With my father safely behind bars, I live with both the relief and the regret. Turning against him is something I will live with for the rest of my life. I’ve never felt good about cooperating. To this day I carry his picture in my wallet. I look at it wishing things could have been different.
It will never be over between us. I know that one day he’ll be waiting for me at the gates of heaven or hell, hoping to finish this. And if he becomes a ghost, an angry ghost, he’ll be on my doorstep haunting me forever. But at least now he isn’t in a position to hurt anyone else or bring any more misery to my family. It’s like he said one day in court: “My son, he don’t scare easy.”
On Tuesday, March 23, 2010, thirteen months after my father was sentenced to life plus twenty-five years, a team of U.S. Marshals, FBI agents including Mike Maseth, and a locksmith dropped in for a surprise search at my father’s former residence at 14 Meadowood Drive in Oak Brook, catching his wife, Diane Cimino, completely off guard. The warrant prepared by Funk was served by the marshals. They were looking for hidden compartments containing cash or other valuables.
During the time leading up to the raid, I kept in touch with Mike. I worked with the FBI to help them find my dad’s hidden money. The three of us—my brother Kurt, Uncle Nick, and I—independently cooperated. Our reason for wanting to help stemmed from the trial. My dad’s defense was that Uncle Nick, Kurt, and I had set him up and conspired to keep him locked up for life so that we could steal his money. We took this seriously and wanted to prove that he was lying.
I received a call from Mike Maseth the day of the search of the Oak Brook home. I told Mike that since the entire basement of the house was paneled, he should pay attention to any pegboard or drywall screws next to a wine rack or behind a framed picture. As the marshals searched the basement, Mike concentrated on other parts of the house. While searching the garage and checking out the cars, he received a text message from one of the marshals who was in the basement.
“Mike, you need to come down here.”
When Mike failed to respond immediately, another text arrived from the marshal.
“No. You really need to come downstairs now.”
As Mike entered the basement, he saw an X-Box 360 set up in the TV area where my father’s kids played their video games. To the left of the television, a framed piece hung on the wall containing approximately half a dozen family photos. After the marshals popped the drywall screws behind the framed piece, they struck pay dirt.
Behind the picture frame was a hollowed-out storage compartment. Inside was a box filled with envelopes containing hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. In addition, black velvet bags of jewelry and loose diamonds were retrieved. There were guns, one of which was clean and ready-wrapped in cloth. (Whenever we stored guns, we always made sure they were clean so as to be free of any tell-tale fingerprints.) They were what we called “throwaways,” 2- and 5-shot pistols, easily concealable in the palm of your hand, that fired .22 long ammo. There were also microcassette recordings my father made. (According to my sources, some politicians were nervous about what was on the tapes.) Ironically, my father had secretly taped his unsuspecting partners whenever he wasn’t around to witness firsthand what business was being transacted.
While Mike searched the premises, we kept in touch by cell phone. Hearing about the cash find made sense to me. It reminded me of the times Grandma Sophie used to tell me that whenever Diane needed money, she’d head downstairs to the basement. The money she brought upstairs smelled moldy—or muffah—as Sophie would say.
The stash included twenty-seven $1,000 bills dating back to 1928. These bills were last printed in 1945, and while the Federal Reserve stopped circulating them in 1969, they remain legal tender. Since no Federal Reserve Notes have ever been declared invalid, if you had one, technically you could still spend it, which would be foolish because now they are worth between $1,100 to over $2,000 to collectors. (In 1969 President Nixon signed an executive order suspending distribution of high-denomination notes as a way of fighting organized crime, by making it harder to move large amounts of currency.)
After discovering the basement stash, Mike moved upstairs with a marshal to Diane’s bedroom, where they encountered a locked rolltop desk, which the locksmith had to open. They found approximately $26,000 in cash in a drawer. This brought the cash total recovered on 14 Meadowood Drive to $728,481. Later that day, the marshal’s search uncovered another $110,000 in United States Savings Bonds.
While my father’s cash haul was quite dramatic, it didn’t match the value of the nearly one thousand pieces of jewelry and diamonds hidden behind the picture frame in the basement. Most of it still had inventory tags. There were expensive watches and fourteen signet and diamond rings, some worth between $30,000 and $50,000. Much of the jewelry was believed to have been purchased by my father or collected as collateral for juice loans. It’s doubtful that he was involved in a jewelry heist.
The search for my father’s assets marked the first time in Illinois history that restitution had ever been sought for homicide victims. Until now, restitution generally applied to white collar crimes and bank fraud cases.
By the time Operation Family Secrets went to court in the summer of 2007, my father claimed he was penniless and that his sons had stolen vast amounts of his money—totaling millions. Since he declared himself a pauper, the taxpayers footed the bill for his defense. He wasn’t the only Family Secrets defendant to plead poverty. Paul Schiro and Twan Doyle did as well.
My father’s cry of indigence was not his first time. He played that card during our case in 1997 when he, Uncle Nick, my brother Kurt, and I (in addition to other crew members) pled out. As part of my father’s plea, he set up an agreement with Mitch Mars’s office wherein my grandmother Sophie would cover his $750,000 fine by signing over her property. The problem was, my father deceived the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the taxpayers when they failed to obtain my grandmother’s co-signature before my father finalized his deal by pleading guilty and accepting a ten-year federal sentence. According to my father, my grandmother had changed her mind. Still penniless on paper, Mitch Mars and the government collected very little toward my father’s fine. Outside of a few dollars collected toward the court costs of our RICO, my father avoided paying his $750,000 fine.
After burning the government previously, my dad was ordered in 2007 to pay restitution based on any assets that could be legally forfeited. The government was able to grab houses and property no matter whose names they were under. My father learned that merely changing the names on deeds and titles wasn’t enough to hide his wealth.
Under Judge Zagel’s ruling, the families of the defendant’s murder victims were entitled to compensation based on the loss of earnings from the family provider. By estimating each victims’ earnings potential, the court came up with a figure—$4.5 million—that my father (along with the other defendants) were now required to pay in the form of restitution. However, restitution obligations wouldn’t stop there. Once the initial $4.5 million was paid out to the victims’ families, the American taxpayers were next in line for an additional $20 million. No longer was my father viewed as a pauper. All the Family Secrets defendants were now jointly responsible to pay for the murder and mayhem they had participated in over the past thirty-five years.
I understand that people make mistakes. Some choose a life of crime the same way some choose to play sports: as a means to escape poverty, using money to measure and validate their success. I wish my father wasn’t one of those people. I often fantasized about sitting with him, watching sports, sharing a pizza, or planning a fishing trip with my brothers Kurt and Nicky, four men out on a “guy” trip together. I know my brothers had a similar wish. Too bad my dad didn’t.
In the past, my lifestyle was very different and distorted. Everything revolved around my father and money. Stay in the fast lane. Make money at anyone’s expense. Play mind games by getting inside peoples’ heads using scare tactics, threats, an
d coercion. Those days are gone. Instead, I remind myself each day to think differently. Stay on the straight and narrow, do the right thing, and be grateful by accepting life’s small victories. Today I am relieved I don’t have to put up with my father’s intimidation and violence. The control he had over me is no more.
News of the March 2010 raid on my father’s hidden stash created a stir within the media. Sixteen days later, three career criminals were arrested outside the Bridgeport, Illinois, compound formerly owned by Angelo “the Hook.” Angelo was known as one of the few bosses who lived in the same turf that he controlled.
The three suspects included Jerry Scalise, who had reportedly been at the scene of the 1980 murders of William and Charlotte Dauber. Scalise was arrested on the evening of April 8, 2010, with two other accomplices, Arthur “the Genius” Rachel and Robert “Bobby” Pullia. Scalise and Rachel had previously served twelve years in a U.K. penitentiary for the 1980 heist of 1.5 million English pounds worth of jewelry from Graff’s, a ritzy jeweler in the Knightsbridge section of London. Their haul included the fabled Marlborough Diamond, a 26-karat stone that was never recovered.
The recent press made light of the ages of the three: Scalise, 73, Rachel, 71, and Pullia, 69. Dubbed “aging mobsters” and “senior citizens,” they wrote flippantly of the arrests with headlines like “Pensioners Arrested for Planning Chicago Bank Robbery.” The Feds viewed their intentions in a far more serious light. In the words of the government, “this case involves three career criminals with virtually no legitimate work history who were plotting to use guns and violence to rob armored car personnel and to flee using a van specifically modified so that the men had the ability [to] shoot at anyone approaching.” The van’s modifications included peep holes drilled for viewing as well as for shooting at police. After their arrests, the three were charged in a 2007 bank robbery in suburban La Grange that netted $120,000. By bugging the trio’s van months earlier, the FBI had collected hours of recordings of the men “discussing their violent criminal intentions,” which included killing an unnamed Family Secrets witness. (First-chair prosecutor on the Scalise, Rachel, and Pullia caper was Family Secrets prosecutor T. Markus Funk.)
It is not clear what Scalise and his gang’s intentions were. It could have been inspired by the FBI’s million-dollar haul taken from my father’s place two weeks prior, or possibly they were looking for the lost Marlborough diamond inside Angelo’s house. Angelo had died in 1999, shortly after serving his sixteen-year sentence in Leavenworth federal penitentiary for the famous $2 million Las Vegas skim uncovered by Operation Strawman during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Living at Angelo’s fortress-like house was his daughter Joann, my brother Kurt’s mother-in-law. Once the FBI suspected that the three men were casing the place and were poised to invade the home and endanger its occupants, agents set up twenty-four-hour surveillance outside. Undoubtedly they saw my brother Kurt visit the house many times.
The FBI’s fears that the three suspects were planning a home invasion weren’t unfounded. A few days before, the FBI watched Scalise and his accomplices, dressed in black clothing, drilling holes outside one of the compound’s windows. On Easter Sunday, my mother, who was visiting Joann, noticed a folded newspaper placed on the back lawn outside the window. Leaving a newspaper or a magazine behind at a potential crime scene is an old Outfit trick. Had my mother picked it up, the perpetrators would have known that the scene might have been corrupted, and that the operation needed to be called off. However, my mother disregarded the newspaper, and it remained on the lawn.
The attempted invasion of the LaPietra compound brought up a serious issue for any gangsters still operating within the ailing Outfit, not to mention those currently incarcerated. How safe are their families if guys like Scalise and his crew are confident enough to loot the home of a boss and endanger his family while he’s sitting in jail or, worse, after his death? You have to wonder, after the FBI foiled Scalise’s alleged plans, what Little Jimmy Marcello, Joey “the Clown” Lombardo, or my father were thinking. Has the Outfit lost that much respect that they are now vulnerable to any third-rate shakedown? Worse, are they no longer feared and are mobsters’ families now vulnerable to ordinary criminals? While I’m not one to pine for the old days of the Outfit, times sure have changed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank my family for understanding why this happened and especially thank my mother and brothers Kurt and Nicky for all that I put them through. I hope they can get on with their lives. I want to thank my ex-wife Lisa for believing in me, and my daughter Kelly Ann and son Anthony for their love and understanding. I love you both with all my heart, and I am thankful to be part of your lives. I want to thank my close friends, who prefer to stay anonymous, for taking the time to be interviewed and provide an insight into the relationship my father and I had. Thank you for verifying what really happened.
The authors are indebted to a number of people that helped make this book possible, starting with the cooperation and support from the dedicated men and women of the FBI, Director Robert S. Mueller; Special Agent in Charge of the Chicago FBI office, Robert D. Grant; FBI agents Royden R. Rice, Michael W. Maseth, John M. Malul, Luigi Mondini, Tracy L. Balinao, Michael B. Hartnett, Christopher J. Mackey, and Neal S. Schiff. We are grateful to an extraordinary group of public servants from the United States Attorney’s Office, Northern District of Illinois, led by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the late Mitch Mars, T. Markus Funk, and former Assistant U.S. Attorney John J. Scully (recently appointed to the Circuit Court of Lake County), who was most helpful in clarifying procedural issues.
We are grateful for the counsel and input received from Professor G. Robert Blakey, University of Notre Dame School of Law, in helping us understand Title IX, USC, 1961–1968 of the RICO laws. Professor Blakey created the RICO legislation that is used by the Department of Justice in the fight against organized crime.
Joining us along the way were former Superintendent of the Chicago Police Department Joseph DiLeonardi; former Chief of Patrol of the Chicago Police Department James A. Maurer; Tactical Officer James Gochee and his wife, Marge; Detective James Jack (Ret.); John “Bulldog” Drummond; attorneys Marc H. Schwartz, Patrick A. Tuite, Rick Halprin, Harry Slavis, Michael R. Kien, and the late Robert Maheu; and journalists Jim McCough, Dan Moldea, and Michael Robinson. Former gangster Frank Cullotta gave a perspective from the “other side,” and thanks also to Robert Cooley.
We owe a debt of gratitude to Ryan Fischer-Harbage, our agent, who gave us direction, passion, and enthusiasm; to Peter Meyer for his calm, steady hand; to Joel Glickman and Jaron Summers; and to retired FBI agents James Wagner, Tom Bourgeois, and Zack Shelton (formerly with the Chicago Organized Crime Squad, who provided history and context).
A tip of the hat goes to the late Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal. The irascible “Lefty” was extremely generous, and we are saddened that he won’t be on the journey with us. To the writer extraordinaire Nick Pileggi for his input and guidance, we remain grateful.
A book of this nature could not exist without the cooperation of the many sources who gave interviews on background only. We appreciate your trust. We are beholden to the Random House/Broadway Books team of Diane Salvatore, Charles Conrad, Jenna Ciongoli, Dyana Messina, and David Drake for their passion, their integrity, and their faith in a difficult project.
Paul Pompian would like to thank his wife, Polly Pompian, for her support and love. A heartfelt thanks to a special group whose generosity and friendship won’t be forgotten: Roger Golden, attorney and friend who has been there every step of the way; long-time pal David B. Dahl, CPA, who is without peer in his understanding of financial crimes; the courageous Frank Calabrese, Jr.; Ronald J. Lewis, Esq., and his wife, Superior Court Judge Maureen Duffy-Lewis; the David T. Busch and Betty Busch families; the Richard C. and Rita Busch families; Neil and Myra Pompian; Richard Pompian; Mike Ditka, Tom Kenny, Robin McKay, George Laftsidis, and the kind staff at Ditka’s Resta
urant; the Grotto Oakbrook Restaurant; Gibson’s Restaurant and John Colletti and Steve Lombardo, Joe DeMondo, JC, RD, Esther R. Felsenfeld Brandon, William P. Jacobson, Esq., and John and Nan Burrows, Yilen Pan, P.G. Sturges, Andrew Rigrod, Esq., Chris Andrews, David Bugliari, Michael Vogler, Philip J. Hacker, Dr. Paul Geller, Dr. Jordan Geller, Dr. Barry Neidorf, Dr. Leon Bender, Dr. Lawrence Rivkin, Dr. Saul Rosoff, Dr. Parsa Zadeh, Dr. Myles Zakheim, Al and Lauren Salerno, Robert Fraade, John Herzfeld, Sonjia Brandon, Lois Kaesler, Charmaine Leonetti, Mike and Claudia Uretz, Craig Braun, Robert “Bob” Magee (retired homicide detective), Neil Tardio, Scott Metcalf, John Stecenko, Cherelle George, Jack Gilardi, Michael and Toni Melon, Michael Miller, Jerry and Arlene Jacobius, the late Jacob Applebaum, and my late father and mother, George and Lillian Pompian.
Keith Zimmerman expresses his sincere appreciation to Gladys Zimmerman and to Gladys Phillips, Doris Zimmerman, Steven Rybicki, future writers Callum, Alistair, and Iona Beaton, and to the memory of Joe Zimmerman, Alex Phillips, Oren Harari, and Kinky.
Kent Zimmerman would like to thank family, friends, and colleagues: Deborah Zimmerman, Nitin John Abraham, Doris Zimmerman, Edward Preciado, Lloyd and Tam Senzaki, Naveen and Viniti Abraham, John and Tara Abraham, the Rybickis, Paul Pompian, Scott Waxman, Danny Alberga at Bella Luna, Frank Coconate, and especially Frank “the Man” Calabrese, Jr. (there, now you finally have a nickname!), Lisa Swan, and Kelly Calabrese. A shout-out to all the guys in and around San Quentin’s H-Unit, past, present, and future, Laura Bowman Salzsieder, Jill Brown, Paul McNabb, Jack Boulware, Jane Ganahl, and all the writers at Litquake. And to Michael Tolkin, Ron Lantz, John Cappas, Paul and Karen Slavit, Scott and Jan Kokjer, Logan and Noah Miller (twin power), Leslie, Jordan, and Dylan Harari, and Alan Black, too. I miss Jeannie Preciado, Oren Harari, and especially Joe Zimmerman.
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