Construction is expected to be completed in August on the new South Barrington home being built by former Chicago Bears linebacker and team leader Mike Singletary, who is being inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame this summer.
Singletary, 39, was the Bears’ middle linebacker from 1981 to 1992 and the emotional leader of the 1985 Super Bowl championship team. He reached the Pro Bowl in 10 of his 12 seasons. He is now a commentator for WFLD-Channel 32’s football coverage, but his principal job is as a motivational speaker and consultant to corporations in the area of diversity. The father of seven, “Samurai Mike” also is a full-time dad.
Singletary and his wife, Kim, are building a more than $1 million, seven-bedroom home on an unpaved street in the gated Glen of South Barrington subdivision, which is on the south side of Mundhank Road about a half-mile west of his existing house. His new, 9,400-square-foot home was designed by Moran Nowak Architects and is being built by GBS Construction. The Singletarys bought the more than one-acre lot last year from developer William Rose for $348,000, according to public records, and began construction last October.
Singletary said he and his family will move into the two-story, all-brick home, which has a five-car garage and an eastern view of Lake Adalyn, in August.
“We are moving because we want to change our lifestyle,” Singletary said. “We had had some of my wife’s relatives staying with us, and we had a whole suite in our present house designed for them. Now, it doesn’t look like we’re going to have any more relatives staying with us. So we wanted to have our master suite and a guest suite on the first floor instead of on the second floor, and we wanted to have all the kids together on the second floor instead of on the third floor. So we set this house up a little differently than our existing one.”
Plus, Singletary said he needs a larger office for his business, which has “really expanded.”
The Singletarys have had their 14-room Georgian in the Hunters Ridge area of the far northwestern suburb on the market since April 1997 for $1.349 million. The six-bedroom, brick and stone home, which was built around 1990 and has more than 5,000 square feet, has a two-story family room and an in-law apartment above a five-car garage. Also, the home has a concrete tile roof and a full, finished walkout basement with an exercise room and a rec room. The 1.3-acre property also has a gated driveway.
Bill Lamack of ERA Countrywood Realty has the listing.
– The 9-bedroom Oak Brook ranch home of the late union official and reputed mobster Dominic Senese, who was critically wounded by a 1988 shotgun blast outside the home in an apparent gangland-style attempted assassination, is on the market for $4.5 million.
Senese, who died of natural causes in 1992 at age 75, was the $98,000-a-year president of Teamsters Local 703 at the time of the shooting, and union sources said his organized crime ties had gone back for more than 30 years.
Those ties may have come back to haunt him in January 1988, when unknown assailants ambushed him as he left his car to open a security gate at the Saddle Brook Chase subdivision. The blast knocked him back into his late-model Lincoln Town Car, but he was able to drive about a block to his house and stagger inside where his wife, Sadie, called police.
Although Senese, who once boasted that he was a cousin of the late mob chief Anthony Accardo, told police he didn’t see his attackers, it was rumored that he did see them but told mob bosses he would not identify them in exchange for no further attempts on his life. In 1990, a federal court-appointed administrator ousted Senese from union leadership, citing the union’s ties to organized crime. Several months later, Senese’s son and heir apparent, Lucien, survived a car bomb explosion.
The subdividable, five-acre Oak Brook estate, which is south of the Midwest Club and just northeast of the intersection of Meyers Road and 35th Street, is being sold by Senese’s family. The all-brick home at 3324 Roslyn Road has three bedrooms, marble floors, custom woodwork and sits atop a hill. Some have said the garage has a turntable that allows owners to park their cars so they face out in the morning, but listing agent Nikki Ricci of Coldwell Banker said she is not aware of one.
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