by Sam Giancana
Just as had happened in the mid-1990s, the Chicago mob scene saw no murders from November 2001 until August 2006. Not wanting to make any additional waves for itself while it suspected the FBI was building a juggernaut of a legal assault, The Outfit took a step back from employing its ultimate enforcement tactic. Big-time gangsters and fringe wiseguys alike were once again allowed to go about their work on the street with little worry that mistakes they made would be punished by death. At that point in time, murder was simply bad for business. Even after the wide-spanning Family Secrets indictment was handed down in April 2005, things remained the same. And then, in late summer of 2006, Outfit heavyweight Little Tony Zizzo left his west suburban condominium to attend a meeting and never came back.
Imprisoned in 1993 along with Jimmy Marcello and Tony Chiaramonte in the Carlisi crew bust, the short and stout Zizzo, who in addition to the nickname “Little Tony” also went by the aliases “Tony the Trucker,” “Tony the Hat,” and “Fat Tony,” was released in 2001 and returned to his old haunts on the West Side of Chicago. Back in business and now carrying the added reputation as a standup guy because he completed his time behind bars without flipping, Little Tony was thought to be on the rise, a certain fixture in The Outfit’s administration of the new millennium. Marcello’s release from prison in the fall of 2003 only added to this mind-set, since when running with Carlisi in the early 1990s the pair were practically inseparable. Rumors abounded, although unconfirmed, that Marcello had even tapped the then-sixty-eight-year-old Zizzo as his underboss, and the duo were preparing to take the crime family into its next generation hand in hand, much like John Di Fronzo and Joey Lombardo had done in the years past.
With Marcello back in jail in April 2005, Zizzo’s role in the syndicate hierarchy became even more important, and he was said to once again be the main conduit between Jimmy the Man and the street. Throughout this time period, he was often spotted by FBI surveillance teams meeting with Joe Andriacchi and Al Tornebene, the alleged acting consiglieri in place of Lombardo. Less than two years later, Zizzo disappeared and was presumed dead.
On the evening of August 31, 2006, Tony Zizzo left home at around 6:30 P.M. for a meeting, alleged by some in law enforcement to be with Joe Andriacchi at a Rush Street eatery. The following afternoon, when he had not returned to his condominium, his wife, Susan, worried and fearing foul play, went to the Westmont Police Station and filed a missing persons report. Soon after the report was filed, Zizzo’s Jeep Cherokee Laredo was found in the parking lot of Abruzzo’s Italian Restaurant in Melrose Park. No signs of a struggle were apparent in a search of the vehicle and the owner of the restaurant, who claims to have been familiar with Little Tony, says he did not see him on the day of his disappearance. After discovering that he had left his daily kidney medication at home, and his cell phone and I-Pass—a card that allows access to Illinois tollways—in his car, the case went cold.
Theories abound in both law enforcement and mob circles regarding why Zizzo was most likely done away with. One theory has him being ordered to be killed by The Outfit power structure as a punishment to Jimmy Marcello because the pair were so close and they blamed Jimmy the Man for the Family Secrets indictment. Whether this was true or not, at the very least, Marcello’s loose lips featured on prison audio surveillance and his inability to keep the Calabrese brothers didn’t help matters. Another theory fingers Marcello for sanctioning the hit because he was worried that Zizzo, who knew enough information to put him away for the rest of his life, would be tempted to turn government witness. A final line of thinking attributed the Zizzo disappearance to a falling out between him and Andriacchi and Di Fronzo over either money or rank. The only thing for certain as the Family Secrets trial approached was that any loose ends that Zizzo represented had now been tied up.
18.
The Trial
A Circus with a Judge
The big top came to Chicago in the summer of 2007 in the form of the Family Secrets trial, a spectacular legal drama over two years in the making. It descended on the Windy City to much media scrutiny and overall fanfare. And following twenty-six months of haggling, from both sides, over tedious pretrial motion after pretrial motion, it didn’t disappoint.
Local TV news broadcasts and the city’s two major newspapers heralded the trial as the most important government assault against American organized crime in more than two decades. In addition to the slew of racketeering counts charged—juice loans, extortion, and gambling—eighteen murders, some older than twenty-five years in the FBI’s cold case file, were finally going to find their way in front of a jury. For some, mostly family members of victims and law enforcement personnel who worked the slayings, it was the inevitable course of things—justice, although much later than expected, was being served.
The press had a field day. And even though the mafia was still very much alive, pundits were rampantly speculating the beginning of the end for the Chicago Outfit. The media wanted an end game, a way to neatly bookend a story they had been tracking since early in the decade when word of a key turncoat inside the local mafia helping the feds make a case against the mob surfaced. You couldn’t really blame them, though. It made for great headlines.
However, make no mistake about it, despite the fact that reports of The Outfit’s demise were more than premature, the successful prosecution of the much-written about defendants would be a serious setback for the long-standing crime syndicate. As the U.S. attorney’s office made its final preparations for trial, and the lawyers for the defense contemplated any last-minute strategy shifts, the city of Chicago held its collective breath for what would be the media event of the year. A real-life soap opera with characters who bore such colorful nicknames like “Bobby the Beak,” “Richie the Rat,” and “Ernie the Oven” that would play out for the better part of the next three months. The circus was in town and it was setting up shop in the heart of The Loop, specifically, at the corner of Dearborn and Monroe inside Judge James B. Zagel’s courtroom on the twenty-fifth floor of the Dirksen Federal Building.
BY late June, the stage was finally set. When the curtain lifted on what was already being dubbed the trial of the century, only five of the original fourteen defendants remained to face to the music. Frank “Goomba” Saladino, The Outfit’s alleged man in Rockford and someone reputed to have been involved in several of the eighteen homicides charged, died on the day the arrest warrants were served in the case. When federal agents came to arrest him at the northwest Indiana hotel room he had been living in, they found him dead of a heart attack. Former Chicago Police Department officer Michael Ricci, charged by prosecutors with passing information to and from imprisoned defendant Frank Calabrese, also died before the trial’s start date. Frank “Frankie the German” Schweihs, the longtime Outfit enforcer and right-hand man to Joey Lombardo, got severed from the case due to his battle with cancer. Mickey Marcello, Thomas Johnson, Dennis Johnson, and Joe Venezia, each of whom worked for Jimmy Marcello’s video poker business, and Nick Ferriola, the son of former Outfit boss Joe Ferriola as well as a liaison for Frank Calabrese to his ongoing rackets on the street, all pled guilty before the trial started. Nick Calabrese, the mob assassin who admitted in his plea deal to playing a role in fourteen of the murders himself, was the government’s star witness.
Although more than half of the original defendants were no longer around to stand before the jury, with the exception of Schweihs, all of the biggest fish in the case remained. South Side hit man and loan shark Frank Calabrese was facing thirteen murder charges, implicated in each and every one by his own flesh and blood, his brother Nick. Jimmy Marcello, the alleged street boss of The Outfit until his arrest in the case, was facing three murder charges and one charge of attempted murder. Joey Lombardo, the highly tenured mafia chief and reputed consiglieri, and Paul Schiro, The Outfit’s representative in Arizona, were each charged with one apiece. Closing out the heavily publicized batch of defendants was Anthony “Twan” Doyle, an Italian man who had an Ir
ish name and was a former Chicago cop accused of giving sensitive police intelligence to and acting as a liaison for Frank Calabrese.
Besides the murders discussed previously—the homicides of Danny Seifert, John Mendell, Vincent Moretti, Donald Renno, Butch Petrocelli, Billy Dauber, Nick D’Andrea, Tony and Michael Spilotro, and John Feccorata—there were plenty more the prosecution threw at the crowded and cramped defense table (actually two defense tables, one in front of the other and placed to the far right end of the courtroom, facing the jury, not Judge Zagel). It was not surprising that most of these slayings were just as heinous as the ones already examined.
• The August 1970 murder of Outfit enforcer, Michael “Hambone” Albergo, who made the mistake of making a juice loan to an undercover police officer and subsequently was subpoenaed to testify in front of a grand jury investigating the local loan-sharking racket. Needless to say, Hambone never made it to the grand jury and was killed by the mob for his dealings with the undercover cop and for fear of him talking.
• The June 1976 murder of thief Paul Haggerty, who had stolen some uncut jewelry that belonged to a member of The Outfit. Haggerty was kidnapped, tortured, strangled, and eventually had his throat slit.
• The March 1977 murder of Henry Cosentino, a local rented wiseguy and friend of Frank Calabrese who was killed by having his throat slit for shooting Frank Saladino in the leg during an argument.
• The June 1981 murder of Michael Cangoni, an area trucking magnate who refused to continue to pay tribute to The Outfit and was blown up in his Mercedes-Benz as he drove on to I 290 in suburban Hinsdale.
• The June 1983 double murder of Richard “Chico” Ortiz and Arthur Morawski, who were both shot to death while sitting in a parked car in suburban Cicero. Ortiz, a local bar owner, was killed because he ran afoul of South Side mob boss Johnny Apes Monteleone for not sharing profits of a loan-sharking operation he was running and for the belief that he was dealing drugs (it was also rumored that Ortiz had committed an unauthorized murder related to his narcotics business). Morawski just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
• The attempted murder of Nick Sarillo, which took place in April 1982, was also on the trial docket. Sarillo, a local restaurant owner who was running a sports book and refused to pay a street tax to Outfit leader, Joseph “Black Joe” Amato, had his van blown up while he was driving on a street in the north suburb of Wauconda.
Appropriately, the Family Secrets trial started out with a bang—almost literally. On the morning of June 19, the first day of jury selection, Kurt Calabrese, oldest son of Frank Calabrese, found what looked like an explosive device on the back porch of his suburban Kenilworth home. Heading out to his backyard to do some lawn maintenance, he stumbled on a clear plastic bag containing a digital timer tied with black plastic tape to what appeared to be three sticks of dynamite. After evacuating the neighborhood, authorities deemed the device a fake.
The incident was the finale in a long line of the harassment of Kurt Calabrese, who is no longer on speaking terms with his father but who had once worked for a loan-sharking operation he ran in the 1990s, had been experiencing in the weeks and months leading up to the trial. Before the bomb hoax, he had been receiving nasty phone calls, threatening letters, and had a number of dead rats thrown on his property. Since Kurt was not personally involved with the trial in any manner—albeit his brother Frank Jr. and his uncle Nick were the prosecution’s two star witnesses—the ongoing harassment left law enforcement looking for answers. Nonetheless they assumed it had something to do with Family Secrets. At the very least it gave the local media outlets, who would normally be hard-pressed to find much excitement during the tedious jury selection process, tantalizing fodder to report.
With a jury consisting of nine men and ten woman—seven of whom were alternates—in place with in a brisk three days, opening arguments began on Thursday, June 21. As Judge Zagel’s courtroom filled to capacity in the moments leading up to the prosecution’s time in front of the long wood-paneled jury box, there was electricity in the air. The anticipation and excitement were palpable.
Joey Lombardo wore a gray suit and red tie, carried a walking cane, and sat on the far left end of the back defense table, intentionally isolated from Calabrese, Marcello, Schiro, and Doyle. Employing the so-called withdrawal defense, claiming to have left his life in the mob behind after being released from prison in 1992, Lombardo was instructed by his defense team to interact with his co-defendants as little as possible. Jimmy Marcello, at the right end seat of the back defense table, was dressed in a dark brown blazer worn over a black mock turtleneck and Frank Calabrese, at the right end seat of the front defense table, in a powder blue sport jacket, sat closest to the spectators gallery. Finally, Paul Schiro, whose once-tanned and healthy-looking figure had been weathered down to a wrinkled, slumping, and haggard physique from his time already in jail for his part in an Outfit-backed string of jewelry heists, and the hulking and broad-shouldered Anthony Doyle, sat on the left side of the front table closest to the judge and court reporter.
At approximately 9:45 A.M., Judge Zagel brought the court to order with his gavel, motioning with his head for the prosecution to commence their opening argument. Rising from his chair, U.S. Attorney John Scully, with a calm, yet determined look in his eyes, slowly walked the short distance from his seat to the small piece of carpeted floor in front of the jury. A one-time member of the Naval Jag Corps, Scully presented a picture that was the epitome of calm and collected as he readied to begin.
Before an audience that was anxiously waiting, almost salivating, Scully began to unfold the story of Family Secrets. He spoke in a straightforward, confidant, and measured tone, staying away from theatrics and remaining focused on raw detail and fact. He started out by telling the jury that this was a case based on organized crime, explaining how the mafia makes fortunes on traditional rackets like illegal sports betting, street tax, and loan sharking, preying and profiting off the weak and weary. Then after sternly declaring that four of the five defendants were charged with mafia-style murders, he made certain that the jurors knew the grave severity of the matter at hand. “This is not The Sopranos, this is not The Godfather,” said Scully. “This case is about real people, real victims. These men are corrupt, violent, and without honor.”
Breaking down each individual murder while standing behind whichever defendant had been charged with committing it, he used an overhead projector that displayed each victims’ face as a way to augment his verbal re-creation. For most of his opening statement, Scully was in close proximity to Frank Calabrese, the man who was charged with the majority of the case’s homicides and who throughout the proceedings wore an ear-to-ear smirk across his face that seemed to scream his indifference to the entire ordeal.
Short, direct, and to the point, Scully concluded in less than an hour, content to rest his opening argument on the shorter end of the norm for most mega trials. Some legal analysts viewed the tactic as a calculated risk, but nonetheless the veteran prosecutor was satisfied that he got his message across. “Longer isn’t always better,” Scully said just short of a year later. “I think our opening proved that. We drove home our main points of emphasis, which were that this was a case about brutal people doing a lot of brutal things, and we delivered it in a way that was easy to digest for people not familiar with the ways of the mafia. I might have spoke the words to the jury, however, the entire prosecutorial team played a role in our strategy and how we wanted to present our case on the first day. I’m more than happy with the way the opening turned out. In retrospect, I think we all are.”
Next up was the famed and flamboyant Joe “The Shark” Lopez, defense attorney for Frank Calabrese. Wearing a black suit with a pink shirt, and tie that matched his socks, Lopez described his client as looking more like a “Wisconsin cheese salesman” than a heartless wiseguy. He claimed that the prosecutors had gotten their hands on the wrong man—that Frank’s brother Nick, not Frank was the act
ual “capo in the mafia.” Hammering home the fact that there was no physical evidence linking Calabrese to any of the murders in the case, Lopez said it was Nick that committed the heinous crimes charged and that now, from his role as a star witness, was looking to “do him too,” referring to helping take down his brother. Lopez also took aim at Calabrese’s son Frank Jr.—also slated to testify against his dad—and referred to him as “ungrateful,” “greedy,” and “addicted to drugs.”
Like Lopez, Jimmy Marcello’s attorney, Marc Martin, continually hammered home the fact that there was an absence of any physical evidence tying his client to any murders in his opening. “You can make the charts as big as you want, it won’t hide the hole in the case: no physical evidence.” Martin made no bones about admitting that Marcello was a mobster, one who had done significant time in prison for racketeering in the past. But he tried to state as many times as possible that that did not make him a murderer. “Just because he was in jail doesn’t make him guilty in this case . . . this is not the Salem witch hunts,” he said. In addition, Martin claimed that Marcello was being dragged into an internal squabble concerning the Calabrese family that had nothing to do with him. “The evidence will show Mr. Marcello has been caught in the crosshairs of a dysfunctional family.”