Why was it important to the story, for you point out that these two girls were
"Italian-American beauties"  and "attend Andrew Jackson Language Academy in Little Italy"??.

How curious, that you neglect to mention the Ethnicity of Nora, (nee Smith), their Mother, who had almost complete responsibility for their childhood rearing. (Irish?)
After all they are only HALF Italian American. What is the other half????

Or the Ethicity of their Grandfather, Gilbert Smith, a man of means, an ex Chicago cop. He was fired  for being "friendly with several admitted burglars."(Irish?)

Why wouldn't you mention the largely Hispanic population of Pilsen?

The Ambrose, LaRaza, Bishops and other gangs infested their neighborhood.
Were these Hispanic Gangs??

Regina fell for a Latin King named Johnny Rivera, a man with a rap sheet and an alias for every day of the week. Was he Hispanic????

At Chicago's Jones Academic Magnet High School, what is the enrollment?
Hispanic: 36.7%; Black: 34.4%; White: 18.2; Asian/Pacific Islander: 10.1; hmmmm

Oscar Velazquez, a truck driver, confided he had a wife and kids in Mexico.
Hmmm . Hispanic ???

Margaret's friend Veronica Garcia, had a gun she was holding for her boyfriend.
Is Veronica Hispanic???

Sister's uncle, William Smith (accessory after the fact?) Irish?
Margaret's aunt offered her refuge (harboring a Fugitive) Irish??

Margaret's uncle by marriage  didn't t know his wife was harboring a fugitive. "My feelings were hurt bad because she did something behind my back," the uncle said. [Your niece is being charged with Murder, and your feelings are hurt?????]
Still, he never considered turning Margaret in."I knew [police] were going to find her anyway," he said. [ Just turn your back, and don't bother to try to figure out how she could be helped] What a NICE guy {gag} His Ethnicity?????

Shouldn't this story be an example where Nurture (Family and ENVIRONMENT) overwhelmed Nature (Genetics) ?????

Is not the Moral: That Beauty, which can often be a Blessing, in such a Environment can be such an Irresistible Magnet, and therefore a Deadly Curse, when the selection of friends, are not between good and evil, BUT between evil and more evil!!!!!

Richard Annotico

To CC's Bright and Beautiful, but living in a Dung Heap, without the support the Community!

We don't let this happen in the Jewish Community!!
So many Italian Americans are being left behind, with no "Affirmative Action" help,
and we concern ourselves only with Spaghetti Dinners.
Why do you allow the Chicago Dailies to continue to insult you ??!!!!

When is the Chicago Italian American Community going to get it's act together??

Are Sisters Angels or Killers?

Chicago Sun Times
September 7, 2004
BY STEFANO ESPOSITO AND FRANK MAIN Staff Reporters

In the precisely choreographed world of the criminal courtroom, Margaret and Regina DeFrancisco were billed either as sweet but slightly confused teenage sisters, or astute, careful killers.

The Italian-American beauties arrived for trial in July, wearing modest polka-dot dresses and white cardigans. Their long brunette tresses were pulled back, revealing young faces scrubbed clean of makeup and, their attorneys no doubt hoped, any taint of the grubby crime of which they were accused.

Prosecutors asked jurors to see past this artful innocence, reminding them that the sisters' clothing concealed tattoos and, while hiding from police, Margaret used a razor blade to slice from her stomach a tattoo she feared might give her away.

If it was hard to believe girls with "angelic looks" lured Oscar Velazquez into their Pilsen basement to rob and kill him June 6, 2000, prosecutor Cathy Sanders told jurors that truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.

And sometimes truth refuses to be neatly packaged. The portraits that emerge after dozens of Chicago Sun-Times interviews with family, friends and police are of two smart, studious, in ways starkly different girls, who mocked but also fell prey to the gang world so close to their Pilsen doorstep.

Regina is the impulsive, heart-on-her-sleeve type. She's 22. As a kid, she dragged home countless stray pets. Later, to escape police, she fled to Texas -- a place she'd never been -- to be with her Latin Kings lover. During her trial, under fierce cross-examination, Regina exploded, glaring at the prosecutor and yelling: "God, you're evil!"

Margaret, 20, was the one who got all the attention, a young woman with Robin Williams-quick humor and a sweet, inscrutable face. She was the sneaky one -- a trait that unnerved one neighbor who knew both sisters well.

"You would look at Margaret and see right through her," the neighbor said. "It was black. There was nothing there. She didn't seem like she had depth, like she had compassion."

In July, a Cook County jury convicted Regina of first-degree murder in Velazquez's shooting. Her sentencing is set for Thursday. A separate jury was unable to reach a verdict in Margaret's murder trial. A retrial is set for November.

A 'perfect' childhood?

Regina's childhood was "perfect, loving." That's what she told an investigator writing a report that a judge will use to help decide Regina's prison sentence.

Regina, Margaret and brother Joey grew up with their mother, Nora DeFrancisco, in a drab brown brick home in Pilsen with a dominant view of the underside of the Dan Ryan Expy.

Augie DeFrancisco, the sisters' father, was a convicted drug dealer. He recently told the Sun-Times that he's reformed. Nevertheless, he was a no-show in the sisters' childhood years, Regina told the court investigator.

The sisters did have a relationship with Nora's father, Gilbert Smith, a gregarious man of means who leased all kinds of Pilsen property and built the DeFrancisco home. Earlier in his life, Smith, who died several years ago, was a Chicago cop. He was fired in March 1960 for being "friendly with several admitted burglars," according to a Sun-Times article. Smith appealed his firing, but it was unclear how the case was resolved.

The sisters left home each day to attend Andrew Jackson Language Academy in Little Italy. Both were good, though not stellar, students, and neither got in any kind of serious trouble -- that their friends could recall.

"I was teacher's pet," Regina told the court investigator. "I was a nerd and didn't know it."

Outside school, Regina's life seemed to revolve around animals -- whether it was a favorite dog or her love of horses. "I've rode all my life," she said to the investigator. "I've never lost a show."Even in grade school, Margaret's good looks drew the boys' attention."They always tried to flirt with her," recalled Margaret's friend Linda Ramos. "She never really paid attention."

Mapping gang turf

Returning to Pilsen each day, the sisters entered a more perilous world. The Ambrose, LaRaza, Bishops and other gangs infested their neighborhood. As they became teenagers, the sisters quickly learned where not to tread.

"She knew gang names and who was against who," said "Patrizia," a friend of Margaret's. "She had lots of street smarts."

In parts of Pilsen it was, and remains, all too easy to get sucked into gang life.

"You send your children to a different neighborhood to go to school, to go to work," said one of Nora DeFrancisco's cousins, who requested anonymity. "They are safe until eighth grade."

The DeFrancisco sisters had little chance of avoiding the attention of gang-bangers.

"When I say beautiful girls, I mean they were model material," said the neighbor who knew both sisters well. "It was all about the looks."

But if the sisters were enticed by gang members, they were also apparently wary. In court, her lips curled into a sneer, Regina referred to gang-bangers as "those hoodlums."

Gangsters came in and out of the DeFrancisco home, neighbors said, but it was Regina who became ensnared.

Trying to keep Regina out of trouble, Grandpa Smith found her a job with a Chicago periodontist. Regina was an exceptionally quick learner, but she showed up late twice, and got fired in spring 2000, her former employer said.

Regina fell for a Latin King named Johnny Rivera, a man with a rap sheet and an alias for every day of the week. In April 2000, Regina and another man were arrested in Chicago for allegedly dealing cocaine to an undercover cop.

At Chicago's Jones Academic Magnet High School, Margaret went from a promising to a struggling math student, said her freshman algebra teacher.

"She seemed a little out of sorts, a little more disheveled -- almost like an adult going through a divorce," said her teacher, Phyllis Cavallone.

Margaret sometimes slipped out of a bedroom window at night, recalled the neighbor who knew the girls well. "If Margaret wanted to do something, she would do it by sneaking around," the neighbor said.

At the same time, through open doors, the neighbor heard the teens argue with their mother. Sometimes, Nora would talk about the sisters as "the bitches."

Enter Oscar

In May 2000, a confident young man with cash was driving his new white Camaro in Pilsen. His name was Oscar Velazquez. He spied Regina. He liked what he saw in the comely 17-year-old, and invited her out for tacos. Regina said yes. She quickly realized she'd made a mistake, Regina would later say. Velazquez, a truck driver, confided he had a wife and kids in Mexico.

"He's so creepy," Regina said during her trial.

A day after the date, Velazquez phoned Regina at home. Margaret, then 16, answered. Regina whispered to Margaret to make up "some baloney" about Regina being in jail -- anything to get rid of Velazquez. But Velazquez persisted, eventually delivering $1,000 cash to Margaret to "bail out" Regina.

Days later, an infuriated Velazquez learned he'd been duped. In the sisters' version of events, Velazquez, armed with a handgun, showed up June 6 at the sisters' home, where he confronted Regina in the basement.

Margaret was upstairs with her friend Veronica Garcia. Margaret heard her sister screaming, "Please don't shoot me!" Garcia had a gun she was holding for her boyfriend. She handed it to Margaret, who raced down into the basement to see Velazquez waving a silver gun at her sister. Margaret fired once, hitting Velazquez in the back of his head.

Later, the three panicked teenagers wrapped Velazquez's dead body in plastic and threw him in the back of his car before dumping the body in a vacant lot. Not knowing what else to do, Margaret sprinkled nail polish remover on the body and set it on fire.

But investigators pieced together a different story -- one in which the sisters planned to rob and kill Velazquez because they figured he was a "patsy."

In the investigators' version, the sisters invited Garcia over because she had a gun, something the friend testified to at trial. The sisters were careful. They laid down plastic on the basement floor to catch Velazquez's blood. And when Velazquez showed up at their home June 6 -- at their invitation -- the sisters asked if anyone knew he had come. No one did, Velazquez said.

While police were still building their case, the girls vanished.

Just days before, one of the sisters' uncles, William Smith, asked Margaret what really happened in the basement.

"Uncle Billy, I'm too ashamed to talk about it," Margaret told Smith.

Two years in hiding

With only a post office box address to go on, Regina took a bus to Laredo, Texas, to find her boyfriend, Johnny Rivera.

"She said she wanted to leave and allow her sister to blame her," said Regina's attorney, John DeLeon. "It's warped logic, but it's her logic."

Regina waited three days for Rivera to show up, and when a friend of his finally did, she slipped into a grim underworld.

Regina changed her name. When her photograph and real name appeared on the TV show, "America's Most Wanted," she hastily moved on. She said she survived by working as a maid. Police suspect she sold drugs -- and made a tidy profit.

Margaret's life in hiding couldn't have been more different. At some point, she ended up in Roscoe, Ill., a 90-minute drive northwest of Chicago. Margaret's aunt offered her refuge in an apartment in a small brick building on a quiet, leafy cul-de-sac. Somehow the eye-catching teen attracted almost no attention in this town of about 10,000.

Carol Danger rented the only other apartment on Margaret's floor. She and Margaret never crossed paths.

"I was just flabbergasted she had lived there," Danger said.

Another neighbor recalled seeing an attractive but skittish teenager occasionally come out.

"She was a little cautious. As soon as I'd look over there, she'd jump inside," said the neighbor, Randy Palm.

Even Margaret's uncle by marriage said he didn't at first know his wife was harboring a fugitive. She would make up excuses about having lost the key to Margaret's apartment, said the uncle, who requested anonymity.

"My feelings were hurt bad because she did something behind my back," the uncle said.

Still, he never considered turning Margaret in."I knew [police] were going to find her anyway," he said.

On March 24, 2002, police staked out the cul-de-sac. The next morning, they moved in. The aunt led them to Margaret's apartment. She was in her bedroom. Margaret didn't seem alarmed. Her face was blank, almost impossible to read.

Caught

Regina's freedom came to an end by chance.

While searching a seedy Dallas neighborhood in October 2002, two sheriff's deputies mistakenly went to Regina's boyfriend's apartment, trying to serve a warrant on someone else.

Rivera let the deputies in, but the gang-banger had left a trace of marijuana flake on his coffee table. The deputies quickly uncovered large "cookies" of crack cocaine, some packaged to sell. Deputies handcuffed Rivera. A groggy Regina lay on a mattress nearby. She wouldn't look at the deputies but did show them an apparent valid Texas ID, with someone else's name on it. The deputies let her go.

Regina was hiding something, the deputies thought.

A week later, they had the apartment manager set up a meeting with Regina. The deputies were waiting.

Regina and another man pulled up in an SUV. As police approached, the SUV sped off, reaching speeds of up to 90 mph as it tore through residential Dallas, the deputies said.

The SUV slammed into a median, blowing a front tire outside the El Jaguar nightclub.

Regina leaped out of the car.

"I chased her for probably 20 or 30 yards, and then I jumped on her back," said Dallas County Deputy Eades, who wouldn't give his first name. A cell phone fell from Regina's hand and skidded across the tarmac. She had $1,500 in cash in her pocket.

In Dallas County Jail, a computer check revealed Regina's true identity and why she was such an important catch.

"We pulled her out of jail," said Deputy Dodson, who also declined to give his first name. "I asked to see one of her tattoos, and she showed me. . . . I called her by name, but she never said a word to me. She knew it was over."

Are sisters angels or killers?
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cst-nws-angels07.html