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

by Frank Calabrese

  When my father came home in a pleasant mood, the dinner table was a haven where the Calabrese family could sit and talk about what was going on in their lives. The entire family sat down and had dinner every day at five o’clock with the TV off. Family time was extremely important to my father. Later, as he worked longer hours on weeknights, and as his three sons grew older, the mandatory family dinner took place every Sunday at three o’clock. Like many Italian households, eating together was a celebration.

  Dad loved home-cooked meals: Italian “stick-to-your-ribs” fare. Eating was a big part of his day. There wasn’t a car ride or an outing where he didn’t stop for a meal. My mom was an excellent cook and baker. One of my father’s favorite meals is lemon chicken with Vesuvio potatoes, homemade ravioli, stuffed pizza, crème puffs, and fresh-baked cookies.

  Dad didn’t use linen or a paper napkin at the table. He wiped his face on a dish towel that mom would dutifully place by his plate. He demanded that his sons observe basic table manners: Never take the last piece of food off a serving plate unless you offered it to everyone at the table. Don’t lean in or reach over somebody’s plate. Don’t talk with food in your mouth, and don’t smack your lips while chewing. He was strict about us washing our hands before eating, and we didn’t wear a hat at the table!

  The Compound was situated on the north side of the railroad tracks of Elmwood Park. The bosses lived on the south side of Elmwood Park, where the beautiful homes were. Other Italian neighborhoods in the area included Grand and Harlem, Riis Park, Amundsen Park, and Galewood.

  Elmwood Park was predominantly Italian when the Calabreses first settled. Its population of twenty thousand lived in a close-knit set of neighborhoods. The village had more than its share of delicatessens, bakeries, and Italian restaurants. Immigrant Sicilians opened their small cozy cafés. In addition to the Italians (and some Greeks) living in Elmwood Park, there were Poles, Irish, Germans, and people of mixed European descent. I was half Irish and half Italian.

  Melrose Park was only a couple of miles southwest of Elmwood Park. Both communities had close ties. The Cook County Forest Preserve divided the two areas, and most of the gangsters’ children went to Holy Cross High School in River Grove. Working-class kids attended the public school at Elmwood Park High. The local newspapers would stoke crosstown rivalry between the Italians and the Irish whenever Holy Cross and Saint Pat’s from Chicago’s Belmont Avenue would play football under the Friday night lights.

  Most of the residents knew who the gangsters were by reputation. To the residents of Elmwood Park, they were ordinary people. Everybody seemed to have connections. Despite its reputation, Elmwood Park was a safe and protected environment to grow up in. It was the kind of village where if help was needed, somebody would be there.

  During the 1970s, the neighborhoods were overflowing with kids. There could be groups of two dozen or three dozen teenagers hanging out. They dressed in baggy pants, gym shoes, leather jackets, and dago T’s and would congregate on the side of the street or by the city parks. There were fights among the boys as rival neighborhoods squared off. Other teens came from Berwyn, Cicero, Taylor Street, and my father’s old stomping grounds, Grand and Ogden.

  There were a number of Outfit bosses, underbosses, and capos that lived in the Chicago suburbs of Elmwood Park and Melrose Park. On the east side of Harlem Avenue was the Galewood/Montclare area; on the west side was River Forest. Some of the bosses who lived in River Forest included Tony “Joe Batters” Accardo, Paul “the Waiter” Ricca, and Joe “the Builder” Andriacchi. I grew up with the grandchildren of Mafia chief Sam Giancana, who lived in Oak Park, an upper-middle-class community. I attended school with Joey Aiuppa’s nephew and Louie “the Mooch” Eboli’s son. If someone’s old man was away in prison and the question “What happened to Joey’s dad?” was asked, the answer was, “He’s away at college.”

  I was in grammar school when I first noticed FBI agents parked in their unmarked cars out in front of the Compound. I had a vague idea about what was going on with my father and the law. A lot of it was unspoken; I knew about mobsters. Once when I was very young, I approached my father. “They asked me today at school what you do for a living.”

  “Tell ’em I’m an engineer.”

  “Like a train engineer?”

  “No, like a hoisting engineer.” Dad showed me his union card. “I worked for the city as a crane operator. Local 150.”

  The Calabrese sons knew that Dad wasn’t exactly a nine-to-five working stiff. Like a lot of other Italian guys, he was strict with his boys. If Kurt or I stepped out of line, we got the belt. We had our chores to do before and after dinner. We were taught about manners. Open the door for your elders. Don’t talk back or swear around ladies.

  One day I got into a scrape with a boy who lived a few doors down the street. I was playing in the alley with the other kids my age, and an older boy got into my face. He was a sophomore in high school, and while I was only thirteen and in the seventh grade, the two of us mixed it up. When the older boy had his legs scissored around my neck and began punching me, I bit him hard in the leg and wouldn’t let go.

  As the opposing kid screamed in pain, I jumped up and punched him a few times. Then I ran home. A little while later, the older kid’s mother rang the doorbell at the Calabrese Compound. She was extremely upset over what I had done to her son. My bite would leave an indelible scar. My father shrugged his shoulders and reached for his money roll and offered her compensation if she needed to take her son down to the hospital.

  “Good job,” he later told me as I was expecting the back of his hand instead of a reassuring pat on the back. “Don’t worry about it. At least you defended yourself.”

  After Uncle Junior died young, I was a tagalong with Uncle Nick and Uncle Joe and their madcap group of friends, up for a little bit of reckless fun. Once we went down to the amusement park in Melrose Park, Kiddie Land, and liberated the bumper car ride. While everyone was instructed to drive in one direction, we circled back the other way, smashing into the other cars until the operator ran out screaming at Nick and Joe. “Fuck you!” they yelled at the guy. In the summer they took me to Riis Park to go swimming in the municipal pool. Grabbing me by the shorts, they’d throw me into the deep end, like older brothers would do. “Now swim!”

  I was twelve years old in 1972 when I first saw The Godfather at the Mercury Theater on North Avenue and Harlem Avenue. It created quite a stir among me and my friends. Suddenly “organized crime” became popular culture fare among a community quietly versed in the ways of the Outfit. The popular fascination with the mob sparked controversy in Elmwood Park when an article on the Outfit appeared in the Chicago Daily News, mentioning Frank Calabrese, Sr., with a picture of the Compound plus a photo of him with his mentor, Angelo the Hook.

  The legend of the Outfit was well known in Chicago. In April 1973 a good friend of mine was out with his father at Sears and Roebuck in Galewood when they heard on the in-store radio that the psychotic mobster “Mad Sam” DeStefano had been found murdered in his garage. My friend and his father knew that DeStefano lived only two blocks from the Sears store. They drove over to the “death house.” It was like a celebrity sighting, with a small crowd milling around the sidewalk. Inside the garage was the bloody body of “Mad Sam” with two shotgun blasts in his chest and one in the torso that severed his left arm. The FBI and the Chicago Police Department homicide detectives determined that Tony Spilotro had visited Mad Sam.

  One day while Kurt and I were playing in the alley next to our three-flat, we looked over at the nearby parking lot and saw two plainclothes detectives sitting in an unmarked car. As we walked toward the car, the detectives, having been spotted, didn’t know what to do next. Suddenly they slumped down and pretended to be asleep. The police were often staked out across the street next to the pay phone at the Kentucky Fried Chicken. During the winter months a car would be parked with the motor running. Inside, two plainclothes detectives trying to stay warm. Th
e Compound phone would ring.

  “Hey, little buddy, is your dad home?”

  “Hold on and let me check.”

  I knew whether or not to say if he was home.

  When my father got a call from one of his Outfit friends, it was the classic ring-once-then-hang-up-then-start-ringing-again code. If this was someone he needed to speak to, then he would know. If the phone rang twice, stopped, then started ringing again, it was a different mob connection. Because of my dad’s occupation, it was a matter of habit among the Calabrese family to let the phone ring many times before answering. It was a given that the line was tapped.

  I reveled in both my Italian and my Irish roots. On long holidays it was one day of Italian celebration and the next day Irish. As I got older, I noticed that whenever the family went to an Italian event on my dad’s side, it was organized and festive with a lot of food. There was a seating protocol according to “rank.” When I went to the Irish affairs on my mother’s side, they were much looser, with little food but a great deal of liquor. The atmosphere was loud and everyone had a great time.

  For the Calabreses, the mix of Italian and Irish culture was a positive experience. On my father’s side, I was the oldest of my cousins. Yet on my mother’s side, Kurt and I were the youngest.

  Dad had an overwhelming personality that appealed to both sides of the family. The Irish relatives especially liked him, and he was deft at winning over a room. Other than Uncle Ed, the Hanley Irish side of the family had little money. They were cops or city workers. Their kids attended Catholic schools and lived in modest houses. Whenever there was a funeral there would be a couple bottles of whiskey on the table and a case of beer in the fridge. My father would then go to the store and come back with boxes of liquor, cases of beer, and a large spread of food. He’d throw it out on the table with a huge smile. To his Irish relatives, Frank Calabrese, Sr., was a kind and considerate gentleman who treated everyone with the utmost respect and equality. He appeared to have no motive other than providing for my mother’s family.

  Who wouldn’t love a guy like that?

  During the 1970s, when the Outfit controlled four casinos in Las Vegas, the Calabrese family would stay at the Stardust Hotel and be comped for nearly everything. My father and his friends would sit by the pool playing gin. The Stardust had a paging system in the hotel, so he would remind us that if he was needed, make sure we paged him under his assumed name, Frank Mauro. At first I didn’t understand, but soon I realized it was important to keep a low profile in case law enforcement was tracking him or members of the family.

  By the time I was thirteen, Kurt and I and some of the other gangsters’ children had our own scams running.

  “Dad?” I would ask in earshot of my dad’s mob pals. “Can I have some money to play the arcade games at Circus Circus?”

  He would hand over twenty dollars, and as I turned to leave, each of his friends would call me over.

  “Here, kid.” Voilà! I scored over a hundred dollars. The same trick worked for the other kids. One of Tony Centracchio’s daughters would take her money over to the slot machines, while the casino hosts and security guards looked the other way.

  Another time Grandma Sophie and I went to see Wayne Newton at the Aladdin Hotel. My father and Frankie Bella, head of the pit bosses at the Stardust, walked us over to the show early, taking a shortcut through a lounge that wasn’t yet open. On our way back to the Stardust after the show, Grandma and I cut through the same lounge, now packed with customers and topless dancers. Grandma had to drag me out.

  Mob buddies like Tony Centracchio checked into the biggest suites closest to the pool. One time I came back to the room early. “Dad, I’m back!”

  Up the spiral staircase leading up to the bedroom, I heard the shuffling sound of someone running into the bathroom. I started up the stairs, when he yelled, “Stay there! I’ll be right down.”

  My father hustled down the stairs. “Me and Tony were upstairs watching TV in our shorts. He got embarrassed and ran into the bathroom.”

  My mother had stayed behind, and although I was only in the seventh grade, I knew that he was up to something, and it wasn’t with Tony in his underwear. I felt uncomfortable but kept quiet about the incident.

  My father’s personal tastes in music reflected his love for Las Vegas. He enjoyed singer Jimmy Roselli, a middle-of-the-road crooner who lived in the shadow of Frank Sinatra. His favorites included Dean Martin, Louis Prima, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, Barbra Streisand, and Connie Stevens. He was an acquaintance of comedian Pat Cooper, who opened for Sinatra and Roselli.

  Dad was a friend of Gianni Russo, the actor who portrayed Carlo Rizzi in The Godfather, who, in the movie, married Don Vito Corleone’s daughter Connie. Russo came by our house a couple of times to eat. Appearing on a late-night television talk show, he showed off a knife that he said had been given to him by a “real mobster.”

  Dad laughed at the TV. “I gave him that knife.”

  My father was not prejudiced. He spoke highly of the black gangsters in Chicago who ran numbers in their neighborhoods—known as “the policy”—impressed with the amount of money they squeezed out of their communities. Yet he despised all drug dealers, black or white. He was impressed by how the Jews, like the Italians, stuck together. He saw them as smart businessmen, citing how the Outfit and their Jewish counterparts had worked well together, and how, historically, they respected each other.

  Like many sons who try to imitate their fathers, at age fourteen I committed my first burglary.

  Breaking into a neighbor’s house while the occupants were away on vacation, I made off with about fifty dollars in change plus a stash of worthless costume jewelry. Not knowing what to do with my haul, I took it down to the basement of the Compound and stashed it inside an old unplugged clothes dryer. Inside the dryer was a black clothing-store bag containing paperwork. I put my stash underneath the black bag and went to bed.

  A few hours later, Uncle Nick woke me and summoned me to the big room, where my father was waiting with the lights on. My father sat me down.

  “You wanna tell me where you got that stuff downstairs?”

  I knew I was found out and wasted no time confessing. “I broke into a house down the street.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I did it for the thrill of it.”

  “Son, you don’t do stuff like that. Do you know what they do in this town if you steal?”

  I had an idea who “they” were. I waited for the cupped-hand smack across my temple. But it never came.

  “Do not steal from anybody in the neighborhood. I don’t want you to do it again. People lose their fingers for breaking into other people’s houses. You’re grounded for a week.”

  It was the first time he had grounded me.

  “I want you to go to bed and think about what you’ve done.” He motioned to my uncle. “You know what to do with this stuff.”

  There was an understanding between Outfit guys not to steal in certain neighborhoods, especially Elmwood Park, River Forest, and Taylor Street, where the bosses lived. If you were a known thief and they discovered your identity, you were a dead man.

  I couldn’t figure out how my father found the stash so quickly. It turned out that the black bag contained his and Uncle Nick’s juice loan reports and football betting slips. I had selected the identical hiding place as my father.

  While I didn’t like getting busted, I was gratified that he had spoken to me like a real father. Strangely, it felt good seeing him act the traditional role of the caring dad. I had experienced an important rite of passage, even if I had picked the wrong neighborhood.

  A few months later, a similar but more confusing rite between him and me wouldn’t end so warm and fuzzy.

  Sitting in the den watching TV, my father asked me if the shirt I was wearing was new. Yes, in fact it was. Except that, on a dare, I had shoplifted the shirt at a teen clothing store on Grand and Harlem. Again, I was amazed. How ha
d he found out, and was he testing me?

  “How much did you pay for the shirt?”

  “Twenty dollars,” I lied.

  In a sudden moment of rage, he slapped me down hard and tore the shirt off my back. I fell to the ground and hunkered down, expecting a beating for stealing the shirt. Instead, he screamed at me.

  “Who the hell are you? Some fucking big shot who pays twenty dollars for a T-shirt? From now on you buy your shirts at Sears like I do!”

  Years later, while browsing in a hardware store, Dad suddenly instructed me, “Block me.”

  To my horror, I watched him pocket a handful of screws and nails. Once we got outside, I handed him a couple of bucks.

  “What’s this for, Frankie?”

  “Next time, I’ll pay. Why would you risk everything you’ve got for a few lousy screws?”

  Embarrassed, he laughed and shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I did it for the thrill of it.”

  One day while washing my father’s Buick Park Avenue Limited, I lifted the floor mat to vacuum on the passenger side, and there it was—three thousand dollars in loose bills. I ran upstairs to tell him what I had found.

  “Did you take any of it?” he asked matter-of-factly.

  “No.”

  He had known that I would find the money. What he hadn’t known was whether I could be trusted handling large sums of cash.

  There were many people on the streets of Chicago’s South Side who played by my dad’s rules. But if you crossed Frank Calabrese, he was fast and furious. My father had multiple personalities, and what made it hard was that I never knew which one I might be dealing with at any given time. He was a chameleon and could change in an instant. A lot of people knew about his dual personality, but only a tight core knew about his third, the deadly one.