According to retired FBI agent James Wagner, the former president of the Chicago Crime Commission, Tony Spilotro was “a killer and a very dangerous individual with a ‘little man syndrome’ ” and a “quick temper,” and was “very arrogant and antagonistic.” Since his death, Tony Spilotro has become an immortalized mob legend.
Retired FBI agent Zack Shelton recounts a 1978 dinner he had with fellow FBI agent and tough guy Ron Elder in Tony’s restaurant. They were in Las Vegas to serve Spilotro as part of the Operation Strawman case. As Shelton and Elder were eating, they heard loud comments coming from a table in the far corner of the restaurant.
“The motherfuckers from the FBI are here … those chickenshit FBI agents …”
At that point Elder walked over to the table to find Tony Spilotro and his associates with their girlfriends.
“We’re trying to enjoy a meal and don’t appreciate hearing your foulmouthed comments from our table. If you have anything else to say, let’s go outside right now.”
Elder returned to his table, and the agents finished their meal without a problem. Later during the trip, agents were booking and fingerprinting Tony at the Las Vegas FBI office when Bud Hall, Zack’s fellow agent, stood in the doorway and peered in.
“Bud gave Tony an up-and-down look,” Shelton recalled, “and said, ‘You really are a little fuck, aren’t you?’ ”
While it is common knowledge that Tony was the template for the Nicky Santoro role played by Joe Pesci in the 1995 Martin Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi motion picture Casino, there are chilling similarities between Tony Spilotro and another fictional Pesci/Scorsese/Pileggi movie character, Tommy DeVito in the 1990 GoodFellas. In addition to Pesci’s remarkable resemblance to Tony as the Santoro character in Casino, the Tommy character of GoodFellas meets a fate similar to Tony and Michael’s after being whistled in by mob hierarchy on the pretext of being made. When he arrives, he is efficiently executed in a residential basement that’s part Spilotro, part Sam Giancana.
In Casino, there’s another famous scene in which the Spilotro-inspired Nicky character gouges a man to death with a fountain pen in a bar. I remember my father telling a similar Tony Spilotro tale, except with a much different setting.
When Casino first came out, my dad talked about that scene. Only his experience didn’t happen in a bar. It happened at a car wash on Harlem Avenue, just down the street from where Tony and Michael lived in Oak Park. My father just happened to be driving by and saw Tony fighting in the car wash lot, stabbing a guy with a pen. He ran over to see if Tony needed any help. Tony was fine, but my father told him to get the hell out of there.
I’d see Michael at his restaurant, Hoagies Pub. He and Tony ran pot and cocaine out of the place. Later, I told my dad what I thought was going on with Tony and Michael. At first my dad thought I was wrong, as I had to be careful because I didn’t want my father to find out how I knew where cocaine was being sold. Michael, my father, and West Side underboss Tony Centracchio hung around a lot socially and did some business together.
Centracchio, who passed away in 2002, oversaw the west suburban video gambling network while legitimately funneling his money into a jewelry store, a retail carpet outlet, and, strangely, an abortion clinic. An FBI wiretap placed in the clinic revealed that Centracchio was having sex with a considerably younger female employee.
While my father was recuperating from brain surgery, he discussed the killing of the Spilotro brothers with my uncle and me as we did our bookwork in the Oak Brook basement.
After Tony and Michael turned up dead, my father told me to stop going to Dr. Pat. He was afraid that Pat might try something because his brothers had been killed. So we found new dentists.
My father had a hard-and-fast rule that harkened back to Tony Spilotro’s affair with Rosenthal’s wife, Geri. My father never intentionally went to the home of an Outfit guy if the wife was home alone. Instead, he would send Kurt and me. When Ronnie Jarrett was in prison, my dad sent Kurt and me to drop off the monthly money for Ronnie’s wife and kids.
My father was concerned that he could be compromised by going to the house of a friend who was in jail. The wife was lonely, and might be looking for a shoulder to cry on. This could create problems. What if she made a move on my father and he said no? Or what if the woman went to her husband and said that my father made a move on her? In my father’s mind that could present a huge problem within the Outfit, especially in light of Butch Petrocelli and Tony Spilotro getting involved with other Outfit guys’ wives.
The deaths of the Spilotros sent ripples of fear not only throughout the streets, but through the ranks of the Outfit. Things had changed. Everybody needed to be smarter, to be more careful, and to trust nobody. The new rule became, if my father and uncle were whistled in by the bosses, they wouldn’t go together. Instead, they would make excuses about the other being sick. My dad and uncle speculated about who in the Outfit might want them dead.
I was instructed by my father and uncle that in the event they were killed like Tony and Michael, I would have a mental list of whom I needed to go after to avenge their deaths.
I was supposed to be in the backseat of the stolen Buick work car the night my uncle Nick killed John “Big Stoop” Fecarotta. By September of 1986, I was twenty-six and fully signed on to my father’s crew and his way of life. After taking a larger role in the day-to-day operations, I was ready to take a massive step forward by planning and assisting in my first gangland murder.
It was decided that John Fecarotta had to go. He was quickly losing face with my father and his bosses, Johnny Apes and Jimmy LaPietra. Jimmy “Tires” DiForti knew it, too. Big Stoop’s days were numbered.
Once Jimmy LaPietra handed down the order, my father, uncle, and I carefully planned Fecarotta’s murder in the basement of Grandma Sophie’s duplex. Because there had been bad blood between them, it was agreed that my father shouldn’t be in the car; otherwise Fecarotta would catch the play. My father reluctantly agreed that I would take the backseat of the stolen Buick and that Big John would be more at ease seeing me there than him. While my father had reservations about my going ahead with the hit, my uncle was 100 percent against it, so much so that he insisted on doing it alone. Although hitting Fecarotta solo from the front seat would be extremely risky, he wanted to proceed without me.
“Look, I can do this by myself,” he said to my dad.
I believe my father let my uncle talk him out of my going because he was torn about me doing it in the first place. The compromise was that although my uncle would go it alone, instead of packing just one gun, he would carry a backup … just in case.
My father was the master of the “sit-down.” Earlier he had arranged Fecarotta’s demise by drawing up a list of grievances he presented to Jimmy LaPietra, successor to his brother Angelo, who was in federal prison. The list of Big Stoop’s indiscretions was long and convincing. It detailed how he didn’t pay back the money he owed Johnny DiFronzo for cars, and how his girlfriend accompanied him out west for the hit. It recounted when he spent over a hundred grand of Outfit cash stalking Tony and Michael Spilotro in Las Vegas and Emil Vaci in Phoenix, and when he won the taxable—and IRS traceable—$2,100 jackpot at a casino and conned Uncle Nick into signing the payout form. This displeased the bosses in Chicago, especially since the members of the hit squad were to be traveling under fake identities and no one was to know they were anywhere near Las Vegas.
The relationship between the Calabrese brothers and Big Stoop soured after Uncle Nick was cajoled into signing for Fecarotta’s winnings amid the growing sentiment that Big Stoop was a major fuckup. But what annoyed my father the most was the poaching of a Calabrese juice loan customer, Richie Urso, a degenerate gambler who was ordered by Fecarotta to pay the mortgage on his house at 268 Gage Road in the Illinois suburb of Riverside. Fecarotta was months behind on his mortgage (even mobsters make house payments) and went too far by drafting paperwork outlining Urso’s financial obligations to him, completel
y cutting out my father. Big John undoubtedly knew that Urso was heavily in debt to our crew.
“I want my fucking money,” my father demanded, holding a blade to Urso’s genitals.
“But I’m paying Fecarotta.”
“You fuckin’ pay me. It’s my loan.”
“What about my payments to Fecarotta?”
A heated meeting between my father and Fecarotta proved unproductive. When my father arranged a sit-down with Jimmy LaPietra, my uncle was on hand to recap Fecarotta’s shenanigans. Through capo Jimmy LaPietra, they got their wish, the green light from Outfit boss Sam “Wings” Carlisi to eliminate Big John. My father and the crew wasted little time plotting Fecarotta’s murder.
At sundown on September 14, 1986, three months to the day after Tony and Michael Spilotro were murdered, Uncle Nick picked up Big Stoop in the Buick on the pretext of planting a bomb on a deadbeat union dentist who had betrayed the Outfit. Although it was unseasonably warm, both men wore thin dark leather gloves. At first my uncle wanted to wear construction-type work gloves, which would draw less attention in Chicago on a warm September evening. When he could not find them, he grabbed a pair of black dress gloves instead.
Fecarotta never suspected that the bomb that Nick produced from a paper sack was a fake, constructed of flares taped up and decorated with “det” cord, disguised to look like a bundle of explosives. Nor did Fecarotta notice that the .38 pistol that my uncle had stashed for him in the glove compartment had its firing pin filed down and was rendered completely useless.
With Fecarotta the experienced wheelman doing the driving and Uncle Nick sitting in the passenger seat, they pulled up to an alley across the street from Brown’s Banquets on West Belmont Avenue. Brown’s was the parlor where Grandma Sophie played bingo. Although it was early Sunday evening, one of my father’s concerns was that none of the ladies from the neighborhood recognize my uncle walking on West Belmont.
The plan called for Nick to get out of the car, pull the gun out of the bag containing the bomb, and kill Big Stoop. Instead, Fecarotta caught the play inside the car and shouted, “Oh no, not you!”
As Uncle Nick struggled with Fecarotta inside the car, he pulled his left arm into the line of fire and shot both himself and Fecarotta. A struggle for the weapon ensued, and Big John held the hammer on the revolver so that it could not fire another round. He popped open the chamber, spilling .38 cartridges all over the Buick’s floorboards. Then Fecarotta jumped out of the car and made a run for it. Nick dashed out of the car in pursuit, pulling his second gun. Fecarotta ran for his life, crossing West Belmont Avenue toward the bingo parlor. Nick shot him two more times before catching up and firing point-blank into his head.
Prior to the shooting, Uncle Nick was supposed to call my father and Johnny Apes, who were on backup in separate cars with hand-held radios, to let them know that he and Fecarotta were in position. That would be the signal that my uncle was exiting the car and that he was ready to whack Big Stoop. But amid the confusion, he didn’t have the opportunity to make the call, so neither my father nor Johnny Apes showed up at the alleyway to pick him up.
Not seeing my father or Johnny, my uncle composed himself and decided to walk the three-quarters of a mile to where he had originally stashed his car. On the way, he tossed the gun into a sewer on the curb. So as not to look suspicious, he slipped off the dark (and now bloody) gloves. As he tried to shove them into his pants pocket, he inadvertently dropped both gloves on the street, only yards from the crime scene.
Bleeding as he walked past a lawn sprinkler, my uncle leaned down to rinse the blood off his arm. Then he made it to his car unnoticed and drove home. When my father hooked up with his brother at his house, he was fit to be tied.
“Where the fuck were you?” my father asked Nick. “Why didn’t you call? I was running around like a fucking donkey.”
Just before Johnny Apes arrived, my father instructed Nick to embellish his story. (“So you’ll look like a hero instead of a fuckup.”) As my dad opened the door, he announced to Johnny with a smile, “Fecarotta caught the play. He pulled on Nick and shot him.”
That night I was supposed to receive a page from my father by nine o’clock, signaling the all-clear, that Fecarotta was morto. If not, my orders were to empty the house and the office of anything incriminating should the cops arrive with a search warrant. The page never came. I waited until my father called. We spoke in code. Apparently things hadn’t gone as smoothly as when the three of us had rehearsed things back in Grandma’s basement. As was typical of my father, information was sparse. He would volunteer only that he had things under control.
My father then drove my uncle to an apartment in Cicero for meatball surgery. The surgeon wasn’t Dr. Kildare but a veterinarian sent over by Jimmy Marcello. He patched Nick up, dressed the bullet wound, and handed him a few painkillers. Later that night the vet returned to finish the job, removing a couple of stray bone fragments from Uncle Nick’s arm.
While my father cursed his brother, I looked at my uncle with admiration. After being shot, he managed to carry out my father’s order alone, unconcerned about who was there to pick him up. When I met up with my uncle, he pulled me aside and whispered, “Frankie. I threw the gun in the sewer. You need to go get it.”
I still had my connections with the city and the Department of Sewers, so I went over with a truck and an Orange Peel and cleaned out the sewer where he told me he’d tossed the gun. I found it and gave it back to him before my father found out. He didn’t know until later that I had retrieved the gun.
At the time Fecarotta was killed, I was willing to make the crew and the Outfit my life. But rather than become a made guy and meet the same fate as Fecarotta, I wanted to stick close to my father. I wanted to be like him. I was okay with the killing of Fecarotta because he had set up my uncle in Vegas. Had it been over something like Outfit cash, I wouldn’t have volunteered. But my family was another matter. Fecarotta jeopardized my uncle’s freedom. I was ready to climb into the backseat.
What I didn’t realize was that by edging me out, my uncle was trying to tell me that the crew and the Outfit weren’t what they were cracked up to be. Uncle Nick knew that my father and his controlling ways would be my undoing. By keeping me out of the backseat, it was as if my uncle was telling me, “This isn’t the life for you. You need to back away.” September 14, 1986, was the night that my uncle saved my life.
When he later appeared back on the streets with his arm bandaged and in a sling, my uncle joked with his friends that he had clumsily fallen at home. Knowing Nick, nobody doubted his story. What he didn’t tell anyone—and what he himself didn’t realize—was that while he had remembered to tell me to recover the gun, he had forgotten about the bloody gloves he had inadvertently left behind on West Belmont Avenue.
One evening during the fall of 1987, Lisa Ann Swan, a pretty blonde of Italian and Norwegian lineage, was out with friends at Eric & Me, a local bar in Elmwood Park. Lisa had grown up in Galewood, which was one neighborhood east of Elmwood Park. Everybody at Eric & Me knew one another. If you weren’t a local, you stood out like a sore thumb.
Lisa saw me from across the bar. She knew who I was, but we hadn’t been formally introduced. When she asked her friend if I was dating anybody, her friend looked back at her like she had two heads. “He’s a nice guy, but his dad is another story. He’s one very scary man. I would never get involved with that family.”
Lisa uttered those famous last words, “How bad could it be?”
When Lisa and I first met, she’d heard that I was a boxer. Once we were introduced, after a few conversations we found that we both wanted the same things out of life.
From the start, we had a peculiar dating pattern. We would meet at ten thirty or eleven at night. Lisa would sit in a running car behind a restaurant and wait for me. When I arrived I was usually carrying a fat envelope full of street crew business.
We went out three nights in a row when we first met. We went ice sk
ating on a Friday. When we got to the rink downtown, it was closed for a private party. Lisa said, “Let’s leave,” but I insisted.
“Just watch,” I told her.
I talked my way into the private party, and Lisa and I (plus two of her friends) ended up eating and skating on the private party’s dime. I could tell she was impressed with my gift of gab. On Saturday I took her to the annual Christmas party for the Italian American Club for our second date. She found it strange the way the southern Italian guys in the neighborhood would hug and kiss each other.
Lisa called the Italian American Club “Frankie’s Grease Ball Club.” She was hanging out with a couple of her girlfriends while I went off, smoking cigars and drinking with my friends. I figured maybe she didn’t like me because we didn’t spend much time together that night. She wore a pretty red suede dress and crimson nail polish. The party was held in a banquet hall in the western suburbs. I introduced Lisa to Jimmy LaPietra. A lot of politicians were there. It was like a wedding reception with people paying tribute, an “informal” formal gathering.
By our third date, our relationship had already accelerated. I took Lisa to my father’s house. Her friends were shocked. “He’s taking you to meet his dad? This must be serious.” She found my father delightful the first time they met. He wasn’t what her friends had led her to believe. He was jovial. Funny. Her first impression was that she liked him, and while he seemed a little controlling over his sons, she figured he was just being a typical strict Italian father. Again, how bad could it be?
Like me, Lisa was half Italian and working-class. Her mother and grandmother were born in Trieste, not far from the Yugoslavian border, perched in the upper northeastern part of Italy. The Calabrese side of my family was full-blown southern Italian. Northern and southern Italians are like oil and water. People in northern Italy look down on Sicilians. Northerners often claim that only they speak true Italian, and that the slang of the Sicilians isn’t the real language.
Operation Family Secrets: How a Mobster's Son and the FBI Brought Down Chicago's Murderous Crime Family Page 10
