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

by Frank Calabrese

When it came time to be sworn in, I was ushered past where the news media were set up and inside the large ceremonial courtroom. Although every major television station and newspaper asked, I didn’t grant interviews. It was evident that the victims’ families were there to watch me and scrutinize every word I said.

  Anticipating my first day on the stand, I was an emotional wreck. Seeing my father for the first time in over six years and knowing that I was beefing on him would be overwhelming. I felt lightheaded, unsteady. The government wasn’t sure how effective a witness I would be. For the first day, I was scheduled to take the stand for about thirty minutes. Because of the upcoming Fourth of July holiday, I would then have time to regroup to get my emotions in check.

  I walked into the courtroom and there were two tables on one side, three on the other. My dad sat about twenty feet away. There were U.S. marshals and FBI agents present. There was a gallery of news reporters. There were mob fans and groupies trying to find seats.

  Then came the moment: me facing my father. As I walked straight toward the judge, I could see my father out of the corner of my eye.

  I didn’t exactly make a smooth entrance. When I walked into the courtroom and my dad saw me for the first time, my emotions kicked in. Instead of walking up to the box to get sworn in, I stepped up in front of the judge’s bench. I thought he would swear me in. With my chin almost up on the judge’s bench, I raised my hand. I realized I was more accustomed to sitting at the defendants’ table. After the bailiff swore me in and I sat in the witness box, Mr. Scully asked me my name. I spoke with my mouth way too close to the mic. “FRANK CALABRESE.” The room appeared to shake. The judge asked me, “Mr. Calabrese, could you please back it up a little?”

  Scully asked me to point out my dad. I was told afterward that when I did, it was the first time during the whole trial that my dad didn’t stand up and wave and smile to the jury. My father had the same awkward look on his face as I did: two people who were once close and who hadn’t seen each other in years. At first he looked sad as the brokenhearted father in disbelief that I was actually doing this. It wasn’t easy for me to accept that he was being tried as a mass murderer. I felt a shuddering outpouring of emotion. I wanted to run over and hug and kiss him. I also wanted to beat the life out of him.

  I wasn’t there to play games or to antagonize anyone. When I walked into the courtroom, I focused straight ahead. Whoever was going to ask me questions, I concentrated on him. During breaks I just sat in my chair, and while everybody else talked and joked around, I didn’t talk to anyone. I was there on a mission. When someone asked me to speak, I spoke. When someone asked me to point to my father or Jimmy Marcello, I pointed. My dad was the one mugging, making faces and gestures and rolling his eyes. I believed this would backfire because the jury was watching him the whole time.

  The stress of testifying would take a physical toll on me. At MCI Milan I had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis; now, prior to going on the stand, I was so anxious, scared, and nervous that I needed a cane to walk straight.

  When my father saw me walking with a cane, I saw a look in his eyes. It was almost as though he was concerned about me for a brief moment. It was a look I’ll never forget and that’s hard to describe. It was very affecting. He looked older, but in good physical shape, as strong as ever. Then his Outfit ways seemed to kick in. When I saw him whispering to his lawyer, I knew exactly what he was saying. He was telling Joe Lopez that by walking in with a cane, I was using an old Outfit trick he’d taught me. If the defense tried to challenge my use of the cane, I was ready to pull up my pant-legs and show them how the MS had eaten away the muscles in both legs. While I wasn’t challenged in court, there were comments made by my father’s team that my use of a cane was just a show. My doctor told me that I needed a cane due to the stress as my MS acted up. I used the cane the whole time I was in Chicago, but once the trial was over, the nervous twitching ended and I didn’t need the cane anymore.

  The first day, my father sat and listened. But once the tapes rolled and I commented on them, he started with the gestures. I could see him out of the corner of my eye. I could see the manipulative, abusive father back in control.

  After the abbreviated first day of testimony, over the July 4 weekend I spent twelve-hour days preparing for my first full day of testimony. I knew that Dad would portray the case as a family dispute to distract attention from the tapes. Yet once I returned to the witness stand it was important for me to be truthful about my past with the crew. Otherwise the defense would rip me apart.

  I owned up to the bad I had done. I was a half-assed gangster, collecting money, shaking people down, throwing bricks through windows, burning down a garage. I made it clear that I’d used and sold cocaine, and that I’d stolen from my father. I wanted to be as transparent as possible. What the jury saw was who I was. It wasn’t my intention to gloss over my transgressions or my past. I didn’t blame anybody else, whether it was my father, my uncle, or the crew. The temptation on the witness stand is to drag other people in and point the finger, but my uncle and I didn’t do that. We took responsibility for our acts.

  On Monday morning I testified about my tumultuous relationship with my father. I admitted to stealing and recounted how he stuck a gun in my face after he discovered the money was missing. I recounted his infamous words as he held the gun—a snub-nosed .38 revolver stuck inside a black dress sock—to my head.

  “I’d rather have you dead than disobey me.”

  During my days testifying, I recalled making my weekly rounds collecting peep show quarters as a high school student with Uncle Nick. I spoke candidly about my cocaine habit and how I wildly spent and invested portions of my father’s money. I described pleading guilty to being part of the crew and being sentenced to fifty-seven months in federal prison. My father wore a slight smirk on his face, scoffing at my testimony. Joseph “the Shark” Lopez explained his client’s demeanor to the Sun-Times as “always smiling. He’s a happy-go-lucky fellow.” Yeah, sure.

  As a high-profile witness, apart from my awkward entrance, I made few, if any, missteps on the witness stand. Ironically, I believe my strength on the stand was a result of how my dad had schooled me. Don’t let people put words in your mouth, he’d said. If, to confuse me or make me look bad, an attorney asked me to say to the exact dollar how much money I had taken, I was honest. If I didn’t know the exact amount, I said so. After a while, the judge and the jury got the point: I stole a large amount of money from him. Now let’s move on.

  I believe what made me valuable as a witness was my commentary on the tapes. I described in detail how the crew operated: collecting street tax, lending out high-interest juice loans, extorting people and businesses, and, at times, killing people. Besides testifying about the killings of William and Charlotte Dauber and Richard Ortiz and Arthur Morawski, I elaborated on the stories my father told on the yard, like the made ceremony. During the playback, Tony Ortiz, Richard Ortiz’s son, leaned in and listened intently to my father’s words recounting the 1983 murder of his father.

  Once the heavily coded prison yard tapes were introduced as evidence, they needed to be played, then translated for the jury. As a witness, it was up to me to break the code by interpreting and translating each conversation, no matter how cryptic. It was imperative that the jury understand the gravity of these tapes.

  At first a small portion of the tape would be played and stopped, sentence by sentence. Scully questioned me on each portion. Soon it became obvious that the piecemeal process was confusing the jury.

  During a break, I suggested a better approach: play an entire section of the tape, and then in my own words I would thoroughly explain the conversation, after which Scully could ask me the questions. When we did this, I could see that the jury understood it better. There were no objections by the defense throughout the playing of the tapes.

  Outside, one of the defense attorneys was asked by reporters why they didn’t object. It was as if they wanted to stay as f
ar away from the tapes as possible. I noticed that Judge Zagel had a copy of the transcripts and was closely following the conversations. I think he was checking to see if I was making stuff up. By the time I finished decoding the tapes, I was confident that the judge felt I was telling the truth.

  The playback of the tapes recorded at Milan between Twan Doyle and my father proved problematic for the prosecution. I wasn’t present in the visiting room when the tapes were recorded, so the defense could object to my interpretation and deciphering of the code words used in the conversations. As soon as Scully asked the first question, the defense immediately jumped up and objected. I wasn’t present during the conversations, so how could I decode them?

  Judge Zagel cleared the courtroom for a sidebar. After I spent a short time in the waiting room, Mitch Mars calmly approached me. He said the judge was going to allow me not only to explain the coded words, but to decode the conversations as I had on the other tapes. That showed the judge’s faith in my testimony. Not once did the defense object, because it was obvious I knew what I was talking about.

  But on cross-examination, Lopez did challenge me by arguing that during the prison yard conversations, I was “pushing the buttons and pulling the levers” to get my dad to talk, and that his responses were merely empty boasts. Lopez accused me of being an “actor” coached by the FBI. When asked why I didn’t walk away from the Outfit life, I responded, “I did. Because I detested the Outfit and didn’t like what I saw.”

  The defense implied that I had coerced my father into saying certain things, but what the jury saw was that you couldn’t coerce a man like my father to say or do anything. I got him to open up. I don’t know how I did it. I didn’t think I could. I still can’t believe I did, because my father never talked like that in his entire life.

  Despite the prosecution’s initial fears, I was turning in convincing testimony on the witness stand. When the defense tried to cross-examine me about pulling the gun out of the sewer with the Orange Peel Grapple and returning it to Uncle Nick, they brought up a discrepancy between my recollection and what was written up in the FBI’s 302. Again, I stuck to my original story that I didn’t retrieve the gun with the Orange Peel. Rather, I retrieved the gun with my hand and cleaned out the catch basin with the Orange Peel truck. Later I handed the gun over to my uncle. I told the court that I had no control over what an FBI agent wrote in his report. I knew that was the truth, and the jury believed me.

  After I finished testifying I was escorted back down to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. I had to sit down for a minute. When Luigi saw the look on my face and the tears streaming down, he asked me if I was okay. Of course I wasn’t okay. Leaving the courtroom, I realized it was the last time I would see my father alive. That was overwhelming.

  My uncle followed me on the stand and gave somber, chilling testimony that was also difficult to impeach. Dressed in a long-sleeved prison-issued sweatshirt and sweatpants, my uncle admitted to being a made member of the Outfit. Eclipsing my testimony in terms of drama, Nick gave a vivid account of the murders he had participated in.

  As my father sat at the defendants’ table, frequently wearing a grin, Nick recounted the murder and torching of Butch Petrocelli, the bombing of Michael Cagnoni, and the killings of Nick D’Andrea, Richard Ortiz, Arthur Morawski, Emil Vaci, John Fecarotta, Michael Albergo, and the Spilotro brothers. He recounted the bombings of a theater, a restaurant, and a trucking company.

  “Did you in fact murder John Fecarotta?” Mitch Mars asked my uncle.

  “Yes, I did. It was me, my brother Frank, and Johnny Apes. We got the okay from Jimmy LaPietra, who was our capo.”

  According to Nick’s testimony, my father kept about $1.6 million in cash stashed around town, mainly in safety-deposit boxes. He told the story of the time he and my dad buried $250,000 in cash near our Williams Bay, Wisconsin, summer home, only to find out later that the bills reeked.

  “Mildew,” Nick recalled. “You could never get that smell out. We tried to use cologne but it only made it smell worse.”

  After four days of testimony for the prosecution, a circumspect Nick sadly referred to himself as “a coward, a chicken, and a rat” for not standing up to his brother and leaving the Outfit. He recalled my father’s tendency toward violence, admitting that he feared his older brother should he stray from the Outfit course. On cross-examination, Lopez asked Nick if he really believed his brother would have shot him had he “froze up” on or refused a hit, to which he responded coldly, “My brother would have, yes.”

  As for the family businesses, when asked by Lopez if my father “put a gun to his [Kurt’s] head” to stay with the crew, Uncle Nick shot back, “No, he put a fist in his face.”

  “And when did the beatings happen?”

  “You name the time. The kids went through hell with their father.”

  “And they gave him hell, didn’t they?”

  “No, they did not,” Nick answered back firmly.

  Holding up under pressure, my uncle escaped the lengthy cross-examination unscathed.

  “I am a killer,” my uncle said sadly before stepping down. “But I am not a serial killer.”

  Once the defense was finished, the prosecution, eager to get him off the stand, asked only one question on redirect. Had he heard the prison tapes? (He hadn’t.) Mars’s single question about the tapes restricted the defense to asking only about the tapes. It was a subject the defense sorely wanted to avoid, so Uncle Nick was excused as the attorneys in the room shook their head in disbelief at Mars’s shrewdness.

  Much to the surprise of the prosecutors, three of the five defendants—Lombardo, my father, and Twan Doyle—took the stand. Who would have thought that the prosecution was going to have multiple chances to cross-examine three of their defendants? In a typical trial, the defendants don’t testify; they like to exercise their right not to testify. But this was no typical trial. In a case like Family Secrets, nobody expected the defendants to testify, especially when there were incriminating audiotapes of them.

  Twan Doyle had attempted to prepare himself for his time on the witness stand, but the street-smart Doyle, once tendered for cross-examination, had a difficult time explaining away why he said what he said to my father on the tapes. Indeed, his defense attorney seemingly tried to soften what he knew would be an impending blow, ending his direct examination with an odd statement: “I’m going to turn you over to Mr. Funk. He’s a very good cross-examiner.… Good luck.”

  And Doyle did indeed have a tough go of it. For example, during Funk’s confrontational cross-examination, Doyle visibly struggled when explaining that his prison conversation with my father about shoving an “electric prodder” up my uncle’s rectum merely concerned recent psychiatric research Doyle had come across. Doyle claimed that he was only discussing this topic with my dad because this approach might help cure Nick of his “insanity.” Funk characterized as “laughable” Doyle’s assertions about this form of “shock treatment.”

  “Anthony Doyle, the Freud of the Chicago Police Department, relaying something he read about in the Psychiatric Journal?” Funk asked in response to a defense objection.

  Under relentless cross-examination by Markus Funk, Twan Doyle finally lost his carefully monitored cool, angrily rising out of his seat and taking exception to a line of questioning about his physical admiration of my father.

  Doyle made the point under direct examination that he was attracted to Frank Calabrese, Sr., when he was a young man because he was strong, worked out a lot, and had big muscles. It was a very strange direct examination. So on cross, Funk inquired about it a little further and Doyle misinterpreted what he was trying to imply, rising out of his chair and asking, “What are you trying to say, Mr. Funk?” Funk did not respond, but instead just looked at him.

  Putting Joey Lombardo on the stand was a bold effort to sell the seventy-eight-year-old mobster as neighborly and fatherly. Dressed in a gray jacket and a silver tie, Lombardo flashed his quirky sense of
humor when he remarked how cops were lousy tippers back when, as a young shoeshine boy, he gave them five-cent shines. Lombardo grinned and flirted with a blond court reporter. He chatted with the court’s sketch artist. He reminisced about his athletic ability as a skater, a golfer, and a handball player as he turned his chair toward the jury while he spoke.

  My father’s charm on the stand was fleeting, as it didn’t take long for his impatience and arrogance to surface. Nor did his snickering and groaning from the defendants’ table bolster his cause.

  Once a person has testified, the other side can comment on his demeanor. When my dad was audibly giggling while the court was going over a homicide that he had committed, it was fair commentary on his behavior for Funk to stop, point at him, and say, “Is there anything funny here?” Conversely, if the prosecutors had seemed afraid to point at my father or look him in the eye, it would have sent a message to the jury that the defendants were in charge. For a mob trial like Family Secrets, it was important to give the jurors and other people in the room the sense that the prosecution was not afraid of them.

  As court-savvy as the defendants were, they were used to being catered to, feared, and treated like bosses. Thus they didn’t respond well to being accused, questioned, and second-guessed in public. Inside their world, they’d always been the bosses. No one had ever talked back to my father, other than maybe Angelo or Johnny Apes. Thanks in part to my role in the pretrial preparation, not only was I ready for cross-examination, but the prosecutors, especially T. Markus Funk, really knew how to push my father’s buttons by pointing at him, raising their voices, and questioning his authority. He was the boss of the crew, and he was not used to having some pipsqueak or some upstart challenging him, let alone making him look bad. The same went for Lombardo. They didn’t take well to someone pointing at them or, in their eyes, mocking them and their testimony.

  Taking the stand in his defense, complaining of bad hearing and playing the role of the feeble, elderly man, my father recalled his poverty-stricken childhood and how he grew up eating oatmeal for dinner, and how later, as a working man earning millions, he couldn’t possibly have had time to perform the killings of which he was accused. As for his association with the Outfit, he insisted that his mentor, Angelo LaPietra, was not his boss.