Brain Damage Control: Tom Waits Meets Super-Joel

In my 1993 autobiography, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture, I described Joel Tornabene as “an unheralded Yippie organizer known as Super-Joel. His grandfather was Mafia boss Sam Giancana.” But Super-Joel had dropped out of the family business; instead, he let his hair grow long and distributed LSD.

The intelligence division of the Chicago Police Department warned Giancana that Super-Joel shouldn’t hang around with me. The cops were telling the Mafia that I was a bad influence. It could’ve been worse: The FBI had planned to “neutralize” comedian/activist Dick Gregory by alerting the Mafia to his verbal attacks on the crime syndicate.

Super-Joel once told me: “If it wasn’t for acid, I with my Sicilian ancestry and you with your Jewish ancestry, we would never have become such close friends.” And he kissed me on the forehead. But that was okay—it meant love now, not murder.

After he was arrested during the 1968 counter-convention, I wrote that “Super-Joel’s indictment was dropped when an attorney for Giancana managed to persuade them that not only did Super-Joel come from ‘a socially prominent family’ in Chicago, he was also mentally incompetent to stand trial.”

But then, in 2006, I learned from his sister Fran that “our grandfathers were a Sicilian doctor and a Norwegian-Irish carpenter. I can’t imagine how anyone would actually believe that Giancana relationship.” I apologized “for passing on false information.”

Fran replied: “I think that Joel must have had quite a good time with the ‘Giancana connection’ hoax. I was first made aware of this story after his death in Mexico in 1993. His attorney came to Chicago to meet with my mother and our family. He seemed to be quite surprised to see a simple middle-class family home in Franklin Park, rather than a River Forest Mafia compound.

“I wasn’t aware of the extent of this story until [rock drummer] Prairie Prince, who I know Joel was close to for years, asked me a few years ago which side of the family was Giancana. Since then, I’ve seen your tale regarding his being moved to the ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ list due to the ‘grandfather connection.’”

I’m embarrassed to admit that I believed this story simply because Joel was extremely convincing when he told it to me. I was a professional prankster who got pranked himself. And I’m not the only one who was fooled. In a radio interview, Tom Waits was asked, “Who’s Joel Tornabene?” And he answered: “He’s in the concrete biz. Mob guy. He was the grandson of Sam Giancana from Chicago. He did some yard work for me, and I hung out with him most of the time. He died in Mexico about five years ago. He was a good friend of [producer/composer] Hal Wilner, and he was a good guy. He had an errant—I don’t know how to put this—he used to go around, and when he saw something he liked in somebody’s yard, he would go back that night with a shovel, dig it up and plant it in your yard.

“We used to get a kick out of that. So I stopped saying, ‘I really like that rosebush, I really like that banana tree, I really like that palm,’ because I knew what it meant. He came over once with twelve chickens as a gift. My wife said, ‘Joel, don’t even turn the car off. Turn that car around and take those chickens back where you found them.’ He was a good friend—one of the wildest guys I’ve ever known.”

Waits has since written a song—“How's It Gonna End,” on his album Real Gone—that includes this lyric: “Joel Tornabene lies broken on the wheel …. ”

Krassner the Luddite has finally dived into the New Media. The above is excerpted from an expanded digital edition of Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut. For details, check out paulkrassner.com.