Alleged mob cop's wife arrested for tax evasion

Friends of ours: Lucchese Crime Family, Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso
Friends of mine: Louis Eppolito, Stephen Caracappa

The wife of "Mafia Cop" Louis Eppolito was arrested Wednesday in Las Vegas on federal tax evasion charges, defense attorney Bruce Cutler said. Fran Eppolito was taken into custody by federal agents on the basis of a complaint that accused her of not paying taxes, Cutler said. Cutler, who is representing Louis Eppolito in a Brooklyn federal indictment, said details of Fran Eppolito's case were not available late Wednesday. Officials at the Las Vegas U.S. attorney's office wouldn't comment on any case pending the unsealing of court documents.

Eppolito's husband, a former NYPD detective, was indicted last year on charges he and his partner, Stephen Caracappa, worked as hit men for the Luchese crime family while they were police officers in the the 1980s and '90s.

Federal prosecutors allege that they took tens of thousands of dollars from former acting Luchese boss Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso to carry out gangland hits and funnel confidential law enforcement information to the mob. In total, prosecutors have charged the pair with involvment in 10 homicides.

Both Louis Eppolito, 57, and Caracappa, 64, have been free on $5 million bail and are under house arrest in the New York City area. They are scheduled to go on trial next month in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn.

Cutler characterized the arrest of Eppolito's wife as "a low-blow thing." Rather than handling tax matters with "civility," the government engaged in "federal thuggery" by using an indictment in such fashion.

The Brooklyn-born Eppolito and his wife moved to Las Vegas after he left the police force in early 1990 after suffering a heart attack. He had been highly decorated during his 21 years as a cop, earning more than 100 medals of recognition and two medals for valor, his attorney said.

Fran Eppolito has been a regular spectator at her husband's Brooklyn court appearances.

Thanks to Anthony Destefano

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Documenting The Nicer Side Of Al Capone

Friends of ours: Al Capone

Did gangster Al Capone really have a kinder, gentler side? In this age of makeovers, CBS 2's Mike Parker reports one area man hopes to re-make the image of public enemy number one. "Like everybody there's another side to somebody."

Meet Nino Cruz, self-described magician and one of the guiding lights behind a new independent movie called, "The Other Side of Al Capone." The gist of the story is that the killer, bootlegger and king of the Chicago Mob was not such a bad guy after all. "He would give hundreds and thousands of dollars at Christmas time when it came to the less fortunate."

To help finance the still uncompleted film, Cruz is selling a tiny fragment of one of the original bricks from the now demolished Capone headquarters, the Lexington Hotel at 22nd and Michigan, along with a copy of Capone's death certificate. The price: $15. They're being sold at PJ's trick shop on rand road in Prospect Heights.

Nino Cruz says a key element of the revisionist movie will be Capone's Loop soup kitchens that fed the hungry in the early days of the depression. "After donating the food to the kitchen, because he had a kind heart which nobody knew about, he'd actually put the apron on and started serving."

"I guess he was a good guy who had a bad side to him."

Backers hope to sell their production to one of the cable channels. Maybe with that "Scar Face in an apron" scene, the Food Network will be interested. The producers say mob boss daughter, Antoinette Giancana will narrate their production.

Thanks to Mike Parker

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Development of the Vegas Poker Mafia Family; Mid-1980's Golden Nugget

Friends of ours: Tony Spilotro

The below is from an email that someone sent me that seems to pick up in the middle of a story. I have requested some answers to some questions that I had for the reader who sent this to me, but I wanted to provide this to all my readers to see if anyone else had some information on this.

The "Honored Society" as the Mafia is commonly known among its members is structured much like a modern corporation in the sense that duties and responsibilities are disseminated downward through a "chain of command" that is organized in pyramid fashion.

1. Capo Crimini/Capo de tutti capi (super boss/boss of bosses)
2. Consigliere (trusted advisor or family counselor)
3. Capo Bastone (Underboss, second in command)
4. Contabile (financial advisor)
5. Caporegime or Capodecina (lieutenant, typically heads a faction of
ten or more soldiers comprising a "crew.")
6. Sgarrista (a foot soldier who carries out the day to day business of
the family. A "made" member of the Mafia)
7. Piciotto (lower-ranking soldiers; enforcers. Also known in the
streets as the "button man.")
8. Giovane D'Honore (Mafia associate, typically a non-Sicilian or
non-Italian member)

In the early 1980s the Vegas family of the Poker Mafia was in place. The "real Mafia" was losing its hold on the casinos. Soon after Tony Spilotro was killed Mike O'Connor and David Cutter were sent to the joint for extortion and blowing up a car. The "real" Mafia was out, but a new "Poker Mafia" took its place. All had been cheating for approximately 10 years when they went into the Golden Nugget. Thus the Vegas family line survived to take full control.

Other events contributed to the ascent of the Vegas family. In 1982 the Los Angeles Times came out with a front-page article that revealed cheating in California cardrooms. Gardena lost its hold on poker in California. The Vegas family was more than happy to fill the void. Steve Wynn had Jimmy Knight running the casino and after the Silverbird closed in 1981 hired Eric Drache in 1982 to run the Nugget cardroom. Then in 1984 Wynn renovated the Golden Nugget. [In 1984 Steve Wynn revamped the Golden Nugget casino with funding raised by Mike Miliken and Drexel Burnham Lambert, provided jobs for more than 5,000 employees. The 44 million Spa Tower's foyer resembled the Garden Room of the Frick museum.]

With Jimmy Knight as the casino manager, Eric Drache as was the cardroom manager, and Doug Dalton running the floor, the door was wide open. This group consisted of Mike O'Connor's right hand man Chip Reese, Doyle Brunson, Jimmy Shehady and a few others. They spilt up the games. It became very well organized and the Las Vegas group controlled everything.

Doyle and Chip were business with Jack Binion. Doyle had been one of Benny Binion's boys and Jack Binion had grown up with this racket. Doyle was like an older brother to him. The Golden Nugget was the same as the Horseshoe. Eric Drache had control of the Golden Nugget and with Jimmy Shehady as his take off man, millions were made. Archie Karas, Lou Olejack and more cheats than you can count were in the casino.

I can only speculate when Bobby Baldwin [President of the Golden Nugget] became apart of this. But he did become a major part of this "cheating conspiracy". With no one having a chance to win in the Hi-levels of poker in Vegas the cheats also took advantage of cheating the casinos in many different ways. Management connections through poker provided dice cheats to "shoot the shot" and "marker scams" to go on. John Martino was implicated in a marker scam. With a bribe to a NSGCB agent [$25,000] he was able to avoid going to jail. This is discussed in the tapes [The Cheating Tapes]. It is also documented as this went to court.

Eric Drache was put in charge of the WSOP. What a joke this was. Poker was now controlled by cheats. It was always controlled before, but it was not this well organized. Eric Drache was a compulsive sports better and soon was losing more at sports than he could steal or cheat. On the occasion that he was let go from the WSOP after running it for years, he had sold many seats for a discount for a quick monetary fix. He must of sold twenty to thirty WSOP $10,000 seats for $8,000 cash before the event. After losing the money he was in a bad situation. Jack Binion covered the loss and nothing was told to the public. However, Eric Drache was no longer running the WSOP. This is the reason that Eric Drache was no longer in charge of the WSOP.

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Angry Son Knows the Mob's True Colors

Friends of ours: Frank "The German" Schweihs, Joey "The Clown" Lombardo, Nicholas Calabrese

Frank "The German" Schweihs played the tough guy in federal court, pleading not guilty to federal racketeering and extortion charges. Schweihs had been on the run, after top Chicago mobsters were indicted as part of the FBI's Operation Family Secrets investigation into more than a dozen unsolved Outfit murders.

So on Friday, resplendent in his orange prison jumpsuit and a cane, Schweihs decided to be amusing, to be funny like a clown, probably because "The Clown" wasn't there.

"Why's all the news media here?" asked the Outfit enforcer. "I dunno," said his lawyer. "Slow news day."

"Slow news day," Schweihs agreed. "They just like to [expletive] with me."

Not everybody laughed. The stocky man in the black shirt two rows away stared at the back of the German's head. He kept staring, and let the room know he was staring, by not sitting down when it was time. His hand clenched the bench in front of him. If eyes were baseball bats, Schweihs wouldn't have made it out of the courtroom alive.

The stocky man is Nicholas Seifert, a son of Danny Seifert. Schweihs also has been charged, along with fugitive mob boss Joey "The Clown" Lombardo, with the 1974 murder of Danny Seifert. And before Seifert left town over the weekend - to travel back home after the court appearance - he called me at the Tribune.

"I came to court to see Frank Schweihs, to see what he looked like, just to see him have his day in court. Because I know he's actually a participant in my father's murder ... I wanted to jump over that bench.

"He's crafty," Seifert said. "He portrays two different types of people. Once the judge walked in, he portrayed himself as a broken-down old man, but prior to the judge walking in, he portrayed a tough guy, making comments about the media. It was his demeanor."

You were staring? "Yes, I wanted him to look at me, so he could see the words that were coming out of my mouth."

What words? "I can't say that, because then the feds won't let me come to the trial."

So you wanted to let him know something that was on your mind. "Yes," Seifert said.

He called me years ago, after I wrote that mobster Nicholas Calabrese had disappeared from the federal prison in Milan, Mich., and had entered the witness protection program in what would become Operation Family Secrets. By then, the Chicago Outfit was in full panic. The bosses couldn't help their friends, the Chicago politicians, or be helped by them. And I hadn't talked with Seifert again until Friday night.

He hates Schweihs and Lombardo.

In September of 1974, Danny Seifert was about to testify as a government witness against Lombardo and six others, who were charged with bilking a Teamsters' pension fund of $1.4 million. Men in ski masks, carrying walkie-talkies, .38s and shotguns showed up at Seifert's plastics factory in Bensenville. A shotgun blast cut him down as he tried to run away. A hit man walked up, put a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger. With Seifert dead, everybody walked.

"It's something I've never gotten over," Nicholas Seifert told me. "Growing up without a father is very rough for any child. Obviously, being in that kind of atmosphere, where everything was good, before the actual indictments, and then all of a sudden, things were going wrong and our so-called Uncle Joe [Lombardo] wasn't our uncle anymore. Then my father ended up getting killed.

"He [Lombardo] would take us to the circus, to ballgames, he was part of our family, he'd come over or we'd go over there for barbecues and stuff," Seifert said.

"My father wasn't afraid of the Outfit. They were friends. You're really not afraid of your friends, even if it comes to war, or whatever it comes to, my father wasn't afraid of those people, and thought ultimately that he didn't need government protection," Seifert said.

He miscalculated, I said. "Yeah," he said.

I told Seifert what the son of a murdered hit man told me a while back, that his father did their dirty work, that they killed him, perhaps to send a message to Calabrese, and that the son felt he was owed something.

Is that how you feel? Do you think they owe you anything? "They owe me my life," Seifert said.

"They destroyed our lives. My family's life. And in all reality, I pretty much want to do the same."

Will you attend Schweihs' trial? "A team of wild horses couldn't keep me away."

So why did you call me? "Because you don't make them out to be Hollywood stars, and they threatened your family and you still went after them," he said. "And I can't wait for this trial."

And the other ones. "And the other ones," he said. "I want to see justice done."

Thanks to John Kass

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Bad Cop Dies

Friends of ours: Frank Calabrese Sr.

A former Chicago police officer charged with conspiring with organized crime to commit 18 murders has died, his attorney said. Michael Ricci, 76, of Streamwood had been in a coma since undergoing heart surgery in November, said attorney John Meyer. Ricci died last week when his family chose to remove him from life support, Meyer said Monday.

Ricci was among 14 people charged with various crimes in an April 2005 indictment federal officials at the time described as the most far reaching they'd obtained against the Chicago mob. He and another retired police officer were accused of informing alleged mob figure Frank Calabrese Sr., also charged in the indictment, about possible mob members who helped federal investigators.

Ricci had pleaded not guilty and said at the time of the indictment that he had known Calabrese "as a person" since 1964. Meyer said Monday that a tape recording FBI officials made of a conversation between Ricci and Calabrese while Ricci visited Calabrese in federal prison proved only that the two men were good friends. "It's unfortunate that he had to die with this cloud hanging over his head," Meyer said. "Especially since he had a very winnable case."

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