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

by Frank Calabrese

  I had already cashed in my retirement savings from my city job to retain counsel. Money was getting tight. Any money on the streets from dealing cocaine was gone. I was out of the restaurants and delivering pizzas part-time at Armand’s just to get by. If it hadn’t been for Lisa’s job at the Board of Trade, our household would have had no money.

  That morning I showered and picked out a set of clothes—pants, shirt, and sport coat—that I assumed would be stored in a federal prison property box for the term of my sentence. Saying good-bye to the kids proved difficult.

  “What’s wrong?” my young daughter, Kelly, asked with her younger brother Anthony, looking up at me.

  “There’s nothing wrong. I’m going to work, and I love you guys very much.” Lisa’s grandmother left the room crying at the sight of me hugging my children.

  As I walked to the train that would take me to the lawyer’s office across the street from the federal building, several thoughts occurred. I would miss my wife. I would miss my children’s formative years growing up. But I was ready to do my time. I anticipated it. I was upset with my father. I was numb, living life by going through the motions. It was a long walk to the lawyer’s office from the train station. As I ambled through the morning rush-hour crowd, commuters bumping into me, I realized it would be my last taste of Chicago for the next few years.

  When I walked into my lawyer’s office, there were my parents and Lisa. I was upset that my dad was there. It was evident that he was there to put on the “dutiful father show” for the judge. Since I was going to be sentenced and incarcerated first, he was wondering how I would handle doing federal time.

  He pulled me aside into an adjoining office for a last-ditch effort at a heart-to-heart. As the “Good Father,” he gave me a tight hug and held back tears. “I don’t know how you came to start doing that shit,” he said, referring to my cocaine habit. “But you broke my heart.”

  “I’ll make you a promise if you make me a promise,” I said. “I will stop doing drugs and do my time if you promise to step back from the Outfit so that we can work on building a new relationship and a new life.”

  We embraced tighter, and tearfully agreed to mend our ways. After prison we would begin anew, both professionally and as father and son. As I crossed the street on my way to my sentencing hearing to surrender, I squeezed Lisa’s hand, feeling good about the pact I had just made with my father.

  I appeared in front of the judge twice. The first time was after my bail was forfeited as I surrendered to the court. With no bail, I was sent directly to the MCC. A short time later, I reappeared in front of the judge for sentencing as my father stood next to me.

  In front of the judge for a second time, a deal was struck: fifty-seven months in federal prison. My PSI officer had recommended forty-seven months, but in my rush to begin serving, I succumbed to the G’s demand of ten more months. I agreed to the fifty-seven months, not counting good behavior. I should have fought it, but I wanted to just go inside and do my time.

  Accepting my fate, I was contrite. I admitted my mistakes to Judge James Holderman and reiterated that I was willing to “do my time like a man and pay my debt to society.” As I spoke, the judge put his pencil down, leaned back in his chair, and looked me square in the eyes. He then asked a series of questions to make sure that the government hadn’t pressured me into waiving my rights by accepting a plea. The judge expressed concern that I had used the same law firm as my father and that I was pleading out along with him.

  When my dad stepped up next to speak to the judge on my behalf, Holderman put his head down and resumed writing, not once looking up. My father spoke about being godfather to twenty-five children, declared his love for his sons, and added that he was a senior citizen with serious health issues. I stood off to the side in shackles, clad in a jumpsuit. I shook my head in embarrassment at his theatrics. He concluded his speech with a tearful request, asking for a final concession.

  “Do you think I can give my son one last hug?”

  My eyes rolled heavenward as my body went limp in his tight embrace. Once I was led away in shackles, out in the hallway, Lisa and my mom wept while my dad’s response was, “So … you guys wanna get something to eat?”

  Mom drove Lisa back to the Elmwood Park train station and apologized for her son leaving her in the lurch, while Lisa wanted only to comfort her mother-in-law after she had seen her firstborn son reenter the MCC. Parked at the station was the pathetic old beater that Dad, an avid car collector, had lent me to drive after taking away my white Jeep.

  Two weeks later, a pair of FBI agents showed up on Lisa’s doorstep and asked if she had any additional information about my father or me. “No, thank you,” Lisa responded as she closed the door, doubled over with stomach pains from stress.

  Not long after, Johnny Marino showed up with a cryptic message that resembled a ransom note. It was a list of necessities that would be “paid for” provided that Lisa presented the correct receipts and invoices.

  “Who asked you to bring this to me?” she asked Marino, who sheepishly shrugged.

  “No thanks,” said Lisa, handing the note back to Marino.

  Later, a box arrived on Lisa’s doorstep from the MCC. It contained my shirt, pants, and sports coat. The sight of my life reduced to a cardboard box of clothes set off a flood of emotions. Dread over the struggle that she suddenly faced as a single parent with two small children. Her love for me, and the hate she felt toward me for leaving our family in the lurch. Then the guilt over the relief she felt at no longer having to watch her husband self-destruct before her very eyes.

  If someone had told me as a kid that I would eventually work with the FBI, let alone forge a close professional relationship with someone like Agent Michael W. Maseth, I would have thought that person was nuts. On the other hand, had that same all-knowing someone told Mike that he would become an FBI agent, he might have been equally surprised.

  According to Mike, chasing Outfit gangsters wasn’t his original career path. He first showed an interest in law enforcement at age twenty-six, in 1996. As a young criminal-defense and personal-injury attorney in Columbus, Ohio, he received a phone call from his mother, who worked as a secretary for a high school vice principal. Two FBI agents had dropped by the school to speak with the students on Career Day.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” Mike’s mom said, “but I gave the FBI your contact information. They’re looking for attorneys. It sounded like something you might be interested in, so they’re sending you an application.”

  While John Fecarotta was dodging Uncle Nick’s gunfire that September evening in 1986, Mike was attending high school in western Pennsylvania, where he was a popular student leader. As the drum major and a “terrible” euphonium player with North Allegheny High’s 350-piece school band, Maseth marched halftime at the Gator Bowl and Cotton Bowl football games, and various other collegiate sporting events. After graduating from high school, Mike earned a bachelor of arts degree in history and a minor in philosophy at Allegheny College. But it was the law that had been calling Mike since his elementary-school days, when, as a smallish youngster, he was a probing debater with a questioning mind. After earning his bachelor’s degree, he was accepted into the Capital University Law School in Columbus, Ohio, in 1992.

  I would later learn from Mike that he received his law degree in 1995 and began working for two small firms. He stayed focused on criminal defense but expertly handled DUI cases. He had his first encounter with the FBI while defending two clients arrested by the Bureau for bank fraud. To Mike, the FBI agents seemed like levelheaded people who enjoyed what they did for a living—unlike him, wanting to pull his hair out representing drunk drivers.

  Mike filled out a three-page FBI questionnaire and later completed the more detailed personality test, after which he heard nothing from the Bureau. He hadn’t thought about the FBI application for about nine months and assumed there was no interest. What was the likelihood that he would be accepted? He figured
not very high.

  But in the summer of 1997, the FBI contacted Mike for a full-scale interview, to be conducted by three agents. After he passed the polygraph test, they asked if he was interested in becoming an agent. In March of 1998, the twenty-seven-year-old was set to report for agent training at the FBI Academy in the shoreline town of Quantico, Virginia.

  Around the time I was starting my prison term, Mike put his stuff into storage, and off he went, going back to dorm life with a roommate, eating in a cafeteria, sharing a bathroom with four other guys, and going to gym class. It was like college with guns, except that Maseth had never fired a weapon in his life—which was fine because he didn’t arrive at Quantico with any bad firearm habits.

  Mike completed his training by taking an intensive seventeen-week program. He crammed to get through written exams, took extensive firearms training, and learned how to drive at high speeds. He soon found Quantico to be more about camaraderie than competition.

  In week six, Mike was asked to rank all fifty-six FBI field offices from top to bottom in order of where he would most like to work. As is the custom at Quantico, when a budding agent steps up to receive his marching orders, he reveals his top choice to the class before opening the envelope. Mike’s first choice was Kansas City, the locale closest to friends and family. He flinched when he read his destination aloud. Our town, Chicago, wasn’t even a top ten choice; it ranked twelfth on his original list.

  Mike spent his first six months of service in Chicago on a revolving training squad doing two-week stints working with a variety of different teams, including Bank Fraud, Terrorism, High-Tech Crime, Street Gangs, Bank Robbery, Public Corruption, and Organized Crime.

  When the time came for a permanent assignment, Mike was originally optioned to Wire Fraud, but his training supervisor had other ideas. His superior, once a handling agent in Chicago for famed mob informant Ken “Joe the Jap” Eto, recommended that Mike be sent to the Organized Crime squad. Perhaps the supervisor felt his law background might supply a fresh investigative perspective.

  It was always our belief that the Organized Crime squad used older, more experienced agents. What prompted his boss to send Mike to one of the two Bureau OC squads that operated out of Chicago? What could the world of organized crime possibly offer a fresh-faced rookie agent like Mike?

  The old Organized Crime office in Chicago was on the eighth floor of the FBI’s 219 Dearborn Avenue headquarters downtown, housed in the federal building. Mike found that his new FBI digs resembled the set of 1970s police sitcom Barney Miller more than that of Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.’s 1960s white-collar drama, The FBI. Only his supervisor, Tom Bourgeois—and later John Mallul after Tom retired—had his own office. Bourgeois was a top agent. He grew up in a law enforcement family, and his father was an FBI agent killed in the line of duty. Tom was two years old at the time.

  According to Mike, the squad room during the 1990s was more like a bullpen than the cubicles of today. When he arrived there were nine agents in OC1. Four aged computers were stashed in the corner for community use. Not all of them worked. There were no regular Monday-morning staff meetings; people worked on top of one another, and it was up to each individual to stay current on what was going on elsewhere.

  This free-for-all environment meant that Mike didn’t have to corner a specific person if he had a question or a comment. He now had a roomful of mentors. A rule of thumb was that questions or observations were taken to other squad members first before going to the boss. Outside of dealing with secret informants (who were referred to only by their code names), investigating was about throwing things out in the open and getting different takes from the peanut gallery. If somebody heard a particular name from four desks up, it was up to that agent to speak up: “I’m dealing with that guy, too. Let’s talk about it.”

  While we worked the same streets alongside the other Outfit crews, there was healthy competition between the two Chicago FBI squads for who would deliver the next big takedown. Mike was assigned to OC1. Mike’s “competitor,” OC2, had scored a major coup in 1992, which involved flipping a bookmaking and gambling kingpin, William Jahoda. This resulted in LCN (La Cosa Nostra) figures being convicted on gambling and racketeering charges, including Outfit consigliere Rocky Infelise.

  Mike’s path and mine were about to cross, at least on the streets. Mike’s first official Organized Crime squad assignment involved shadowing Johnny Apes’s lieutenant, Jimmy DiForti. DiForti worked in my father’s crew and had been indicted and was set to stand trial for the murder of a juice loan deadbeat named Billy “the Pallet Man” Benham. In addition to shadowing DiForti, Mike was ordered to conduct surveillance on our crew lieutenant Ronnie Jarrett.

  While Mike was tailing Ronnie in the Bridgeport area, another squad agent supplied directions from another vehicle on a two-way radio. Mike soon learned that giving chase in the real world (as opposed to drills at Quantico) was not easy. Jarrett, as usual, drove erratically, sometimes speeding up to fifty miles an hour the wrong way up one-way streets.

  “Quick! He’s making a left here,” the voice emitted from the radio, “and a left there. No, no. Now he’s going right!”

  My father taught me to always know my backstreets. While I grew up knowing the avenues and alleys of every neighborhood in and around Chicago, Mike had no idea which street was which. Navigating into a dead-end alleyway and driving in circles, he fell three miles behind the chase and pulled over to the curb. He couldn’t find his ass with a road map that day and sat in his crummy old square box Bureau car, exasperated. What the hell had he gotten himself into with this job? He was out of his element. He didn’t know anybody in Chicago and needed to get up to speed quickly and figure out who were these guys in the Chicago Outfit.

  Mike was having difficulty getting into the groove of the squad. After the botched surveillance, Mike approached Chicago Police Department detective Bob Moon, who served on the squad as a task force member. Moon and Detective Al Egan were veteran cops whom the Feds trusted when they needed local intelligence: the inside scoop on particular mob hangouts or information on who had been arrested and on what charges.

  “Listen, Bob, help me out. I’m lost!” Mike said. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I don’t know who these guys are. You gotta explain it to me.”

  Moon was a down-to-the-bone blue-collar Irish Catholic cop. We knew the name, and that he was a Chicago copper placed on the FBI’s Organized Crime task force crew. He once infiltrated our crew through one of our members, Louis Bombacino, posing as a juice loan customer. Both my father and my uncle Nick had dealt with Moon. He was round, short, and stout, with a bald pate and glasses. According to Mike, he was one of the funniest guys in the office, with the driest wit. While sitting at his desk, he called up the archdiocese as Pope John Paul II lay dying. He asked to speak with the bishop so he could submit his name for consideration to replace the ailing pope. But to us, Bob Moon was no joke.

  Not only did Moon answer Mike’s many questions and supply him with important details, but Bob made him feel more at ease in the squad room. Moon gave Mike a detailed history of the Outfit and a who’s who of the players involved with Ronnie and DiForti. As it turned out, Ronnie was becoming a key figure in a new investigation of the Calabrese Chinatown crew. Although Jarrett was not a made guy—he was only half Italian—he had done sufficient jail time and whacked enough people to make him a well-established name within the Outfit.

  Mike knew Chicago had a long, colorful history of corruption between organized crime and the police that dated back to the days of Capone. Chicago was tainted with plenty of dirty cops like Richard Cain, Michael Corbitt, and Bill Hanhardt—high-level guys who were in the pocket of the Outfit bosses.

  It was hard to know whom to trust inside the police force while working with the OC1 squad. Law enforcement never really knew which cops, judges, politicians, or moles my father had in his pocket. As a result, it was wise to keep interdepartmental cooperation among the Bureau, the Chicago
PD, the U.S. Marshals, and the Cook County Sheriff’s Department strictly to those you knew and trusted firsthand. Now that Mike was in the mix, it would only get crazier when we eventually bumped heads.

  Plea agreements regarding the RICO charges were reached by me, my father, Uncle Nick, and Kurt on March 21, 1997. Crew members Louis Bombacino and Philly Beans Tolomeo—the latter having fled to witness protection—also pleaded out. Co-defendant “Pete” Fiore would try his luck in court, and serve ten years.

  By July, I felt I could do my time as long as I was away from my dad. I had violated my bond by using drugs, so I was the first inside. My plan: attend drug rehabilitation in Yankton, South Dakota, with the judge’s consent, applying the time toward my sentence.

  I reported to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago in late July 1997, the first stop inside the federal penal system. After MCC, the Federal Bureau of Prisons would assign me to a prison within five hundred miles of my home to accommodate my family. My mission was simple: serve my time and return home to mend fences with my wife and family, and leave behind my life with the crew.

  Conversely, going to the MCC was something that my father wanted to avoid. He ordered his lawyers to have him report directly to the Federal Correctional Institution at Milan, Michigan, to begin his 114-month sentence. To ensure a quick and smooth transition, he was eager for the rest of his family—Kurt, Nick, and me—to plead out alongside him and not go to trial. Kurt pleaded guilty to a tax charge and was sentenced to two years. My father’s rap to Kurt was that if he didn’t do this, my dad could get sixty years, while Kurt would get a relative slap on the wrist or be sent to a boot camp. What kind of son would risk his father having to serve sixty years? Being too old for boot camp, Kurt was sent to FCI Oxford in Wisconsin. Not long after, Kurt was put on a bus back to the MCC, where he served eighteen months.