Mob School

Frank Calabrese Sr. smiled broadly, sometimes chuckling, as his son, Frank Jr., underwent cross-examination Thursday, denying that hatred motivated his decision to cooperate against his father.

Testifying at the Family Secrets trial for a fifth consecutive day in court, the younger Calabrese said he still loved his father but worked secretly for the FBI in an effort to keep the reputed mob boss imprisoned. "I know he loves me, just not some of my ways," Calabrese, referring to his own drug use, said of his father. "I love him, just not some of his ways." But in a 1998 letter in which he offered his cooperation to a federal agent, the younger Calabrese wrote, "I feel I have to help you keep this sick man locked up forever."

The elder Calabrese is on trial with three other reputed mob figures and a former Chicago police officer in connection with 18 long-unsolved gangland murders.

At times, Calabrese appeared flustered by the rapid-fire questioning of his father's lawyer, Joseph Lopez.

Calabrese, whose secretly recorded conversations with his father in a federal prison in Milan, Mich., dominated the trial this week, denied he steered his father into talking about several murders or the inner workings of the Chicago Outfit.

His father was trying to "school" him in the ways of the mob so that he could exert control of the father's criminal operation on leaving prison, the younger Calabrese said. "He's schooling me because I'm telling him I want to be involved," Frank Calabrese Jr. said.

Lopez hit hard at Calabrese's on-again, off-again estrangement from his father over the years. Calabrese acknowledged that despite his father's genuine concern for him, he stole $600,000 to $800,000 in cash stuffed in a duffel bag from him.

After his father discovered the theft several months later and came to confront him at his house, the younger Calabrese fled out a window. "I didn't want to be around him no more," Frank Calabrese Jr. said.

After they went to prison in the mid-1990s in a loan-sharking operation, Calabrese said he hoped his father would keep a promise to semiretire from the mob. But he decided to contact the FBI when it became clear that "he was not going to change his ways," he said.

The elder Calabrese had not worked outside of the Outfit since about the 1960s when he worked for the City of Chicago as a stationary engineer, his son said. He did have a remodeling business for a while, but it was funded with Outfit money, Frank Calabrese Jr. said.

The elder Calabrese is on trial with reputed Outfit members Joey "The Clown" Lombardo, James Marcello and Paul "the Indian" Schiro, as well as Anthony Doyle, a former Chicago police officer. The case centers on charges of conspiracy to commit the homicides as well as loan-sharking and illegal sports bookmaking.

The aging defendants have been the center of attention at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse, as waves of spectators crowd the courtroom to take in a few minutes of the real-life mob tale.

Lopez, wearing a pinstripe suit and a pink shirt and tie, questioned Frank Calabrese Jr. repeatedly about his relationship with his uncle, Nicholas Calabrese, whom Lopez implied the younger Calabrese favored over his own father. Nicholas, one of seven defendants to have pleaded guilty in the case, also secretly recorded brother Frank Calabrese Sr. and is expected to implicate him in numerous murders.

Calabrese agreed with Lopez that at times he spoke with Nicholas Calabrese, as well as other uncles, about things he did not tell his father.

Frank Calabrese Jr. acknowledged that he lied to investigators in the 1990s in an unsuccessful bid to avoid prosecution in the loan-sharking case. Calabrese said he lied at his father's direction. "I did that for my father, for the crew, for myself," he said.

Calabrese said his father had confronted him several times while he was taking drugs and stealing family jewelry to feed his cocaine addiction.

His father expressed his concern about the thievery, telling him, "People will cut your hands off for doing things like that," Calabrese testified.

Earlier Thursday, in some of the last of numerous video surveillance tapes played this week in court, the elder Calabrese told his son that those who believed that Lombardo and others led the Chicago crime syndicate were wrong.

The elder Calabrese, believing his son was set to rejoin the Outfit as an active member on his release from prison in 1999, told him that they could be part of a better, stronger crime syndicate. Too many members of the Chicago mob were being too public about their roles, even bragging incorrectly that they were Outfit leaders, the elder Calabrese said in one videotaped conversation in the prison visiting room.

With a few "good guys," a stronger Outfit would arise, the elder Calabrese said. "It's not going to be the Christmas tree . . . it used to be," he said. "It's going to be a smaller Christmas tree that's going to have the loyalty that was once there."

Thanks to Liam Ford

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Son Hears How Mob Hit Men Killed His Father

Tony Ortiz sat on the edge of a bench in a federal courtroom in Chicago on Wednesday, eyes intent, as he listened to a secret prison tape recording of a reputed mob hit man, Frank Calabrese Sr.

Calabrese Sr. was allegedly describing how shotgun ammunition obliterated Ortiz's father, Richard, when he was killed in 1983.

"Tore 'em up bad," Calabrese Sr. said on the recording, played during the Family Secrets trial. "Big, big bearings," he said. "So them, them will f - - - - - - tear half your body apart."

Calabrese Sr. was describing the murder to his son Frank Calabrese Jr., whom he was grooming to take over his Outfit crew.

Instead, Calabrese Jr. was on the stand Wednesday, explaining the recordings he secretly made of his father while they were in prison in 1999. Calabrese Jr. wants his father, accused of 13 hits, in prison for good.

"God works in mysterious ways," Tony Ortiz said after the testimony.

Calabrese Sr. "bragged about the bullets tearing up my dad," Ortiz said. "It had to be tearing him up inside to see his son testify against him."

Calabrese Sr. contended Ortiz was killed because he was dealing drugs and doing juice loans without Outfit permission.

Tony Ortiz was only 12 when his father died and said he doesn't know what his father did, besides run a bar in Cicero. Ortiz, now 36 and with four kids of his own, just knows his dad didn't deserve to die, and so brutally.

Also slain was Ortiz's friend Arthur Morawski, who had nothing to do with Outfit life but happened to be with his friend in Ortiz's car.

"The Polish guy that was with him was a nice guy, OK?" Calabrese Sr. said on the tape. "But he happened to be at the wrong place."

Morawski sold Ortiz glasses for the bar Ortiz ran in Cicero on 22nd Street, the His 'N' Mine Lounge.

The two friends had just returned from the racetrack when Calabrese Sr. pulled up beside them with two Outfit killers in the car -- his brother and Outfit hit man Nick Calabrese, and the late reputed mob killer James DiForti.

Calabrese Sr. said the two gunmen froze when they pulled up to kill Ortiz. Calabrese Sr. said they had been stalking Ortiz for nine months.

Calabrese Sr. recalled how he had to nudge the men to leave the car. "OK now, out. Out, out, get out," Calabrese Sr. said on tape with a chuckle. "He was laughing about it," Tony Ortiz said. "That's what kills me the most."

Next to Ortiz in the courtroom was his mother, who wiped away tears, and his uncle, who sat stoically.

Calabrese Sr.'s attorney, Joseph Lopez, will begin cross-examining Frank Calabrese Jr. today. While Lopez hasn't addressed the Cicero killings, he has argued that much of the tape is a father making false boasts.

Calabrese Sr. detailed how the men prepared for the hit, from testing the shotguns to making sure the gunmen emptied their weapons into the victims.

Tony Ortiz said he got a little satisfaction watching Calabrese Sr.'s son testify against him.

"You can tell on the tapes he really loves his son," Ortiz said. "He still has the opportunity to talk to his son, although I doubt that will ever happen," Ortiz said. "I would give anything in the world to go out to the racetrack one more time with my dad."

Thanks to Steve Warmbir

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Romantic Fling and Side Deals Led to Spilotro's Murder

Mobster Tony "The Ant" Spilotro was pocketing money he made from side deals behind the mob's back and boasting that some day he would occupy the throne of organized crime in Chicago. Making things worse, Spilotro was having a romantic fling with the wife of a Las Vegas-based mob associate.

"Right then a nail went in the coffin," convicted loan shark Frank Calabrese is heard saying on a tape made secretly — by his own son — and played Tuesday at the trial of Calabrese and four others accused in a conspiracy that included 18 murders, including Spilotro's. "Right then, that was one nail," Calabrese repeats.

Spilotro was known as the Chicago mob's man in Las Vegas and inspired the Joe Pesci character in the movie "Casino." He and his brother, Michael, were murdered in June 1986 and buried in an Indiana cornfield.

Calabrese says on the tape that sex with the wife of a mob member violates a code. "That is a no-no, that is a no-no, that is a friend and that's a commandment," he tells his son, who secretly recorded the conversation to help the FBI gather evidence against his father.

In short order, Spilotro and his brother both were murdered — on orders from the big boss of the mob at the time, Joey Aiuppa, Calabrese says. "Joey Aiuppa had a meeting before they all went to jail and he told them he wanted him (Spilotro) knocked down," Calabrese says, then quotes Aiuppa as saying: "I don't care how you do it. Get him. I want him out."

Calabrese, 69, is on trial along with James Marcello, 65; Joseph (Joey the Clown) Lombardo, 78; convicted jewel thief Paul Schiro, 70; and retired Chicago police officer Anthony Doyle, 62. They are charged with taking part in a racketeering conspiracy that included the murders of the Spilotro brothers and 16 others.

Aiuppa was the top boss of the Chicago mob. He died in 1997 at age 89, shortly after his release from prison where he served time for a casino skimming conviction. Lombardo was convicted in the same case.

The tapes that have been played for three days now were made at the Milan, Mich., federal correctional center where Calabrese and his son, Frank Calabrese Jr., were serving time for a loan-sharking conviction.

Unknown to the elder Calabrese, his son was helping the FBI, saying he believed his father would never leave the mob and he wanted to "expose my father for what he is." Jurors also have seen videos made at the prison.

On one tape, Calabrese Sr. also says it was Aiuppa who got Edward Hanley a position with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union. Hanley rose to become international president of the union, which represented employees ranging from bartenders to room maids.

Hanley, a one-time member of the AFL-CIO executive board, was repeatedly investigated by federal prosecutors but never charged. But experts often cited the union as an example of mob influence in labor.

On the tape, both Calabreses refer to Hanley — who retired from the union in 1998 and died in a Wisconsin auto accident — as "Uncle Ed" and the father says Aiuppa got him his first union job. "He started him off in the Cicero local," Calabrese Sr. says.

The tapes are a catalog of Chicago mob murders.

Calabrese Jr. interprets some of his father's remarks as confirming that he was on hand, watching from a scout car, when former mob enforcer William Dauber and his wife, Charlotte, were murdered in Lake County July 2, 1980. And likewise for the Sept. 14, 1986, murder of mobster John Fecarotta, allegedly by Calabrese Sr. brother Nicholas Calabrese, who has pleaded guilty to racketeering and is expected to be a prosecution witness.

Calabrese Jr. also testified that his father once drove him past a South Side parking lot and "gave me a nudge."

"I understood there was a dead body there," the son testified.

He apparently referred to the last remains of Michael "Hambone" Albergo, a mob figure whose body has long been sought by the FBI. Agents dug up a parking lot near U.S. Cellular Field, home of the Chicago White Sox, several years ago but have not said exactly what they found there.

Calabrese Sr. attorney Joseph Lopez said in his opening statement that they found "thousands of bones" but none traceable to Hambone Albergo.

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Mob Past Memories Are Dusted Off for Trial

In the biggest organized crime trial here in years, jurors scribbled dutifully in notebooks Monday as the son of a reputed mob leader offered a rare, almost surreal how-to lesson about growing up in the “Chicago Outfit.”

The witness, Frank Calabrese Jr., defined terms like “work cars” (untraceable cars for use in crimes), “juice loans” (“high interest loans,” he said, from “the Outfit”) and “underbosses” (akin, he explained, to “vice presidents of companies”).

Mr. Calabrese also told of hidden Uzis, shotguns and rifles in a wall of the home he once shared with his grandmother. And, in his nasal Chicago tone, he outlined essential mores of the Outfit, like, “You weren’t supposed to steal without permission.”

On trial here are five men, including Mr. Calabrese’s father, Frank Sr., who federal prosecutors say were powerful leaders in the city’s organized crime operations in decades gone by. The men are accused of taking part in a racketeering conspiracy that included gambling, loan sharking and 18 killings that, until now, had never led to charges.

Among those deaths: the fatal beatings in 1986 of Tony Spilotro, a chief enforcer in Las Vegas known as the Ant, and his brother, Michael, who were found buried in an Indiana cornfield.

Fourteen men, including some in their 70s, were indicted in the case when it began in 2005, but time and age, among other things, has thinned the numbers. Two of the initial defendants died. One is too sick to stand trial. Six others have pleaded guilty.

On Monday, five men — some balding and one, Joey Lombardo, known as the Clown, who was rolled into court in a wheelchair — listened intently as the younger Mr. Calabrese, 47, repeatedly broke another of what he described as the Outfit’s dos and don’ts: “A lot of things you weren’t supposed to talk about.”

Mr. Calabrese, whose testimony began last week and is expected to go on for days to come, told of discussions he said he had overheard about killings, including those of the Spilotro brothers. He said his father and an uncle, Nicholas, had once planned out a shooting by setting up two chairs in their office like the front seat of a car and practicing how it would come down. He said the same uncle had once asked him to fish a murder weapon out of a Chicago sewer; he was working for the city’s sewer department at the time, Mr. Calabrese said, and retrieved the gun while out on the job.

The elder Mr. Calabrese, 70, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges, said nothing aloud in court Monday, but he repeatedly whispered to his lawyer, Joseph Lopez, and sometimes smiled or smirked or shook his head as his son spoke. Mr. Lopez, in an opening statement when the trial began last month, suggested that his client and his son simply did not get along.

“It’s very difficult for any parent to see his child testify against him,” Mr. Lopez told reporters last week. But on the stand, the younger Mr. Calabrese (whose code name was Jr. on the elaborate handwritten spreadsheets for collecting “street taxes” and counting cuts in gambling operations that were flashed on a large screen before jurors) said he had sought his father’s promise a decade ago that he would “stop his ways” and “semi-retire from the Outfit.”

Total retirement, the son explained, was impossible. “Stepping back,” where people were called on only once in a while, was allowed. But while father and son were both in prison for loan sharking, the younger Mr. Calabrese testified, it became clear that the elder man was not planning to quit at all. That, the witness said, was when he wrote a letter to the F.B.I., offering all that he knew.

If the trial, which is expected to last much of the summer, seemed to some full of faded organized crime images — white-haired men in failing health and nicknames out of a forgotten book — it did not, apparently, to others.

Last week one witness, Joel Glickman, went to jail for refusing to testify against the defendants. He said he was afraid of what might happen to him if he talked.

On Monday, Mr. Glickman, 71, came to court — appearing grumpy but willing to talk about the hundreds of thousands in “street taxes” he said he had paid as a bookmaker since the 1960s. Mr. Glickman had nothing unpleasant to say, though, about Mr. Calabrese or the other men on trial. Under questioning by Mr. Lopez, he took pains to say that Mr. Calabrese had always been cordial and diplomatic and that he had never threatened him in the least.

Loyalty, Mr. Calabrese, the son, explained to the jury, was another of the dos and don’ts he had learned from his father.

He recalled that after the Spilotro deaths, he pledged he would avenge the death of his father and his uncle if they were ever similarly killed.

“One of the rules of the Outfit was that your Outfit family came before your blood family,” he said. He added, “It also came before God.”

But the trial has shown that family ties, whatever the family, don’t always hold. Later in the trial, Nicholas Calabrese, the uncle, is also scheduled to testify — for the prosecution.

Thanks to Monica Davey

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"Made" The Chicago Way - Mob Induction & A Son Turning on His Father

In one of the first undercover tapes played at the Family Secrets trial, a speaker identified as reputed mob boss Frank Calabrese Sr. recounted for his son the ceremony at which Outfit members become "made."

The underboss, the Outfit's second-in-command, and capos, who led the street crews, initiated new members one by one, cutting their fingers and then burning a holy picture in their hands, the elder Calabrese said in the 1999 conversation. The bosses checked out if anyone flinched in pain, according to the tape played Monday in court. Candidates had to have a murder under their belt.

"You know what I regret more than anything?" said Calabrese, accused by prosecutors in 13 gangland slayings. "Burning the holy pictures in my hand. That bothers me."

In his first full day on the witness stand, Calabrese's son, Frank Jr., who identified his father on the tape, testified about murder and intimidation as his father glowered at him from under furrowed brows, his chin jutting forward in defiance at times and amusement at other times.

The younger Calabrese, dressed in an unbuttoned blue, red and white polo shirt, largely avoided his father's gaze, looking straight ahead as he responded to the questions of a federal prosecutor, often pushing out his lower lip and knitting together his eyebrows in the same manner as his father.

For the first time, Calabrese told why he had turned his back on his father and wore a hidden recorder for the feds as the two talked in a federal prison.

When the younger Calabrese was about to go to prison in the loan-sharking case, he said, he had a meeting at his attorney's office that his father unexpectedly attended. Calabrese had violated his bond by taking drugs, and his father made him promise to go clean, he said. "Promise me you'll never do drugs again" and be "a good person," the older Calabrese told him, the son testified

At the same time, Calabrese asked his father to "semiretire" from the Outfit, and "he said he would," the son testified.

After he went to prison, the younger Calabrese said he felt as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders, leading him to decide to indeed change his criminal ways. But Calabrese said he realized his father never intended to reform.

The younger Calabrese said he contacted federal authorities from prison and offered to cooperate. Now he is one of the government's star witnesses at the trial of the senior Calabrese, 70, reputed mob figures Joey "the Clown" Lombardo, James Marcello and Paul "the Indian" Schiro as well as Anthony Doyle, a former Chicago police officer. At the heart of the prosecution are 18 long-unsolved murders.

In an undercover tape played in court Monday, the elder Calabrese expressed some regrets at being made a full-fledged member of the Outfit in the secret ceremony years earlier. On the tape, the elder Calabrese said he told his sponsor, Angelo LaPietra, boss of the 26th Street crew in the early to mid-1980s, that "I didn't want it."

"I would be strapped down and if I wanted to do something else, I couldn't," Calabrese was heard on the tape telling his son.

The elder Calabrese told his son that to qualify, a made member had to have committed at least one murder, though the initiation could take place years later, the son said. But the elder Calabrese gave plaudits to Mario Puzo, author of the "Godfather," saying the book's depiction of the making ceremony was "very close" to the real thing, his son said.

Calabrese told jurors that his father and his uncle, Nicholas Calabrese, had confided to him years earlier the details of how brothers Anthony and Michael Spilotro had been killed in one of the Outfit's most infamous murders.

Nicholas Calabrese is expected to testify for the government, implicating his brother, Frank Sr. in as many as 13 murders. The cooperation of the elder Calabrese's brother and son led to the code name for the federal investigation, Operation Family Secrets.

In the mid-1980s, the Outfit was unhappy with Anthony Spilotro's handling of its interests in Nevada, and Nicholas Calabrese and John Fecarotta went out to Las Vegas to kill Anthony Spilotro and someone else, the younger Calabrese testified.

They were unsuccessful, but while they were there, Fecarotta won a lot of money while gambling. Casino records placed Nicholas Calabrese there for the Las Vegas trip. The two older Calabreses were furious when they learned of the records because Nicholas Calabrese and Fecarotta had killed another Outfit associate - - whose name Calabrese Jr. said he could not remember - - while they were in Las Vegas.

When the first attempt to kill Anthony Spilotro failed, members of the Outfit decided to bring the Spilotro brothers to Chicago, under the pretense of initiating Michael Spilotro as a "made" member, Calabrese Jr. said. The Spilotros were led to a Chicago-area home and to the basement, where "a whole bunch of guys" surrounded them, he testified.

The brothers were strangled, and beaten to death as some of the Outfit members held their legs, he said. The older Calabreses told him that "Michael didn't put up much of a struggle," but Anthony Spilotro struggled and warned those who were killing him, "You guys are going to get in trouble!" Calabrese Jr. testified.

Nicholas Calabrese later shot Fecarotta to death because Fecarotta was assigned to bury the Spilotros' bodies, which were discovered in an Indiana cornfield, but Nicholas himself was wounded in the hit, Calabrese Jr. testified. When his uncle recovered, he asked Calabrese Jr., at the time a supervisor at the Chicago Department of Sewers, to retrieve the gun used in the shooting from a sewer where Nicholas Calabrese had dumped it. The younger Calabrese said he arranged it so his work crew carried out repairs in the area where the gun was dumped. Under the pretense of cleaning the sewer, Calabrese found the gun and returned it to his uncle, he testified.

Jurors and defendants alike paid rapt attention to much of the testimony Monday, even when Calabrese Jr. detailed high-interest juice loans, street taxes on businesses and other Outfit operations.

The serious atmosphere of the courtroom was broken only a few times, including once when Calabrese Sr. decided to get up to leave the courtroom for a restroom in the middle of his son's testimony. The elder Calabrese, who is in custody, went to a bathroom in a lockup hidden from the view of jurors.

A few minutes later, outside the jury's presence, Judge James Zagel admonished the defendants that they were allowed to leave for a restroom break during testimony, but by doing so they waived their constitutional right to be present for testimony.

Lombardo, whose nickname of "the Clown" has long matched his history of colorful antics, piped up: "I go pretty often, judge!" drawing laughter from the packed courtroom.

Much of Calabrese's testimony Monday dealt with the minutiae of Outfit life, such as how he spoke in code with his father, how juice loans were calculated and his work with his uncle in enforcing bans on illegal activity in parts of the Chicago area without Outfit approval.

Calabrese Sr. also told his son, in one of their taped conversations played Monday, that federal authorities did not always know who were actual members of the Outfit. Asked by Assistant U.S. Atty. John Scully whether that meant that the Outfit had "sleepers" who worked almost exclusively behind the scenes, Calabrese said, "Yes."

The only other testimony Monday came from Joel Glickman, a former mob-connected sports bookmaker who previously had refused to testify, despite being given immunity from prosecution, and had been jailed for contempt. After a week in jail, Glickman decided to testify after all. He said he took out a juice loan for his boss at an insurance company from Calabrese Sr.

Thanks to Liam Ford

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