Not Letting Family Secrets Slide

There was a break in the courtroom action at the Chicago Outfit trial called Family Secrets, so I took a walk outside the federal building, wondering how to explain my obsession to you.

Recently, a few readers have asked me to switch gears, to give you all a break from endless murders, political corruption and the Outfit's proficiency in putting key people in key spots, including City Hall and the Police Department. But I can't walk away. Not now. Not yet. Not until Friday, with Family Secrets almost at the end.

I'm compelled to cover it, having broken the story about hit man Nicholas Calabrese disappearing into the federal witness protection program in 2003, in a column that explained how the Outfit panicked, with Nick talking, foreshadowing a few of the 18 unsolved Outfit murders that have now been solved.

Yet there's more to this than a reporter following an old story. I stood out there on Dearborn, thinking, with traffic rolling past, when a big truck from the Rosebud Restaurants squealed its brakes, the sound piercing me, and there it was, the reason for being there:

Family Secrets is the whole ballgame in Chicago. It's not merely some interesting trial with colorful gangsters and flamboyant lawyers in wild ties. It is more than mere drama, more than some nice read.

Family Secrets reveals the infrastructure of a great metropolis, illuminating part of the iron triangle that runs things, with the Outfit at the base of the triangle. Certain politicians who pick judges and who influence development and zoning, and certain cops form the protective sides. This iron triangle won't be approved as the 2016 Olympic logo at City Hall, where the mayor keeps losing his hair as the inner workings of the Chinatown crew in his old neighborhood opens like clams at Cafe Bionda or Tavern on Rush.

We've heard witnesses talk about murders and extortion. But we've also seen something amazing -- mob bosses such as Joey "The Clown" Lombardo and Frank Calabrese Sr. explaining their worldview from the witness stand.

There is no Outfit, they insist. But Calabrese did explain how sports bookmaking and loan sharking -- the Outfit's lifeblood -- works, with millions upon millions at play. He lectured on how to build a sports book, using layers and layers of buffers, intermediaries, an organizational web that reaches into the pockets of every person who places a bet on a ballgame, on Rush Street and beyond.

We've learned how critical it is for the Outfit to nurture public servants, alleged sleepers like defendant Anthony "Twan" (Passafiume) Doyle, who worked the evidence section in the Police Department, and who is on federal tape talking in a prison visit with Calabrese Sr. about murder evidence and cattle prods for those who betray Outfit secrets, like Frank's brother Nick.

Are there any more secrets? Sure, a few.

Secrets about Bridgeport money finding its way to Rush Street; building inspectors who help bar owners, providing the right occupancy permits; and links between nightclubs that stretch from Bellevue and Rush to Springfield.

Other secrets have bubbled up from the witness stand, names of other men not charged, like Joe "The Builder" Andriacci and Frank "Toots" Caruso, referred to by the feds, but not by Chinatown, as "The Doctor."

Still, there are other stories I could work on, such as the lame excuse by Chicago Bears linebacker Lance Briggs' on how he trashed his Lamborghini after spending hours recreating at the Rush Street club Level, which is a mere sneeze away from Carmine's.

Or that one about the Republican Senator from Idaho, waving a sensuous, anonymous hello to a stranger at an airport washroom in the next stall; or Senate Democrats cringing now that the boss of Iran has all but thanked them for giving him the chance to fill the power vacuum in Iraq.

Family Secrets was overshadowed weeks ago by the story about a Channel 5 reporter in a pink bikini top at a pool party. And Chicago's Outfit trial will be washed from broadcast memory soon, with that tape in a county courtroom, the one of R&B singer R. Kelly allegedly having sex with an underage girl.

Local TV will gorge on that sex tape, promoting it at 5, 6 and 10 and the next morning, and the national networks that have ignored Family Secrets will feast on the sex tape, the face of the girl obscured, but not her body and not his, in the name of journalism, and of providing us an embrace that we can't live without. But Family Secrets is important, too, an embrace Chicago's lived with for decades.

"As you know, this case involves the history of organized crime in Chicago, for over 40 years," said Assistant U.S. Atty. Mitchell Mars, the lead prosecutor, told the jury.

"The Outfit has survived and prospered with greed, depravity, corruption. People are hurt. People die," said Mars, delivering the beginning of a closing argument he's waited almost his entire career to give.

Mars will finish on Thursday, and I'll be there.

I just have to see this one through.

Thanks to John Kass

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Marcello Pulls Out Shamrock for Good Luck

The last thing you'd expect at the Outfit trial would be a big green shamrock next to Jimmy Marcello's name.

It reminded me of that nightmare suffered by Christopher Moltisanti, the young mobster in "The Sopranos," who wakes up from a coma to tell his crew that he has seen hell for Italian wiseguys: Eternity spent in an Irish bar where every day is St. Patrick's Day. But the jury in the Family Secrets trial of five alleged Outfit members wasn't dreaming Tuesday, and there it was, the green Irish good-luck charm, the clover that decorates the hat of the mayor on St. Patrick's Day, up on the big screen as Marcello's lawyer tried to debunk the prosecution case.

"You've heard he was a made member of the Outfit, and that only those who are 100 percent Italian can be made," said Marc Martin in his closing argument Tuesday. "Well, look at his birth certificate. His mother is Irene Flynn. Her father was James Flynn. Her mother was Katherine Lavin, and we know she's Irish because she's one of 14 children."

Marcello rocked in his chair, bald head gleaming under bright federal fluorescent lights, black eyebrows, scowling, as Irish as a pierogi in a frying pan. He'll need a new nickname soon, so pick one: O'Marcello, or McCello?

The shamrock demonstrates how desperate the Outfit is these days, but it allowed Martin to attack the testimony of key prosecution witness and confessed hit man Nicholas Calabrese, who testified that Marcello was a made man and part of several murders, including the 1986 killings of gangsters Anthony and Michael Spilotro.

"The only thing that was made about Nicholas Calabrese's testimony about Jimmy Marcello is that he made it up," Martin told the jury.

They just stared at him, perhaps because those taped conversations from prison weigh more than a shamrock.

Earlier, Assistant U.S. Atty. Markus Funk elaborated on taped conversations between defendant, Chinatown loan shark Frank Calabrese Sr. and former Chicago Police Officer Anthony Doyle, who in a pre-Marcello moment years ago, changed his name from Passafiume to Doyle when his sponsors put him on the Police Department, where he would work in the sensitive evidence room.

Funk played the tape of Doyle sharing information about a key piece of evidence: the glove lost by Nicholas Calabrese after he murdered his friend, John "Big Stoop" Fecarotta after the botched Spilotro burial.

In that tape, Doyle and Calabrese speak of giving electric shocks to Frank's brother Nick, who they feared was talking to the feds. There was talk of many volts and a cattle prod inserted just so.

Doyle testified last week that he'd read about electroshock therapy in a magazine and meant no harm. Funk argued this was pure nonsense. "Do you honestly believe this man is talking about something he read in a psychiatry magazine? That's Anthony Doyle, the Freud of the Chicago Police Department," Funk said in a quote of the year, as several jurors shifted uncomfortably in their seats. But if Doyle was indeed the Outfit's Sigmund Freud, he could have counseled Joey "The Clown" Lombardo, who has been suffering an extreme case of juryphobia since he testified earlier in the trial, according to Lombardo's own lawyer, Rick Halprin.

"He doesn't trust you," Halprin told the jury. "He's frightened to death of you. He does not believe that any of you will give him a fair shake, and that you'll judge him on his past."

That past includes two federal Outfit convictions, one for bribing a United States senator from Nevada, and the other involving skimming millions of dollars from Las Vegas casinos. And there is still that Lombardo fingerprint on the title application for a car used in the 1974 murder of federal witness Daniel Seifert, who would have testified against Lombardo, Tony Spilotro and others.

Halprin commanded the courtroom, using his voice and posture, an absolutely impressive performance that was worth the wait, a pro's pro. But the problem isn't Halprin's fine work, but the evidence, like that fingerprint.

Another problem is the testimony from dentist Pat Spilotro, who insisted recently that Lombardo was an Outfit boss who told him the murders of his brothers were unavoidable. Halprin accused Pat Spilotro, sitting in the third row on Tuesday, of exaggerating to push his own anti-Lombardo agenda.

"It's all smokescreen, lies and deception," Pat Spilotro told me in the hallway outside the courtroom. "I only tell the truth. My family tells the truth. Lombardo was absolutely part of this."

There were several other tough Irishmen watching in court and they don't need shamrocks. One was Ted McNamara, the FBI agent on the Outfit squad. Another was Assistant U.S. Atty. John Scully, prosecuting his last case in a career of putting wiseguys in prison. And that other guy, a Patrick named after the Irish saint who drove out the snakes out of Ireland eons ago.

His name is U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald. He doesn't need shamrocks. All he needs is time.

Thanks to John Kass

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Chicago Outfit Miniseries Heads to Jury Deliberations

When Chicago's biggest mob trial in years got under way, prosecutors urged jurors to throw out any Hollywood notions they'd picked up from "The Sopranos" or "The Godfather."

Ten weeks later, as jurors prepare to begin deliberations, they could write a miniseries based on what they heard in the courtroom about the Chicago Outfit, as the city's organized crime family is known.

There was an admitted hit man, who would "shoot you in the head over a cold ravioli," according to a defense attorney. A son who pretended to reconcile with his father, then recorded their prison conversations for the feds - including one about how men burned holy pictures in their cupped hands at the ceremony to become a "made" guy.

So-called friends allegedly luring friends to their deaths. Bodies buried at construction sites. Secret meetings in parking lots. Code words used in jailhouse conversations. And a dentist, determined to solve the crime of his murdered brothers, who had an on-the-lam alleged mobster show up at his office with a toothache.

The jury is scheduled to begin deliberations Tuesday in the federal racketeering conspiracy case against five defendants: reputed mobster Joseph "Joey the Clown" Lombardo, 78, reputed mob boss James Marcello, 65, convicted jewel thief Paul Schiro, 70, retired Chicago policeman Anthony Doyle, 62, and convicted loan shark Frank Calabrese Sr., 70. Survival Kit In Sardine Can: $12.97

Assistant U.S. Attorney Mitchell Mars said the 10-week trial was about "the history of organized crime in Chicago," and asked jurors during his closing arguments to hold the defendants accountable for murder, illegal gambling, loan sharking and extortion.

Defense attorneys, meanwhile, attacked the case as one built largely on the testimony of a hit man who admitted lying to authorities in the past and was only cooperating with the government now to escape the death penalty. Attorney Joseph Lopez told jurors the FBI stands for "forever bothering Italians."

Much of the testimony centered on 18 long-unsolved murders, including the killing of one man whose story has already been picked up by Hollywood. Tony "The Ant" Spilotro, known as the mob's man in Las Vegas, was the inspiration for the psychopathic burglar played by Joe Pesci in Martin Scorsese's 1995 film "Casino."

In the move, Pesci's character and his brother are beaten with bats in a cornfield and buried alive. In court, jurors heard what admitted hit man Nicholas Calabrese alleges happened.

Calabrese, the brother of defendant Frank Calabrese Sr., testified for the government that mobsters were mad at Tony Spilotro because he was "bringing too much heat" on them and romancing the wife of a Las Vegas casino executive.

He said the brothers were lured in June 1986 to the basement of a suburban Chicago home where they were told Tony would be dubbed a "capo," or mob captain, and Michael a "made guy."

Instead, Calabrese said, the men were jumped by about 14 men who beat and strangled them to death. The bodies were soon discovered in a shallow grave in an Indiana cornfield, but a forensic pathologist who helped conduct autopsies told jurors there was no evidence they were still breathing when buried.

Jurors also heard from the Spilotros' brother, Patrick, a dentist who choked back tears on the witness stand. He said Lombardo appeared at his suburban Chicago dental office in January 2006 to have a tooth abscess treated while wanted by authorities in the "Operation Family Secrets" case.

The dentist told the court he had spent years speaking to people who might know something about his brothers' deaths and feeding that information to the FBI. Lombardo was no exception, Spilotro said, telling the jury he asked Lombardo why his brothers ended up dead. "I recall his words vividly," Spilotro said "He said, 'When you get an order, you follow it. If you don't, you go, too.'"

Lombardo was arrested after he made another visit to the dentist's office.

Three of the defendants testified.

Lombardo, who lived up to his "clown" nickname by wisecracking on the stand, told jurors he's not a member of the Outfit and learned everything he knows about the mob from James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson movies.

Doyle testified that during a secretly recorded conversation with Frank Calabrese Sr. in prison, he had agreed with much of what the prisoner wanted without knowing what it was, and that the code words Calabrese used were "mind-boggling gibberish."

Calabrese Sr. told jurors that he associated and did business with Outfit members, but insists that he never took the oath of a so-called made guy. But first, he had to endure the testimony of his brother Nicholas, who admitted participating in more than a dozen murders and placed his brother at seven killings. He linked all the defendants but Doyle to a murder scene.

Nicholas Calabrese was labeled a "grim reaper," a "walking piece of deception" and a man who would kill you for serving him cold pasta by Lopez, representing Calabrese Sr.

Calabrese Sr. also listened as prosecutors asked his namesake - son Frank Calabrese Jr. - to translate conversations with his father at a federal prison in Michigan where both were serving time for a loan-sharking conviction.

In one example, Calabrese Jr. told jurors that when his father described a mob associate as "not a nice girl," that meant the man was cooperating with authorities.

Lopez said the elder Calabrese pleaded guilty to loan sharking thinking it would help his son. Calabrese Sr. was only boasting on the tape, making up tales to impress his "low life" son, Lopez said.

Prosecutors mocked many of the explanations offered by defense attorneys as unbelievable or ridiculous, and they asked jurors to disregard the claim by Lombardo's defense that any criminal activity he was once engaged in, he withdrew from long ago.

Mars said one thing jurors should have learned from the trial is, "Once you belong to the Outfit, you belong for life."

"These are people that cheat, steal and kill each other," he said. "They can make who they want, they can break who they want."

Thanks to Tara Burghart

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Mafia II Trailer

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Origin of the term "The Outfit"

Virtually every story about the Family Secrets trial now winding down in Federal Court refers to the local organized crime network as "The Outfit."

At some point recently the name started sounding odd to me -- how did a term normally associated with clothing come to refer to a vicious conglomerate of thugs and killers? Is it a media creation, or something mob guys use in referring to their enterprise?

I put the question to John J. Binder, a professor of finance at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of "The Chicago Outfit" (Arcadia Publishing, 2003). It was a topic he had researched, he said:

"`Outfit' shows up frequently in the literature of the old west to describe groups of men on a ranch or on a cattle drive," he said.

The idea being that, ideally, such a group works together in a coordinated way, much like a full outfit of clothing works together when one is well dressed, Binder said.

The word was used in a similar way in the military at least as early as World War I, Binder said: "Your squad, your unit, your outfit...same difference," he said. And the same idea: "Not a disorganized gaggle of people, but a coordinated outfit," Binder said.

Early bootleggers ran in what the media commonly referred to as "gangs," Binder said. But in Chicago after the end of prohibition, these gangs consolidated and began referring informally to their enterprise as "`our outfit,' lower case o," Binder said.

This evolved into "`The Outfit,' upper-case o," Binder said, and became as something of a code word. It was and remains a distinctly Chicago term for what elsewhere goes by "the mob," "the syndicate," "the arm" (in Buffalo) and various Italianate names.

Yet Binder said his research leads him to suspect that Outfit guys stopped saying "Outfit" in around the early 1960s when the media started using it so much it lost any value it might have had as a code word.

"I you ever hear someone claim to be `in the Outfit' or `close to the Outfit,' he's a wanna-be," Binder said.

Try that on for size.

Thanks to Eric Zorn

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