Although we hadn’t communicated in months, my father had no reason to suspect that I would steal from him. (Had he known, he would have come after me and killed me.) As the weeks and months passed after I took the money, my dad didn’t come around looking for his cash. Over the next eighteen months, I spread the money around town. First I invested in a couple of restaurants. I helped start La Luce on West Lake at Ogden and became a partner in Bella Luna, a popular pizza-pasta place on North Dearborn, owned and run by my childhood friend Danny Alberga.
I also spread my father’s wealth among the family. I gave fifty thousand dollars to my youngest brother, Nicky, who wanted to attend college in Boca Raton. Next, I gave my mother thirty thousand dollars. Then I put money down on a house for my family. The rest I put aside, blowing it on trips to Vegas with my friends, snorting cocaine (a habit I’d picked up), and financing a small coke-dealing operation around town. Soon I was running my own tiny crew, starting out small and running the operation with the same spirit my father ran his with, carefully and discreetly.
Although law enforcement had me under surveillance at both restaurants, I stayed one step ahead, careful not to get caught dealing or holding. There were numerous traps set up by the DEA using informants to try to smoke me out and make me incriminate myself. But I didn’t take the bait. My father had groomed me to be cautious and smart, and I based my drug business practices on what my father would have done lending money. Be secretive. Be careful not to become overextended. Deal only with people you trust, and move the merchandise quickly.
One guy who I suspected was cooperating with law enforcement wanted to meet in person. I sent a message back: “If I want to meet people, I’ll join a social club.” Later I found out he was cooperating with law enforcement, which reinforced my rule of selling only to people I knew. But with my caution, I still made two mistakes: (1) throwing my money around like a spaccone, behavior that was contrary to what I had been taught by my dad, and (2) getting high on my own supply. As the drug sales mounted and the restaurants began doing well, my plans to replace my father’s money evaporated. The drugs had given me the courage to decide not to return the money.
My father watched from afar the success I was enjoying.
I heard he was impressed with how well both restaurants were doing. My father had no idea how much money it took to get a restaurant started, or how much I kicked in to become a partner at Bella Luna. Soon he began coming around, asking questions, and we started talking again. I could tell he was trying to figure out how he could get involved. I lied to him about how much money it took to get La Luce off the ground. I put him on the payroll for a few hundred bucks a week to stave him off.
Back then I was rolling in money. Danny Alberga, the owner of Bella Luna, and I were driving around one time looking at restaurant equipment because we were remodeling the place. We were out on Madison Avenue, where there were a lot of homeless people. I had a brand-new white Jeep with the top off because it was the summer. We were coming out of one of the restaurant supply stores and I told Danny, “Check under the seat. I got some money I forgot about.”
Danny reached under the seat and there was a brown paper bag with twenty thousand dollars inside, two bundles of ten thousand apiece.
“Are you fucking nuts?” Danny screamed. “There’s twenty dimes in here!”
At this stage, Lisa knew better than to ask me about money.
There were a lot of things she didn’t ask about. To her, less information was more. It’s not that she wanted to be lied to; it was just that she didn’t want to hear it. Yet had she known I was using cocaine or that I’d stolen from my dad, she would have left me.
Lisa was barely a drinker and staunchly opposed partying with drugs. One time we went to Boston. At the hotel, I went out on the balcony and smoked a joint with my friends. The husbands and wives all smoked, but not Lisa. She was so angry that we got into a big fight on the plane ride home.
Soon the pieces added up: clues like finding a rolled-up twenty-dollar bill and folded slips of paper in the drawer. When Lisa confronted me, I denied using, claiming the items belonged to one of my friends.
Danny Alberga didn’t approve of my drug use either. But I was making money selling, and was damned lucky I didn’t get caught. Had my father known what I was up to with his money, the old man would have killed me.
At first my drug use was a weekend-warrior thing. I’d do only a line or two on Friday nights. I was having problems with my father and got more into it. I blame myself. When I began selling, my use spiraled.
I would often come home pasty white and clammy, with my heart racing. Lisa would find my stash. One time she taped a Twelve Steps to Sobriety pamphlet to the spot where she had found drugs. A couple of times she flushed thousands of dollars’ worth of cocaine down the toilet.
My cocaine use put a strain on my family life. Around the time our second child, Anthony, was born prematurely and was confined to the neonatal unit, I was buying small quantities, converting them into ounces, and selling to my select group of people. With my father’s juice loan and gambling operation, I needed to keep my drug business very low profile so that the two of us never crossed paths.
Alarmed at my increased use, Lisa tried to enlist the help of family members.
She called Kurt, who met her at the Chicago Board of Trade, where she was working. In a restaurant across the street, she told Kurt that I was hurting a lot. Kurt had his funge face on and never got back to her. He was having his own problems with my father. Then Lisa cried to my mother, but she would not get involved. Of course, she couldn’t go to my father or Uncle Nick.
Kurt did confront me about my drug habit.
Like Lisa, he didn’t do drugs. We had a conversation. But he didn’t know how to talk to me about it. He never told me that Lisa had spoken to him. I found out later. They had an intervention of sorts, but that didn’t work out too well. When I was selling drugs, we were moving around from house to house. My life was chaos.
Cocaine made me feel I could think clearly. Then I learned there are two kinds of users. There’s the addict and the abuser. Had I been an out-of-control rent-snorting addict, Lisa would have left me immediately. But I was the abuser and would continue to use until I dealt with the issues concerning my father. That’s probably why Lisa cut me some slack.
After I stole the money and started the restaurants, my relationship with my father thawed again. Dad was visiting the restaurants to hang out. He would sit in the back and drink a little wine.
I saw that my father was enjoying our revived relationship. Now that I was no longer involved in his crew, we could make a go at it. The only problem was how to return the money before he noticed it missing. If I could get the money back to him, I’d be home free.
I loved seeing my father play the proud papa, fielding compliments from friends and associates about how well I was doing with the restaurants.
One winter night in 1992, after he’d had too many glasses of wine, I elected to drive my father home. Father apologized profusely. “Thanks for driving me home. You know I don’t mean to be such a pain in the ass.”
“No, Dad, I don’t mind. I’m enjoying this.”
Getting out of the car, we stood outside my dad’s home. He cried, kissing me and telling me how much he loved me. Father and son enjoyed a long embrace.
“I love you too, Dad,” I said. “This was a nice night.”
“Yeah, but you know,” my father said, breaking away from the embrace and grabbing me by the shirt, violently shaking me. “You gotta quit bein’ so fuckin’ nice. You gotta quit bein’ so fuckin’ nice!”
Spring 1995. It was eleven o’clock in the morning on a summer weekend. I was living in Elmwood Park when my father and Kurt appeared outside my locked screen door. When the two of them arrived, I could see the swollen cheeks and redness in Kurt’s eyes. I knew right away it was about the money.
Uncle Nick, Kurt, and I were the only people who knew the hiding places f
or my father’s money. Once my father noticed it was missing, he immediately accused Kurt and slapped him around.
He knew that Kurt was more fearful of him than I was. After grilling Kurt, he found out what he suspected: it was I who had taken his money. For months afterward, he would continue to blame Kurt, convinced he had played a part in the scheme, which wasn’t true. He threatened Kurt that whatever money I didn’t repay, he would be on the hook for it.
I gazed at Kurt standing on the porch, then at my father. I saw the cold, glassy look in my father’s eyes. It was as if he was transfixed by something far in the distance. The Thousand-Yard Stare. My father was in Outfit throat-slashing mode. I knew this because my father had taught me to look into the eyes of my opponent. The eyes were the window to the soul, except what I saw in my father’s eyes wasn’t a soul but icy rage. He knew who had taken his money.
My two children, Kelly and Anthony, were standing in the hallway with Lisa. They had no idea what was going on, and my father wouldn’t come into the house, which was a very bad sign.
He wanted me to come outside. I’m thinking, Do I run upstairs and get my gun, then go outside? Maybe I should shoot him through the door. Or should I just go outside and talk to him? With Lisa and the kids in a possible crossfire, I stepped outside unarmed.
Word was already on the street that my father and I had butted heads, but were back on speaking terms. My father was unaware that I had partied with and sold cocaine. Had he known that, he would have killed me instantly.
As soon as I stepped outside, he grabbed me by the arm and began pulling me down the street. A full head taller than my father, I did not resist or raise a hand against him.
He gave me a few openhanded cracks to the face.
“You took my fucking money.”
At first I denied it.
“Yes you did. You fucking took my money.”
My father hit me again with the cupped hand to the temple, disorienting me, nearly knocking me down. I had to remain on my feet; otherwise my father might stomp me.
“I know you took it,” he whispered furiously, inches from my face. “I got a gun over there in the truck. Confess right now or else I’m going to go get it and shoot you in the fucking head. You don’t understand the predicament you’ve put me in. It’s not my money! It’s Angelo’s money. How am I going to explain it to him?”
I knew my father was lying. I had to think fast.
“Fuck it!” I screamed. It took him aback. “I spent it all. Make an appointment with Angelo, and I’ll go shoot him in the head.”
My father looked at me like I was crazy. “We can’t do that.”
“Why not? Fuck him! He isn’t right with you. You don’t like him anymore. That guy doesn’t respect you. I say we kill him. Let’s go do it together.”
My father let go of my arm. “No. I’ll talk to him.”
Being busted by my dad for stealing the money was one thing, but what followed, the decree, chilled me to the bone.
“From now on, I own you. The restaurants are mine. Your house is mine. Everything is mine. You will report to me three times a day and do whatever I say until you pay me back my fucking money.”
I couldn’t believe it. Everybody was trying to get away from this madman. Now I was his again.
Once my father found out that he’d been robbed, he systematically set out on a mission to recover as much from me as he could. Our father-son relationship became strictly a business arrangement. I was no better off—actually, I was worse off—than one of his deadbeat customers on the street. Financial reparation came in waves as my father tightened the screws. First he took back approximately ninety thousand dollars in cash left in the till, followed by another ninety thousand in drug money that I recovered off the streets. He then credited another hundred thousand to my “account” that he owed from our home-remodeling projects. Add in the boat, the new dump truck, and two snowmobiles, it all belonged to my father now, not to mention my stake in both restaurants. For the coup de grâce, he grabbed my white Jeep, replacing it with an old beater that I would drive as a daily reminder of my transgressions.
My father took back the money I had given my brother Nicky to attend college in Florida. Retrieving the money that I had put into the two restaurants became a stickier issue, particularly with Danny Alberga, owner of Bella Luna. Danny had already had serious reservations when he’d agreed to bring me in as an investor in the first place.
Alberga told me, “I just want to make sure this money has nothing to do with your father. I don’t need the aggravation. If I need money, I’ll go to the bank and borrow it like anybody else. I don’t want or need your father as a partner.”
At the time I bought into Bella Luna, I was partying hard, snorting and throwing money around by taking my friends on trips to Vegas, and laying down three-thousand-dollar roulette bets. The partying stopped once my father lowered the boom. Now the investment that I’d made in Bella Luna came crashing down. Just after my father discovered his money was stolen, Danny got the phone call. It was my dad.
“You gotta meet me in the morning for breakfast.”
“Sure. What’s going on?”
“Just meet me in the morning.”
Danny recalled a breakfast he’d had with me, my dad, and Johnny Marino at the American Eagle on Grand Avenue the morning after a night of serious drinking. My father had ordered a half a cantaloupe. When the waitress brought the fruit cut in squares rather than intact, he went ballistic.
“Does this look like a fucking half a cantaloupe to you?”
He angrily wiped the table clean with his arm as plates, food, coffee, and cutlery went crashing to the floor. Danny and the group left the café hungry.
The next morning Danny met my father and me at a coffee shop in Franklin Park. I hung my head low and sat on my hands. Danny sat in the booth facing my father and me.
“We’re gonna order breakfast,” my father ordered, “and when we get done, we’re gonna talk about stuff.”
When the waitress came over, my dad and I ordered, while a nervous Danny asked for a cup of coffee.
“What do you wanna talk about?”
“My son put money into your restaurant that didn’t belong to him. How much money did he put in there?”
Danny looked over at me, not wanting to throw me under the bus. “What did you end up giving me, Frankie? I don’t remember exactly.”
“Over sixty thousand.”
Danny and I locked eyes. Sixty grand? Alberga was into my father for sixty grand? I had just thrown my best friend to the wolves.
“That money belonged to his grandmother,” said my father, but Danny knew the score. Nothing was ever the old man’s. Drive up in a fancy car, it was never his, belonged to a friend. Now it’s Grandma’s money.
“The long and short of it is,” my father said, leaning in, “this money has to be returned.” Alberga was left with few alternatives. Mess with a gangster. Throw me, his best friend, to the lions. Or pay the loan back. Three weeks later, after finalizing a bank loan, Danny, like a true friend, arranged another sit-down with my father.
“All right, Frank, I got the loan. Who should I make the check out to?”
My father shook his head. “No, no, no, no, no, no. What goes out as cash comes in as cash.”
With the loan amount sitting in the bank, Danny had to cash checks over time around town to pay my father his money. This meant that Dad was going to become a fixture around Danny’s restaurant. He would arrive every Friday like clockwork, during the restaurant’s busiest time. My father’s presence created a distraction and made it difficult to work. One Friday evening, surrounded by customers and frantic waiters and waitresses, my father did one-handed push-ups in the middle of the floor. Another night while Danny was in and out of the restaurant delivering pizzas, my father was planted at a front table gazing out the window.
“You doin’ anything wrong here, Danny boy?”
Alberga was no fool. He knew what my fathe
r was getting at.
“Look, Frank, I have thirty-eight dollars in my pocket. I’m delivering pizzas. I’ve been here since nine thirty this morning. If hard work is a crime, arrest me now.”
“It’s just that there’s a truck across the street in that vacant lot with tinted windows, its back end facing us. They’re watching the place.”
“Frank,” Danny maintained, “I’m clean. Nothing’s going on. You should talk to your son.”
One of the pretty waitresses, Janice from Atlanta, teased my father. “Do you know Ferlin Husky, the country singer? You look just like Ferlin Husky.”
As my father sat and joked with a couple of his friends having dinner, he told her, “Ferlin Husky? I can sing you some Ferlin Husky songs.” And he did.
Danny knew my father’s reputation as a killer, and warnings by both Kurt and me only heightened Danny’s concern. He had to get my dad paid off as soon as possible and was trapped until he managed to gradually siphon the rest of the sixty thousand dollars to him. My father was showing up regularly, bringing in friends and demanding special service and pizza deliveries to his lawyer’s office.
Finally Danny was down to the final five thousand balance. During a busy Friday evening my father walked in, and Danny handed him five grand in twenties rolled up in a tight wad, just as a waitress walked by. My father angrily pulled him aside.
“Don’t you ever fucking hand me my money in front of people again! From now on we go into the bathroom.” My father examined the bankroll and shook his head. “Can’t you give it to me in hundreds?”
After the final payment, my father brought up the subject of interest on the loan. Danny had had enough. Stashing a pistol in his pants just in case, he motioned my father back into his office.
“Let’s stop right there,” Alberga explained. “This was never a loan. I went to the bank and borrowed the money. You got your cash. If there’s anybody who owes you money, it’s your son. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve given you back his investment. This is what’s owed and that’s it.”
Operation Family Secrets: How a Mobster's Son and the FBI Brought Down Chicago's Murderous Crime Family Page 13
