic unity in buildings that were tall.

Sullivan is perhaps best known for the following quote:

It is the pervading law of all things organic, and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things super-human, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law. —1896 essay “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered.”

Sullivan and Adler also designed two of Graceland’s tombs. I didn’t get to see the celebrated Getty tomb but I did unwittingly take a picture of the Martin Ryerson tomb, having no idea Sullivan designed it. Martin Ryerson (1818–1887) was a wealthy Chicago lumber baron and real estate speculator. His son commissioned the team to create the impressive yet understated Egyptian Revival tomb.

Across the way from the Ryerson tomb is another Egyptian Revival mausoleum but of a much grander style. With its quirky mix of Egyptian and Christian iconography, the Schoenhofen mausoleum definitely makes you stop in your tracks.

German-born Peter Schoenhofen (1827-1893) came penniless to America in 1851 and took jobs in various breweries around Chicago. Eventually he and a partner, Matheus Gottfried, opened a brewery. Schoenhofen bought out Gottfried in 1867 and the company became the Peter Schoenhofen Brewing Company. Ads bragged that the beer’s clean taste came from the artesian spring located under the brewery. Their Edelweiss brand was the best known.

The Schoenhofen Brewing Company has quite a storied past (including unfounded rumors they were broadcasting war secrets to the Germans during World War I) that you can learn more about in this excellent podcast.

Some of the Schoenhofen Brewing Company’s buildings in Chicago still survive today and are on the National Historic Register. You can glimpse two of them in the iconic movie The Blues Brothers when the fellows are driving to St. Helen of the Blessed Shroud Orphanage. German architect Richard Schmidt, who designed a number of them, also designed Schoenhofen’s mausoleum.

The monument to George Pullman, inventor of the Pullman sleeping car, features a Corinthian column flanked by curved stone benches. It was designed by Solon Spencer Bemen, architect of the company town of Pullman (where those sleeping cars were manufactured).

The story behind Pullman’s burial is unique. Fearing that some of his former employees or other labor supporters might try to dig up his body, his family arranged for Pullman’s remains to be placed in a lead-lined mahogany coffin. After lowering that coffin into a deep pit whose base and walls were reinforced with 18 inches of concrete, they poured more concrete and a layer of steel rails that were bolted together on top of that. The entire burial process took two days.

There’s one more mausoleum I want to feature that I saw as we were driving toward the front gate to leave. It looked so different from the others I made Chris stop so I could hop out.

The Huck mausoleum was built in 1915, probably by the wife of Louis Carl Huck, on a plot Huck purchased in 1888. The architect is unknown. Like Schoenhofen, Huck was a German-born brewer who founded his own business, the Louis C. Huck Malting Company. He sold it 22 years later and went into real estate, leaving behind an extensive list of holdings after he died.

Huck’s namesake, Louis C. Huck, Jr., invented the blind rivet which was first used in the B-24 Bomber in 1943. He formed Huck Fasteners in 1940 and developed what became known as the Huck Bolt, an aluminum fastener that is used today in trains, planes and automobiles. He is entombed in the mausoleum with his parents.

As we left Graceland Cemetery, I reflected on what a lovely oasis we had enjoyed amid the frenetic busyness that is Chicago. So much history rests there in the monuments, and the beautiful flora and fauna that surrounds them. I hated to leave it.

Later that week, I visited one last Chicago cemetery that is the final resting place of some fellows with less than stellar reputations. If you want to learn more about Chicago’s colorful mobster past and some of its starring players, come along with me next week to Mount Carmel Cemetery.

It’s an offer you can’t refuse. 😉