Operation Family Secrets: How a Mobster's Son and the FBI Brought Down Chicago's Murderous Crime Family

by Frank Calabrese

  “Until he actually starts talking,” Maseth told his fellow agents on the squad, “we don’t know if he has anything or not.”

  It was dangerous for the FBI to debrief potential inmate witnesses inside their own prison walls, so a predawn rendezvous was arranged at a nearby Bureau office. Waist-chained and cuffed on the pretext of being sent out for medical treatment, my uncle was escorted from FCI Ashland under cover of darkness.

  Maseth, Hartnett, Bourgeois, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Mitch Mars drove their anonymous rental car into Ashland, a small Kentucky town nestled on the banks of the Ohio River. There was eeriness in the air. In the predawn darkness, the first sight that caught Maseth’s attention was Ashland’s towering oil refineries. It was a scene straight out of the movie Robocop as tall orange flames shot out of ominous industrial smokestacks that peppered the mudflats of the turnpike.

  The rental carrying the lawmen zoomed down the pitch-black highway. They were driving so fast that a Kentucky cop came out of a roadside doughnut shack, chased them, and pulled them over. As the policeman approached the driver’s side, Hartnett reached over from the front passenger seat and slapped his FBI ID up against the window. Because the Two Mikes were in plainclothes and they’d been traveling seventy-five in a twenty-five-miles-per-hour zone—and carrying guns—there was a real chance of a blue-on-blue shoot-out.

  Standing by the driver’s-side window, the cop yelled, “Do you know what the speed limit is?”

  Hartnett and the police officer exchanged cold stares. Then the cop blinked. Looking down at Hartnett’s creds, he answered his own question.

  “Well I guess you do. Listen, you guys be careful out there.”

  As the officer waddled back to his cruiser, the agents spun gravel and sped back onto the highway toward the tiny courthouse office a few miles away.

  Once Nick arrived, he was shuffled in, accompanied by the heavy jangle of chains and shackles. He was escorted into one of the smaller rooms. In a separate office, Nick’s lawyer, John Theis, met with Assistant U.S. Attorney Mars and Agent Bourgeois and hammered out last-minute details of their agreement. The Two Mikes joined Nick in the cramped room. There was an awkward silence. Suddenly, my uncle sprang out of his chair and bellowed, “That’s it! I can’t do this. I just can’t do it!”

  Hartnett abruptly stood up and yelled, “Sit down!”

  From that point on, Uncle Nick wouldn’t respond well to Hartnett and his by-the-book style. But with Maseth, it was a different story. After a few minutes of quiet, Mike calmly asked him, “Is there anything you need, Nick? Can I get you something?”

  “It’s just my back. It’s killing me. I’ve always had problems with my back.”

  Mike explained to Nick that as a young boy, he had undergone fusion surgery on his back. The two exchanged tales of chronic pain and lumbar stiffness. It was clear that if Uncle Nick was going to make a deal with the Feds, he would be most comfortable working with Maseth. Nick later told Mike that Hartnett’s outburst reminded him of his brother, Frank, who would scream at, slap, and humiliate him in public.

  Mars, Bourgeois, and Nick’s attorney emerged from their conference. It was agreed that if Uncle Nick told the FBI the truth and it resulted in substantive convictions, the Feds would go to the judge and explain that he had been helpful and would subsequently put in a good word for him regarding his sentencing.

  Starting that January 15, to Mike’s amazement, my uncle provided the FBI with names, precise dates, and lurid details about a variety of unsolved gangland slayings, beginning with the Fecarotta murder. There was the killing of Emil Vaci in Arizona. The Ortiz-Morawski Half and Half Murder in Cicero. The Tony and Michael Spilotro executions in DuPage County. Nick supplied information that pumped new life into another long-dormant case: the 1974 cold-blooded hit on businessman Daniel Seifert. The Seifert murder involved Tony Spilotro, John Fecarotta, Jimmy LaPietra, Chinatown Outfit assassin Frankie “the German” Schweihs, and another slippery, colorful Grand Avenue mob boss, Joey “the Clown” Lombardo.

  The FBI was caught off guard. The Bureau had been completely unaware that this unassuming, bumbling lackey had been privy to dozens and personally involved in fourteen hits. It was clear to the Two Mikes and prosecutor Mitch Mars that their latest star witness would serve up a bounty of substantiating information that implicated high-ranking Outfit kingpins—like Lombardo and Calabrese senior—plus a host of top earners and soldiers, and a couple of dirty cops.

  After their first twelve-hour debriefing session, Maseth and Hartnett were exhausted. They were astonished that Nick’s memory was so precise. His inside knowledge of the Outfit and Calabrese crew murders was vast. And my uncle was a made guy. The so-called mob experts had categorized Nick as merely a gofer and a driver for my father. The Two Mikes’ fledgling Operation Family Secrets investigation had taken a major turn, first with me opening the door, and now with my uncle Nick kicking down the walls.

  Operation Family Secrets was about to rise to a much higher level and into the realm of a major organized crime inquiry. For the unprecedented information that my uncle gave up, the Two Mikes had to chase down and substantiate every detail. It was time to put together a crack investigative team that would, for the first time since Elliot Ness, put the entire Chicago Outfit on notice.

  After Maseth and Hartnett flipped Uncle Nick in the tiny courthouse office in Ashland, Kentucky, the Two Mikes were overwhelmed with what lay ahead. Both agents were blindsided by my uncle’s dramatic admissions. Before going to prison in 1995, Nick had only one prior: a weapons charge that was dropped.

  They didn’t know that the Calabrese crew was also Angelo LaPietra’s murder squad, and they didn’t know that my father’s crew had a higher purpose inside the Outfit. They understood we were a prominent street crew and we had a good juice loan business and would resort to violence. But the FBI didn’t know our crew were the go-to guys when Angelo LaPietra wanted someone murdered. When Angelo was tasked by the bosses to hit someone, these were his guys.

  Keeping off the FBI’s radar was an indication of how careful, low-key, intelligent, and at the same time treacherous my father was at conducting business. Until Pandora’s box was opened, nobody figured my soft-spoken uncle was a serial hit man like my father. Nick’s information reinforced and corroborated my father’s prison yard admissions on the Ortiz-Morawski, Dauber, and Albergo hits. Nick also linked him to the Michael Cagnoni bombing by recounting an incident when he had injured his hand by testing explosive devices.

  With devastating testimony from my uncle and me, Operation Family Secrets opened the door for the FBI to prove that the Outfit functioned as a criminal enterprise whose reach extended well into interstate commerce. If the Bureau and the DOJ could indict Outfit bosses, made guys, and soldiers for a series of murders, gambling, juice loans, street tax, obstruction of justice, and crimes linked to interstate commerce, the results would be devastating for organized crime.

  To be found guilty of racketeering under the RICO Act, as established in the U.S. Code, Title 18, Chapter 96, a person must have committed two of thirty-five listed crimes within a ten-year period. Twenty-seven of the cases related to the Outfit were federal, with the other eight being state crimes. In the past hundred years of the Outfit’s existence, this would be the first time it could be indicted for violating RICO statutes. And the first time a made member was held accountable.

  Could the Two Mikes be the guys to bring the Outfit down?

  The FBI allows agents to run investigations on a one- or two-agent basis, and if substance is shown, a larger unit will be enlisted. Maseth and Hartnett needed to meet with Supervisor Bourgeois to get him to sign off on an expanded squad to cash in on my and Uncle Nick’s revelations.

  Unlike high-profile FBI agents like Bill Roemer and Joe Pistone, who wrote popular true-crime books, Maseth and Hartnett were just two young agents building an investigation. Bourgeois knew they had a strong case and were gathering an inordinate head of steam.

>   Soon Mike was promoted to co-lead case agent. Maseth and Hartnett had to sell their colleagues on joining their budding investigation and build a team. Although the Two Mikes had a hot case to offer, many of the agents were assigned to their own investigations or were busy readying cases that were about to go to trial. Once Agent Bourgeois gave them the go-ahead to expand operations, Maseth and Hartnett needed to select their team and entice the right associates to join them.

  By early 2002, they had their crew set up. According to Mike Maseth, it was like assembling a fantasy baseball team. After they listed the murders, the Two Mikes completed another list of squad members who might want to work with them. They needed to attract certain agents with certain skills to fill specific needs. Operation Family Secrets pursued crimes that were sprawled over three decades. Maseth and Hartnett needed personnel willing to put in long hours without clock-watching or whining about overtime.

  Mob prosecutors Mitch Mars and John Scully (later joined by T. Markus Funk) came from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. They would serve as the prosecution team. Bill Paulin, Laura Shimkus, and Mike Welch would make up the IRS portion of the squad. (No investigation was complete without those dreaded IRS agents.) Veteran FBI agent Ted McNamara brought his encyclopedic knowledge of the Outfit landscape and an uncanny knack for pulling up valuable needle-in-the-haystack wiretap transcripts and case files. Agent John Mallul jumped over from Chicago’s OC2 squad. He had been instrumental in cracking the William Jahoda–Rocky Infelise case in the early 1990s. Mallul scored a civil RICO complaint against a labor council that controlled twenty locals and twenty thousand union members for LIUNA, the Laborer’s International Union of North America. LIUNA’s board of directors included mobsters Bruno and Frank Caruso and relatives of Joe “the Clown” Lombardo, Johnny Apes, and Vincent Solano. Mallul succeeded Bourgeois as OC1’s squad supervisor after Bourgeois’s retirement.

  Agent Anita Stamat was also recruited and became the squad’s criminal anthropologist. She was in charge of translating coded Outfit messages and correspondence. Agent Tracy Balinao was a skilled field investigator and Bureau liaison for victims and eyewitnesses. Other “first-round picks” included Trisha Holt, Dana DePooter, and Andrew Hickey. Luigi Mondini and Chris Mackey made major contributions when they joined the squad in 2004. Lastly, Bob Moon and Al Egan, two veteran detectives from the Chicago Police Department, were added to the task force.

  With eighteen unsolved murders to reconstruct and numerous surveillances to organize, the Operation Family Secrets squad quickly increased from seven to sixteen people. But it was Maseth and Hartnett who maintained primary contact with my uncle and me as their two star witnesses.

  For security reasons, they decided to debrief Uncle Nick at FCI Ashland in Kentucky because there was less foot traffic there than at Milan or Pekin. Although Nick had been in Kentucky for months, he was no longer surrounded by a support group of wise-guy inmates like Jimmy Marcello and Harry Aleman. In Ashland, Nick was isolated from his Outfit brethren.

  The information flowed constantly, but the FBI could talk to him only for a prescribed period of time. Each debriefing session with Nick lasted ten or twelve hours. There were very few breaks and no time for ritzy lunches. The agents lived on candy bars, vending machine grub, and fast food. In the beginning, the debriefings took place in Ashland, but later they were moved to an undisclosed location.

  Mike didn’t know what to expect. For forty or so years, my uncle had been programmed not to talk to police. Sitting in a room with three FBI agents, a federal prosecutor, and a defense lawyer, my uncle had a lot of nervous energy. Uncle Nick was jittery and worried because, like me, he was about to do something that he had never imagined.

  The FBI became extremely judicious about whom they chose to do business with. When Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano was arrested in 1998 on drug charges—seven years after becoming a government witness—the Department of Justice began driving a harder bargain for mobsters willing to cooperate or enter WITSEC (the Witness Security Program). One of my main concerns was whether or not the Bureau (or another government agency further up the food chain) would ever cut a deal with my father, putting him back on the street. Such an arrangement would endanger the lives of both Nick and me.

  But it was extremely unlikely that my father would flip; putting him back on the street was a near impossibility. Short of revealing who killed JFK and Jimmy Hoffa, the most he could hope for was a slightly more comfortable cell inside a federal penitentiary. My uncle showed remorse for his crimes during his debriefings. His return to society as a productive and nonviolent citizen was plausible.

  During the debriefing process neither my uncle nor I knew that the other was cooperating, much less talking with the same federal agents. It was vital in the investigation that we hadn’t compared notes or shared information, and that neither of us knew of the other’s whereabouts or involvement in the case.

  For Mike Maseth, having a made member from the Outfit available to build a RICO case and close high-profile unsolved murders was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Now he had to decide how best to dispense the vast amount of information on his all-important official 302 report on my uncle.

  In the 302, the FBI writes down what happens in an interview. Since Nick was giving Mike forty years’ worth of information, Mike decided that if they were going to debrief Nick through several interviews over a long period of time, they wanted the 302 to make sense and have a broad context. They wanted somebody to read the document five years later and understand how everything tied in. Instead of doing a bunch of individual 302s every time Nick and Mike met, they compiled one gigantic 302, a chronology of what Uncle Nick told them throughout his briefs.

  Maseth’s jumbo 302, which spanned 120 pages, would become the bedrock upon which Operation Family Secrets was built. It would become the road map that Mitch Mars and the U.S. Attorney’s Office would use in assembling their case in federal court.

  The Two Mikes got into a heated discussion in the parking lot at the new White Sox ballpark, where the squad was conducting a search for the body of Michael “Hambone” Albergo. It was a big production that resembled an archaeological dig, and based on Uncle Nick’s information, the key area was roped off for excavation. The female agent in charge of investigating the Albergo murder and overseeing the digging operation approached Maseth with a question. She said the Evidence Response Team (ERT) needed to know how deep to dig. Only Nick knew the answer, and because Mike was Nick’s handler, Mike was put on the spot. Hartnett had warned Mike not to contact Nick with too many specific questions. It would, in his opinion, be counterproductive to their ongoing debriefing relationship with him.

  Yet the agent at the site insisted, and she had a full crew waiting for an answer. Feeling squeezed with so much personnel and equipment on the scene, Mike got on the phone and made calls before getting through to Nick. As the ERT began their work, Hartnett overheard Mike telling someone that he had just spoken to Nick. A visibly upset Hartnett pulled Maseth aside.

  “Didn’t I tell you not to call Nick?” Hartnett asked his partner. “You know, if you screw this thing up, it’s my ass.”

  “Calm down. It’s my ass, too,” said Maseth. “Besides, I’m taking a beating out here, and all I want to do is help solve the case.”

  Later that night a set of bones was found at the dig site. By midnight, they were dusted and laid out. It looked like the remains of vertebrae and a spine. The next morning, a Sunday, Agent John Mallul pulled up to the command center with the office’s special agent in charge (SAC).

  “John,” Maseth said wearily to Mallul, “I’ve got good news and bad news. We did find some bones, but the vertebrae seem too small to be human, and the skull we found looks to be that of a German shepherd. I’ll let you tell the SAC.”

  Albergo’s body was never found.

  But not all of Uncle Nick’s leads went cold. In recalling the details behind the Cagnoni bombing, he remembered that the license plate of th
e decoy car used in the blast came from a 1950 Ford that was later traced through police reports to have been stolen. Nick’s claim that he and my father had staked out Cagnoni’s business on South Damen Avenue at Blue Island Avenue two weeks before the murderous explosion was backed up by an old FBI 302 surveillance report that placed my father, John Fecarotta, and Frank Santucci in a parked car behind a building, half a block from Cagnoni’s place of business. (After scoring such useful data, Mike promised himself he would not complain about having to fill out and file multiple 302 forms.)

  Later, Uncle Nick precisely recalled the use of a K-40 antenna stashed inside a parked car on the expressway, which detonated the brick-sized chunk of malleable C-4 explosives placed under Cagnoni’s Mercedes. Squad investigators matched the make and model of similar parts of an explosive device that was used in the attempted bombing murder of another Outfit victim, Nick Sarillo.

  After the painstaking process of piecing together events involving the eighteen previously unsolved homicides (although it was revealed by the government during sentencing that Uncle Nick detailed nearly two dozen slayings on Mike’s jumbo 302), the investigation entered another phase between 2002 and April 2005—that of consolidating data and evidence for arrest and trial. Locating precise wiretap conversations proved to be the most time-consuming. When Agent Luigi Mondini investigated the Emil Vaci murder and the Outfit’s attempt to whack the Spilotro brothers in Vegas, he needed certain wiretaps made there in the 1980s. The police in Nevada hunted through their archives, and when they dispatched the material to Chicago, Luigi wound up with a large stack of congealed reel-to-reel tapes. After baking the tapes in an oven to restore their usability (similar to what recording studios do to rescue decades-old vintage music masters), Luigi monitored hours of irrelevant material to find one pertinent four-minute conversation. It could take weeks to score one brief piece of tape. The tech room, where agents worked and reviewed wire transmissions, was so small that they could barely maneuver around the equipment.