In finalizing my plea bargain, the main snag was the fine attached to my fifty-seven-month sentence. My father’s fine amounted to around $750,000, which he arranged to pay in part by forfeiting Grandma Sophie’s property rather than touch his own cash. After settling his own fine, he promised through his attorney to pay my fine, but only if I agreed to plead guilty along with the rest of the family. My fine came in at $150,000. Nick’s was closer to $25,000, and Kurt’s came near $5,000.
The upside of my dad’s offer was that I could keep the equity in my home, which meant that Lisa and the kids would still own a home while I “went away.” Foremost in my mind was the pledge that Dad had tearfully made to me at the attorney’s office that once we were released, he would step back from the Outfit, repair our relationship, and legitimize his business dealings. The big if was that I would have to trust him to come through with the $150,000 for my fine in exchange for pleading guilty and not going to trial.
Except for doing a night for brawling, I had never served any time. After going through intake, on my way up to the MCC’s thirteenth floor with four ominous-looking black inmates, I had no idea what to expect. Violence? Racial tension? Inedible food? I walked toward a steel door with a long vertical window. Inside I could see the tiers, a Ping-Pong table, and no guards. Just guys walking around in their shorts.
I walked to the door and stopped. I saw a bunch of guys pointing at me. I figured, Okay, this must be it. I’m the new guy. I’m going to have to prove myself. Once I entered, I realized they were pointing at the door to tell me it was open.
The MCC’s room accommodations were basic: two bunks, toilet, small desk with pencils and paper, and a cellmate. The environment was more open than I had pictured. Lockdown was ten at night until five in the morning.
The guard who signed me in didn’t like Italians or my family, so he put me with a guy that nobody else would cell with. I was sitting on my upper bunk when this animal hulk walked in. He was a humongous, hairy white Indiana hillbilly, close to fifty years old. He looked at me and growled. They called him Bear.
One look at Bear during my first night inside, and I slept clutching a pencil for protection. After a few days, Bear opened up to me. We talked and got along. After his wife died and a hooker screwed him out of a lot of money, he threatened to kill her. Then he threatened the judge and nearly strangled and killed his last cellmate. The guards were terrified of him. I bought him food and threw popcorn into his mouth like an animal in the zoo. The guards got a kick out of how fast I tamed him. Trouble was, he didn’t bathe.
After I dragged Bear into the shower and took a scrub brush to him, if anyone got near me, he became protective … like a mother bear. When I moved from the thirteenth to the seventeenth floor, Bear was heartbroken. But the move was good for me. I joined friends from Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst and the West Side of Chicago, and a kid from Elmwood Park.
Prison is about fiefdoms, turf, and control. You stick with your kind, whether by race, nationality, area code, county, region, or lifestyle. I was assigned to the kitchen, while my pals Pat and Joey worked the laundry. As the minority, the Italians confined themselves to the same small area in the day room.
I spent nearly five months—July through November 1997—at the MCC. I missed my family and friends, but after a couple of weeks inside, my mother visited me. She was surprised at how relaxed I was. Yet I discouraged visitors. At my insistence, Lisa rarely came, alone or with the kids. Whenever I got a visit, even if it was for a few minutes, it put me back. I’d go upstairs, and it was like starting over.
The kids had a tough time being away from their dad. They were six and seven at the time. They had questions for which Lisa had no answers. While she had little faith left in our relationship, she needed to hang in there for the kids.
Before going inside, Uncle Nick ran into Lisa at a social event. A man of few words, a somber Nick offered reassurance that I would find the way to live drug free amid the turmoil. He shook his head sadly, and admitted, “The boys should never have been involved, and shouldn’t be in jail.”
Life inside was better for me than working the streets with my father, but I kept in touch with him to see if he was serious about going straight. He was intensely interested in and fearful of the MCC. What was it like? Was I okay doing my time there? Was it difficult?
While my uncle was sent to FCI Pekin, Illinois, a few hundred miles away and a higher-security institution, my dad was admitted to FCI Milan in October of 1997. I was still waiting to “get designated.” Designations were big news at the MCC. The assignments were regularly posted on a community bulletin board. It was like trying out for football, seeing if you made the team. Every day the list went up, I would run over to see if my name was on the list. One day I saw it: “Frank Calabrese, 06738424, Milan, Michigan.”
Frank Calabrese? FCI Milan? That can’t be right.
I approached one of the counselors. “Excuse me, but I think they made a mistake on this list. That’s my father going to Milan, not me.”
The counselor reviewed the list and looked up. “Nope. That’s definitely you.”
Milan, the same prison? That can’t be!
At first I thought the FBI was trying to punish me. After talking to veteran inmates, I learned that with multiple defendants on a case, spreading people around different federal lockups was difficult. The government often made concessions for out-of-state families by bunching family members into one institution for visiting convenience.
My heart sank at the thought of having to do time in the same facility as my father. My plan to start a new life was derailed. The idea was to put more distance between me and him. Now here I was, done in by a random glitch in the Federal Bureau of Prisons system.
Being transported to Milan would give me time to think. I had no choice but to make the best of the situation. My time at Milan could be well spent working things out with him and seeing if he would live up to his two promises. So far he hadn’t come through with the money for my fine. Now, would he live up to his commitment to retire from the Outfit, or would he continue his manipulative and controlling ways?
I was about to find out.
I was in prison.
The trip from the MCC in downtown Chicago to FCI Milan had one stopover. I arrived by bus at USP (United States Penitentiary) Terre Haute, Indiana, and then flew on “Con Air” into Michigan. It was November 1997 and transportation was shut down for the Thanksgiving holiday. Because the Terre Haute facility was under lockdown, I spent my entire stay in the SHU, the Secure Housing Unit. This was my first stay in the hole.
For sixteen days before I boarded the plane for Milan, I stayed locked down in one of USP Terre Haute’s older wings. It was filled with Cubans from Fidel Castro’s Cuban Crime Wave purge of the late seventies and early eighties. These were criminals who had been dumped onto American shores like Al Pacino’s Tony Montana character in Scarface. Lockdown was twenty-three hours a day with one hour of “rec” outside in the frigid cold. Consistent with the high security, rec was spent in an outdoor cage. It took only one session for me to beg the guards to let me back in with the Cubans and the cockroaches. Meals were slid through a slot three times a day. Inmates were issued one set of clothes that could be swapped out every couple of days. Showers were offered every three days. I scored a couple of dog-eared paperback books off a cart that squeaked by my cell. I spent time doing push-ups on the bed to avoid crushing roaches on the floor.
Terre Haute was the appropriate stop for me to consider my dilemma. Was my father going to change or, more important, was he going to step up? Would he step up and stand behind his sons, by paying my fine and looking after Kurt, who had opted to sacrifice his freedom for his dad. It was also time for me to step up and become proactive, if not for myself, then for my family. Federal prison would be the great equalizer. The prison yard would be the place where I would judge my father not by his promises, but by his actions.
When I walked into FCI Milan, I noticed th
at a large part of the prison was old. There was an outdoor yard with a new gymnasium and three large housing units. There were cells and tiers but no bars. Milan’s cells had electronic doors. Going through intake, I was fortunate to get an outside cell unit rather than one facing inside that was part of a noisy dormitory. In a matter of days, I had gone from sitting in the cold darkness of a two-man cell in the hole in Terre Haute to moving into a modest two-man room that looked more like a college dorm than a prison cell—and with no cockroaches.
I had met a guy at the MCC who advised me, “When you get to Milan, make sure you get a job quick!” Once I made it through Milan reception, the guard in my unit tested a bunch of fresh “fish” inmates on their first days. He assigned us to cleaning detail in the cell block unit. Most of the guys ignored him and didn’t show up, but I, along with a couple of guys, cleaned the window frames with toothbrushes. I did what he said and after that he didn’t mess with me. The guys who didn’t show up, he fucked with them all the time.
The first night, as the new Frankie, I unloaded my “property” in my cell. I noticed the obvious differences between the MCC, USP Terre Haute, and FCI Milan. Milan offered freedom to roam the yard until the 9:00 p.m. count. There were few internally locked doors. There was very little signing in and out. Movement wasn’t predicated on having to be escorted by a guard. While there was a “hole,” there was no fear of being shot from a gun tower if an inmate stepped onto the grass or wandered into places that were designated “out of bounds” because of regulations and sight lines. I got lucky when my cellie (cellmate), Lenny LaLiberte, showed me how to eat healthier and lift weights, which became an important routine in my recovery.
Once I hit the Milan yard, it was time to seek out my dad, who lived in an adjoining unit. (The old Frankie would have avoided his dad for as long as possible.) My father was excited, telling everybody that I was coming and that we were the best of pals. It was a good sign and a good start.
I got lucky again when I scored a job in the commissary that a biker from Cleveland named Johnny Ray helped me get. So now I had a regular job and spent time playing softball and hanging out with the bikers.
Inside my new environment, I concentrated on reinventing my relationship with Dad. Seeing my progress pumping iron, he joined me on the weight pile. We reminisced together about growing up in the old neighborhood and how he had won a weight-lifting contest years ago in jail. He joined me at substance-abuse meetings, and we attended Catholic Mass together.
Over the first couple of months, we mainly stuck to talking about the daily routine of prison life. Whenever the subject of leaving the street crew behind came up, he assured me that his Outfit days were over. Whenever I broached the subject of his promise to pay his sons’ fines, he denied making such an arrangement through his lawyer.
His denial was the first red flag that I spotted in testing our relationship. A second red flag came when he approached me with news that “a friend” had located Matt Russo, who would be approached with a sum of money. In exchange, Matt would recant his story and testify that my dad was innocent. Then I was to lie on the witness stand.
“I think we can beat this, Frankie.”
“You’re gonna force me to get on the stand and lie for you? You do realize that once I’m up there, the government can ask me any questions they please.”
“I can always subpoena you.”
Because Matt Russo had been tracked down by one of his soldiers, I became convinced that my father was still active on the streets. Then one day he let it slip that the Catholic priest had allowed him access to the phone. The priest’s line wasn’t monitored. An alarm went off in my head. Was he manipulating the priest with a newfound “interest” in Catholicism so that he could keep in touch with people on the street?
For a while, we both lived on the first floor of G-Unit, sixty feet apart. Then we were getting in each other’s way. I noticed he was increasingly short-tempered, especially after I nixed the idea that we share a cell. I soon discovered that he was reading my mail. Collecting it from an unsuspecting guard, he intercepted a letter from Kurt, who had halted contact with him after feeling hoodwinked by his guilty plea. Kurt asked in the letter how I was holding up being in the same prison with our father.
“What’s worse?” Kurt wrote sardonically. “Losing your freedom or being in jail with Dad?”
Taken aback by the tone of Kurt’s letter, he returned it to the guard, who passed the opened letter on to me, explaining that my father had seen it first. When I confronted my father, a heated argument ensued. After our row, we became estranged and didn’t speak for days. As I walked past him on the yard, we bumped shoulders and kept on walking. I noticed the cold murderous Thousand-Yard Stare in his eyes.
But inside the prison walls, I no longer feared him.
By early 1998, my father was going through cellmates in rapid succession. Everything had to go by his rules: No eating in your bunk. Take your shoes off before entering the cell. Wash your hands after you pee. If you opened the window, he’d close it. At times his cellmates would come to me to complain. Some were afraid that he would get angry at them. I defended my dad, careful not to reveal the strain between the two of us. I needed to maintain a facade that we were friends while I evaluated his actions and true intentions.
Inside the limited confines of the prison universe, I could take my father only in very small doses. I didn’t care for his jailhouse buddies. He mostly hung around made guys. They would sit in front of the boccie courts, complaining about how awful prison life was. None of them worked jobs or took classes, because most had money coming in from the streets deposited into their prison accounts. If any of them had a job, it was a menial assignment, like emptying a trash can twice a day. My dad’s chore was filling a napkin holder at a certain table in the chow hall.
By January 1998, I was enjoying a plum job at the prison commissary. Whatever kept the prison running, especially food and clothing, was shipped through the commissary. I took my job at the commissary quite seriously. Not long after I began working there, more commissary guys shipped out. I moved up quickly in seniority.
There were many benefits working in the commissary, including access to new clothes and a new jacket for the winter. I made sure I shared new stuff with my father. Rather than scamming or shortcutting, I learned that perks came from hard work.
My restaurant experience proved invaluable for working there. I assisted the correctional officers in ordering supplies, and because I had been in the food-preparation business in Chicago, I called various companies to send samples. Next I helped reorganize the warehouse.
Commissaries were the only enterprise that brought profit into the federal prison system other than Unicor, the furniture factory. With the help of the inmate staff and me, the Milan guards won the prize for running the most profitable commissary in the federal system, earning them a five-hundred-dollar check each and a beer and pizza party.
The entire Milan facility held 1,200 men, and through my hard work, I earned a seat on the prison commissary board, representing my 250-man unit. It gave me influence as to where a portion of the profits from the commissary would go. On behalf of the men in my unit, I lobbied for new televisions, exercise mats, and certain brands of toothpaste and toiletries.
Things were going well at the commissary until I heard the news: my father had been hired to work in the commissary. The prison guard in charge of hiring was an Italian guy who thought he had done me a favor by showing respect and giving him the job.
It was the last thing I wanted. I pulled my dad aside.
“Why do you wanna work at the commissary, Pa? You’ve got your job putting the napkins in the container. The commissary is hard work.”
The staff welcomed him because he was my father. As part of the job, each employee was assigned an aisle to stock every day, and because I had gained seniority, I was assigned the easiest aisle. Since my father was the new guy, he received the most difficult aisle, with the heavi
est cans and boxes to stack. To help him, I switched aisles, and because I worked days and evenings, each night I would stock both aisles before he arrived at work the next morning.
In came my father, acting like King Farouk, sitting around with his feet up on the order desk, taking occasional naps.
I pulled him aside. “You gotta start looking busy.”
“But there’s nothing to do,” he said. “This is such an easy job.”
He got a big kick out of working at the commissary because he got to pick through the fruits and vegetables first. The staff maintained a small kitchen in the back where we’d cook Italian dishes. On a few occasions, the guards brought in food from the outside so that my father and I could cook them a genuine Italian meal.
Those were “Good Dad” days. He loved to cook. We made pasta and sausage and peppers and red gravy from scratch. I made my Italian fish salad, which the guards loved. Cooking with him, I thought once again, maybe there’s hope for better days.
As the guards looked the other way, I reminded him to be tight-lipped with the other inmates regarding the special perks we enjoyed at the commissary. “Please don’t say anything. These are privileges that we work hard for.”
When he began bragging to the other inmates about his easy job, that pissed off the COs. I got into it with him about it.
“While you’re out there telling everybody the commissary is an easy job, I stock both of our aisles every night! I took the hardest aisle and gave you the easiest.”
“What did you do that for?”
“Because you’re my father!”
Working together in the commissary marked the first time he was required to take orders instead of giving them, especially from his own son. In the eyes of FCI Milan, we were now equals. Whenever a delivery truck came in, the inmate staff would hop up on the dock to run forklifts and move boxes. We were busting our asses while my dad stood around with the guards, pointing and supervising. One day I walked up to him:
Operation Family Secrets: How a Mobster's Son and the FBI Brought Down Chicago's Murderous Crime Family Page 16