by Sam Giancana
Many believe that the extreme and gruesomely heinous nature of the double homicide indicates just how loathed Tony Spilotro had become in certain circles within The Outfit. The fact that so many powerful syndicate figures were present for the executions illustrates that belief more than anything. Furthermore, it is suspected that the pair of grisly gangland slayings were a message from The Outfit’s freshly minted administration to the entire crime family that certain forms of behavior would never be tolerated, no matter how powerful the person exhibiting it. After the job was complete, the group of mob executioners filed out of the Eboli residence, each going his separate way. Another set of mob soldiers were set to arrive shortly and take care of the mess in the basement, and the crew of winded and tired hit men could finally relax. Some of them went back to enjoying the warm and sunny afternoon with their families, others went to grab a bite to eat or to a local tavern for a stiff drink—just another day in the life of some of the Midwest’s most dangerous and lethal. A lot of headaches had just been cured, a great deal of future frustrations averted. The Ant had been exterminated.
Spilotro’s violent demise is one of the most horrific gangland slayings in the annals of American crime, and it set off a chain reaction of events that would culminate twenty years later in the FBI’s biggest strike against the American mafia since the early 1980s.
1.
The Fugitive
The Clown Goes Underground
On consecutive afternoons in mid-January 2006, two of the Windy City’s most notorious wiseguys ever, both recently apprehended by federal authorities after almost a year on the run, were ushered into the courtroom of U.S. District Court Judge James B. Zagel, looking more like grandpas than gangsters. However, make no mistake about it, these two men, despite appearing meek and frail were not your average senior citizens. Although they looked as if they were supposed to be playing shuffle board in a Miami Beach retirement community, they were both, the government claimed, stone-cold killers and highly respected members of one of the most powerful and dangerous crime syndicates in the world.
These men were the then seventy-six-year-old Joseph “Joey the Clown” Lombardo, longtime Chicago mafia chieftain, and his top lieutenant, the then seventy-seven-year-old Frank “Frankie the German” Schweihs. Less than a year earlier, each had disappeared into the shadows and gone on the lamb after a massive April 2005 federal racketeering indictment fingering fourteen people and including eighteen previously unsolved gangland homicides—two of which were the brutal murders of Tony and Michael Spilotro. Both Lombardo and Schweihs ducked out of sight when they realized that, if caught, they’d be held without bail because of their previous criminal records and would probably never taste freedom again. Representing two of the final links to the crime family’s glory days of the middle to late twentieth century, when the mob seemed invincible, The Clown and The German were highly-coveted government targets.
Even without initially rounding up Lombardo and Schweihs, the FBI had delivered a mighty blow to the family when it arrested eleven of their co-defendants: James “Jimmy the Man” Marcello, alleged boss of The Outfit; his half-brother and top lieutenant Michael “Big Mickey” Marcello; the Calabrese brothers, Frank “Frankie Breeze” Calabrese Sr. and Nicholas “Nicky Breeze” Calabrese, a pair of already imprisoned South Side mob heavyweights; Paul “Paulie the Indian” Schiro, The Outfit’s representative in Arizona; Nicholas Ferriola, son of the late crime family Boss Joseph “Joe Nick” Ferriola; Dennis Johnson, Thomas Johnson, and Joe Venezia, three Marcello brothers’ lieutenants; and Michael Ricci and Anthony “Twan” Doyle, two former Chicago police officers. Co-defendant Frank “Goomba” Saladino, a reputed hit man and The Outfit’s proxy in Rockford, was found dead of a heart attack when the Feds came to arrest him at a motel in Northeast Indiana. The list amounted to a endangered species list of Chicago wiseguys, making certain, regardless of how the case would eventually be resolved, a major shakeup among the syndicate’s rank and file was imminent.
“When the indictment and the arrests finally came down, it was a real sense of relief for the Bureau,” said FBI agent Ross Rice. “There is so much that goes into building this type of case, so many things that can and do pop up that you don’t necessarily expect, for it to all come together is a major accomplishment. Some of these murder investigations had been lying dormant for two, three decades. To the general public that doesn’t mean much, but each of those homicide victims has family members that are still alive and those people have to live with the after effects every day. That’s really where the motivation for constructing Family Secrets came from on our part. The Spilotro brothers’ murders may have received the most attention from the media and from Hollywood and whatnot, but to us, they’re all the same and of equal importance.”
As recent as just a few years earlier, however, things were looking up for the widely renowned Midwest crime family. In 2004, Jimmy Marcello, the much heralded heir apparent to the top seat in The Outfit, emerged from a ten-year federal prison sentence and assumed the post of syndicate street boss. Marcello wasted little time making his presence felt. Gone were the days when tame and less-violent tactics were the status quo in the city’s underworld, replaced by an edict from Jimmy the Man to rule with an iron fist. Verbal warnings soon became vicious beatings, and everybody on the street was forced to take note of the freshly minted godfather’s new regime. According to some in law enforcement, Marcello may have actually gotten a head start in his tenure as don while still incarcerated in a Milan, Michigan, federal correctional facility; it’s believed Marcello possibly ordered at least two gangland hits from behind bars. With the aid and counsel of grizzled and savvy mob veterans like Joey the Clown, the crime family’s consiglieri, top Outfit capo Joseph “Joe the Builder” Andriacchi, and the syndicate’s overall don No Nose Di Fronzo, Marcello took aim at returning the Chicago mob to its once-held prominence.
And then, a caged bird began to sing.
That bird was Nicky Breeze Calabrese, a sixty-two-year-old imprisoned Outfit hit man and younger brother of fellow mafia assassin Frankie Breeze. In actuality, Calabrese had been singing since early 2002 and continued doing so all the way up and through the eventual indictment and trial.
Getting Nicky Breeze to play ball with the FBI was no easy task. Faced with physical evidence linking him to one of the eighteen murders named in the eventual indictment and with the threat that the government planned to ask for the death penalty at his trial, Calabrese refused to talk for a good two years. It wasn’t until the FBI brought word to Calabrese in his cell at a Pekin, Illinois federal prison that his own brother had signed off on his death warrant that he chose to cooperate and testify against his mob cohorts in open court.
Nicky Breeze spilled his guts, and as a result, the U.S. Prosecutor’s Office levied the biggest federal racketeering case against a mob hierarchy since the infamous Commission Case of the mid-1980s, when a young and ambitious U.S. attorney named Rudolph Giuliani took down all the leaders of New York’s five crime families in one fell litigious swoop. Even more shocking, Calabrese’s cooperation was precipitated by the defection of his nephew, Frank Calabrese Jr., who in 1998 had been serving time behind bars with his father. When Frank Jr. became fed up with his father’s antics, he wrote a letter to the FBI offering his assistance in building a case against his uncle and dear old dad.
A mainstay on the city’s streets for over three decades, Nick Calabrese had a great deal of information to offer the government. This included clearing up many unanswered questions regarding several high-profile area mob assassinations and implicating his own flesh and blood, his older brother Frank, in thirteen of the eighteen murders charged in the indictment. Gleaning what they could from their mega-turncoat, the FBI opened up shop on a sprawling underworld exposé, which came to be called Operation Family Secrets—an assault federal authorities hoped to severely cripple the foundation of the Chicago Outfit with.
“It was a major coup for us to flip Nick C
alabrese,” said John Scully, a retired U.S. prosecutor who was one of three government lawyers assigned to prosecute the case in the summer and early fall of 2007. “After that happend everything fit together. It was a domino effect, the information we got from him put our case over the edge. At that point, we knew we would have enough to indict. When Mr. Calabrese sent out feelers to the FBI agents, it was kept real hush-hush. When he finally turned and they started the debriefing process, only a few key people knew what was going on. I was in the dark about what happened. I didn’t even know that he was cooperating. For a good two weeks, I didn’t know anything. Finally getting the news was an outstanding feeling and made me feel like all of our work, put in by both our office and the FBI, had paid off.”
With the mountain of information provided by Nick Calabrese, the government spent the next three years building their case, a legal blow to major organized crime with few equals. When their investigation was complete, the federal government had what amounted to a nine-count, fourteen-person racketeering indictment that charged the bulk of the leadership of the Chicago mafia, as well as others, with extortion, loan sharking, illegal gambling, eighteen allegations of murder, and one allegation of attempted murder. Following two months of grand jury testimony in January and February 2005, the indictment was announced on April 25, 2005, with arrest warrants issued that same day for all fourteen defendants. Seven of the accused in the potentially groundbreaking racketeering conspiracy case were charged with committing or agreeing to commit murder on behalf of Outfit leaders. The police officers, Mike Ricci and Anthony Doyle, were accused of passing information to and acting as liaisons for Frank Calabrese Sr., who had been imprisoned on another racketeering-related conviction since 1997.
ON the same April morning that fast-rising U.S. Prosecuting Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald announced the unsealing of the indictment to an anxious press corps, federal agents rounded up eleven of the fourteen men charged without incident. With Frank Saladino dead of a heart attack lying beside a bundle of cash in his motel room, the only two alleged co-conspirators of the indictment not accounted for were Joey Lombardo and Frank Schweihs. Entertaining no desire to lose their freedom and become guests of the state, Lombardo and his ace henchman, Schweihs, each vanished from sight.
A week later, in an odd twist of events, Joey the Clown sent the first of several handwritten letters to Judge Zagel, in which he outlined surrender terms, proclaimed his innocence, and—perhaps justifying his nickname—requested a laughably low bail of $50,000. In spring 2005, Lombardo was placed on the much-famed FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List. However, despite the written correspondence between him and Zagel, letters sent through his attorney and conspicuously postmarked from within the city of Chicago, the trail on Lombardo and Schweihs went cold.
“I thought it was a bit out of character for Lombardo to flee,” said former FBI agent Tom Bourgeois. “In a lot of ways it didn’t fit his traditional way of conducting business. But then again Joey is a sharp guy, and I’m pretty certain there was a rhyme and reason to his actions. He’s no dummy. He knew, at least for the sake of the media, he was the centerpiece of the case and that his capture would be a top priority for the FBI. Plus, it’s not like the guy had never been behind bars before. So, whatever his thought process was, I’m pretty sure he felt that it was important for him, and maybe for The Outfit as an entity, to go on the run.”
Then, in December 2005, the feds got a break. Enticed by the $25,000 reward for the capture of Lombardo or Schweihs, an anonymous tipster—rumored to have possibly been a Schweihs family member—pointed law enforcement in the direction of Kentucky and clued the bureau in on the whereabouts of Frankie the German. On December 16, 2005, a fleet of federal agents descended on a quiet apartment complex in suburban Lexington and took Frank Schweihs into custody without a struggle. Brought in front of Judge Zagel for his arraignment, The German couldn’t understand the hoard of media cramped in the corner of the courtroom watching and analyzing his every move. “What all ’dem reporters here for?” Schweihs gruffly asked his attorney as two U.S. marshals helped him, wearing leg irons and holding a cane, shuffle to the podium in front of the judge. “Slow day, I guess,” replied his lawyer without missing a beat.
Still, as the new year came and went, there was no sign of Joey Lombardo, the most recognized Windy City wiseguy named in the expansive indictment and possibly the most important for ensuring the desired crippling blow to the heart of the Chicago underworld. Then, after almost ten months of chasing their elusive target, all of the FBI’s diligent hard work and patience finally paid major dividends. Going on a tip via The Clown’s dentist—none other than Pat Spilotro, younger brother of Tony Spilotro—the FBI zeroed in on its target in mid-January 2006. As Lombardo arrived for what he thought was going to be a top secret late-night dental appointment, agents converged on the 1994 navy blue Lincoln Mercury sedan holding Lombardo and arrested him. Although heavily bearded and sporting a mane of long straggly hair, the FBI was pleased to confirm it had found its man. Joey Lombardo, like a young child who runs away from home only to stop at the end of the block, had never left the city limits. Taken into custody with no opposition, Lombardo was finally booked, fingerprinted, and jailed on January 13, 2006.
Lombardo, with cut hair and shaved beard, was arraigned before Judge Zagel the following Tuesday afternoon; living up to his moniker, he kept everyone in the courtroom in stitches. Nicknamed The Clown by his associates and the Chicago press for his reputation for sly-witted antics—such as taking out a newspaper ad after a release from jail proclaiming his intention to abstain from future criminal activity, having a proclivity to crack jokes with officers of the law assigned to take him down, and placing a newspaper with a cut-out peephole over his face to shield himself from reporters—Lombardo had several humorous exchanges with the judge as he pled not guilty to the charges asserted against him. When asked if he was ready to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, Joey the Clown responded, “Yeah, yeah, nutt’in but da truth,” in a raspy tone, drawing laughter from the press gallery. Later on in the hearing, when Judge Zagel asked why he missed an appointment with his heart doctor the previous spring, Lombardo replied with a smirk, “I was, what you would say, ah, unavailable,” to more laughter from the packed courtroom.
During a post-arraignment press conference, Lombardo’s attorney, highly respected criminal defense lawyer Rick Halperin, said his client would seek assistance from the government to cover his legal fees and court costs, asserting that The Clown—a man long linked to the upper-echelon of a multi-million-dollar-a-year criminal empire—was unable to shoulder the financial burden himself. A month later in a court proceeding to determine Lombardo’s financial solvency, Judge Zagel ruled to grant the aging mobster the benefit of government assistance in paying for what was certain to be a long list of hefty legal expenses.
Lombardo’s arrest and apprehension so close to his home of the past four decades led legal experts and pundits alike to ponder why Joey the Clown, someone who most certainly would have had the ability as well as the opportunity to flee the state, if not the country, if he so wished, never even left the city limits of Chicago. Some think that Lombardo was such a neighborhood stalwart that, at the age of seventy-six, he had neither the will nor the desire to leave the area where he had spent the majority of his life. Others speculate that with the Marcello brothers in jail, The Outfit needed Lombardo around town to look after the everyday operations of the local underworld and help the crime family transition to a new power structure for the duration of the upcoming trial. In any case, one thing’s for sure, the fact that The Clown’s letters to the judge were postmarked in Chicago, meant that Lombardo was not trying very hard to conceal his whereabouts.
2.
The Outfit
The History of the Mafia in Chicago
At the turn of the twentieth century, vast numbers of European immigrants flooded into the United States, looking to make a new life with their fam
ilies in the self-professed land of opportunity. A large chunk of these immigrants came from Italy and the tiny neighboring island of Sicily. Many of these Italian and Sicilian men and woman settled in Chicago, with their hefty ambitions in tow. Many also brought with them Old World customs and traditions that they hoped would aid them in adapting to their new surroundings.
When lofty expectations of quick success in the New World didn’t come to immediate fruition, some turned to one of their home country’s darkest traditions for solace—the top secret criminal societies known as the Camorra in southern Italy, the Ndraghetta in northern Italy, and the Mafi a in Sicily. These organizations were created as early as the twelfth century to give common citizens a voice and needed protection against corrupt government forces that could not be overcome without its existence. However, when transplanted to the United States about 100 years ago, the reincarnation of such underworld societies came to exist purely for its leaders to gain financial profit and power in the community. It is sad that the core values and attributes on which the original organizations were founded were all but lost.
The first manifestation of Italian organized crime to spring up in Chicago was the extensive racket empire run by James “Big Jim” Colosimo. Getting his start in local politics, working his early years in America as a clerk for an area politician, and then eventually as a a precinct captain and “bagman” for the city’s immensely influential First Ward, Colosimo used his political connections to forge a stronghold over all vice taking place in The Levee, at that time Chicago’s premiere nightlife district. As his power grew, so did his organization, which by 1915 numbered in the hundreds and became a blueprint for the city’s modern day crime syndicate by being multi-ethnic. By importing several key lieutenants from New York City, including his nephew John “Johnny the Fox” Torrio, to help him expand his holdings and influence to the city’s surrounding suburbs, Colosimo soon became one of the wealthiest and most recognized gangsters in the country. He head-quartered his activities out of a restaurant and nightclub known as Colosimo’s Cafe, which became renowned for its great food and as a top spot for entertainers of all kinds to perform. As Chicago’s first genuine godfather, Colosimo hobnobbed with celebrities and romanced some of the city’s most beautiful women.