Family Affair

by Sam Giancana

  With his retrial in Las Vegas slated to begin the following Monday, Tony was already on edge. Picked up at the airport by Michael and his wife, Ann, Tony and his wife were taken to their former residence in suburban Oak Park, a home now occupied by his brother and sister-in-law. A phone call from Jimmy Marcello later that night taken at Hoagies, Michael’s restaurant, confirmed the ceremony the next day where Tony was supposed to be upped to captain status and Michael was to be formally initiated into the crime family.

  Neither brother was extremely confident with the validity of the alleged events set to take place the following evening, but both know they had no choice but to do what they were told. When they were instructed to meet Marcello late Saturday afternoon at a hotel parking lot in Schiller Park, they hesitantly went, skipping Michael’s son’s Little League Baseball game. Armed with the full knowledge they could be walking into an elaborate sabotage, the Spilotro brothers bucked up and followed orders. They appeared to be accepting the inevitable.

  The siblings’ worst fears were confirmed when they were brutally beaten and strangled to death at the faux ceremony the next day by a ruthless group of hit man later identified in court testimony by Nick Calabrese as himself, Joe Ferriola, Sam Carlisi, John Di Fronzo, Jimmy Marcello, Jimmy La Pietra, John Fecoratta, Louie Eboli, and Louis “Louie Tomatoes” Marino. One of the most storied eras in Outfit history had concluded, almost appropriately, in a sadistic rage of violence.

  Tony and his brother had become rouges. They were clearly operating by their own rules, and this was unacceptable to their bosses. Their murders would resonate with the public, press, and various law enforcement agencies for much time to come, and in some ways, make Tony Spilotro more famous in death than he had been in life— movies like Casino and television shows like Crime Story were inspired by his legacy.

  And in the classic fashion of The Ant, the overly heinous double homicide reached far beyond the grave, demonstrating that not even death could stop Tony Spilotro from causing the Chicago underworld major headaches. In the ultimate act of fate, the execution of the two Spilotro brothers would unknowingly start a chain of events that nearly two decades later would bring a storm of chaos upon The Outfit and threaten to bring the entire crime syndicate to its knees.

  12.

  Burial Blunders and Farm-Side Follies

  Big John Pays the Price

  Tony and Michael Spilotro were lying bludgeoned, battered, and very dead on the basement floor of Louie Eboli’s Bensenville home as the nearly dozen participants and witnesses in the vile slayings were slowly shuffling out the door and on their way. Some would go enjoy a hardy dinner after the exhausting execution, others would retreat to their suburban estates to spend the rest of the Saturday evening with their families. For these men, it was merely just another day at the office. However, even though the murder of the Spilotros was completed, there was still work to be done. The two bodies had to be buried, transported from Eboli’s house to a makeshift grave site somewhere far away from the Windy City suburbs. The duty of making certain this job got done as quickly and cleanly as possible fell upon Giovanni “Big John” Fecoratta, one of the Spilotros’ killers and a highly tenured Outfit enforcer and hit man from the Chinatown crew. A longtime leg breaker for the mob-controlled Local 8 of the Industrial Workers Union, Fecoratta was one of the La Pietra Brothers’ most trusted lieutenants.

  Instructed to bury the bodies outside the state of Illinois in northern Indiana, Fecoratta called for the assistance of Albert Tocco. Tocco and his cleanup crew—named in FBI reports as Dominic “Tootsie” Palermo, Albert “Chickie” Roverio, and Nicholas “Jumbo” Guzzino, the younger brother of slain Outfit member Sam “The Gobber” Guzzino and imprisoned Outfit member Richard “Fat Richie” Guzzino, arrived at the Eboli residence shortly before sunset. With the help of Fecoratta, they loaded the two corpses into the back of a work van and took off headed across the state line to a predetermined site where they would dig the grave. Before they left, Fecoratta told Tocco to call him when the job was completed.

  Driving approximately 60 miles past downtown Chicago, Tocco and his lieutenants found an isolated parcel of a cornfield in Enos, Indiana, parked their van, and began to dig. It was now after midnight and the sky was pitch black. Having dug only a few feet into the earth, the foursome of wiseguys, heard a car pull up by the side of the road. Thinking it was the police, they became scared and all ran off in different directions. Lucky for them, what they thought was a cop car was just a couple teenagers looking to score some marijuana plants they knew to be growing in that particular field. After some time passed, and the teenagers were long gone, Palermo, Roverio, and Guzzino returned to the grave site. Their boss, Albert Tocco, did not. He was lost in the vast Indiana cornfield and couldn’t find his way back.

  Still spooked and thinking the police may be returning to the scene, Palermo, Roverio, and Guzzino hurriedly placed the Spilotro brothers’ corpses into the half-dug grave and covered it with dirt. They then got into the van and sped away, leaving Tocco behind to find his own way home. Meanwhile, Tocco was furious and frustrated and had no idea where he was. When he realized his compatriots had abandoned him, he began walking, trying to locate the nearest pay phone so he could call for help. Seething with anger, Tocco, his clothes soaked in the Spilotros’ blood, made his way to Interstate 41 and hiked nearly two miles until he came upon a roadside telephone booth. Out of breath, he called his wife, Betty, who was sound asleep in their south suburban home, and told her to get up and come retrieve him in rural Indiana.

  Angelo Tocco was no dummy. He had been around The Outfit for a long time and knew the repercussions for such a colossal misstep would be harsh. It was well-known both in law enforcement and gangland circles that in the months following the debacle, he was very worried about his and his family’s personal safety. Tocco had gained significant stature in The Outfit for leading the final stage of the crime family’s successful takeover of the chop shop rackets. He was promoted to full-fledged capo in the early 1980s, but was convicted and jailed on racketeering charges in 1989. He died behind bars in 2005.

  When Betty Tocco finally arrived at her husband’s location, he was boiling over with anger and on the ride back to Chicago, spilled the entire story of what had just transpired. The fact that such sensitive Outfit information was forbidden to be spoken of outside the crime family didn’t seem to bother him, as Albert told his wife everything—who was murdered, who was in charge of the burial, who he rode out to the cornfield with. Tocco, not one to easily accept blame himself, appeared to place a big chunk of responsibility for the mess-up on John Fecoratta. “This never would have happened if Al Pilotto were still in charge,” he remarked to Betty during his rant. Betty Tocco word subsequently testify against her husband.

  The next morning, Tocco called Tootsie Palermo to ream him out and get the skinny on what he, Roverio, and Guzzino eventually did with the bodies. He then phoned Fecoratta and told him what happened. Unbothered by the news, Big John told Tocco that everything was okay and not to lose any sleep over the incident. Unfortunately for Fecoratta, everything wasn’t okay and in only a few short months, he was the one that was going to have to pay the consequences for a job far from well done.

  LESS than two weeks later, on June 23, 1986, Michael Kinz, a local farmer, came out to his cornfield to spray some weed killer. In the midst of its application, he stumbled upon a suspicious pile of turned over soil on his property. Fearing it was a dead, poached animal underneath the ground, Kinz contacted the Indiana Game Wildlife Agency, who sent a biologist to the scene to check it out. After only digging a few feet, the biologist discovered two heavily bruised and beaten dead bodies and called the local sheriff’s office, who then made contact with the Chicago FBI office. Within hours, the once quiet farmland was crawling with hoards of law enforcement personnel, reporters, cameramen, and interested on-lookers. Suspecting it could be the Spilotro brothers they had found because their family had reported them missi
ng a week earlier, the FBI compared Tony and Michael’s dental records to the two dug-up corpses and got a match.

  Word quickly spread that the Spilotros had been found dead, and the media had a field day with the lurid story of the high-profile gangster, who many Chicago news outlets were mentioning as a future don candidate for The Outfit, running afoul with his bosses in the crime family. For the next several days, the story made the front page of all the local newspapers and was constantly being discussed and analyzed on the area’s television news broadcasts. This was exactly what The Outfit leadership didn’t want to happen. Tony Spilotro, the ultimate thorn in their sides for the past several years, was supposed to disappear and never be spoken of again. Out of sight, out of mind, was the syndicate’s theory. He wasn’t supposed to be discovered a mere nine days after he was rubbed out, with his violent death becoming the talk of Chicago. They were mad. And they wanted someone to blame.

  Even though it wasn’t Fecoratta who personally bungled the burial, the fact that he was already sitting on his mob superiors’ bad side as a result of previous indiscretions didn’t work in his favor when The Outfit began assessing culpability. Big John had recently begun to get a reputation for slacking off on his assignments, being hard to get in touch with when he was needed, and even worse, talking outwardly subversive. There were rumors that he was the culprit behind a stick up that had taken place at a local mob-run poker game. He owed outstanding debts to John Di Fronzo, John Monteleone, and the La Pietra brothers from previous street loans he had taken out, and he was also suspected of stealing money, holding back earnings on his rackets, and pocketing cash given to him to disperse to other Outfit members while traveling on business together. Bringing his girlfriend on top-secret syndicate assignments and allegedly filling her in on the details of his activities didn’t help matters either.

  Everything considered, whether he was the one who actually botched the burial or not was of little consequence. Fecoratta was going to take the heat. And taking the heat in The Outfit meant you were living on borrowed time. Displeased with the entire postmortem Spilotro fiasco and Fecoratta in general, Joe Ferriola and Sam Carlisi, the primary decision makers in the Chicago mafia at that time, marked Big John for death. They informed Fecoratta’s captain, Jimmy La Pietra, acting in his jailed brother’s place as head of the Chinatown crew, of the situation and told him to take care of all the details. La Pietra then farmed out the contract to two of his most-experienced executioners, the Calabrese brothers.

  Knowing that Fecoratta was savvy in the ways of the underworld, someone who wouldn’t let himself be an easy target, Frankie and Nicky Breeze took their time in setting up his murder. Letting some time pass after the Spilotros were found to make him feel that he had escaped The Outfit’s wrath, the Calabreses waited until after Labor Day to set their assigned contract in action.

  In early September, Frankie Breeze called Fecoratta and said that “Brother Jimmy,” another nickname for Jimmy La Pietra, had given him and his brother the task of bombing a local dentist office, and he wanted Fecoratta to go along on the job with them and act as the getaway driver. Going to lengths to make certain Big John didn’t suspect a setup, Nick Calabrese went as far as taking him out on faux casings of the office located near the corner of Belmont and Austin. On September 6 at around 9:00 P.M., Nick picked Fecoratta up at a designated meeting point, and the pair headed for their target.

  Before Nick had gotten into the car—a stolen 1986 Buick Century—to leave for his rendezvous with Fecoratta, his brother, Frank, gave him three guns from his garage. Two of the weapons were loaded and the other was not. He also gave him a fake bomb, made up of emergency flairs to look as if they were sticks of dynamite, carried in a crumpled brown paper bag. Frank instructed Nick to give Big John the dummy gun and to take the other two himself, hiding one in his waistband. When Fecoratta let his guard down, Nick, who was given the duty of trigger man because it was felt Big John would least expect it coming from him, was to shoot him in the head. Frank would be waiting in another car and pick Nick up after the hit was completed.

  Arriving in the alley behind the dentist’s office, Nick and Big John made small talk for a few moments, waiting for a pedestrian to leave the area before going into action. Finally, with the coast clear, Nicky Breeze grabbed the brown paper bag as if he were going for the fake bomb, and instead came up with a loaded .38-caliber pistol. He started to point it at Fecoratta, but he was too slow. Fecoratta was primed for the play, and the pair started to struggle for control of the weapon, former comrades in arms, now engaged in a battle to the death. The gun went off twice, and both Nick and Big John were wounded at the same time. Fecoratta was hit in his chest and Calabrese in the shoulder. Unfazed by the shot to the chest, Fecoratta was somehow able to tilt the chamber back on the gun, unload the remaining bullets onto the floor, and bolt out of the car.

  Gathering himself, Calabrese got out of the car and went after him. He chased him across Belmont Avenue, a busy metropolitan roadway, and toward a set of buildings on the north side of the street. Both men were bleeding from their wounds and blood marked their trail. Nick was almost hit by a car at one point. By the time he reached the door to Brown’s Banquet Hall, a facility often used as a bingo hall at 6050 West Belmont, Fecoratta was weak and losing steam. He staggered and fell down. Just as he was trying to get back up, Nicky Breeze appeared, grabbed Big John by the hair, and put two bullets in the back of his head, killing him instantly. Running away from the bingo hall, Calabrese accidentally dropped the pair of leather golfing gloves he had been wearing during the job.

  Within minutes, the cops were on the crime scene—via a 911 call from a shocked and disturbed bingo player—and discovered two separate types of blood and the gloves Nicky Breeze left behind. Although they weren’t aware of it at the time, they had just found the first piece of what would be a very complex puzzle. A puzzle that began with the Spilotro execution and that would not be solved, or even known about, for close to two decades. And the result would be one of the biggest federal racketeering indictments and convictions in American history.

  13.

  Changing of the Guard

  A New Regime

  When Tony Accardo died on May 27, 1992, a void was left at the top of The Outfit that needed to be filled. Like any corporation needs a CEO or any army needs a general in order to operate at maximum capacity, the mafia needs strong leadership at the top. Accardo, buried at Queen of Heaven Cemetery in west suburban Hillside in a grave site sectioned between deceased Outfit brethren Paul Ricca and Sam Battaglia, left some pretty big shoes to fill.

  Even though Accardo had let other mafia stalwarts like Sam Giancana, Joey Aiuppa, and Joe Ferriola look after the day-to-day operations of The Outfit throughout his time overseeing the syndicate, at the end of the day, the responsibility for the welfare of the Chicago mafia ultimately fell on his shoulders. He was the foundation, the pulse of the streets, and his absence from the scene made a lot of people predict peril for the Family in the future. The Windy City underworld was in a period of great transition, and for the first time in nearly half a century, the stability that had been the trademark of the local crime family was now in question.

  Luckily for the Chicago mob, the Big Tuna had been actively planning for the time he would no longer hold the crown to his Midwest mafia kingdom, and in his later days he had begun grooming several heir apparents to take his place atop the throne when he was gone.

  Four primary Accardo lieutenants stepped to the forefront after the Big Tuna’s death and assumed the torch of power—Joseph “Joey the Clown” Lombardo, John “No Nose” Di Fronzo, Joseph “Joe the Builder” Andriacchi, and James “Jimmy the Man” Marcello, each of them reputed to have taken a significant leadership position in Outfit activities from 1992 forward. The immediate success they found in their former mentor’s stead quelled any thoughts that the mafia in Chicago would crumble into disarray without Accardo’s leadership. The 1990s and the dawning of the new
century would bring new and untapped rackets for The Outfit to exploit, more money to be made, and a fresh perspective on mob rule implemented by Accardo’s successors that would both harken back to the glory days of the Big Tuna’s past and set forward a new and more prosperous road leading to a rewarding future.

  Taking a page from their legendary predecessor, The Outfit’s new breed hierarchy, to its overall benefit over the past two decades, has gone to extreme lengths to disguise its depth chart. To this day, nobody, not even the FBI, knows for certain what the pecking order in the Chicago mob is. Lombardo, Di Fronzo, Andriacchi, and Marcello have done such a good job of keeping their crime family’s business under wraps that queries into who is the syndicate’s real bosses and who are merely front bosses are asked and debated upon almost daily among the area’s law enforcement, historians, and press alike.

  “The Outfit’s new breed of leadership has followed closely in the footsteps of their predecessors,” said former FBI agent Jim Wagner. “They’ve learned from guys like Accardo, Aiuppa, and Alex on what it takes to have a nice run in the upper echelons of the mafia. For the most part, they know how to successfully navigate around the pitfalls that most mob bosses face on an everyday basis. Most important, they’ve been able to mask their overall hierarchy by using multiple fronts and insulation methods that tell us that the new Chicago mafia, despite reports of its downfall, is just as active and dangerous as the old Chicago mafia.”