FORMER COCAINE KINGPIN NOW SERVES HOT DOGS, NOT DRUGS

MARKHAM -- Two decades after customers clamored to buy cocaine from a
teenager named John Cappas, they're lined up again to buy what he has
to sell: Hot dogs.

The one-time "drug kingpin," as the newspapers called him in the late
1980s, this summer became an owner of a hot dog stand called Johnny's
WeeNee Wagon.

It's a few Chicago suburbs and a world away from where he ran the drug
empire that made him $25,000 a week -- enough to buy a house, fast
cars and a necklace that spelled "Spoiled Brat" in diamonds to drape
around his Playboy bunny girlfriend.

In a bright red building that looks like a barn with a man-sized
statue of a hot dog wearing an American flag out front, he sells hot
dogs, gyros, burgers, and now for the first time since the place
opened in 1955, french fries.

"I'm doing the right thing now," said the 43-year-old Cappas, who was
released in 2004 after service 15 years in prison.

That doesn't mean Cappas is shying away from his past.

He obviously enjoys telling stories about what life was like before he
was arrested. Like the time he made headlines when, knowing federal
agents were looking to arrest him, he and a local television reporter
took a spin on Lake Michigan on a friend's speedboat ("The feds had
already seized mine," he said.) before he turned himself in.

Nor did he keep it a secret that for his grand opening last weekend --
an event that included a magician and a tiger he says belonged to
former boxing champ Mike Tyson -- he'd asked two friends who were
Chicago police officers before they were convicted of selling cocaine
to judge his auto show.

But Cappas knows that his reign as a drug kingpin includes more than
funny stories about his lavish lifestyle. He's linked to the deaths of
two 19-year-old sons of Chicago police officers, both of whom killed
themselves with their fathers' service revolvers after, authorities
said at the time, at least one of them bought drugs from one of
Cappas' accomplices.

And he knows that for all the "toys" he had, there was a time members
of his family wanted nothing to do with him.

"I was banished from my (family) house," he said, his father, Louis
Cappas, nodding in agreement.

Then he was banished from society, with a judge who sentenced him to
45 years in prison, angrily telling him that he had "lost his soul."

"I am what I am," he said simply. "I'm never going to live that
down."

That helps explain why he said it is important to let people know he
is no longer the same young man he was when he was sentenced to prison
- -- something he says he deserved. And that he wants to make amends.

"I do not want kids to follow in my same footpaths..." he said. "I'm
paying some penance for what I did in the past."

That means his plan is not just to own a successful hot dog stand in a
community, but to play a role in that community. He talks about plans
to sponsor Little League teams and build a baseball diamond, as well
as continue talking to at-risk kids, as he's done for the last few
years.

He said a big part of his message is that's possible to turn your life
around, to come out of prison and make an honest living.

"This is my way of giving back," said Cappas, who also plans to
publish a book about his life.

It all has impressed Scott Ladany, the owner of Red Hot Chicago, Inc.
to sell Cappas his hot dogs.

"I did hesitate but ... it's a gut feeling that he deserved a second
chance in life," Ladany said.

Ladany said that what Cappas did after he got to prison -- earned a
college degree and studied and taught cooking classes -- helped
convince him that Cappas had changed.

So far, Cappas sees no signs that his past has cost him any customers.
In fact on one recent day customers, many of whom said they knew all
about Cappas' drug dealing past, were in a line that stretched out the
door. Some said his past was partly why they were there.

"It's great to see somebody whose life is turned around and is trying
to do something good," said Mary Beth Johnson, a 47-year-old Orland
Park resident, who grew up nearby and came to the stand regularly when
she was a little girl. "It's great to see this in our neighborhood."