“He did never control me—never!” he emphasized on the stand. “Many people feared him. Many people couldn’t look him in the eye when they talked to him. I never had that problem.”
Although I was not allowed to watch his testimony, my father’s primary defense was that my family was conspiring to keep him in jail to steal his money, his jewelry, and the car collection with which he was obsessed. He rambled on about the two million dollars he claimed his family members had stolen from him, even as the prosecution objected. As a result, Judge Zagel removed the jury and threatened my dad with contempt if he continued to talk about it after the prosecution objected and the objection was sustained. My father recounted another bizarre tale about my uncle Nick giving him a sloppy holiday kiss on the lips.
“The kiss he gave for Christmas was a Judas kiss,” he exclaimed. “My brother was like Alfredo in The Godfather. If he wasn’t running things and screwing things up, he wasn’t happy.”
As for his reaction to my testimony, he could only conclude that I could “make Jesus look like the devil on the cross.”
John Scully had delivered the opening statement, and Mitch Mars would handle the summary. Markus Funk was entrusted with the closing argument. As he prepared for his closing PowerPoint presentation, Mitch Mars sat in the back of the war room, reclining on a couple of chairs pushed together. He was shuddering from his unrelenting cold and hacking cough, his coat draped over his body like a blanket. Occasionally he’d shout out directions to Mike Maseth and Funk from the back of the room whenever he felt his team was spinning its wheels. Funk was having a difficult time finding his groove.
Having spent the last few years in the trial-intensive Narcotics unit, Funk was not as comfortable with the OC squad’s more “scripted” approach to closing arguments. They did a practice round, but about an hour or so into it, he felt something was not right. Maseth and Funk decided to shelve the scripted approach and go back to delivering a closing like Funk would do in a normal multidefendant conspiracy case, working informally off the PowerPoint and doing it free-form instead of closely following prepared statements.
Having had only a few hours’ sleep, Funk disappeared to collect his thoughts. Funk’s free-form delivery ran five full hours over the course of two days. During his defendant-by-defendant, murder-by-murder, count-by-count survey of the prior months’ evidence, Funk repeatedly and directly challenged my father’s claims of innocence, taking my father to task for what he had done in life and how he had tried to use his time on the witness stand to distance himself from that conduct.
My father did not appreciate the attention. While discussing one particularly gruesome homicide, Funk caught my father smirking and chuckling to himself. He wheeled around, pointed at my father, and said to the jury, “See this man laughing? There is nothing funny here. There is simply nothing to laugh about in this case!” My father’s smile vanished.
Mitch Mars continued the onslaught during his powerful rebuttal closing argument. In response to Mars’s charge that my father had “left a trail of bodies in his wake,” my dad blurted out a line that will go down in Family Secrets infamy.
“Dem are lies!”
The jury was not sequestered and was out for three days. On the fourth day, it delivered the verdict. On September 10, 2007, the five defendants were found guilty of racketeering and conspiracy, which included charges of loan-sharking, extortion, and illegal gambling. Over the objections of the defense, the jury took a weeklong break, during which time Judge Zagel revoked Twan Doyle’s bail. The jury reconvened to deliberate a breakdown of who they felt was responsible for which murders. On September 27, which marked the thirty-third anniversary of the killing of Daniel Seifert, my father, the Clown, and Little Jimmy were convicted of murder.
My father was found “responsible” for the most killings: seven—those of Michael Albergo, William and Charlotte Dauber, Michael Cagnoni, Arthur Morawski and Richard Ortiz, and John Fecarotta. The jury was deadlocked on his responsibility for six of the deaths: those of Paul Haggerty, Henry Cosentino, John Mendell, Donald Renno, Vincent Moretti, and Butch Petrocelli. (At the time of sentencing, however, in determining if there were “aggravating circumstances,” Judge Zagel would agree with Funk and also hold my father and his co-defendants legally responsible for those additional murders.)
James Marcello was found responsible for the murders of Anthony and Michael Spilotro. Joseph Lombardo was responsible for the murder of Daniel Seifert. The jury was deadlocked on Paul Schiro’s responsibility for the death of Emil Vaci. (At sentencing, Judge Zagel found Schiro did in fact participate in the Vaci homicide.)
The verdicts proved to be controversial to the victims’ family members, who became very vocal about the outcome. Some had waited decades for justice and closure. Upon hearing the verdicts, Charlene Moravecek, the widow of Paul Haggerty, whose murder remained unaccounted for, cried out, “I’ve waited thirty-one and a half years for this?”
“I’m feeling pretty crappy,” admitted Bob D’Andrea, after the jury deadlocked on whether Jimmy Marcello beat his father to death. “Deadlock might as well be innocent.” Zagel later agreed with Funk that Marcello participated.
After my father was found responsible for shotgunning Richard Ortiz to death, his son, Tony Ortiz, reveled in the conviction. “Finally, it’s over. It’s closure! We’ve been waiting for this for a very long time. He won’t be smirking any longer.”
Once all five defendants were found guilty, a seventeen-month pause preceded sentencing. My uncle received immunity and a small amount of money deposited in his prison commissary account, allowing him to buy toiletries and small food items. His fate, along with the fates of the five defendants, would be decided by Judge Zagel in February 2009, when everyone—the defendants, the legal teams, and the victims’ family members—reunited for sentencing. Two key players would be missing from this emotional event, with Funk remaining as the sole member of the trial team still in the employ of the G.
When Mitch Mars approached the witness stand to cross-examine Joe Lombardo, he leaned in and eyeballed the Clown for a few seconds. Lombardo, no stranger to lawyerly intimidation, leaned in and imitated Mars’s penetrating stare.
“Mitch was the best lawyer I’d ever seen in my life, bar none,” Mike Maseth once told me. “He was fast on his feet and he knew how to deal with witnesses and other lawyers. He knew how to deal with the judge. Nobody could get anything past him.”
While Lombardo took the stand in his defense and denied his role as an Outfit gangster, Mars designated him as a capo of the Grand Avenue crew. He was not, Mars asserted, financier Allen Dorfman’s errand boy, and he did more than conduct illegal dice games. The Clown, also known as Lumpy, embezzled and brokered multimillion-dollar deals with Dorfman. Mars wondered aloud how an ex–shoeshine boy lackey would score $2 million on a Dorfman-orchestrated transaction that cost Lombardo out of pocket $43,000.
Mars hammered away at Lombardo’s involvement in the Seifert slaying, the prosecution’s most challenging aspect of Operation Family Secrets. During closing arguments he presented seventeen reasons why Lombardo was guilty of murder. (When discussing the Spilotro case, Mitch gave the jury 240,000 reasons why Marcello was guilty of Tony and Michael’s slayings—that would be the $240,000 that Marcello paid Uncle Nick to keep his mouth shut. Mars argued that someone would not pay that kind of money unless he had good reason to—like covering up a murder.)
Mars cross-examined Joey Lombardo and carved him up, according to court observers. It’s not that he screamed or yelled—Mitch was only five foot seven and he was not flashy. Markus Funk, despite his years spent in the hallowed halls of academia, was more your prototypical prosecutor, an imposing six-foot-four blond opponent.
Yet every one of those mobsters knew Mitch because he had been the Chief of the Organized Crime Section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the past fifteen years and had tried the most significant organized crime cases in the country. Honest to a fault and a man o
f unimpeachable integrity, Mitch usually credited his trial partners, FBI agents, and those who made contributions to the prosecution of a successful case.
During the trial Mitch had a persistent cough and was told by his colleagues to get to the doctor. If he had any other serious health problems during the trial, he didn’t let on to his associates. Wanting to see it through to the verdicts, Mitch didn’t visit the doctor until early October of 2007. He never returned to his beloved office.
Everybody assumed he had a cold. Right after the trial, he finally went to the doctor to get some tests. After Mike Maseth called up Mars and asked how the tests were going, Mars told Mike he couldn’t get them done because his oxygen levels were too low. “What do you mean your oxygen levels are too low?” The doctors took an X-ray and found that he had a liter and a half of fluid in his lungs. They removed the fluid and did a CAT scan, and two days later the doctors diagnosed cancer in both lungs.
After hearing the news that he had lung cancer, Mars, a non-smoker, quietly arranged for a leave of absence. Four months later, on Tuesday night, February 19, 2008, Mitch Mars died at age fifty-five.
The next morning Patrick Fitzgerald sent out a personal e-mail to his staff. “We lost a very dear friend and a treasured colleague today,” wrote Fitzgerald. He praised Mars’s long career of public service.
Mars first joined the U.S. government in 1977 as a staff lawyer for the House of Representatives, having served on the House investigation of the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., assassinations. In 1980 Mars joined the Organized Crime Strike Force in Chicago, and in 1990 his office merged with the U.S. Attorney’s Office. In 1992 Mars became the Organized Crime supervisor, a position he held until 2007, along with the title of Assistant U.S. Attorney.
Mitch Mars came from the South Side of Chicago, and like many of his Outfit adversaries, he rooted for the White Sox rather than the Chicago Cubs. In addition to convicting my father, James Marcello, and Joe Lombardo, Mars successfully prosecuted Albert “Caesar” Tocco, Ernest Rocco “Rocky” Infelise, Harry Aleman, Salvatore “Solly” DeLaurentis, cocaine dealer John Cappas, former Cicero mayor Betty Loren-Maltese, and former Cicero assessor Frank Maltese.
Mike Hartnett had done the Betty Loren-Maltese Cicero case with Mitch Mars and recalled how the trial lasted thirteen pressure-packed weeks. Hartnett agreed that Mars was the best in a courtroom. Great directs, spectacular cross-examinations. He could tear someone apart, but he had such a great personality, he didn’t come off as cocky or egotistical.
According to his colleagues, Mars became a prosecutor for just the right reason: to put criminals in jail. He didn’t use it as a stepping-stone to go into the lucrative private sector. He treated federal agents and courthouse staff with respect. If Mitch was trying the case, the Feds knew they weren’t going to lose. They didn’t care which defense attorneys were on the other side. Mars would smoke them.
Another of Mars’s contemporaries recalled Mitch’s intuitive ability to zero in on a potentially hot case. Back in 1982 one of the suspects Mars was looking at was Paul “Peanuts” Panczko, a notorious robber and burglar who spent twenty-three years in and out of prison. Panczko had been involved in staking out a place. He and his cohorts got stopped by some Chicago cops (one of them being Dennis Farina, the future actor). Peanuts had a gun with him. Since he was a convicted felon, this was illegal.
When the case was brought in—you had to get an indictment approved by the U.S. Attorney—the government initially wasn’t going to prosecute the case. But Mitch decided, “Let’s go after him for this gun. He probably knows a lot and we need to keep him off the street.”
Consequently, Peanuts Panczko cooperated and went into the Witness Protection Program, but not before he wore a wire against other mobsters, including James “Dukey” Basile. Mars’s move created a chain reaction, and after he was busted, Dukey wore a wire against Jerry Scarpelli, another mob killer involved with the Wild Bunch.
Unlike many lawyers who sit in their spacious offices and have a hard time relating to the average person, Mitch was the average person. If he went to meet somebody, he would drive his own car and run out into the rain with the hood of his jacket up. He wasn’t the almighty guy. Although he was smarter than many, it wasn’t always about doing things his way. He listened intently, and that was why he was able to prosecute our case so flawlessly.
Mars had a bottom-line way of getting to the facts. For example, during the Family Secrets trial, Uncle Nick testified about the number of bosses who were at the Bensenville house for the ambush and murder of the Spilotros. Many were skeptical that so many mob higher-ups would actually be there. Jimmy Marcello’s lawyer, Marc Martin, called Nick a liar and questioned his testimony about the killers wearing gloves. Why wouldn’t the streetwise Spilotro brothers, Martin asked, flee after seeing a bunch of mobsters waiting for them wearing gloves?
“They [the Spilotros] weren’t going to get out of the house no matter what they thought,” Mars replied. “[The mobsters] could have worn T-shirts that said, ‘We’re Here to Kill the Spilotros.’ It didn’t matter. They weren’t getting out of there.”
On February 23, 2008—almost a year before sentences were handed down—funeral services were held for Mitchell Mars in a village named, appropriately, Justice, Illinois. The road to Justice was closed as the motorcade drove west from Chicago—which would have irritated Mars for the inconvenience it might have caused the average citizen.
Beside each on-ramp to the expressway, people waved. Later, an honor guard presided over his viewing at the Damar Kaminski Funeral Home in Justice. Three thousand people showed up between 3 p.m. and 9 p.m. on a workday. People who had never met Mars waited in a line for two and a half hours to pay their respects and view the casket.
One person who came through the line said to Mitch’s mom, “I never met your son but I just wanted to come and say thank you. You raised a great son. He did great things for this community. We need more people like him.”
John Scully delivered the eulogy at a private Catholic service at St. Cletus Cathedral in LaGrange the following day. Later that week, a memorial ceremony was held at the Dirksen Federal Building. The ceremonial courtroom was filled with six hundred fellow professionals, and Mike Maseth spoke to the crowd.
Was Family Secrets Mars’s greatest case? Who knows? But I think it is fair to say that Family Secrets was the culmination of his career. He’d done a lot of mob cases, more than any other person in the history of Chicago. Make no mistake, Mitch was a thorn in the Outfit’s side.
“Criminal cases are about accountability and justice,” said Mitch Mars during the closing arguments of the trial, “not only for the defendants, but also justice for our system, justice for our society, and justice for the victims. Our system works. It is the greatest system in the world. But it only works when those who should be held accountable are held accountable.”
Five weeks after the guilty verdicts were announced, Mitch Mars sent a letter to my father’s lawyer, Joe Lopez, stating that prosecutors Mars and Funk had met with an anonymous jury member regarding an alleged threat that my dad had directed to U.S. Attorney Funk during the trial’s contentious closing arguments. According to the letter, a copy of which was sent to Judge Zagel, the juror “partly heard and partly read” my father’s lips saying to Funk, “You’re a fucking dead man.” According to the letter, during deliberations, three other jurors “confirmed the juror’s observations and heard Mr. Calabrese say the same thing.”
Lopez dismissed the threat as “nonsense,” the figment of “an overactive imagination.” But the accusation set off alarms among the co-defendants. Rick Halprin, Lombardo’s attorney, stated, “I have grave concerns about this. This is, to say the least, novel. You would assume it impacted their [the jury’s] thought process. We know from the letter that one-third of them talked about it.”
Marc Martin, representing Jimmy Marcello, claimed that from the start of the trial, Marcello had been angling for a
severance from my father, his grumbling and snickering co-defendant. “Marcello has been complaining about this since day one and this just adds more fuel to the fire,” Martin told the press, and he vowed to raise the issue during posttrial motions. He questioned whether the prosecutors broke the rules by meeting with the juror without the court’s permission.
“My client has more brains than that,” Lopez responded. “We were surrounded by FBI agents and U.S. Attorneys and spectators and nobody heard anything, and now a month later? Why wasn’t something said immediately?”
During trial testimony regarding my dad, Joey Lombardo was overheard saying, “Man, I’m tied to the bumper of the car this guy’s driving and he’s dragging me over the cliff with him.”
Judge Zagel called for an unusual closed-door hearing to “establish the details surrounding the alleged remarks.” While the defense attorneys requested a retrial once the jurors were called back and questioned, Judge Zagel declined such action, opting to call in the juror who had originally stepped forward. During the hearing, the juror was asked questions and Funk was put under oath and cross-examined by defense counsel. Judge Zagel, having heard all the evidence he needed, ruled that my father had in fact uttered the threat. Another set of facts had been resolved against my dad.
Three months later, on June 11, 2008, it was time for Frank Schweihs to face the music. Schweihs was as treacherous on the streets as my father. Potential witnesses were hoping that the German would die before his trial date so that they wouldn’t have to take the stand. Ailing from cancer and emaciated, he was confined to a wheelchair, which didn’t rob the German of any of his trademark charm. During the criminal hearing, the seventy-eight-year-old Schweihs struggled out of his wheelchair and gazed over at Funk, who was to first-chair (lead) the prosecution, and called him out. “You making eyes at me? Yeah, you … you making eyes at me?”
Operation Family Secrets: How a Mobster's Son and the FBI Brought Down Chicago's Murderous Crime Family Page 27