Gunning for a family member wasn’t an entirely new concept to my dad. According to a story captured on tape, my uncle Ed was once heard bad-mouthing Italians and the Outfit during a drunken tirade at a downtown bar. After confronting Hanley, Joey Aiuppa set up an ambush at a local steam room with my father and Angelo parked outside. On Aiuppa’s signal, when Uncle Ed walked out of the bathhouse, the two were to spring into action. But the signal to kill did not come. My father’s original plan was to spirit Uncle Ed into the car by telling him that something had happened to my mother, his sister.
I asked Dad if he was okay with that, and he said, “An order is an order, and the Outfit comes before your family.”
Angelo became part of the family when Kurt became romantically involved with his granddaughter, Angela Lascola. Kurt and Angela were young when they began dating. At first, Angelo took a shine to Kurt. He was “Frankie C’s” son, and Kurt and Angela’s impending marriage “would keep things in the family.” But the couple’s relationship soured.
A few years later Kurt and Angela reunited, which didn’t sit well with Angelo, who was in jail at the time. Kurt and Angela continued to see each other secretly, and when Kurt confided his renewed love for Angela to my father, he blew a gasket. Kurt and Angela reacted by eloping at city hall.
When my father found out, he nearly killed Kurt. He chased him in his car at speeds over ninety miles per hour, trying to run him off the road. When he caught up with Kurt, he gave him a beating and threatened to disown him.
In 1986, not long after his marriage to Diane, my father suffered intense migraine headaches and had problems with his eyesight. He wasn’t keen on doctors, dating back to his childhood, when he spent months recovering from scarlet fever. Diane persuaded him to get a checkup, and after the results of the tests came back, I met with him at his Oak Brook home. The news wasn’t good. He had problems with his pituitary gland. His white blood count was minuscule, and it was feared that he might have a tumor in the middle of his brain.
After further tests confirmed the tumor, my dad required immediate brain surgery. Assembling his family for a sit-down, he sugarcoated his condition, laughing it off. But privately with me, he was very worried. His orders were precise.
He told me I needed to step up and run things with Uncle Nick because there was a good chance that he would die from the surgery or else go blind. I was to stay in the background with the bosses and let them think my uncle was running everything.
As my dad’s health problems worsened, my devotion to my ailing father increased. We spent “quality time” together going over specific scenarios and rules: Never completely trust or confide in anybody. Any direct questions about his businesses, plead ignorance. Take care of my mother, and don’t fight with my brothers over anything material. He wanted me to be cautious and work closely with Uncle Nick. He knew that people on the street could take advantage of Nick’s kindness whenever they came up short on collections.
My father sat down with me and Kurt and pulled out a large case of expensive jewelry. He urged us to divide everything in half. Kurt and I looked at each other.
“We don’t care about your jewelry. We only want you to get well.” We knew how hard it was for him to give up control.
On the day of the operation, my father insisted that both families be present in the waiting room. My dad’s will was strong. At the same time, he looked vulnerable as they wheeled him away. For the first time in my life, my big strong dad looked helpless.
An awkward air hovered over the waiting room as my father’s two families occupied opposite ends. On one side was Diane and her family; on the other was my mother and my two brothers and Uncle Nick. After Dad had been under the knife for hours, the doctors pulled a golf-ball-sized tumor out of his skull. But the prognosis was good. He would be in pain for a while, but the surgery had gone smoothly. I was encouraged.
Wow! Things were going to change for the best. With a second chance at life, my father would be more humble. He would see the light and maybe walk away from his life with the crew. Maybe the tumor was the reason for his multiple personalities and abusive behavior, and after the surgery the “good dad” would return permanently.
I spent most of my time with Uncle Nick while my dad convalesced. We both hit the streets and collected loan payments and street taxes and set up a temporary office in the basement of my father’s Oak Brook home. While he was getting stronger, I hatched a bold plan. I painted an overly grim picture of his health to Dad’s mob friends and associates. Every time I ran into a friend of my dad’s or an Outfit associate, I’d sadly hang my head. Soon word spread on the street that my dad was very sick and possibly wouldn’t make it. I asked him, “Why not play the sick card and step back from the crew so that you won’t be obligated to the Outfit anymore?”
He seriously considered the idea, but the stronger he got, the more remote the possibility of “stepping back” became. All my hopes of his retirement fizzled after he told me he was itching to get back into action and reaffirm his presence on the street. “I’m gonna be back out on the street and get everybody back in line! And the first place I’m gonna start is in the neighborhood. I will get everybody’s asses twitching again.”
While recovering on the sidelines, my father missed out on a pair of plum Outfit assignments: the killing of Emil Vaci in Arizona and the murders of Tony and Michael Spilotro.
With its sprawling green industrial parks and grand highways, Oak Brook in DuPage County was a long way from the Patch. It was home to the world corporate headquarters of the McDonald’s fast-food chain. One intersection in Oak Brook could be as large as a city block in Grand and Ogden. Although it was out of his comfort zone to build a large dream home and be ostentatious, my father hired an architect to design his very own McMansion.
He didn’t set out to build the biggest house in the neighborhood, as he now lived among the Outfit brass. Joe “Nagall” Ferriola had a home one block away, while Joey Aiuppa’s compound was just down the street. My father’s finished house featured a grand wood staircase cascading into a large open foyer. The bedrooms were spacious and jumbo-sized compared to the salad days of the Elmwood Park three-flat. The home’s interior was similar to television gangster Tony Soprano’s. Years later, whenever my mother and I watched the TV series, we would laughingly associate the Soprano dwelling and its fancy appliances with my dad’s house in Oak Brook.
Unlike today’s Chicago Outfit bosses, who have converted much of their Outfit fortunes into legitimate business enterprises, it was difficult for my father to make the same transition. He was often too stern and unyielding to be a lawful, let alone silent, business partner. Just like with the adult-bookstore owner, he would wear people down and drive them away with his demands. As a result, his foray into legitimate business was limited to co-owning hot-dog stands and other eateries with his mob buddies.
My father, Uncle Nick, Kurt, and I launched a general contracting company, hiring a few of my Elmwood Park buddies. Together we would remodel income properties to resell at a tidy profit. After I gave up my coveted city job, the fledgling Calabrese contractors won the bid for the masonry work and drywall for an addition at North Central College in Naperville. The partnership proved tense from the start. With my father in total control, the shortest tasks might take hours to complete.
Outfit business on the streets of Chicago flourished. Father controlled his empire like Genghis Khan. It would take the smoothest of the smooth to bilk a Calabrese out of his hard-earned cash—that is, until he hooked up with journeyman Outfit juice collector Philip “Philly Beans” Tolomeo.
Philly Beans started out as a Chicago policeman who grew up with another Chicago cop gone bad, Mike Ricci. They worked side by side until Philly got kicked off the force. In fact, Philly ran the Bistro A-Go-Go the night Larry Stubitsch was shot and killed by Dickie DeAngelo. As a young man Philly had that Saturday Night Fever Italian pretty-boy look that women ate up.
Philly had a weakness for u
nderage girls, and loved to con older women out of their fortunes. Yet Philly the hustler could effectively lay out a ton of new juice money on the streets. He had a load of connections and was especially well liked. My father was confident he could manage Philly Beans and let him join his crew. Joe Ferriola felt that if anybody could rein him in, it was Frankie C.
I first met Tolomeo at a hot-dog stand in Melrose Park that my dad co-owned with Mike Ricci, Nick, Johnny DiFronzo, and Ronnie Jarrett. I recall seeing Philly Beans talking on the pay phone, dressed in a loud sport coat with matching slacks, and a garish yellow-and-rust-colored fedora.
By 1987, Philly Beans had juice all over town. He was one of the crew’s biggest earners. Although Philly was a moneymaker, he was “a fuckup” whom my father and I needed to stay on top of. Every Saturday night my father and I would meet next door to Armand’s Pizza, inside an antique car storefront after closing hours. I would wait for my father to pull into the back. Philly would arrive through the back door, and later Ronnie Jarrett would follow. Tolomeo would turn in his loan paperwork for us to review. A typical Calabrese “loan application” was handwritten on an index card, complete with a customer’s vital information, including driver’s license, date of birth, job and salary information, what jewelry and titles he owned, and whatever he could put up for collateral. My father and I would go through the same routine with Philly every week.
When my father returned to working with the crew after his convalescence, he put two and two together and figured that Philly was loaning my father’s juice to himself. Apparently Philly Beans had attended the Bernie Madoff/Charles Ponzi School of Banking. My father sent my uncle around to check up on a few of Philly’s delinquent customers, and it turned out that he had a long list of ghost debtors. Philly wasn’t distributing Calabrese loan money to new accounts after all; he was pocketing the money for himself. To make up for the deficit in payments, Philly Beans rotated different customers as late. On the days he came up short or the numbers didn’t add up, he repeatedly took Uncle Nick’s kindness for weakness, and my uncle would often make up the shortfall out of his own pocket.
My father confronted Philly with the damaging evidence at M&R Auto, a repair shop in Elmwood Park owned by a mechanic friend, Matt Russo. Dad beat Philly badly, breaking his cheekbone. Philly Beans wound up owing my father over three hundred thousand dollars.
My father and uncle paid a visit to Elmwood Park to sort out Philly’s problem with his mother. My dad explained to her that Philly had stolen a large sum of money from “certain people” and that her son could be in deep trouble. While he didn’t threaten her, he gave her an out to use the house as collateral for the loan. He promised not to kick her out and gave her the option to sign over the hundred-thousand-dollar house to him or place it in the name of one of Nick’s in-laws.
Once the house was taken over, he rode Philly Beans pretty hard, slapping him across the back of the head and giving him barely enough money every week to live on. Philly knew that if he ran wild again, he would get more than a broken cheekbone. This time his life was on the line. The only reason he was kept alive was to work in the crew and make restitution for the rest of the three hundred grand he had stolen. Yet Philly understood that once he paid the money back he would become disposable.
Philip Tolomeo disappeared from the Chicago area. It turned out that the Calabrese crew was not the only organized crime group Philly Beans had scammed. In addition to embezzling my father’s money, he had taken cash from another Outfit crew. Tolomeo fled to California, where he set up more con jobs on unsuspecting ladies and widows. When his luck ran out on the West Coast, Philly Beans turned himself in to the FBI. Before entering the Witness Security Program, he handed over to the Bureau detailed records of the juice collections he had made on behalf of the Calabrese family 26th Street/Chinatown crew.
Now it was the government’s turn to babysit Philly Beans until they could build a case against my family. This proved to be highly problematic for the FBI and the WITSEC Program because Philly was up to his old grifter ways. He was arrested for soliciting an underage prostitute and had to be re-relocated. A short time later, the FBI discovered he was back in the juice loan business, working with the South Philly mob. He was arrested again, and had to sit in WITSEC isolation until his case came up.
Despite his flamboyance, Philly was a problem for my father and the crew if they went to trial. His smooth style, personal panache, and firsthand knowledge of the inner workings of the crew could help the government win over any jury.
If Uncle Nick’s involvement in the murder of Emil “Mal” Vaci wasn’t so gruesome, it might be right out of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. My uncle, Big Stoop, and Frank Schweihs were sent by the bosses to Arizona and Las Vegas to settle a couple of troubling problems. Everything that could go wrong did, and for Nick, it ranked as a very surreal road trip.
The sad fate of Emil Vaci started at the Stardust Hotel and Casino in Vegas during the 1970s. The Stardust was run by Al Sachs, Bobby Stella, and the Outfit’s gambling ace, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, portrayed by Robert De Niro in the film Casino. Lefty worked under a variety of job titles to get around the gaming license requirements. Rosenthal had previously pleaded no contest to charges of conspiring to fix a New York University basketball game by approaching the star point guard, Ray Paprocky. The Stardust’s owner of record, Allan Glick, and his company, Argent, operated three other Vegas properties, the Hacienda, the Fremont, and the Marina. But the Stardust was Glick’s flagship hotel.
By 1979, the FBI had begun investigating the Vegas money trail. In what later became known as Operation Strawman, quarterbacked out of the FBI’s Kansas City office, a series of FBI wiretaps uncovered the infamous Las Vegas “skim.” A skim is cash income being skimmed off the top, uncounted, pocketed, and hidden from government tax returns. During the 1970s, this cash was diverted to Chicago and Kansas City mob headquarters. Part of Rosenthal’s job was to make sure the Stardust kept up its skim numbers.
Operating at the nearby Fremont was a clever slot manager, George Jay Vandermark, who was a six-foot-two, 190-pound, older version of Alfred E. Neuman. Vandermark was easy to spot with his trademark black horn-rimmed glasses and dual hearing aids. Long a mastermind with the slots, Vandermark set up a system at the Fremont where a group of phantom change booths stood in the middle of the casino floor, right under the nose of the gaming commission inspectors, generating pure mob revenue by mis-calibrating the scales that counted the coins by weight. While the Fremont’s “legitimate” change booths were only “counting” nine hundred dollars per thousand brought in, “extra” booths generated 100 percent unaccounted, unreported skimmed funds to the tune of millions of dollars a year. The exact amount that was actually sent back to Chicago was another story.
It wasn’t long before Lefty Rosenthal moved Vandermark from the Fremont to the Stardust. It was then that Dennis Gomes of the Nevada Gaming Control Board figured out the skim. Only he couldn’t prove it, because, time after time, a leak inside Las Vegas law enforcement warned the gangsters of any pending raids on the casino counting rooms. Gomes, tired of the tip-offs, acted independently and staged his own impromptu raid on the Stardust.
Gomes’s spontaneous raid uncovered a seven-million-dollar Vandermark skim. The trouble was that the Outfit had received only four million of it. Realizing that he had just opened a can of worms for Vandermark, Gomes set out to warn him, only to be informed by Jay’s son that his father had gone “on vacation” to Mexico in mid-May 1976.
A few days later, Vandermark’s son was found dead, apparently of a drug overdose. Vandermark returned to the U.S. after his son was murdered. Instead of coming back to Vegas, he relocated to Phoenix and checked into the Arizona Manor, an Arizona hot spot for celebrities, under the name of George Skinner. The Manor was managed by Emil Vaci—who had run junkets from Phoenix to Las Vegas, and was tied in with the Outfit. Vaci tipped off John Fecarotta and Jimmy LaPietra. They paid Vandermark a visit
at the Manor and took him for a walk. After Vandermark was killed on the premises, his body was taken out in a wheelchair, driven to the desert, and buried.
Almost five years later, in 1981, a grand jury in Kansas City indicted a handful of mob bosses, including Joe Agosto and KC mob boss Nick Civella, for skimming and redirecting gambling funds from Vegas hotels into mob accounts. But after seven convictions in 1983, the government still wanted to know about Vandermark’s disappearance.
On January 21, 1986, Emil Vaci was questioned by a grand jury on the disappearance of Jay Vandermark. Outfit bosses were concerned that his testimony would not only expose them, but affect their entire skimming operation.
Vaci’s grand jury appearance was problematic. Ordinarily gangsters taking the fifth in front of a grand jury spend only a short time behind closed doors. Vaci spent over three hours pleading the fifth. Though he revealed nothing, the Outfit had grave doubts, and since it was better to be safe than sorry, it was decided back in Chicago that Emil Vaci had to go.
It was decided that a group of elite hit men would be dispatched west from Chicago not only to deal with Vaci’s worrisome grand jury appearance, but to also take care of Tony Spilotro in Las Vegas. Spilotro and his crew were out of control, pulling heists and drawing attention, irritating Tony Accardo and Joey Aiuppa. Spilotro had become one of the most celebrated Outfit crime figures since Capone. His high-profile crime spree plagued the Outfit and continued to garner unwanted publicity as the Vegas news media regularly reported burglaries and home invasions, unauthorized by the boys back home.
The hierarchy in the Outfit was fed up with the trouble out West, and the frustration peaked when Joey Aiuppa and Jackie Cerone were sentenced to prison because Spilotro was out of control in Vegas. Stories were getting back to Aiuppa that Spilotro was involved with Rosenthal’s wife, Geri (played by Sharon Stone in Casino). The old mustaches, as they were referred to, frowned on violating the long-held taboo of sleeping with the wife of a high-ranking mobster. The icing on the cake was the unauthorized murders and heists, which were only drawing more attention to Spilotro and his so-called Hole in the Wall crew.
Operation Family Secrets: How a Mobster's Son and the FBI Brought Down Chicago's Murderous Crime Family Page 8