I had no idea what kind of circus he and his lawyers would put on. On the other hand, had I gone and watched him come out as an old man who was remorseful, that would have bothered me. You’re looking at two people inside one body. One is this vicious man who could take your life in a second. Then there’s the other man, a loving father that I’d want to care for.
In the weeks that followed, Judge Zagel finished sentencing the remaining Family Secrets defendants. Joey “the Clown” Lombardo was sentenced after Judge Zagel remarked, “In the end, we are judged by our actions, not by our wit or our smiles. In cases like this, we are judged by the worst things we have done, and the worst things you have done are terrible.”
The Clown would be sentenced to life in prison, primarily for the murder of his once-close friend, Daniel Seifert. Lombardo had this to say to Seifert’s wife and two sons: “First, I want to say to Emma Seifert, Joe Seifert, and Nicky Seifert, I was sorry for the loss then, I’m sorry for the loss now. I want the court and the Seifert family to know I did not kill Danny Seifert and had nothing to do with it, before, during or after.… Where is the evidence, Funk? Where is the evidence?”
Leaving the courthouse three decades after her husband’s murder, Emma Seifert admitted, “I’ll never feel safe.”
As for James “Jimmy Light” Marcello, in a far less dramatic atmosphere than the sentencing of my father or Lombardo, Judge Zagel handed down a sentence of life in prison. Little Jimmy was found responsible for the murders of Tony and Michael Spilotro. In a strange twist of irony that had become the trademark of Operation Family Secrets, during the time leading up to the trial, investigators discovered that Marcello and his brother had received information concerning the fact of, and nature of, my uncle’s cooperation with the Feds. They had secretly obtained this information from none other than decorated Deputy U.S. Marshal John Ambrose, who was on two of Nick’s top-secret witness security details. Following Ambrose’s 2009 trial, which was handled by prosecutor Funk, Judge John F. Grady sentenced Ambrose to hard time in a Texas federal penitentiary for endangering my uncle’s life and for besmirching his badge and the trust of his colleagues.
When it came time for James Marcello’s own sentencing, he showed no emotion, barely nodding his head. He was clad in a sport coat and slacks instead of prison orange.
“I regret you didn’t live a better life,” Zagel said to Marcello, “but you will have to pay for your crimes.”
The final Family Secrets tally of sentences went like this:
Frank Calabrese, Sr.: Multiple life sentences, plus 300 months
Joey “the Clown” Lombardo: Life
James “Little Jimmy” Marcello: Multiple life sentences
Paul “the Indian” Schiro: 20 years
Anthony “Twan” Doyle: 12 years
Michael “Mickey” Marcello: 8.5 years
Nick Ferriola: 3 years
Joseph “Family Man” Venezia: 40 months
Thomas Johnson: 30 months
Dennis Johnson: 6 months
That left my uncle, Nick Calabrese. What would be his fate? How would the judge take into account his participation in fourteen murders while factoring in his cooperation and testimony in putting away the primary players and leaders of the Chicago Outfit?
In anticipation of my uncle’s sentencing, once again I put pen to paper.
In 1995, before the Calabrese clan was herded off to prison, Uncle Nick took it upon himself to see Johnny Apes, the Outfit underboss to whom he reported. Nick complained to Johnny that his brother had involved his sons in his legal problems and wasn’t doing anything to keep us from going to jail.
“What do you want me to do?” Johnny Apes asked Nick.
“I’m just telling you. You’re the boss.”
Johnny Apes handed my uncle a pistol. “This is the best I can do.”
A few months later, I sat with Uncle Nick. By then, we were both estranged from my dad.
I said, “I don’t know what to do. I’m on the run from my father and I know you’re not talking to him, either.”
Uncle Nick offered me the pistol that Johnny Apes gave him.
Prior to his death in 1999, Angelo LaPietra made a comment to his granddaughter Angela that my father should never have brought Kurt and me into his business, and that it was a cardinal sin that should have been dealt with by the bosses.
In January 2001, six years before the Family Secrets trial, I left Chicago and moved to a rural Cary, Illinois, town house and reunited with Lisa and my two children. A year later, we decided to leave the Midwest. The family was getting along well. During that time, I gradually shared bits of information with Lisa about my ongoing cooperation with the FBI OC squad and Agent Mike Maseth. Once the indictments fell, a major Mafia trial was now on the horizon. After Lisa and I received threatening calls that we suspected came from one of my father’s surrogates, I realized it would be best if my family left Illinois to start a new life elsewhere.
Wanting to go someplace warm, at first I looked into relocating to Florida, but I didn’t find anything affordable. A trip west to Nevada didn’t pan out either. After a pit stop in Arizona, I lined up an appointment with a local real-estate agent. I phoned Lisa with the news. I had put in a lowball bid on a modest single-family home in a cul-de-sac. Arizona wasn’t only a haven for retired golfers and ex-gangsters. The schools were good, and there were plenty of children in the neighborhood. Arizona’s dry climate was less likely to aggravate my MS symptoms than were the humidity and cold of Chicago.
At the beginning of June 2002, I loaded up my family for the long drive to the Southwest. The government provided me with a modest stipend to relocate. The sum, dispensed monthly, was markedly less than what a company in the private sector might pay an employee to move cross-country. We were Arizona-bound.
The Witness Security Program was never an option. Had my family and I gone into WITSEC, I would have become a man with no history or past, which I felt would permanently limit me to low-paying jobs. Being in WITSEC would have meant giving up contact with family and friends, something I wasn’t willing to do. I also felt it would do grave harm to my children if they had to conceal their real identities.
Besides, I’m not one to run and hide. It’s not how my dad raised me.
Arriving in Arizona, I opened up a West Coast office of a skin care company of which I had part ownership. After a couple of years of successfully building the business, I was offered a buyout and decided it was time to do what I loved the most: go into the restaurant business and make pizzas.
Lisa and I opened a boutique pizza parlor in an unassuming strip mall. The bistro served quality Chicago thin-crust pizza along with some of the same Italian entrées I whipped up during my days working at Armand’s in Elmwood Park. Lisa became the salad queen of the eatery, and as we built the business, I worked seven days a week to make it a success. Settling into new surroundings, I sat with Lisa and the kids to explain what I had been through during the past decade. Back with my family, I would put the lessons of my relationship with my father to work on my own children. I vowed that together we would have a loving, team-driven family unit.
By the summer of 2007, when CNN began broadcasting coverage of the Family Secrets trial, my dad’s face filled the television screen. Friends from Chicago and neighbors who knew the Calabrese name began asking questions. Then some of the kids’ friends at school discovered on the Internet the murderous ways of “Grandpa Poppi.” Amazingly, the kids and I learned how nonjudgmental Arizona residents could be. (“A few of the kids at school thought we were cool,” my daughter, Kelly Calabrese, recalled.) The Family Secrets trial added another Arizona angle when Anthony Doyle, who had retired and settled in the small desert town of Wickenburg, Arizona, was returned to Chicago to stand trial.
While the children adapted to their new home, Lisa was concerned about their safety. During the trial, journalists and news vans flocked to our pizza joint, much to the displeasure of the strip’s landlord. Whe
n the hair salon next door alerted me that reporters were asking questions about their new neighbor’s past, something had to give.
Lisa became frightened by unsavory-looking characters that showed up in the mall. With increased trial publicity, she worried that if I continued to make myself accessible around the restaurant and someone from the Outfit tried to kill me, it could jeopardize the safety of our children, our employees, and our patrons.
Luigi Mondini, my handling agent, and Assistant U.S. Attorney John Scully flew into Arizona to reassure Lisa. I was undaunted and ready to complete my mission. About that time, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI worked with me on my pending testimony. Before I was flown back to Chicago, for security purposes, I was holed up in a secret location in preparation for my appearance on the stand.
Responding to Lisa’s fears, Luigi secured a place in a gated compound residence in Tucson for me to prep the next five weeks. Lisa and I decided to close the restaurant for the summer, with hopes of reopening in the fall after the trial. We decided that if word circulated that I was temporarily in protective custody, the rest of the family would be safe. Although there was no evidence that I or the family had been stalked by members of the Outfit, there was speculation that my father had hired private detectives to locate me. An alarming moment occurred when a man in a Jeep with Illinois license plates sped up to the front of our house and screeched his tires loudly. It turned out to be a friend of a neighbor, who, ironically, was an ex–New York City cop.
After the Operation Family Secrets convictions and sentencing, life for my family in Arizona returned to a semblance of normality. Although my father currently serves his prison sentence in solitary confinement apart from the general population at the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners (MCFP) in Springfield, Missouri, his presence still lingers miles away in the Southwest.
Lisa calls it the Umbrella Effect. The fear of him doesn’t stop simply because he’s locked up. To this day, Lisa has nightmares about the man. His aura penetrates prison walls. A guy like Frank Calabrese, Sr., doesn’t just affect one person. He looms over us like a large umbrella—from me to my wife and her immediate family, to my kids, and to the friends of my children. Not once did my father seem to realize how his actions affected those around him.
As for my personal safety, I’m pragmatic. If people can kill presidents, they can kill me. Nobody is invincible and completely safe in today’s world.
After the publicity surrounding the trial, the verdicts, and the subsequent sentencing, Lisa and I reluctantly closed down our pizza parlor. When I joined a new company I met with my manager to explain my past.
I gave my boss the heads-up. We talked man-to-man. Some of the people who now worked with me were people I had known at the restaurant, so I figured it was only a matter of time before the word got out. Besides, I didn’t want to blindside my boss. I told him about my past and that I would be glad to answer any questions. If there was a problem, I would rather walk away than make him fire me.
He told me it was admirable that I had taken a bad situation and turned it into a positive. Not having walked in my shoes, after learning my story, he felt fortunate that he had grown up in a hardworking family with a father who was kind to him. He hoped that I would stick around.
On December 1, 2008, ten years after my fateful letter to Special Agent Tom Bourgeois, I sent another letter, this time to Judge Zagel concerning the fate of Uncle Nick, who was to be sentenced on March 26, 2009, for his role in Operation Family Secrets.
The letter read in part:
I want the court to know that while my uncle did some terrible things, he is a good man. By testifying, he was trying to do the right thing. While it isn’t my intention to justify anything he has done, I know in my heart that he is ready to spend the rest of his life as a productive member of society.
It was extremely difficult to testify against my uncle and take him away from his family. He was there for everybody; putting their needs first.… I believe in my heart that if my uncle received a second chance, he would be a model citizen and family man. I would put my freedom on the line to guarantee it.
Uncle Nick cooperated in January 2002, and after completing his racketeering sentence in November 2002, he remained in custody, working with Mike Maseth and the other FBI agents. As he testified, “I let fear control my life, and beneath that fear was a coward who didn’t walk away from that life.”
My uncle was sentenced to twelve years and four months for his part in the fourteen Family Secrets murders he committed with my father. His sentence came out to less than one year per killing.
In explaining the logic behind his sentencing, Judge Zagel stated that, unlike defendants Joe Lombardo and my father, Nick showed remorse and shame for his crimes. Zagel noted that Nick had committed fourteen grisly murders and that the sentence was bound to resonate negatively with the general public and more so with the victims’ family members and survivors.
Charlene Moravecek looked over at my uncle and pronounced, “He is the devil.” She left the sentencing in tears and fainted outside the courtroom.
Tony Ortiz was crushed that Zagel didn’t give Nick more time. He wasn’t buying my uncle’s professions of remorse. “He shot my dad in the head with a shotgun nine times,” Ortiz later told the press. “Did he once apologize to any of the families? No, he did not.”
But Zagel, ordinarily viewed as a law-and-order judge, explained that without revealing firsthand testimony from criminals like my uncle, how could families in the future gain closure by seeing their loved ones’ killers brought to justice? Zagel reminded the court that Nick, once released, would forever be looking over his shoulder, and he reminded Nick that the Outfit “will not forgive or relent in their pursuit of you.”
While a good number of people seethed that Zagel “went easy” on Uncle Nick, I and members of my family had hoped that his time served between 2002 and 2009 would be sufficient to free him. Instead, with a few months shaved off for good behavior, he could be a free man in 2013.
My uncle entered an “open-end” arrangement, which placed his destiny in the hands of Judge Zagel. Part of that agreement was that the states could not prosecute him for any of the murder charges. Otherwise, there was no deal. Zagel could have sentenced him to life, or Nick could have walked away. He got twelve years, seven more years than Sammy “the Bull” Gravano got for cooperating, and the Bull admitted to being involved in killing nineteen people.
It is clear that without our testimony, Operation Family Secrets wouldn’t have developed. Yet I’m sure it was extremely difficult for Assistant U.S. Attorney Funk to plead my uncle’s case for leniency. He had to have anticipated the unpopular reaction to Uncle Nick’s sentence. Yet my uncle’s contribution to the case was essential in gaining the convictions of the Outfit’s upper echelon, and sent a message that the Outfit would no longer be tolerated.
Prosecutors don’t win popularity contests with family, friends, and neighbors by advocating shorter sentences for convicted murderers who cooperate with the Feds. I’m sure Funk struggled with the whole process of speaking on behalf of my uncle. But the public doesn’t realize that future defendants need to know that if they come forward and cooperate, there’s something in it for them if they’re truthful. A deal was a deal, and now it was the government’s turn to hold up its end of the bargain. And Funk did not renege on the deal. He told Judge Zagel that the Nicholas Calabrese with whom Funk had many interactions was impossible to square with the cold-blooded and methodical executioner Nick admitted to having once been: my uncle, in short, presented a “walking, talking, breathing paradox.”
In the final analysis, I’m happy that I came forward and named my uncle as John Fecarotta’s killer. By doing so, I ultimately saved both of our lives. It enabled Nick to atone for his sins and step away from my father and the mob. I and a lot of working-class citizens of Illinois are now free of Frank Calabrese, Sr.’s grasp and of the Outfit. The price of liberty is eternal vigila
nce. If society is to be free of organized crime and the Outfit, we can’t have enablers—politicians, the business community, corrupt cops, and ordinary citizens—who make it possible for organized crime to exist.
With the success of Operation Family Secrets in the history books, Mike Maseth was asked to make a special presentation about the case that would be available for various government functions, conventions, and FBI and law enforcement gatherings. When the FBI held one of its national conferences in 2008, Mike and his colleagues from the Chicago OC squad were invited to give a PowerPoint presentation outlining the entire investigation. To Maseth’s surprise, his hard-boiled, seen-it-all audience of law enforcement peers gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up response. When Mike told me about the positive reaction he had received from the presentations, he invited me to be a participant in future sessions. I was intrigued.
My initial reaction was that nobody would be interested in my story. What if people thought I was just a guy who beefed on his father? I wanted to get on with my life. But when Mike called me about a law enforcement conference in California, I decided to give it a try. I sat down with Mike and Luigi and went over the highlights. We put together a tight presentation. At first I was nervous telling my personal story to a roomful of strangers. But then I couldn’t believe the response and the empathy we received, especially during the question-and-answer period afterward. It was remarkable. My family and a few of my friends also urged me to tell my story. They felt it was a moving family tale and a story of courage. Yet I didn’t feel what I did was courageous. I did it only because it was the right thing to do.
Lisa said something that made a lot of sense. I needed to tell my story because there are people in similar situations, trapped inside their own family secrets. There are people out there who are afraid to stand up and speak up against abusive family situations. They feel as if they’re locked in a cage of secrecy, and there’s no way out. I believe my story shows there is a way out. What is important is that it doesn’t have to be the wrong way out.
Operation Family Secrets: How a Mobster's Son and the FBI Brought Down Chicago's Murderous Crime Family Page 29