Mike, Luigi, and Chris Mackey were to escort two separate truckloads of documents between Chicago and Washington, D.C. The evidence would be digitally scanned on state-of-the-art equipment and archived in D.C., a painstaking process, since some of the documents dated as far back as 1958. The older documents were extremely brittle and could easily disintegrate.
The agents methodically numbered the boxes and carried the boxes on dollies and loaded the truck. Leaving Chicago early on Saturday morning, they followed the truck to Pittsburgh, where there was a stopping point because under the rules mandated by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the driver was allowed to drive only eleven out of fourteen work hours.
Agents Mondini and Mackey led the expedition in a Crown Vic in front, followed by Mike and another agent named Smitty bringing up the rear. The truck steadily advanced to D.C.
When they drove to D.C. the first time, they were expecting to see people waiting on the other end, ready to take the stuff off the truck. But Chris, Smitty, Luigi, and Mike unloaded the entire first shipment themselves.
On the second trip to D.C., the group passed through Pittsburgh again on January 22, 2006, a date to remember for Pittsburgh NFL football fans. It was the day the Steelers won the AFC Championship by defeating the Denver Broncos 34–17 in Denver and secured a spot in the Super Bowl.
The Pittsburgh FBI office was on the south side, and with so many rivers and bridges to cross, the truck and trailer caravan had to navigate through the city’s bar district. The Steelers had won the championship less than an hour before.
The caravan was stopped by police at the site of the mass celebration. The roads were blocked. The streets were packed with crazed Pittsburgh Steelers revelers. Passage seemed impossible. Yet the three FBI vehicles snaked their way through the crowd. The locals didn’t part like the Red Sea. Instead, they swarmed the truck and climbed aboard, dangling from the side of the cab. The agents and the driver had no choice but to forge ahead at a snail’s pace.
They “badged” their way through to get to the office in time. It was pure mayhem. Fans were jumping onto the side of the truck, hooting and hollering, waving the Terrible Towel. The driver did pretty well. The more he beeped his horn, the more the crowd loved it. Fortunately, the hordes didn’t turn the truck over.
Two weeks later Mike’s team, the Steelers, behind quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, went on to win the Super Bowl by defeating the Seattle Seahawks 21–10 at Ford Field in Detroit. Next up, Operation Family Secrets advanced to the finals and on to the trial stage as well, where a team of Assistant U.S. Attorneys would lace up and take the field to prosecute the Operation Family Secrets defendants in a federal courtroom.
Daniel R. Seifert was the man who could connect the dots between the Central States Teamsters Union Pension and Welfare Fund and the Chicago mob. The murder of Seifert outside his Bensenville, Illinois, plastics factory in September 1974 ran markedly against the grain of the usual Outfit killing. The news media jumped on the story because it was a gangland murder of an ordinary businessman
who wasn’t a mobster. Second, the killing was shocking because it happened in broad daylight, in front of Seifert’s wife, Emma, and his four-year-old son Joe.
Throughout 1971 and 1972, Danny Seifert, a high school dropout turned successful entrepreneur, was president of International Fiberglass, Inc., a fiberglass-molding company that was backed by a suspicious group of “investors” that included Irwin “Red” Weiner and Milwaukee Phil Alderisio. Seifert first met Weiner when he did carpentry work for him, and soon he entered into a three-way partnership with Weiner and Alderisio. Later Danny and Joe Lombardo formed a close friendship. The Seiferts were so smitten with the Clown’s act that they named their youngest son Joe.
Weiner subsequently sold a portion of his share of the business to Tony Spilotro, Frank Schweihs, Allen Dorfman, and Lombardo. As a no-show employee, Lombardo would come in to hit the heavy bag in the office, crack jokes, and chat on the phone.
Headquartered in Elk Grove Village, International Fiberglass became an Outfit-infiltrated company financed with a loan from the Central States Teamsters Pension Fund. In February 1973 Seifert discovered that illegal mob money was being laundered through International Fiberglass’s books, and he left the company. When Lombardo, Spilotro, Weiner, and Dorfman were investigated by a grand jury for criminal fraud, Seifert was to be the prosecution’s star witness. These “gentlemen” had plenty to be concerned about because the $1.4 million loan obtained by Weiner through his good friend Allen Dorfman came from the Central States Teamsters Pension Fund and would lead back to the Outfit. Seifert then gave federal investigators proof that Alderisio and Lombardo (the latter, through two canceled checks) were silent partners at International Fiberglass. Seifert would document fiscal wrongdoing using checks deposited to the company books that were kicked back to Lombardo under the guise of reimbursing him for back wages. By 1974, as indictments loomed, the Outfit deduced that the knowledge of the canceled checks could have come only from Seifert and that he would testify against them in court. It became obvious that something had to be done.
On September 27, 1974, three cars showed up early at Plastic-Matic Products, the Bensenville plastics factory that Seifert now operated. Joe Lombardo and Jimmy LaPietra arrived in a brown Ford LTD. John Fecarotta and Tony Spilotro drove up in a white-and-blue Dodge Charger. Frank Schweihs drove a third, unidentified car that was never found. The ambush was set. Danny Seifert showed up for work with his wife, Emma, and toddler son Joe. As Emma and her son walked into the office ahead of Danny, three gunmen dressed in hooded sweatshirts and ski masks burst through the back door. They grabbed Emma and little Joe and locked them inside the bathroom. The assailants told Emma that they were there to rob the place.
Emma screamed, but obviously not loudly enough, because Daniel didn’t hear her. When Danny walked into the office, he was thrown to the ground in the entryway, hit with the butt of a gun, and severely beaten. Before the assailants could handcuff Seifert and shoot him, Danny bolted out the glass door, streaking it with blood, and was chased by the three masked men in the parking lot of the plastics factory. Screaming for help and running for his life, Seifert burst into the adjoining office building and yelled for somebody, anybody to call the police. When one worker picked up the phone, a masked gunman aimed a shotgun at him and told him to put the phone down.
Danny raced through the premises with the gunmen in hot pursuit. By the time he made it out the door and back into the parking lot, he had been shot in the leg. He fell to the ground. The next shot was a point-blank shotgun blast through the back of his head. As the shooters bolted from the scene, someone called the cops. There was a police call out for a pink LTD, but when officers drove by a Key Pontiac dealership, they saw a brown Ford LTD and some guys getting into the Dodge Charger. An unsuccessful chase ensued. The brown Ford LTD was later found with ski masks and a pair of handcuffs left behind. The abandoned car had been altered as a mob work car complete with a supercharged engine and revolving license plates. During the crime-scene investigation, one woman identified Fecarotta in a photo lineup as a man who had been casing the Seifert factory. Another female witness identified Spilotro as being one of the occupants of the blue getaway car. Emma told the cops she was convinced one of the masked men was Lombardo because of his height and stocky build and because she recognized that “Joey was a boxer and very light on his feet.” She was sure he was the one who had pushed her and Joe into the bathroom. A salesperson at an electronics store, CB Center of America, picked Lombardo, Fecarotta, LaPietra, and Schweihs out of a photo lineup as being in the store buying police scanners that were later linked to the getaway cars. Joe had signed the receipt for the scanners as “J. Savard”; Savard was the maiden name of Frank Schweihs’s wife.
When the brown LTD was retrieved, its ownership was linked to a bogus business called Acme Security, whose address was identical to that of a plumbing company called Minotti Plumbing. Minotti
was owned by an acquaintance of Lombardo’s.
In spite of the evidence collected during the Seifert murder investigation, and the fact that a witness was later told by Lombardo at a driving range, “That son of a bitch won’t testify against anybody now, will he?” no charges were originally brought against the shooters. Also, the case against Joe the Clown, Tony Spilotro, and Allen Dorfman in the matter of International Fiberglass, Inc., and their alleged unlawful use of Teamster pension funds was dropped due to the lack of evidence needed to bring the case to a grand jury. Without Seifert’s testimony, the government’s fraud case fizzled.
When the news of the sanctioned hit (signed off on by “Joey Doves” Aiuppa) reached Outfit consigliere Tony Accardo, he was infuriated that such a brazen order had been given in the first place.
FBI Agent Tracy Balinao, assigned to the reopened investigation, was a year older than Joe Seifert, who as a four-year-old saw his dead father “lying in the grass” in a pool of blood. Almost thirty years later, in 2003 when the case was reopened, Tracy interviewed Emma and Joe in an effort to piece together the details of the murder.
Lombardo was first tied to Seifert’s murder by a government informant and career criminal, Alva Johnson Rodgers, the man who had heard Lombardo’s boast at the driving range. Uncle Nick later contributed information as he was being debriefed by Mike Maseth. Since there was no conclusive DNA evidence, nor a definitive eyewitness to identify the masked shooters, it was now up to the FBI OC squad to build a seamless web of evidence that would bring an indictment and a conviction thirty years later.
Tracy Balinao had been with OC1 since 1996, the same year Mike Hartnett joined the squad. Between the 1997 investigative launch and the 2005 indictments, Balinao (in addition to taking three maternity leaves) began working with another tough-minded agent, Chris Williams. As the case approached the indictment stage, Williams exited the squad, leaving Balinao in charge of linking Lombardo to the case.
Balinao was born in Chicago and lived near Wrigley Field before her family moved out to the southwestern suburbs in Oak Forest. Graduating from the University of Illinois in Chicago in 1991, she was recruited by the Bureau and joined the FBI for support and clerical work. After three years of organized crime research, Balinao applied to become an agent around the time of the first Iraq Gulf War. After graduating from Quantico she was transferred back to Chicago, where she worked on the bank robbery detail for about a year and a half before being reassigned to the Organized Crime squad.
Balinao found that police and FBI reports from 1974 about the Seifert murder contained little contact information on the witnesses that was still useful. Women had married and changed their surnames. Other people were deceased. Officers and agents had retired, and witnesses had moved on without leaving Social Security numbers to help trace their current whereabouts.
Nevertheless, many key witnesses were found and came forward. In spite of fear of Outfit reprisal, most agreed to cooperate. A salesman at the CB Center of America reiterated his sworn statement that Lombardo and Schweihs had dropped in to purchase the police scanners. Another woman reaffirmed that she had seen Fecarotta staking out the premises the week before.
A woman who was hit by Tony Spilotro in his Dodge getaway car on her way to work “reidentified” his picture decades later. At the time, she had taken down Spilotro’s license number and picked him out of a lineup, not knowing the person she was pointing out was the infamous hit man.
The rookie policeman who chased the getaway car had become the police chief of Elmhurst, Illinois. One retired FBI agent on the original case flew in from out of state (at his own expense) to supply additional background information. Many other retired policemen and FBI agents cooperated with Balinao in the hope that she could accomplish what so many others couldn’t: nail Lombardo.
Perhaps the most interesting witness who revisited the Seifert case was Marvin Lemke. Lemke happened to be doing asphalt work at the Key Pontiac dealership the day of the shooting when he noticed the suspects gathered together. Lemke knew something was going down, because he had committed robberies in the past and had done time. Lemke was the perfect witness, but back in 1974 the investigators thought he was not credible because of his criminal record. But he knew exactly what was going on when he saw all the shooters consolidate into one car.
The dominant piece of evidence that linked Lombardo to Seifert’s death was the fingerprint lifted off the application for title of the brown Ford LTD. The original title application, notarized by a secretary in Irwin “Red” Weiner’s office and later sent off to the Illinois Secretary of State’s office, was later tracked down in Washington, D.C., as part of an organized crime national archives file. The car registration had already been dusted for fingerprints by FBI agent Roy McDaniel and revealed Joe the Clown’s full print, proving he had access to the car.
Some of the thirty-year-old case files were missing. But then another agent who was looking at the Michael Cagnoni file called the Two Mikes. “You guys gotta see this,” he said. It was a big file on Seifert that they didn’t think the Bureau had. That’s when they retraced the print that had already been identified as Lombardo’s.
Joey later insisted that he must have touched the registration when it was sitting on the secretary’s desk at Irv’s office, since he was frequently there.
Resurrecting decades-old cases like the Seifert and Ortiz-Morawski murders took tremendous personal tolls on the victims’ families. During the Family Secrets investigation, agents like Balinao trod on highly emotional and sensitive family ground. For the Seifert case, the burden was on Tracy and the squad to convince witnesses like Emma and Joe that this time the authorities were building an ironclad case, and had the wherewithal to see it through. It was important that witnesses put their fear aside and testify at the trial. When Tracy would update Joe Seifert with new and pertinent developments regarding the case, he would often ask Balinao to contact his mother herself. This was in an effort to engage her. At first Emma didn’t want the FBI anywhere near her; she thought they were bringing up the bad stuff again after she had gotten over it. She was very angry that nothing had been accomplished back then, and now the FBI was telling her she would be safe, after Daniel had cooperated and ended up dead.
The corrosion of organized crime had devastated yet another family. In the decades that passed, Emma Seifert had remarried and moved on with her life, making new friends who may not have known about her tragic past. Meanwhile, Emma’s sons Joe and Nick were both deeply traumatized by their father’s death. Each, independently of the other, had considered seeking revenge on the man they knew as children as “Uncle Joe.”
Agent Chris Mackey encountered a similar situation during the Ortiz-Morawski investigation. When Richard Ortiz’s son first heard that his dad had been shot and killed on July 23, 1983, he ran down to the Cicero murder scene the very next day. Later, there was conjecture that the Cicero police were involved. It was hard for Mackey to imagine a young kid having to grow up in Cicero thinking the police might have killed his father, which wasn’t true.
When the Cicero Police Department stepped up a fresh inquiry during the Family Secrets investigation, Maseth and Mackey confidentially approached the Cicero police and urged them to back off. The cops were told in so many words that the FBI had a handle on the killers.
During the reopened Vaci investigations, Agent Luigi Mondini spent hours at a restaurant with Emil Vaci’s daughters, just listening to them talk about how horrible their life was after their father died.
“What happened to my father? Why was he killed?” they asked.
Suddenly their dad didn’t come home. The next day he was found in a ditch, rolled up in a tarp. The Phoenix Police Department investigated for a bit, but nothing came of it. Nobody seemed to care. Now, years later, my uncle Nick would step forward and reveal what really happened.
By the time the Family Secrets defendants went to trial on a sultry Tuesday morning, June 19, 2007, the manner in which FBI
agents handled Outfit mobsters had changed dramatically. During the 1960s and 1970s, an FBI agent might have taken a more macho approach. Today, the FBI’s strategy is more psychological and less confrontational. With a star witness like my uncle, who had an adversarial relationship with federal agents nearly his whole life, a confrontational approach might not work. There were certain agents he wouldn’t speak to. (Some he won’t speak to even today.) Cooperation isn’t something that is cajoled out of a defendant. Straight talk and earnest negotiating are what brought witnesses like my uncle and me to the table to cooperate. That, and the damaging DNA evidence.
After indictments were served in 2005, the ball was in the court of the three-man prosecution team working closely with the FBI Chicago Organized Crime squad. Because of the amount of local and even national interest in the case, the trial was to be held in downtown Chicago, at the United States district courthouse at 219 South Dearborn, in the large ceremonial courtroom. The court battle was to be presided over by United States District Court judge James Block Zagel.
Zagel, a Chicago native, Harvard Law graduate, and Reagan appointee, had been on the bench since 1987 after serving as the Director of the State Police. Zagel had authored a crime thriller called Money to Burn, published by Putnam in 2002. Set in Chicago, the book mixes characters with judicial experience (Judge Paul E. Devine is the story’s narrator) with the financial intrigue of the Federal Reserve Bank. The Wall Street Journal extolled Money to Burn as “a funhouse-mirror morality tale.” Later, in April 2009, after the Family Secrets trial, Zagel was selected to preside over another high-profile case: the corruption trial of the disgraced former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich.
By the time the Family Secrets trial began, the number of defendants had shrunk to five: Frank Calabrese, Sr., James Marcello, Joseph Lombardo, Paul Schiro, and Anthony Doyle. Dropping off along the way by pleading out were Michael Marcello, Nicholas Ferriola, Thomas Johnson, Joseph Venezia, and Dennis Johnson. Frank “Gumba” Saladino had died, as had Mike Ricci. Frank Schweihs, after being diagnosed with cancer, was to be tried separately. Nick, of course, had switched sides. While he had an agreement with the government that he wouldn’t have to face the death penalty, he was still on the hook for the crimes he had committed, and his fate would be decided by Zagel at the sentencing phase.
Operation Family Secrets: How a Mobster's Son and the FBI Brought Down Chicago's Murderous Crime Family Page 24