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

by Frank Calabrese

  The three-man prosecution team came out of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois, headed by Patrick Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald had served as the federal prosecutor in charge of the Valerie Plame CIA leak, which led to the prosecution of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Under Fitzgerald’s authority, the Family Secrets prosecution team consisted of three primary chairs: Assistant U.S. Attorneys Mitch Mars, John Scully, and T. Markus Funk. Funk was the last to be added to the team.

  Mitch Mars, the lead prosecutor, was a press-shy, low-key prosecutorial genius. He had a youthful bespectacled look and an easygoing style. His office and desk were a legendary mess, with mounds of paperwork stacked everywhere. If an agent had to leave a document in his office, he or she would often tape papers and memos to his chair. As the Chief of the Organized Crime Strike Force, Mars was respected and feared by street soldiers and the Outfit upper echelon.

  John Scully, the father figure of the group, had expertise as a mob prosecutor dating back to 1982, when he was with the Department of Justice. In 1990 a merger within the U.S. Attorney’s Office resulted in the formation of the local Organized Crime Strike Force units.

  In the early 1960s, starting with Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, the federal government pushed the idea of having dedicated people—prosecutors, agents, and representatives of different agencies—to work on the mob in specific cities that had been overrun by organized crime, places like Boston, New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, and Providence.

  Scully worked as a federal prosecutor on the case against corrupt cop and former Chicago Police Chief of Detectives William Hanhardt. Our street crew viewed Scully as a dangerous lifelong prosecutor. In our eyes, there were two kinds of prosecutors. One was looking to jump-start his or her career and move on to the private sector. The other was a career prosecutor working for the G. Mars and Scully were career G-men, and according to my father, you never wanted to go up against a career prosecutor.

  Prior to signing on to the Operation Family Secrets team, T. Markus Funk had been with the U.S. Attorney’s Office since 2000. Before becoming a federal prosecutor, Funk worked as a law professor teaching criminal law at Oxford University in England and later at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. On loan to the State Department, he spent 2004 through 2006 in Kosovo as the Section Chief for the Department of Justice. In Kosovo, Funk helped the war-torn Muslim majority establish the rule of law and revamp their judicial and prosecutorial systems. In fact, even today Funk’s book on Kosovo trial practice remains their most-cited legal source.

  When Funk was contacted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago about a bombshell mob case called Family Secrets, he was immediately intrigued. Though he hadn’t worked in the organized crime section, he had gained considerable experience in Kosovo fighting human trafficking and Eastern European organized crime syndicates. When the U.S. Attorney’s Office asked if he would be interested in working Family Secrets, Funk, still living on a fortified U.S. base, called his colleagues back in Chicago and asked around about the Family Secrets case. Then he accepted the offer.

  The biggest challenge the three prosecutors faced was to keep a complicated case like Family Secrets, spanning nearly four decades, simple. That meant knowing which elements to include and which to leave out. With a one-week burglary or bank robbery trial, a prosecutor could get away with including a few extra facts. But with a long, drawn-out trial like Family Secrets, the jurors could get frustrated if they didn’t understand the relevance of certain testimony or were confused by what it meant and how it fit.

  Mitch Mars’s role as lead prosecutor became crucial. It was important that he put the case together in a streamlined fashion when the time came for me to testify on the stand.

  When Family Secrets hit the trial stage there wasn’t the traditional sense of FBI agents “handing things off” to the Assistant U.S. Attorneys. Very few decisions about witnesses or which tapes to play were made without agent input. The FBI and the prosecutors remained a close-knit team throughout the trial, often working eighteen- or even twenty-hour days. Because the schedule was grueling, Maseth often slept in one of Mitch Mars’s war room offices, on an inflated air mattress he borrowed from John Scully. Mike Maseth and the team of agents worked with Mars, Scully, and Funk to carefully coordinate the witnesses. Issues and questions arose daily. When would a certain witness be needed? How should they schedule the flights of witnesses? How should they arrange the seating, because one person might be a victim, another, a perpetrator? How could they monitor and keep certain witnesses apart and unaware of each other’s role?

  The Operation Family Secrets strategy was to cluster five defendants into one solid case, creating a sample spectrum of mob authority. With Frank the German separated, Operation Family Secrets still had a wide-enough range of defendants, a cross section of men from different crews working toward a common end—to advance the interests of the Outfit. Marcello and Lombardo were the boss figures and capos; my father was the dreaded hit man and juice loan crew chief; Schiro and Doyle were loyal soldiers who did the Outfit’s bidding. The Assistant U.S. Attorneys and the FBI wanted to make certain they could satisfy the criteria for the RICO charges to a tee. It was the nation’s most expansive mob-murder racketeering indictment, and Funk was charged with, among other things, helping establish the homicides. The objective was to collect the homicides, and once it was proven that a defendant had been involved in or had conspired to commit murder, the maximum sentence that defendant faced increased from twenty years to life. The law also states that with any of the co-conspirators, if they all worked together, the act of one represented the acts of all.

  I had no communication or contact with the prosecution team during the trial. I spent my days on call in a room downstairs from the courtroom, reliving key moments with my father and mentally preparing myself to go on the stand. I tried to imagine how my father and his defense team might challenge my testimony and integrity in court.

  With a case spanning nearly forty years, the question of the statute of limitations was bound to come up. While it’s commonly known that the statute of limitations doesn’t pertain to murder cases, it was ruled that the Family Secrets prosecution team was allowed a cushion of time regarding the nonmurder aspects of the case.

  On the defense team, noted criminal attorney Rick Halprin represented Lombardo. Courtroom tacticians Marc Martin and Thomas Breen repped Jimmy Marcello. Paul “the Indian” Schiro’s lawyer was the low-key Paul Wagner. Anthony “Twan” Doyle was represented by Ralph Meczyk. My father chose flashy Joseph “the Shark” Lopez. Lopez is a state-court master at dealing with the press and notorious for his shocking pink socks, shirts, and ties.

  Defending my father was never an easy task. In my opinion, the problem is that my father doesn’t trust lawyers, and he doesn’t believe in telling them the whole story, which puts them at a disadvantage out of the gate. He doesn’t like to pay lawyers, either.

  There were varying opinions as to whether it was advantageous that Frank Schweihs be tried separately. As anxious as the FBI and Assistant U.S. Attorneys were to nail the German, there was concern that his presence might extend the trial by weeks or even months if he was included in the first round. Schweihs was a psychopath and unlikely to agree to stipulations made among the attorneys designed to speed up the trial process. As the trial date approached it became evident that Schweihs would be severed from the trial because he was too ill with cancer.

  I had never met the German, although I knew his daughter Nora. We had mutual friends in Cicero, and she had married and later divorced Michael Talarico. The German was a time bomb who could go off at any moment. Any one of his outbursts could trigger a mistrial. In a criminal career that spanned fifty years, Schweihs had had hundreds of encounters with law enforcement personnel. Prior to sentencing in front of U.S. District Court Judge Ann B. Williams, Schweihs was described by the federal prosecutor
as “one of the most violent people to come before this court.”

  Jury selection for the trial took almost three days, a short period of time considering the complex nature of the case. Prior to the three-month trial, the prosecution team won a ruling to cloak the names of the jurors, which was met with a strenuous objection by the defense. Family Secrets would be tried in front of an anonymous jury.

  In preparation for battle, the prosecution team set up three separate war rooms—the smallest for storage, the largest as a strategy room, and the third serving as a general office. On the wall of the large conference room was a calendar and a dry-erase board converted into a three-month calendar constructed with masking tape and marking pens. The prosecution team gradually built a timetable, filling in dates with witness appearances color-coded in yellow, blue, and pink according to which witness was assigned to which prosecutor or agent. Mitch Mars was especially adept at sequencing the prosecution’s witness appearances. John Scully, who had history with the most people, was assigned the longest list of witnesses. There would be approximately 130 witnesses, including those for the defense.

  Defending the five was going to be a difficult proposition. It’s not certain how much of a case a criminal attorney as talented as Rick Halprin had to work with representing the former fugitive Joey Lombardo. The juggernaut the defense team would have the most trouble sinking would be my prison yard tapes. The tapes, coupled with my commentary, represented evidence that would be extremely difficult to refute. How I would fare as a witness would hinge on how effectively I could break my father’s gangster code for the jury. Following me on the stand would be my uncle, another star witness with a steel-trap memory and direct testimony as both executioner and participant. It felt strange that after nearly seven years apart, Uncle Nick and I would finally face my father again, though not as blood compatriots but as witnesses for the prosecution in court.

  Since all the Family Secrets defendants except for Anthony “Twan” Doyle were in custody, the accused arrived at the federal courthouse accompanied by U.S. marshals via transport bus from the MCC. Before the judge arrived and the jury was ushered in, there was some quiet conversation, but not much, mostly a solemn quiet. Joey Lombardo and Jimmy Marcello talked to each other. Paul Schiro sat silent. Twan Doyle entered the building flashing, to the delight of the assembled press, his retired badge and police photo ID to security guards. Once inside the courtroom, he acknowledged my father, something the jury did not see—a retired decorated police officer friendly with an Outfit crew chief. The two had a long history as friends and now were co-conspirators.

  The government launched its case with Mitch Mars, the seemingly disorganized genius; John Scully, the scholarly patriarch; and T. Markus Funk, the youngest of the trio, and often the feistiest and most aggressive. To the concern of his colleagues, throughout the trial, Mars nursed a nasty cough. The agents kept the war room stocked with cough drops, aspirin, and boxes of Kleenex. Funk would often slip him one of his Ricolas. Mitch would usually dissolve a Life Saver or a cough drop in a glass of water, since he didn’t want the jurors—who weren’t permitted to eat while in the jury box—to see him sitting at the counsel table eating candy or breath mints.

  Mars’s golden rule was to never piss off the judge, so it was important for anyone associated with the government’s case to go out of his or her way to make sure during the discovery process that each defense attorney had been given the necessary copies of scanned government documents.

  Every morning my father would put on his smiling face—“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Good morning, your honor, Judge Zagel”—a gesture many saw as disingenuous. His routine attempts to engage in small talk with the prosecution team, seated only three feet away, were rebuffed.

  While many of the victims’ family members took seats in the gallery, very few members of the defendants’ families turned up at the courthouse. Joe Lombardo’s son, Joey junior, showed up, but my stepmother, Diane, made herself scarce—perhaps in part because the government characterized her as an unindicted co-conspirator. The prosecution argued to Judge Zagel that my father’s conversations with Diane were not subject to husband-wife privilege, because, they charged, she had engaged in criminal conduct and spoken in coded language regarding “recipes” (illegal collections from gambling or juice loans) with my father while he was in prison.

  My uncle and I would be permitted to attend the trial only as participants during our testimony on the stand. Outside of a few friends from the street—such as Shorty LaMantia’s son Rocky—there was little support for my father. Virtually no one from my family, including aunts, uncles, and my mother, attended the trial.

  Kurt was there primarily to witness our father’s behavior. Well before the trial, upon hearing about my cooperation with the FBI, my mother, Kurt, and my youngest brother, Nicky, visited my father at FCI Milan. They explained to him that in the interest of the family they would not take sides. My dad agreed. Still, as the group was leaving, my father took Kurt aside and assured him that he could protect him from the wrath of the Outfit brought on by my uncle and me. In return, he asked Kurt to refute our testimony on the witness stand.

  “I don’t want to get involved,” Kurt reiterated.

  On the first day of jury selection Kurt called to tell me that a plastic bag containing a digital clock and what appeared to be three sticks of dynamite had been placed on his back door. He wasn’t sure what to do about it. A few days prior, he had noticed a prowler dressed in black skulking around the backyard of his house. After he turned on the outdoor lights, the man fled through a hole in the back fence.

  Then a spate of threatening notes turned up at Kurt’s home. Seeing the acts as desperate, Kurt stood firm. When he discovered the explosive in his yard, he asked me to quietly send the FBI over to determine whether or not the bomb was authentic. (It wasn’t.) Once news of the bomb threat hit the media, Kurt was inundated with reporters and cameras at his front door. The FBI offered Kurt and his family witness protection, but citing the media as a bigger problem, he refused and took his family to stay with his in-laws at their family complex in Chinatown.

  The Family Secrets jury would be in for a history lesson about the Outfit. James Wagner of the Chicago Crime Commission set the stage by giving the jury a history of the Outfit dating back to Al Capone. Another key witness slated to testify was porn shop owner turned FBI informant William “Red” Wemette, who was being extorted by Joey Lombardo and Frank the German. Scheduled to appear were former burglar Bobby “the Beak” Siegel, Ernie “the Oven” Severino, Sal Romano, and bookmaker Michael Talarico. Another witness, Joel Glickman, was jailed early in the proceedings after refusing to testify. He was to be questioned about a juice loan that my father made back in the late sixties to an insurance executive Glickman worked for. After spending the weekend at the MCC courtesy of Judge Zagel and Markus Funk, Glickman was granted immunity and took the stand. Among the victims and their family members who would testify were Emma Seifert; Joseph Seifert; Dr. Pat Spilotro; and Michael Spilotro’s widow, Ann, and her daughter, Michelle.

  Once the trial was under way, John Scully presented the prosecution’s opening statement, which homed right in on my father, who was accused of carrying out most of the murders. Scully was eager to smudge the mob’s romantic appeal by citing the corrosive effects of organized crime on the victims and their families. “This is not The Sopranos. This is not The Godfather. This case is about real people, real victims.”

  In building its case, the prosecution would systematically go through each and every murder, beginning with Danny Seifert in 1974 and Michael Albergo in 1970. The remaining sixteen murders would be presented chronologically. Around the trial’s midpoint, I would appear as the first star witness.

  A few days before I was scheduled to testify, I was so emotionally charged that I could barely sleep. I was constantly on the phone with Lisa, my mother, and my brothers for support. It felt good knowing my family supported me and
had my back. When I first agreed to cooperate, one of the conditions I asked of the FBI was to leave my family and my legitimate friends alone. To this day, the FBI has kept its word and has never once talked to my family or bothered any of my hardworking friends.

  After going over my testimony with the prosecution team, I entered the courtroom prepared. The first time I met John Scully, he did a great job of ripping into me during testimony preparation. I told Mr. Scully that I’d go to jail and sit for ten years if it meant taking my father off the streets and keeping him locked up. Not once did I ask for immunity or lie to protect myself. On the contrary, I did my time. I needed Markus Funk, Mitch Mars, and John Scully to pretend they were the best defense team in America, taking turns tearing into me, and they did a great job, much better, actually, than the actual defense attorneys.

  The day before I was to testify, I asked Mr. Mars and Mr. Scully if I could go inside and get familiar with the surroundings once everyone had left the courtroom. Escorted by a few FBI agents and U.S. marshals, I spent a few minutes in the courtroom taking it in. I asked where my father would be sitting. After sitting silently on the witness stand for a few moments, I had the strangest feeling. Those moments prepared me for the battle I was about to wage against my father.