Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 45

Section 4 (fhirad (Tribune Sunday, February 17, 1985 2 ihp- Federal investigators get line on turbulent gambling rackets i i-IJ jl if i 1 English Yaras Smith had been beaten, stabbed and strangled. The informative affidavit by Philip DiPasquale, an IRS agent with 19 years of experience in gambling investigations, describes Smith as an admitted bookmaker who told DiPasquale a year ago that Posner and gambling figure Salvatore De-Laurentis "operate bookmaking businesses." DiPasquale, a slight man with a disarming manner, was acting in an undercover capacity while placing wagers with bookmakers, and Smith apparently was unaware that he was associating with a government agent. Smith disappeared on the night of Feb. 7 after telling his wife he was going to meet north suburban gambling figure William Jahoda in the Village Tavern restaurant in Long Grove. Jahoda, whose name also appears prominently in the affidavit, has not been seen since the previous day, when he reportedly told a friend he was leaving town on "a vacation." Some police sources suspect that he fled to Mexico.

While doing undercover surveillance, DiPasquale was often accompanied by a female IRS agent. On numerous they pretended to be customers in north Continued on page 14 By John O'Brien and Ronald Koziol For nearly three years, federal tax agents posing as free-spending bar patrons, high-rolling gamblers and even garbage collectors monitored a major sports-and horse-betting racket that investigators say may be linked to three recent gangland murders. Among key targets of the investigation are Michael Posner, 42, and Daniel Jacob-son, 54, who authorities believe oversee a network of North Side and north suburban bookmakers suspected of handling millions of dollars in bets each year. Details of the investigation are contained in a 33-page affidavit prepared by an Revenue Service agent and filed ty-federal prosecutors last December in U.S. District Court.

The affidavit offers a rare insight into the workings of syndicate bookmaking in the Chicago area. It also sheds light on' some methods used by federal investigators while probing organized gambling between March, 1982, and last Dec. 12. The three victims of the gangland killings over the last five weeks were suspected of involvement in illegal gambling, and police believe that their deaths point to a power struggle for control of bookmaking profits within the local crime syndicate. The most recent victim was Charles English, 70, a semiretired rackets boss who some detectives believe was trying to regain control of a suburban gambling operation he once headed.

English was gunned down Wednesday evening outside an Elmwood Park restaurant. The killings began Jan. 10 with the ambush shooting of Leonard Yaras, 44, who police said collected the mob's share of gambling earnings from bookies in the Rogers Park neighborhood. Last Sunday, Hal C. Smith, 48, of Prospect Heights, regarded as a prominent Independent bookmaker, was found in the trunk of his champagne-colored Cadillac.

fit r' irr 's PUS ARENA jlVWVtLt ROAD SUNDAY AfTtRNO "FEO.J sMv.vrt JO Du Page shoots for Silicon Valley 2 Views mixed on county's potential for high-tech growth JURrr. ws kahxs West Chicago Geneva n. jp i Wheaton 7 1 Roosevelt Rd. I I rf J)1 f-MFel National 1 Accelerator qI r-. x-' 3 I Laboratory r5i" Naperville (56) I 'K e-rf-v)t ToBwav JL I f- I I '-p 'i Burroughe YS Combuetlort une cneryv i I Enalneedng Center JAC' 9 1 2 li Naperville tffl 76th Ave.

7 fflcaQO Trtburw Map gS ..1 mk4 lMk Tnbunt photo by Paul F. Gero At the Catholic Youth Organization gym in Pilsen, 10-year-old Rocco Natale puts up his dukes, imitating the boxing heroes in the posters behind him. "I like everything here," the 4th-grader says. "I like my boxing coach a lot, and if I could I would like to be a someday." In fight against gangs, By Howard Witt "Silicone Valley." Ask Du Page County officials about California's high-technology region, which many hope to emulate along the East-West Tollway, and those words often form part of the answer. The mispronunciation of the name of the area Silicon Valleymay seem unimportant.

But it bespeaks how little Du Page planners have studied the rapid growth of other high-tech industry centers in the country and the traffic and housing problems that followed. "Nobody's looking to see what happened out in California," asserted one county planner, who asked not to be identified because his cautionary tone is so uncharacteristic of county officials. "So no one knows what the potential is for that to happen here." In fact, there appears to be little agreement on just what is happening along the East-West Tollway. Clearly, something big is growing along what has come to.be known as Du Page's "research corridor." In Naperville alone, a score of major research and development labs, including the Amoco Research Center, Bell Laboratories and Nalco Chemical are nestled in pleasing, campuslike settings flanking both sides of the tollway. Stretch the boundaries to the east and west, from Oak Brook to Aurora, and include the Ar-gonne and Fermi National Laboratories to the north and south, and there is more than-20 million square feet of office and research space.

What's more, there is ample room to spare. Only about a third of the available land along the tollway has been developed, prompting some officials to estimate that the space could more than double, to 50 million square feet, by the end of the century, making it half the size of downtown Chicago. But is Du Page County truly nurturing a high-tech region to rival the nation's acknowledgedand much larger centers of advanced computer and semiconductor research outside San Jose, Boston; Raleigh, N.C.; and Austin, The signs are mixed. Naperville Mayor Margaret Price, whose city is home to the largest number of research and development firms, does not hesitate to declare that "Naperville is in the class with Silicon Valley and Boston." Naperville off icials who have seen their population more than double in the last 10 years to 55,210, are so convinced they will continue to attract high-powered research firms and the scientists and engineers who fill them that they are expanding their municipal sewage facilities to accommodate a population of 130,000. "If we continue as we are planning," said Jack Romine, executive director of the Naperville Chamber of Commerce, "we should reach population by the year 2000.

Ultimately, we could cap out at If we go to more multifamily housing, we could go to 150,000." Others are more cautious in their predictions. "I don't think we can expect to see the kind of rapid growth they had in Silicon Valley or Route 128," the high-tech region near Boston, said Clayton Kirkpatrick, chairman of a special Du Page County commission mapping economic growth. "These things have a tendency to grow quite We are probably at an early stage." Though the development of the corridor is generally dated from the late 1960s, when and Amoco moved in, it is unclear whether the region kj i a contender again But Kirkpatrick, for one, is not so sure. Though prominent and respected for their academic research, Northwestern and the University of Chicago do not generally provide the kind of commercially viable research that emerging high-tech companies seek, he said. "Northwestern and Chicago are not quite oriented as MIT or California or Duke or North Carolina or the University of Texas at Austin," Kirkpatrick said.

Interviews with spokesmen from the major computer research and manufacturing firms in the San Jose and Boston areas also suggest that the Du Page corridor is a long way from being recognized as a significant high-tech region. "I don't hear Chicago mentioned in the same breath as other areas like Boston or Austin or the Silicon Valley," said Rebecca Wallo, spokeswoman Continued on page 14 has moved into the "critical mass" stage common to the growth of true high-tech areas. That critical mass commonly means a combination of prominent universities; reasonable land prices; comfortable communities filled with quality, affordable housing; proximity to a major airport and large city; and convenient transportation. When those elements are present in an area, and several major research laboratories have already located there, "a certain synergy develops that just builds on itself," said Donna Kelly, spokeswoman for As evidence that the critical mass has been reached, those who see Du Page rivaling the Silicon Valley point to the major private-industry research labs already along the corridor, the Argonne and Fermi labs, the University of, Chicago and Northwestern University and to the availability of a wide range of housing in the county. By Mark Zambrano Even before he became a boxer, his friends called him "Rocky II." As a gang member in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood, George Casas was known for his punching prowess in addition to a talent for wielding a bat.

"My older brother was in a gang too," said Casas, 20. "They called him Rocky. So his friends started calling me Rocky II, and I tried to live up to the name. 1 "I remember I was attacked once by a rival gang. They beat me with bats because I was wearing the wrong colors.

A week later I saw the guys who got me. I got my friends together, and we came out with bats and got them back." Last spring Rocky II climbed into the ring for the first time after the Catholic Youth Organization CYO opened a training gym in his largely Hispanic neighborhood. A few months later he quit the gang that had been the dominant force in his life for 12 years." The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, which is trying to revitalize the CYO as part of its new campaign against gangs, is hoping that many youths in Chicago's poorer neighborhoods will follow Casas off the streets and into sports programs. On Friday the archdiocese announced that it will allocate $12,500 to establish CYO urban basketball leagues for high-school-age players in the Southeast and West Sides of the city. In all, the archdiocese has committed $250,000 to its antigang campaign for this year.

By paying new attention to the CYO, the church is trying to revive an organization that once played an important role in the fight against youth crime in Chicago's ethnic neighborhoods. Its religious, cultural and athletic Continued on page 3 J'J'f" Vi Figuring costs: How computers put a byte on school budgets i I i i. k'' is one computer for every 72 students, and if the current buying trend continues, there will be one computer for every 14 students within five years, said Hilda Uribe, an analyst with Future Computing Inc. of Richardson, Tex. Computers have become much more accessible to schools in the last few years, because computer firms have donated equipment and slashed prices in an attempt to corner the growing personal-computer market.

Studies have shown that parents are likely to buy the brand of computer their child uses at school. To determine how schools are using computers in' the Chicago area, The Tribune, mailed questionnaires to 240 public school districts and 10 private high schools in suburban Cook, Du Page. Lake and Kane Counties and to the Chicago Board of Education! Nearly 61 percent of the schools responded to the survey, including 148 public suburban districts, 2 Continued on page 4 schooling worry that they could end up widening the gap between students in affluent areas and their counterparts in poorer locales that children in areas such as Wheaton will be taught to use computers to their fullest potential, while disadvantaged students will receive little or no training. Others worry that in the rush to buy expensive computers, many schools are not laying the groundwork for their effective use by training teachers in their applications and the evaluation of software. But whether those conditions are being met or not, computers are coming to school in increasing numbers.

From June, 1981, to June, 1984, the number of com-, puters in American public schools went up almost twentyfold, to 630,000 from 33,000, according to the New York City-based Talmis a market research firm specializing in computers. Talmis predicts that the number of computers in schools will top 1 million by June. Nationwide there By Jean Latz Griffin Education writer Marilyn Pollock's 5th-grade class in Wheaton is what many believe the classroom of the future will be like: 27 children using 15 computers to learn everything from math to creative writing and American history, "I am a facilitator and model learner," said Pollock, a 28-year veteran of teaching who designed the all-computer class, which began in September in Madison Elementary School. "The computers have given the students what I have always tried to create in my classrooms, a sense of learning through exploration." But for every teacher who, like Pollock, believes that computers will revolutionize education, at least one critic predicts that the current rage of bits and bytes will fade much as educational television did. Even some who expect computers to shape the future of A Tribune ptoe by John Dziakan School.

Some educators worry that in the rush to purchase expensive computers, many schools are not laying the groundwork for their effective use. "Monster Math" asks Art Counts and Cindy Hazel to add 6 and 2 on their computer in Marilyn Pollock's 5th grade class at Wheaton's Madison Elementary 3.