Chicago Officials Cringe That Al Capone Refuses to be Rubbed Out

Friends of ours: Al Capone

Chicago officials shun any association with Al "Scarface" Capone, whose Prohibition-era exploits made his name synonymous with the city.

"Anything that glorifies violence we are not interested in," said Dorothy Coyle, director of the city's office on tourism. But 60 years after his death, they still can't run his memory out of town and visitors from all over the world are very much interested.

They drive by Capone's house. They leave flowers, coins and cigars at his grave. They take pictures of places associated with him never mind that everything from hotels where he ran his criminal empire to the garage where his henchmen carried out the St. Valentine's Day massacre is long gone.

"That era, the mobsters, gunfights … I'm just fascinated by it all," Nancy Spranger, of Fenton, Mich., said before boarding an Untouchable Tours bus decorated with fake bullet holes to see sites tied to Chicago's gangland past.

Much of the mobster's history is left to the imagination because Chicago officials have made little effort to preserve or promote sites tied to his legacy. In the 1980s, they gunned down an effort to designate Capone's house on the South Side a national historic landmark.

Jonathan Fine, president of Preservation Chicago, understands why the city wouldn't want reminders of Capone, but says the city loses a piece of itself with each demolition of one those sites destroys. "Destroying history is the most shameful legacy of all," Fine said. "You can't erase it, so you might as well embrace it."

Laurence Bergreen found Chicago officials far from receptive when he was researching his 1994 book "Capone: The Man and the Era."

"They rebuffed me (and said) 'Why don't you write about the symphony, architecture, Mayor Daley?'" he recalled.

John Binder, author of "The Chicago Outfit," has a conspiracy theory: that the lingering influence of organized crime even today in Chicago has the city dead set against anything that smacks of mobsters. "It's not that they want you to forget about the past, they want you to forget about the present," he said a few days before a deputy U.S. marshal was arrested on charges that he fed information about an informant to the mob.

It's clear that many people still are drawn to the city's mobster past.

Capone is the subject of 50,000 hits a month on the Chicago History Museum's Web site, five times the number of inquiries about the Great Chicago Fire and "by far the number one hit on our Web site," said museum curator John Russick.

Untouchable Tours owner Don Fielding said he's been able to stay in business for 18 years longer than Capone was around, he'll remind you because "people like the idea of somebody getting away with something."

Capone surely did for a while raking in tens of millions of dollars as head of a vast bootlegging, prostitution and gambling operation. He was widely suspected in a number of murders but never charged.

Finally, with the help of federal Prohibition Bureau agent Eliot Ness, head of a special unit dubbed "The Untouchables," Capone was brought down by income tax evasion charges.

Convicted after a trial in which his men tried to bribe jurors, Capone spent seven years in federal prison. He died in 1947, his mind ravaged by syphilis.

"He's kind of been elevated to this status as the quintessential example of (the) American gangster," Russick said.

Countless films, TV shows and books have cemented that image.

"You hear somebody say 'This guy's a regular Al Capone,' you don't need to say another word about the guy," said Robert Schoenberg, author of the book "Mr. Capone."

"He's infected the national consciousness," Schoenberg said.

Make that the international consciousness.

Tourists from Europe and Asia especially love to see and hear about the places where his torpedoes pumped his enemies full of lead, tour guides say.

"European tourists who watch a lot of American gangster show reruns, they are fascinated," said guide Michael LaRusso Reis. "The French and the Italians love to go to Union Station in Chicago where they filmed the baby carriage scene" for the 1987 movie "The Untouchables." And sometimes, those tourists get a little under-the-table assistance.

"Some (city) employees have gangster tours brochures, and when supervisors aren't looking they will slip them to European tourists," LaRusso Reis said.

Thanks to Don Babwin

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Mafia Victim Not a Rat?

Friends of mine: Colombo Crime Family, Greg "The Grim Reaper" Scarpa

Accused FBI mob mole Lindley DeVecchio, charged with sealing the fate of a Brooklyn teen by tipping off a Colombo crime pal that the boy was about to squeal, had been completely wrong about the 17-year-old's intentions.

Filings in a related case make clear that murder victim Patrick Porco was no rat. "Porco flatly refused to answer the investigators' questions," the court papers reveal.

DeVecchio, a star FBI agent who helped make major cases against the mob in the '80s and early '90s, now stands accused of four counts of second-degree murder for an all-too-cozy relationship with Colombo killer Gregory "The Grim Reaper" Scarpa. Brooklyn prosecutors allege that he thanked Scarpa for the info he got by sending back tips that helped the mobster avoid arrest and whack rivals. DeVecchio has denied any wrongdoing.

In the Porco case, DeVecchio is accused of acting to safeguard Scarpa's son, Joey, from a murder rap.

In the spring of 1990, cops and prosecutors were eager to talk to Porco about a fatal drive-by shooting the previous Halloween. The victim was Dominick Masseria, 17, who was believed to have tossed eggs at the wrong bunch of kids. Porco and Joey Scarpa were in the white limo involved in the shooting.

Just after speaking on the phone with DeVecchio, Gregory Scarpa told his girlfriend that Joey was going to have to kill Porco, prosecutors say. But last week's filings make clear that prosecutors' efforts to find out what Porco knew were going nowhere.

On May 5, 1990, Porco and his sister met with prosecutors and Detective Alphonse Lombardo. "Neither one was willing to talk," the papers reveal. "Inspector Lombardo confronted Patrick Porco with the fact that he was likely to be killed because he was the only witness who could implicate Joey Scarpa.

"Porco started crying, but he steadfastly refused to cooperate."

But even the appearance of cooperation was enough. Porco was found shot dead - once in the mouth, signifying rat - on Memorial Day, 1990.

In 2005, the Brooklyn DA reopened the Masseria case, identifying the shooter as Craig Sobel, 39. The papers revealing Porco's noncooperation were filed in connection with the Sobel case.

Thanks to Alex Ginsberg

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Blood vs. Blood in Operation Family Secrets

The mob hit men were under the gun -- literally -- as they exited the brown Ford LTD and approached their target in front of the His 'N Mine Lounge in Cicero.

One of them, Nick Calabrese, felt he had a choice. Either kill the intended victim, Richard Ortiz, an alleged dope peddler who had crossed the mob -- or be killed himself.

Nearby, in the car he just left, sat his brother, Frank Calabrese Sr., with a gun aimed out the window. Frank Calabrese Sr. was providing cover for the hit men. He could just as easily mow them down if they froze on the job.

Nick Calabrese had no doubt his brother would do it if he didn't complete the job, according to federal court testimony. It was not a new feeling for Nick Calabrese. He and other family members often worried that Frank Calabrese Sr. was going to kill them. In fact, Frank Calabrese Sr. instilled fear and terror into his family every day.

Interviews with friends and acquaintances of the family and law enforcement sources along with a review of court records provide fresh details on life in the Calabrese family. The stereotype of the mobster -- whether it's Tony Soprano or Michael Corleone -- is that while he does business brutally, he treats his family with honor and respect. Calabrese Sr. shattered that perception, according to interviews and court records.

In the 1983 murder of Ortiz, the victim had been stalked for months. Nick Calabrese had called off one hit attempt because he believed it was too risky. But rather than tell his brother the truth and incur his wrath, he told him another hit man, James DiForti, froze during the job.

Frank Calabrese Sr. told Nick Calabrese he should have killed Ortiz anyway. And then Frank Calabrese Sr. told his brother he should have killed DiForti, as well.

Such brutality and ruthlessness may help explain why Calabrese Sr. has not one but two family members cooperating against him in a case that has been called the most important mob prosecution in Chicago history. The investigation is called Family Secrets, and it indeed will reveal some of the deepest family secrets of the Chicago Outfit. But underlying the case are other family secrets -- those of the Calabrese family -- that many never saw but that still haunt the family.

At the trial starting in May, Nick Calabrese will testify about the mob killings he and his brother went out on together, such as the Ortiz killing. In that case, Nick Calabrese and DiForti went through with the hit at the His 'N Mine.

Calabrese Sr.'s son Frank Jr. was less involved in the mob life and has gone clean. He will tell jurors about the conversations he had with his father as they walked the yard while in prison together on another case in 1999 -- conversations he secretly recorded at great risk to himself to ensure his father never saw freedom again.

In those conversations, Calabrese Sr. may have believed he was advising his son on mob life and planting the seeds with him to continue the Calabrese legacy in the Outfit. Instead, he may have been sowing his own destruction.

Frank Calabrese Sr. is even recorded once on tape telling his son he would send "his blessing" if other top mobsters determined his brother Nick was cooperating and had him killed.

How Frank Calabrese Sr. treated his children became a sore point between Calabrese Sr. and his brother Nick. The tension reached a high point during the first federal case against them in 1995, according to law enforcement sources.

While Frank Sr. and Nick had deep involvement in their street crew, Frank Jr., had much less involvement, while his son Kurt's role was virtually nonexistent.

Nick Calabrese felt his brother could have better looked out for his sons in the case and worked to reduce any chance of prison time for the two young men. But in the end, both went to prison. While Calabrese Sr. was sentenced to nearly 10 years in prison, son Frank got 57 months and Kurt got 2 years.

When Frank Calabrese Jr. and his younger brother, Kurt, were growing up in Elmwood Park, their childhood, from the outside, seemed normal and all-American, according to people who know them. They lived in a tight-knit, Italian-American neighborhood, going to school at John Mills Elementary and to what was then Holy Cross High School.

In the community, Frank Calabrese Sr. worked to portray himself as a great father, one who was always friendly with the neighborhood kids. Inside the home, though, was a radically different story.

Calabrese Sr. would at times erupt in rages, even over the smallest matters, and scream like a maniac at his two sons, according to sources who know the family. Following the humiliation would come the beatings, with Kurt Calabrese often taking the worst of it. It was a reign of terror that left both sons dreading the time their father came home every day. The abuse continued into adulthood.

When Kurt Calabrese, for instance, got married in the early 1990s, the matter was not a cause of celebration for his father. Kurt was seeing the granddaughter of Angelo "The Hook" LaPietra, a brutal mobster who was Calabrese Sr.'s mentor in the mob.

Neither Calabrese Sr. nor LaPietra wanted the two young people to see each other, but the two fell in love and secretly got married.

On his wedding night, Kurt Calabrese broke the news to his father while they were sitting down at a restaurant in the west suburbs. Calabrese Sr. was stunned that his son would disobey him and punched him in the face. Fearing for his life, Kurt Calabrese hightailed it out of the restaurant and drove off. The two engaged in a high-speed chase, with Kurt Calabrese eventually eluding him.

Chicago political operative Frank Coconate, a friend of Frank Jr.'s, pointed to that confrontation as an example of the price the family paid for Calabrese Sr.'s decisions. "That's what the Outfit does, it makes you choose between them and your family," Coconate said. Frank Calabrese Sr. "chose the mob and threw his family in the gutter."

Despite often taking the worst of the abuse, Kurt Calabrese is not cooperating in the case, law enforcement sources said.

Calabrese Sr.'s attorney Joseph Lopez denied that his client ever abused his children and said the elder Calabrese loves both sons dearly. But Lopez also went on the attack on Frank Calabrese Jr., calling him a con artist who "could sell air conditioners to Eskimos."

Calabrese Jr., who is believed to be living out of state, put his life on the line by secretly recording his father, according to court testimony and law enforcement sources. FBI agents did not have the ability to listen in on the conversations as they happened, and if his father attacked him, agents -- whose presence at the prison was a secret -- were not close enough to protect him, law enforcement sources have said. Calabrese Jr.'s key reason for cooperating with the government was to keep his father locked up for good, sources said.

People who associated with Calabrese Sr. say no one was safe from his wrath. Even having breakfast at a restaurant with Calabrese Sr. could turn into a free-for-all. Calabrese Sr. would be very particular about his order. If the waitress should make an error, the mobster would erupt in a fury, spewing obscenities.

Calabrese Sr.'s demanding nature has not mellowed with age.

Well-known Chicago private investigator Ernie Rizzo learned that firsthand when Calabrese Sr. hired him last year to help him prepare for trial, according to a source familiar with Rizzo's account. Calabrese Sr.'s trial strategy is to try to dig up dirt on his son Frank Jr. in an attempt to undermine his testimony.

It's unclear how attacking the son, though, will counter Calabrese's Sr. own words on hours of secretly recorded conversations in which he discusses mob hits. His attorney has suggested in court that Calabrese Sr. was merely bragging about things he actually never took part in.

Calabrese Sr. wanted Rizzo's office number. And his cell phone numbers. Plus his home phone number. And the phone numbers of any bars where he hung out.

Calabrese Sr. also was frustrated with his attorney, Lopez, because Lopez allegedly wasn't taking his calls -- or calls from his representatives -- as often as Calabrese Sr. wanted.

So Calabrese Sr. wanted to find out if Rizzo had better luck with Lopez. Calabrese Sr. wanted Rizzo to keep a log on how many phone calls it took before the attorney answered Rizzo's calls. That way, Calabrese Sr. would have something to badger Lopez about.

Calabrese Sr. "orders people around like a hit man," Rizzo would say, according to the source.

The thing that disturbed Rizzo most was that Calabrese Sr. would try to get to meet him alone, away from his lawyer, at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in the Loop, where Calabrese Sr. is being held. The one-on-one meeting never took place.

Thanks to Steve Warmbir

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Are Murder Rates the Best Guage of Violent Crime?

As end-of-year crime statistics are tallied, newspapers in recent weeks have been running headlines comparing their local crime rates with other cities and with prior years.

"L.A. County homicides decrease by 6%," the Los Angeles Times reported. The Dallas Morning News headlined its report, "Murders fall, rapes rise in '06," while noting that Dallas was likely to retain its reputation as the most crime-ridden city with a population of one million or more. According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, violent crime "rose sharply" in 2006, but the rate of increase declined during the year. But while murder stats make for good headlines, they may not be the best gauge of violent crime, or a city's safety. I took a look at two compelling theories from criminologists that call into question the way the numbers are used.

The first theory, proposed by the federally funded Improving Crime Data project run by researchers from Georgia State University and the University of Missouri-St. Louis, holds that a city's stats should be adjusted for underlying demographic characteristics. The idea is to figure out if a city's murder rate is higher or lower than you would expect it to be. To do that, researchers examined factors that appeared to contribute to a higher murder rate, including the number of people living in poverty, the city's racial makeup and the divorce rate. (They also identified factors that didn't appear to have an impact on murder rates, including population density. More detail on the calculations can be found here.)

The thinking is that those underlying factors can't be controlled, so when you take them out, you can more clearly evaluate how well police and city policies are preventing homicides. "It helps you direct the police forces in a way that is data-driven rather than either political or serendipitous," said Robert Friedmann, professor of criminal justice at Georgia State University and principal investigator on the ICD project. He added, "When you're ranking a city on raw rates, it doesn't take into account the nature of the city."

Think of a comparison between two hospitals' death rates (a topic I wrote about last year). If Hospital A has a higher proportion of patients suffering from life-threatening diseases, it wouldn't be fair to compare its death rate to Hospital B, which tends to treat patients with milder complaints. Prof. Friedmann's team believes that certain cities (Atlanta, Detroit) have higher underlying risk of murder than others (Denver, San Francisco).

The group relies on stats from the federal government, so its most recent ranking is for 2004. According to that ranking, San Francisco was No. 1 among 67 cities in adjusted homicide rates, despite ranking 30th in the raw rates. Atlanta, conversely, fell to No. 46 from No. 7 after the adjustments. And Detroit dropped to No. 37 on the list from No. 3 -- suggesting that the city's demographic profile helps explain what the Detroit News earlier this month called an "abysmal" crime picture for the city.

The project's underlying premise, that a city's economic and demographic makeup forecasts crime rates, has controversial implications. I asked Prof. Friedmann whether his model is suggesting that African Americans are more likely to commit murder than whites living in similar circumstances. "On the face of it, it looks troubling," he replied. But he offered another explanation: Blacks are disproportionately the victims of homicide. Also, his model shows only that a city's black population correlates with homicide rates, not that it causes them -- some other underlying factor may be influencing the numbers. "It seems to me that if you take the racial attributes out of a politically correct discussion and just look at the facts, it is something that makes sense to analyze," Prof. Friedmann said.

Meanwhile, Anthony Harris, professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is behind another theory getting a lot of attention. He has for several years argued that murder numbers are not a good measuring stick because they can be heavily influenced by the emergency medical care someone receives. The difference between life and death on the operating table can determine whether a murder rate rises.

Prof. Harris was the lead author of a study in 2002 examining the decline in the murder rate between 1960 and 1999. Prof. Harris focused on the role improved medical care had on "lethality," which is the proportion of violent crimes that result in death. Even though the number of potentially deadly attacks surged in that time period, and the proportion of attacks involving guns also rose, lethality actually decreased by 70% -- to under 2% from nearly 6%. He concluded that improved medical-response times and trauma surgery were responsible for turning many would-be murders into assaults.

To demonstrate the effect of medical care, the researchers compared counties nationwide by various medical criteria, and found, for instance, that counties with at least one hospital were associated with 24% lower lethality than those without a hospital. Prof. Harris also found other medical factors that contributed to a drop in lethality of violent crimes, including the addition of physicians to a county's population and the presence of a facility for performing open-heart surgery.

The Harris study was, by necessity, indirect: The researchers lacked the data to track individual cases and determine whether the same injury was more likely to cause death in 1960 than in 1999. Instead, they tracked broad trends in crime and health care.

Prof. Harris told me that looking at all violent crime, rather than homicide, would better serve lawmakers and police. "If people were looking at aggravated assault and the use of guns in producing serious injury, I think the debate would be totally different," he says. "The big social indicator is injury by gun, and its long-term medical effects."

Derral Cheatwood, professor of sociology at the University of Texas at San Antonio, who has studied the relationship of medical resources to homicide rates in Maryland and Pennsylvania, told me that one of the biggest changes is the approach to treatment at the scene of a crime. "It has shifted from the 1960s, where you put someone in an ambulance, rush them to the hospital and treat them there, to an emergency medical vehicle, where you start to treat them right away and stabilize them," he said. (Bill Doerner, professor of criminology and criminal justice at Florida State University, offered up an interesting anecdote: As recently as 50 years ago, ambulances in Leon County, Fla., were run out of funeral parlors, presenting something of a conflict of interest.)

Lethality has actually edged up since Prof. Harris completed his study. One possible reason for the increase, he said: Several large cities, including Los Angeles and Las Vegas, have closed trauma centers, which can be particularly expensive to operate. "Homicide rates are where trauma centers really have an impact," Connie Potter, executive director of the National Foundation for Trauma Care, told me. A May 2004 report from her group declared a "crisis" in U.S. trauma centers, with 30 closed since 2001.

Thanks to The Numbers Guy, Carl Bialik

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Author Comments on Thief!

Friends of ours: Lucky Luciano, Carlo Gambino, John Gotti
Friends of mine: William "Slick" Hanner

It's strange that our fascination with the mob centers so on top bananas like Lucky Luciano, Carlo Gambino and John Gotti when, as any crime beat reporter will tell you, the most incredible stories always involve madcap misfires by the lowliest flunkies, the truly clueless nostra.

Fort Myers author Cherie Rohn ran into just such a lovable screwball more than a decade ago in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when, after losing her job as a TV station manager, she enrolled in casino dealer's school. One of her instructors was a well-traveled man of action named William "Slick" Hanner. "He was walking around with his notebook of 20 hand-scrawled pages in his third-grade-educated hand of his life story, looking for somebody to write it," Rohn recalls. "No money, of course, but I looked at it and it was like an electric shock went through my body. Something about this guy grabbed me and I vowed to write his story."

A decade in the writing, "Thief: The Gutsy, True Story of an Ex-Con Artist" is the laugh-out-loud misadventures of a savvy Chicago street kid who managed to partake in the profitable mob trifecta of booze, gambling and prostitution without ever actually becoming a made guy.

Like some street-smart version of Forrest Gump, Slick went from rags to riches while drifting through America's hottest post-war entertainment scenes. Whether he was fleecing poker players aboard his yacht, the Knot Guilty, in Miami Beach, driving a limo for Nevada's infamous Chicken Ranch, serving as Jerry Lewis' bodyguard or managing the poker room at the Landmark casino in Las Vegas, Slick was where the action was for the last half of the 20th century. "He was an interesting kind of a screw-up adrenaline junkie con artist who goes through life like a speeding freight train about to derail at any minute," Rohn says of her colorful collaborator.

The project was no mere samba down memory lane. Hanner's third-grade education was one obstacle, but Rohn had her challenges as well. "Aside from a couple lurid love letters, I hadn't written anything," she says. "So I had three tasks: I had to learn to write, I had to learn to write as a guy, and I had to learn to write as a guy who hung with the mob."

Rohn does a wonderful job at all three, telling Slick's first-person tale with all the swagger and latter-day slang of a high-rolling con artist of the day. "We filled it out very slowly," she says. "I actually had to put words into his mouth."

She also found that time was of the essence if she hoped to interview Slick's running mates. "Through the nine agonizing years of writing this story, a lot of people died, mostly from unnatural causes," he quips.

At 74, Slick is still doing what he does best, playing poker and consulting with Las Vegas casinos on how to thwart card sharks.

Does the guy who knows where the bodies are buried fear that some associates may take offense at his candid biography? What are you, nuts?

"We had a few death threats," Rohn admits. "I'm not going to tell you where they came from but they were real. Slick isn't one to worry. His attitude is, 'Hey, if that happens, we can sell a few more books!'"

Thanks to Jay McDonald

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