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

by Frank Calabrese

  The first was the caring and loving provider, the patriarch. The second was the controlling and abusive father, demanding and strict, the streetwise Outfit member who ran a vicious and profitable crew. And the third was the killer, whose method of murder was strangulation, followed by a knife to the throat.

  Only his victims and Outfit associates saw number three firsthand. Those who were close to him sensed it. The Outfit bosses—they knew. He sat at the feet of the master, Angelo the Hook. My dad was treacherous and a hothead. He was intense even by Outfit standards. It wouldn’t take much for him to get that glassy-eyed stare.

  We would be having a nice time, laughing, talking and jiving, when something in the conversation would flick a switch.

  My father was a gale force to be around. He was a savvy businessman and didn’t like to back a customer into a corner unless it was necessary. He tried not to bully but he was scary. If someone got cracked in the face, it probably wasn’t his first infraction. In my dad’s eyes, you had it coming or else you had ignored the warnings that had preceded his taking physical action. He had an anger problem—he would resort to violence quickly and was fast with his hands. Many felt that it was his temper that kept him from obtaining an Outfit leadership position.

  Dad wasn’t one to yell. He didn’t puff his chest out or point his finger or bellow accusations. But he was a heartbeat away from erupting. Then his hands did the talking. Not a punch to the face, but a calculated smack to the side of the head with a cupped hand placed strategically around the eye, the temple, and the ear. It came quickly and unexpectedly, like a Tyson left hook, first knocking you off balance, jamming your equilibrium, and down you’d go. With the second personality, if you were habitually late with your payment or street tax, or if you crossed him by ignoring the various warnings, things could get ugly fast. After a few minutes in an empty room with the door locked, many wondered if they would come out alive.

  Frankie “Ciccio” Furio, a longtime associate now deceased, worked closely with my father after Larry Stubitsch was murdered. He was one of the guys who saw the early signs of multiple personalities. Ciccio put it best, giving my dad, his boss, the best advice a guy in his position could offer: “Never bring the street into your home.” It was an unspoken Outfit code not to be broken. Yet, to me, Dad was the family mentor and savior, and a “temple of knowledge.” Both Uncle Nick and I looked up to him, admiring his strength and talent as a provider and a leader.

  I had spent my final high school days in Elmwood Park. The neighborhood was about 60 percent Italian. I went to school with kids whose fathers worked for the Outfit. We knew what our fathers did, but it was unspoken.

  To me and my classmates, going to school in the neighborhood was about getting an education and staying out of trouble. I was taught (and so were a lot of my friends) that you never acted the big shot, never implied, “Do you know who my father is?” If we did get into trouble, the people we feared most were our fathers. They pushed us to stay away from trouble, to study hard and make something of ourselves. Go to college. Land a respectable job.

  Both Kurt and I attended Holy Cross, the local Catholic high school. In high school I was generally trouble-free, a talented athlete in football and basketball, and an average student. In New York City, mob power is traditionally handed down from father to son, but the Outfit viewed its family legacy differently. With few exceptions, the offspring of Outfit members were pushed to be “legit.” As a result, many became lawyers, doctors, and professionals, as if the majority of Outfit families took Frankie Furio’s advice seriously: Don’t pass the Outfit lifestyle on to your sons. While there were a few brothers out there working the streets together, there weren’t too many sons getting involved in the mob business.

  My father continued to test me. One day he had an altercation with the next-door neighbor, who had a habit of parking his car and blocking the Compound driveway. When Dad approached the man, the neighbor responded with an obscene retort. He was a huge man, standing a head taller than my dad. I ran into the garage and grabbed a baseball bat. As the two men exchanged words, I came out of the garage with my bat, ready to swing.

  Seeing me out of the corner of his eye, my father stayed in the guy’s face until he backed down.

  “Just talk to me,” he explained to his neighbor diplomatically, “and don’t threaten me or swear at me. I’ll talk to you like a man, you talk to me like a man, and we got no problem.”

  After the guy walked away, I put down the bat. My father smiled, seeing the potential in me, knowing there was a sense of loyalty that he could nurture and control.

  One of my first part-time jobs was making pizza at Armand’s on Grand Avenue, where a lot of the locals hung out. It has now relocated after fifty years in business, but there was a time when, if somebody walked into Armand’s, chances are he would see prominent Outfit gangsters dining in the corner tables. During its heyday, Armand’s paid street tax to boss man Jackie Cerone.

  In 1975, about three months shy of my sixteenth birthday, I was completing my driver education class to get my learner permit. At the time Uncle Nick was living in the three-flat, and he would take me out driving without my permit.

  One day after school, Dad called me down to the garage. He handed me a letter from Holy Cross that needed to be signed and returned. He confronted me in a mob sit-down style.

  “What is dis?”

  It was a deficiency notice alerting my parents that I was behind in my math studies, and that I still had time to raise my grade before the semester ended. In quick response, my angry father vowed to pull me out of my driver education class; without passing driver’s ed, I would have to wait until I turned eighteen to get my license. My heart sank and I pleaded with him, promising that if he would only let me finish driver’s ed, I would get my grade up by the end of the semester.

  He was adamant. The answer was no. School was more important. But with his next breath, he had an odd request.

  He handed me a greeting card “to Frank” and told me that if Mom asked me if this was my card, I should say yes. I looked at the card, and it was an “I love you” message from his goomah. It was bizarre. One minute, he’s punishing me for my grades, and the next he wants me to lie to my mother about a card from his mistress that he thinks she may have seen.

  When it came time to take the driving test, he took me down to one of his friends who worked for the DMV, who gave me the answers. Whenever possible, he would show me how best to cheat the system.

  By the time I left high school in 1978, my father was dating Diane Cimino, his longtime goomah, behind my mother’s back.

  He began mixing business with family. He would stash stuff at home and have me running small errands. While I didn’t have any designs to join the Outfit, I wanted to work with my father and enjoy his same independence. My father did not sit me down and ask what I wanted to do with my life. Nor was joining the Outfit encouraged as a possibility. Instead, he slowly groomed me.

  I bought into what he was doing. I was to be his secret weapon, his behind-the-scenes guy, low-key like him. Out of father-son loyalty, I stood ready to do whatever he asked of me.

  I never actually saw him kill anybody, but one night he came home with his adrenaline pumping. He would talk in the bathroom with the exhaust fan on and the water running in the sink. I could see the high in his eyes as he rambled on about a murder he’d just committed. He was almost breathless as he spilled his guts.

  “We just got ’im … and this is how we did it.… Our guy wasn’t listening to the rules … so we shotgunned him.”

  To which I thought, I wonder what my friends’ fathers are telling them right now about their day at work.

  One day in 1976 Dad arrived home carrying some heavy duffel bags. We went into the back room where we worked out together with weights, next to the washer and dryer, and he told me, “I want you to set up the folding table, count these quarters, and put them in bags.” I gladly followed his order.

  Aft
er counting the quarters came the late-night rides and waiting in the car, going to restaurants, dropping in at different people’s homes, and meeting guys on the street. I rarely listened to what was said or what business was transacted. At first I didn’t know why I was going along, or what he was doing. It was just, “C’mon, son, take a ride with me.” Growing up, I was my dad’s favorite, and he took me out with him a lot.

  I learned that the quarters came from a string of adult bookstores that Uncle Joe was running for my dad. When Uncle Joe tired of the job and my father’s inflexible rules, Uncle Nick and I took over as collectors. Once a week we’d drive around, emptying quarters from peep show machines, counting the money and coins before stashing them in another garage. The take came from six stores in downtown Chicago and a seventh just over the border in Indiana.

  In a bookstore operation a patron would pay two dollars to enter the store (refundable upon making a purchase). He might wander into the back room, lit by black light, to feed the machine quarters to watch a short porno movie. Years ago, peep show machines were cash cows and adult bookstores were the places where sexual deviants could go. It was a rough atmosphere that neither my uncle nor I took pleasure in. Perverts would urinate on the machines or, worse, defecate on the floors.

  We found that seven or eight o’clock on Monday nights was the slowest time of the week, the best time to collect. I knew that when we went into a shop, my uncle was “carrying.” We’d flip the lights on and there would be some guy blowing another guy on the floor.

  As a nineteen-year-old collecting quarters and ordering Triple-X inventory like dildos, blow-up dolls, and magazines, shadowed by my heat-packing gangster uncle, I got a firsthand look at life in the seamy underworld.

  My father had slowly been running the businesses into the ground. He constantly expected more money to come in. If we were bringing in eight thousand dollars a week, he wanted to know why it wasn’t nine thousand dollars. Whenever we’d take money out to buy new films and inventory, he’d get agitated. “Why does it cost so much?”

  We had a store in Mishawaka, Indiana, right next to South Bend, that featured nude shoeshine girls. They had a room with two large benches where the patrons would sit down and a naked girl would come in and shine their shoes. It cost seven dollars at the desk. Whatever the girl did extra for the customer, we didn’t want to know, as long as we got our seven bucks for the nude shoeshine.

  What happened to the string of bookstores was symptomatic of how the Outfit operated businesses once they took over. What the Outfit did was bleed a business until there was nothing left. Had we taken care of those stores, they could have generated a lot of passive income. When my father first approached the owner to pay a street tax, I think he was paying three thousand dollars a week for the whole chain. After a while we took over counting his quarters and keeping track because my father wanted more. It was the classic Outfit greed. They were making three thousand dollars while the owner was bringing in, say, twenty thousand. But the guy was a natural at running his business and he worked hard. He had contacts inside the city who helped him obtain the necessary licenses. Had we kept him in place, my father could have made thousands per week by not bothering him, and could have been paid a tidy sum for little effort.

  But once Dad gets involved in an enterprise, he wants to see the books. Next he’s sending his guys in—like us—to count his quarters. We were stealing a fortune in quarters at each store for my father, and the owner knew it. Then my father cracked the guy in the face. That’s what he was about, more control and sucking out more cash.

  He tightened the grip until one night the owner filled up a couple of grocery bags full of cash, threw them in the trunk of his car, and fled to California to take a job with the government. Such was my official entry into my father’s crew. I kept my work at the porn shops a secret from my friends in the neighborhood.

  He was slowly grooming me, and from that point on, I was ready to lead two lives: mine and the life my father had mapped out for me.

  Before Nicholas Calabrese was honorably discharged from the U.S. Navy in the late 1960s, he had followed orders without question. One night, during an ocean storm, the young sailor was ordered to straddle the missile destroyer USS Bainbridge and the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise to repair communication between the two vessels. Encased in a small wire cage that spanned the two ships, with the waves crashing at heights of twenty feet, he could easily have been swept away and drowned. Uncle Nick later told family and friends that it was the scariest moment of his life. But he obediently carried out the order without a flaw. Such was the loyalty of Nick Calabrese.

  When my uncle joined my father’s crew in the summer of 1970, many figured him to be just a lackey for his brother. He was a pleasant-looking guy, dark-haired with a smaller build than his older brother—and he wasn’t as intimidating on the juice-collection trail. Some likened Nick to the mild-mannered Fredo in The Godfather.

  If Uncle Nick spoke, it was in a low, respectful tone. He read constantly, and liked to sit on the couch doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. He was the guy who picked up Dad’s dry cleaning. He was the accident-prone klutz who would trip and fall, jamming his fingers, when he moved furniture for his brother. When he had a few too many drinks he was goofy, and occasionally, in fun, he would throw a punch or two to show how tough he was. He raised a daughter, Michelle, with Joy, his first wife, and a son and a daughter, Franco and Christina, with his second wife, Noreen.

  Nick’s July 1970 initiation into my dad’s Chinatown crew was a chilling affair. When he first joined as a driver and gofer, Dad was dodging a subpoena issued by the Illinois Crime Investigating Commission, which was probing juice loan rackets and mob activity on the streets of Chicago. Michael “Bones” or “Hambone” Albergo, a former running buddy with the late Larry Stubitsch, was tagged as a collector for the Calabrese crew. But Albergo was viewed as a weak link who could roll over and cooperate with law enforcement. When the order came down from Tony Accardo and Angelo LaPietra to “retire” Albergo, my father told Uncle Nick they needed to find a suitable site to dig a four-foot-deep hole.

  At first my uncle thought he was giving him the business, but after casing the South Side, it became apparent that he wasn’t joking. After passing on a site or two, the pair settled on a site at Thirty-fifth and Shields across from Comiskey Park. Packing a shovel, the two took turns digging the hole in an obscured area, covering the finished dig with a large sheet of plywood.

  In August of 1970, Ronnie Jarrett, a Calabrese crew member, stole a Chevy (as a work car) and arranged to pick up Albergo on the pretext that he was going to “a short meeting.” After one failed attempt, Jarrett snagged his soon-to-be victim. With Albergo in the front passenger seat, Jarrett pulled up to where Nick and my father were waiting. My father climbed in behind Jarrett on the driver’s side while Uncle Nick sat behind Albergo. Both men surreptitiously slipped on their gloves as Jarrett pulled up near the Thirty-fifth and Shields grave. Ronnie shut off the ignition, and Nick, as ordered, grabbed a stunned Albergo’s right arm and held it tightly behind him while Jarrett grabbed Hambone’s left arm. My father, as executioner, slipped a rope over Albergo’s head and tugged hard until his body went limp. Albergo was dragged out of the car, then undressed down to his underwear. His clothes were thrown onto some railroad tracks, and to make sure the hit was complete, my father cut the dead man’s throat. In the cover of darkness, he, Ronnie, and Uncle Nick pushed Albergo into a deep hole and smothered the body with lye.

  Uncle Nick later admitted to peeing on himself during his first hit, and hiding the fact for fear that my father would mercilessly mock him. With a gangland murder under his belt, in one short month he was “all in,” both with his brother’s crew and the Outfit.

  Many years later, while driving near the Chicago White Sox ballpark, Dad pointed out to me an area near Thirty-fifth and Shields by the elevated train tracks.

  “There’s one over there,” he told me, making
the sign of death, a finger across his throat, like a knife.

  Like during his navy days in the steel cage, Nick performed without question. He got the job done. True to his brother’s wishes, he mastered the art of blending in, and for the next thirty years, Nick would operate under the law enforcement radar.

  Unlike Uncle Nick’s swift transition from driver to hit man, my ascent into my father’s street crew was a gradual process. When your father asks you to do something, you assume that what he’s telling you is best for you and the family. He was the master at using people for what they were good at. He was a quick read. He could sense their strengths and their weaknesses. My uncle’s strength was dependability and commitment. But under pressure, there were times my uncle didn’t think as clearly as my dad would have liked. Dad knew that I thought like he did and that I could handle myself.

  Like my uncle, I was taught the art of blending in through a series of street-smart, day-to-day rules. Very few of the street crews would be as careful and deliberate as my father’s. His rules ranged from the use of common sense to subtle tactics that kept law enforcement confused and at bay. He set the example of his prime rule: Remain low-key.

  I was instructed, Never flash a roll of cash in public. Don’t be a hot shot—spaccone—and if you are handling or exchanging a large sum of money, conduct the transaction under the table. I learned to talk with my hands in front of my mouth, a habit I still practice. While talking at a phone booth, I made sure my back was to the phone box, with a 180-degree view of the street. I would carry a small .22 five-shot pistol in my pocket that I could toss away should the cops arrive unexpectedly. If I suspected I was being followed, I drove slowly and made a lot of turns with the signal on. If a car pulled up next to me, I was taught to stare back intently. If the driver didn’t look back, he was probably tailing me.

  When my father was followed by undercover agents, to throw them off, he would visit places where he wouldn’t normally go. Once he ended up in a Greek restaurant and took a seat at the counter and ordered a meal. He asked to speak with the owner, and when the owner came out, he shook his hand.