Chicago’s restaurant industry harbors a few colorful characters, and their dealings aren’t always pretty.
“When you go get a steak on Rush Street, you don’t really know what goes on in the back room,” defense attorney Damon Cheronis told a jury Tuesday on the 19th floor of the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse.
Prosecutors on Tuesday argued that Jawad Fakroune’s alleged attack on Adolfo Garcia in the back room of Garcia’s now-shuttered martini and oyster joint Yours Truly went way beyond the occasionally cutthroat interactions that can characterize the seedier side of the city’s restaurant scene and the people who make their living by it.
Over about 20 minutes, late on Nov. 25, 2024, Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Rothblatt said, Fakroune beat up Garcia in the kitchen of Yours Truly and told him he would kill him and his children if that’s what it took to recoup $1.5 million from Garcia’s struggling restaurants.
“When (Fakroune) wasn’t getting his money back as quickly as he wanted it, he resorted to violence and threats,” Rothblatt said.
Fakroune, 47, faces two charges of extortion for the beating and subsequent communications with Garcia, whom prosecutors allege was so fearful after the attack that he began sleeping next to a butcher knife.
Fakroune is accused of posing as Angelino Escobar, the son of the famed Columbian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, and lying to people about his connections to nonexistent Italian mafiosos to ensure payback on his loans. His trial, which got underway late Tuesday afternoon, promises to open a window into Fakroune’s fast-paced and often shadowy world of business dealings with the city’s restaurateurs, which prosecutors allege took place under multiple aliases.
But Cheronis, Fakroune’s defense attorney, warned the jury that “the things (Fakroune) did, the things he said, they way he acted, they are not morally right, but they are not illegal.”
Cheronis said that he wouldn’t ask that the jury approve of Fakroune’s conduct in the kitchen of Yours Truly in November 2024. But, he said, hostile and aggressive behavior didn’t amount to extortion, either. For Fakroune to be convicted of extortion, he said, the jurors would need to agree with federal prosecutors that he’d entered a lending agreement with Garcia.
“Bullying is not a federal crime,” he said. “This was a toxic business relationship that blew up in the ugliest way possible, but there was no extension of credit.”
Cheronis also sought to paint Garcia as a shady character who was in financial free fall, hemorrhaging money to “side partners and secret deals,” lying about what he owed and desperate to avoid his own troubles with the law.
Prosecutors said they expect Garcia, the government’s star witness, to spend much of Wednesday on the witness stand.
Fakroune appeared aware of the fact that the confrontation at Yours Truly was captured on the restaurant’s surveillance system, Rothblatt said, and at one point looked into one of the cameras to claim that the FBI wouldn’t catch him. He left Chicago later that month, prosecutors said, and went to stay in an apartment on the Manhattan’s Lower West Side.
When federal agents knocked on that apartment door in New York about a month later, Fakroune allegedly fled wearing only his underwear and ran “in a naked jaunt” — barefoot and only grabbing a black garbage bag to cover himself up — about a mile until he escaped out the back door of an upscale Italian restaurant, claiming to have been robbed.
Federal authorities ultimately arrested him in Michigan City, Indiana, in January 2025. He’s been incarcerated since then at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago while the extortion case and a second case alleging fraud and tax evasion are pending against him.
