On Nov. 25, 2024, security camera footage from Adolfo García’s unsuccessful oyster and martini bar Yours Truly showed García standing alone in the bar’s basement when a man in a long, grey coat and black baseball hat walked in, demanding his money back.
The man, who García knew as Angelino Escobar but whose real name is Jawad Fakroune, had already been angry with García over late payments on a series of loans he’d given him for several different restaurants around Chicago and the suburbs, all of which had gone under.
That night, Fakroune beat up García and told him he would kill him and his children if that’s what it took to recoup $1.5 million he said García owed him.
“Get my money,” he said. “Ready tomorrow. Or I (expletive) kill you …. I will hunt you down, man. Every day, every night. Believe that.”
Thursday was García’s second day on the witness stand as prosecutors kept building their argument that Fakroune’s alleged attack on García in Yours Truly and the phone and text exchanges that followed went way beyond a business partnership gone sour and instead constituted extortion.
Jurors, audience members, U.S. District Judge Manish Shah and a visibly emotional García spent the first hours of Thursday’s testimony watching the 20-minute confrontation between Fakroune and García, which began in the restaurant’s basement and wound in the kitchen where the two men circled a stainless steel table as Fakroune shouted questions and threats and García, holding his head from an earlier blow, begged him to “please just stop.”
At one point, Fakroune seemed to be aware that the restaurant’s security footage was capturing the confrontation as he stared straight into the camera. About a year later, federal authorities arrested him in Michigan City and charged him with two counts of extortion while posing as the son of a Colombian drug lord. He’s also facing a separate, pending federal case alleging tax evasion and wire fraud.
Fakroune, seated at the defense table in Shah’s 19th-floor courtroom, let out a heavy sigh and rubbed his face as the footage played. García spent much of the video crying as he watched it from the witness stand.
On the footage, he could be seen leaning against the table, holding his head as Fakroune had his last word.
“You better have it, man,” he said. “Tomorrow.”
Fakroune was then captured on camera walking out through the same bar where García had handed his assistant the check earlier that day.
García testified that he took Fakroune’s statements very seriously, driving around the Loop and South Loop and taking a butcher knife from his kitchen to put beside the bed that night.
In a phone call secretly taped by the FBI the next day, he told Fakroune he was trying to scare up cash to replace the $8,000 check he’d made out to Angelino Escobar, Fakroune’s alias, which had set off the confrontation in Yours Truly.
“I’m already a dead man walking by your standards, so (expletive) it,” he said.
“I hope you understand that,” Fakroune replied.
“I do, thank you,” García said. “You told me last night 9,000 (expletive) times.”
Fakroune told García he’d call him back in a few hours and expect that García had come up with the cash.
A few hours later, García called back to say it would have to be a check, made out to an LLC named 613 N. Wells, without the name Angelino Escobar attached to it.
“Your (expletive) check is ready to be picked up,” he said. “I never want to see you again in my life.”
Fakroune’s defense team has told the jury that while Fakroune’s actions toward García were ugly, bad behavior doesn’t equate to breaking federal law. Attorney Damon Cheronis said Tuesday that the confrontation in the kitchen of Yours Truly doesn’t merit an extortion conviction because Fakroune never extended Garciía a line of credit.
But as cross-examination began Thursday afternoon, Cheronis started by zeroing in on García’s difficult history in the city restaurant scene. García admitted on the stand Wednesday to being “an absolute failure” as a restaurant operator and to facing serious personal problems as he sank deeper and deeper into financial distress throughout his dealings with Fakroune.
“You had a reputation in the restaurant industry for being a bad operator … and for taking money from your partners,” Cheronis said. “Almost every business partner that you’ve worked with has called you a fraud.”
Cross-examination was set to continue Thursday afternoon.
