The yellow brick building at 6128 S. Kilpatrick in West Lawn contains two apartments and a basement recreation room. The roof over the entry porch has a slight tilt to it–a Prairie School touch perhaps. With its pine tree in the front yard and garage on the alley, the building resembles thousands of two-flats that dot Chicago’s working-class neighborhoods.
“I came to this country 40 years ago with no clothes to wear,” said Speredakos this past May. “My husband and I struggled so we could have something for our later years. Now these people owe me $27,825 in back rent, and if I lose, everything I own could be taken away from me. I don’t sleep much at night, and all day I’m in court with Bambi and David McMillion.”
You couldn’t miss them. David McMillion is a large, bearded man with shaggy brown hair and a southern twang. He has a cross tattooed on his right hand and sometimes walks with a cane. Bambi has lacquered bright blond hair and dresses girlishly in bright dresses, Mary Janes, and false eyelashes. The McMillions went to the New Nevada for lunch and supper. “Those barbecue ribs were just tremendous,” remembers David. Often they stayed till closing.
The McMillions would also state that they were being forced to pay extra for gas and electricity for the building’s hallways, the basement rec room, and the utility room–they would later insist that the amount was more than $200 a month above what they thought they should be paying. And they would contend that Speredakos reneged on a promise to let them park their van in the garage behind the building. All these problems, they said, had exacerbated their medical problems: David had a heart condition, arthritis, and diabetes, and Bambi had Graves’ disease. The McMillions say they complained to Speredakos’s father, John Bisbikis, and to Speredakos herself. They contend she flat out refused to repair anything. “Mrs. Speredakos, you will never get rent out of us until you fix what’s broken,” David McMillion says he told her.
By this time the New Nevada restaurant had gone bankrupt because sales taxes hadn’t been paid. Speredakos and her partners were feuding, and she hired a downtown lawyer, Barry Barnett, to help her. She told him about the McMillions, but he advised her not to move against the couple because the Cook County Sheriff’s Department said they were needed by the FBI as witnesses in another case.
David McMillion’s career high came early. He began preaching in earnest when he was seven and for the next few years led crusades across the country under the banner David McMillion’s International Flames of Revival Ministries. “I knew Billy Graham and Oral Roberts,” he says. “I was on 600 radio stations. I traveled to 39 countries.”
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After serving in Vietnam, David entered the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary in Springfield, Missouri. He didn’t last long. Asked why, he says he flunked public speaking because he stood too far behind the podium. He says for a while he worked as a private investigator, then as a country-and-western singer. He claims to have opened for Ronnie Milsap and Eddie Rabbitt under the name Johnny Lee Diamond, but Rabbit’s former manager and Milsap say they don’t remember him. Then, he says, he became a magician, Jonathan Champagne. He says, “They put me in a steamer trunk, and an assistant set it on fire. Then a Mack truck came along and smashed the trunk to pieces. When the truck stopped, there I was inside the truck.” In 1985 he returned to a traveling ministry, preaching at “little churches to little-size crowds.”
