by Sam Giancana
The multistate burglary spree is said to have commenced in October 1984 in Glendale, Wisconsin, where $310,000 worth of Baum and Mercier watches were stolen from a Mercedes in the parking lot of a hotel when its owner, a high-end jewelry salesman, went into the lobby to make a phone call. In October 1986 in Monterey, California, they struck again and nabbed a half a million dollars worth of Rolex watches off a duped salesman on a trip for work. There were jobs in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Texas, and Ohio, where they scored $1.5 million from safe deposit boxes at the Hyatt Regency in Columbus. Back in Wisconsin in 1995, they stole $750,000 worth of uncut diamonds from a jewelry salesman in his hotel room.
Through discussions with Jimmy D’Antonio, Hanhardt knew The Outfit was happy. Everyone was making money. When Jimmy Legs died as a result of severe injuries sustained in a car accident in 1993, the crew didn’t miss a beat and kept chugging along at a steady pace. Hanhardt was seen in the presence of reputed high-ranking Mafioso Rudy Fratto, who investigators believed became the gang’s new contact in The Outfit when D’Antonio died.
But by the mid-1990s, the FBI was on to Hanhardt and his crew. Numerous informant reports of the group’s activities gave rise to a top priority investigation by the FBI. Using a former victim as bait, the feds set up a sting for a potential score in northern Indiana. The FBI was video-taping as the crew followed a previously ripped-off jewelry salesman traveling in a blue Lincoln Town Car from suburban Chicago to a restaurant parking lot in Porter, Indiana, where the crew took $60,000 worth of watches out of the trunk. One of the lookouts for the job, in a nearby idling car, was also caught on tape. It was Bill Hanhardt.
With the decade coming to an end, the bad news continued to mount against Hanhardt. In 1999, as a result of a divorce proceeding, one of Hanhardt’s crew members’ estranged wife discovered a safe deposit box filled with stolen merchandise and fake ID’s. The FBI found out and swept in with subpoenas. That same year, Jimmy D’Antonio’s nephew surfaced and turned over to authorities twenty-seven suitcases he found that had belonged to his uncle and contained burglary tools and intelligence files.
The curtain finally came down on Hanhardt in October 2000, when he, along with Basinski, Brown, Altobello, De Stefano, and Schiro were indicted for a string of robberies that spanned a decade and a half. Facing a rock-solid case against them, the entire crew agreed to plead guilty to the charges. In the weeks leading up to the highly publicized in-court plea, the pressure of the events surrounding Hanhardt proved too difficult for him to cope with and he tried to commit suicide by overdosing on pills. His attempt was unsuccessful, and he was sentenced to sixteen years in prison in the spring of 2002 at the age of seventy-three.
“Bill Hanhardt was a complex individual who leaves a complex legacy,” said Richard Stilling, who worked with him throughout his career in the FBI. “It’s still hard for some people like myself, who knew him in a professional setting, to understand that other side of him. He was like two different people. He was a paradox.”
PAULIE Schiro, the gang’s top surveillance expert, was sentenced to twelve years. It was the first significant prison sentence the then sixty-four-year-old Shiro would have to serve; however, he knew if he stayed out of trouble on the inside and did good time, he could make it out in time to still enjoy some of his golden years in the Arizona sun. The prospect of a future as a free man died early in his sentence. Rumors of Nick Calabrese’s cooperation in late 2002 led Schiro to speculate to a visiting friend that what Nicky Breeze had to offer could help the government put him away forever. The Indian was trapped in a corner it didn’t look like he was getting out of and all he could do was wait for when the feds decided to drop the bomb.
16.
Sins of the Father
Frank Calabrese Jr. Turns Informant
Frank Calabrese Jr. was fed up. Specifically, he was fed up with his father, Frank Sr. He was fed up with being lied to. He was fed up with being bullied. And he was fed up with having the future of an entire mob crew placed on his shoulders. After years of abuse at the hands of his dad, the mob hit man, Frank Jr., decided to do something about it. Incarcerated in a federal prison in Milan, Michigan, alongside his father—both there as a result of a 1995 racketeering conviction that took down Frankie Breeze and several underlings, including his two sons—and unhappy with his father’s decision to continue living a life of crime, even behind bars, he reached out to the Chicago FBI office. In a letter dated July 27, 1998, and addressed to agent Tom Bourgeois, Frank Jr., offered up his cooperation in constructing yet another case against his father. One he hoped would keep him in prison for the rest of his life.
I am sending you this letter in total confi dentiality. It is very important that you show or talk to nobody about this letter, except who you have to. The less people that know I am contacting you the more I can and will be able to help you. What I am getting at is I want to help [you] and the GOVT. I need you and only you to come out to Milan FCI and we can talk face to face. NOBODY, not even my lawyers, know that I am sending you this letter, it is better that way for my safety. Hopefully, we can come to an agreement when and if you choose to COME HERE. Please if you decide to come make sure very few staff at Milan know your reason for coming because if they do they might tell my father and that would be a danger to me. The best days to come would be TUES or WEDS. Please no recordings of any kind, just bring pen and lots of paper. This is no game. I feel I have to help you keep this sick man locked up forever.
Bourgeois, a 22-year veteran of the FBI, was familiar with both Calabreses, as he had worked feverishly through the late 1980s and early 1990s putting together the case that would eventually send both of them to jail. Born in Baltimore, his dad was a Maryland-based FBI agent who was killed in the line of duty when Tom was just two years old. Moving to New Jersey with his mother and new step-dad when he was six, he attended high school in suburban Redwood and then college at Marquette University in Milwaukee. Joining the FBI in 1981, Tom spent his first three years of service in Wisconsin and then South Carolina, before being assigned to the Organized Crime Unit in the Chicago office in 1984.
“When I first got Frank Jr.’s letter, we immediately sat down as a unit and mapped out a plan to parlay his possible cooperation into a major investigation and hopefully a big bust,” Bourgeois recollects. “I wasn’t necessarily surprised that Frank Jr. wanted to come over to our side, but at the same time, the letter took me a little off guard because I wasn’t expecting to receive it. Needless to say, it was a big deal and had to be dealt with very carefully. We had a hunch that Frank Sr. didn’t treat his sons that well. Informants told us about Frank Jr. being berated in public by his dad for being too soft on debtors he was collecting from and stuff like that. So we definitely saw him as a possible weak link in the fence that surrounded his father. I think he saw in the way we handled him through all the stuff that went down with the original bust that we weren’t monsters, like his dad might have made us out to be. We treated him like a gentlemen and did some stuff like return some of the items we seized in a raid of his house, that we thought might endear us to him. After his sentencing in the mid-1990s, I approached him when his father wasn’t looking, and gave him my card. From that point on, the ball was in his court. Luckily for us, he decided to do something about it.”
BROUGHT into the Chicago mafia at a very early age, Frank Jr., had little choice what line of work he would go into as an adult. Frank Sr. figured if The Outfit life was good enough for him, it was good enough for his oldest son. The fact that Frank Jr. was a Golden Gloves boxing champion as a fourteen-year-old convinced Frank Sr. even more that the street life was the right fit for his son. Frankie Breeze started sending Frank Jr. out on collection assignments while he was still in high school. First, he gave him a series of adult bookstores and movie theaters to go to on a weekly basis to collect street tax profits. Then he promoted him to collecting juice loan payments from clients of Frankie Breeze’s loan sharking business, even personally teachi
ng him the best way to rough up those who either refused to or couldn’t pay. Following his teenage years, his father got him on the payroll at the City of Chicago’s Sewer Commission and began mentoring him in the tricks of loan sharking, bookmaking, and arson for hire.
The older Frank Jr. got, the more he got involved with his dad’s work for The Outfit. The more involved he became in mob affairs, the more money he made and the crazier his life became. He developed a cocaine problem and was prone to fits of rage, behavior he picked up from his father. And the violence his dad exhibited in his job and tried to teach his son to emulate was not always confined to the street. Sometimes it came home. When Frank Jr. told his dad that he was dating a girl that his father did not approve of, Frank Sr. beat him up. When Frank Sr. discovered that Frank Jr. had stolen over a half a million dollars in cash from his personal stash, he stuck a gun in his face and told him, “I’d rather kill you than have you disobey me.”
Eventually, Frank Jr.’s work with his dad got them both sent to prison, convicted on charges of running a large-scale juice loan racket—one of the biggest loan-sharking rings ever to operate in the city’s history—the case that was built by Tom Bourgeois and his fellow agents who worked the Calabreses’ South Side crew. Before they left to serve their prison terms, Frank Jr., sick of living a life of crime and being terrified of his gangster father all the time, asked Frank Sr. to give up his racket empire once he returned home and go straight. Father and son embraced and Frank Sr. promised to abide by his wishes.
However, once the pair got to prison in Michigan, Frankie Breeze was singing a different tune. Despite his son’s reservations about spending the rest of his life in The Outfit, he began to speak often about eventually turning over control of his crew and loan-sharking operation to him. He desperately wanted Frank Jr. to carry on the Calabrese name in the Chicago mafia long after he was gone. The fact that Frank Jr. had no desire to follow in his footsteps and had made it clear that he wanted him to retire from the mob after his release from prison, didn’t seem to deter him from steering his son in the direction of a future in the underworld.
Coming to the realization that his father had no intention of leaving The Outfit behind as he had promised, Frank Jr. felt he had no other option but to turn against him. He had a lot to offer the FBI, including shedding insight into the long dormant John Fecoratta murder investigation.
“I went out to Milan to see Frank Jr. for the first time in August of 1998,” said Bourgeois. “Things had to be kept real quiet because we didn’t want Frank Sr. to have any idea about what was going on. The staff at the prison was real helpful in that regard and did everything in their power to make sure our business with Frank Jr. went as smooth as possible. When I got there, he told me about the Fecoratta hit and how he knew that it was his father and uncle who did it and how his uncle got shot in the process. His dad used to tell war stories and that was one of the ones he talked about a lot. I knew if it checked out, it would be a major development and could lead to some big things. You see, Frank Jr. was terrified of his father. I think he thought he was going to kill him or eventually get him killed somehow. He basically knew his dad was a menace and didn’t want him doing any more harm. His thinking was it would be better for everyone if he was to stay behind bars for the rest of his life. From that conversation with Frank Jr., we opened up the Family Secrets investigation.”
WITH Frank Jr.’s cooperation secured, the next step for the FBI was to see if they could use the recently attained information to flip Nick Calabrese and to get Frank Jr. to get his father on tape and talking about life in The Outfit. Visiting Nicky Breeze in Pekin Federal Prison, in Pekin, Illinois, where he was doing his time, Bourgeois and fellow FBI agent Mike Hartnett explained to him the situation.
“I went in there and I didn’t play any games with him,” said Bourgeois. “I said to him point blank: ‘We got solid information that you killed John Fecoratta, and we have a court-ordered DNA test, blood test, and X-ray, that’s going to prove it.’ I told him, ‘There was blood at the scene that wasn’t Fecoratta’s, and we know it was yours. There was a glove left behind, and we know it has your DNA on it. And we know that you got shot while pulling the job, and when we x-ray you, we’re going to see it.’ He just sat there and turned white. Didn’t say anything, just nodded his head, like he knew he was in big trouble.
So, we get the X-ray back and it lights up like a Christmas tree. You can see the chipped bullet fragments from in his arm clear as day. And then the DNA and blood tests come back, and they’re both positive matches for what we had at the crime scene. We had Nicky boxed in, and he was fully aware of his predicament without us having to spell it out for him. I go back to Pekin and tell him the news. I say, ‘We got all this evidence, and its pointing directly at you.’ I also tell him, ‘We’re not stupid, and we know you weren’t alone on this, and we know there were people a lot higher up then you on The Outfit food chain that were involved with ordering the hit. That said, unless you want to help us, you’re gonna end up taking the rap.’ And in this case, the rap meant the government was going to seek the death penalty against him. He still didn’t really respond, other than simply acknowledging the situation. We left there, and told him if he wanted to talk, we’d be there to listen. We broke contact after that for a while.”
The following February, they had Frank Jr. wired for sound, recording conversations with his dad behind the prison walls, trying to get him to divulge as much incriminating information as he could without arousing suspicion. Since Frank Jr. was a big music fan and known for walking the prison yard and recreation areas with headphones attached to his ears blaring his favorite tunes, Bourgeois and the Bureau’s technical support staff thought it would be best to bug his portable Walkman.
At the same time, in a move to get Frank Sr. to gear his conversations toward certain specific subjects, like past murders that could possibly be pinned on him and to inject an overall climate of paranoia into The Outfit as a whole, the FBI began a disinformation campaign. They sent their agents and informants out into the street and told them to imply to as many people as possible that they had more people cooperating with them in some large, unnamed investigation than they actually did. Frank Jr. also knew the best way to get his dad talking was to use his uncle Nick—a person Frank Sr. had developed simmering tensions with since their conviction—as a catalyst to goad him into discussion.
For the next year, as Frank Sr. held court with his son in their time away from their cells, almost every word he spoke was making its way back to the government. And once Frankie Breeze began to talk, he didn’t stop. And boy did he like to talk. He talked about the past—how his brother Nick came to him and asked to be brought into the family business:FRANK SR.: One time we were talking at Slicker Sam’s. This was in the sixties. ’66. After Larry died. Was it after Larry died, let me think a minute. No, yes it was after Larry died. So it had to be ’67 or ’68. I would think it was either ’68 or ’69....Yeah, so we were talking and he says to me, I’d like to get into something like you know what you’re doing. I said, Nick, I said, I would like to have you with me, but you know, this is a rough life, Nick....I says I can’t promise you what we’re going to do. But in the mean time, I always got him all of his jobs. Any job that Uncle Nicky had, I got him.
FRANK JR.: I mean I was just wondering like what made him decide, ’cause I really think that once he started doing that, he didn’t want to be there no more. It just seemed like it.
FRANK SR.: I wish he would have told me...ya know, if he would have told me, if he’d been honest with me and said listen, I only want to do this part. I don’t want to do that part...I would have respected that.
He talked about the present—his fear that his brother is going to end up cooperating with the government against him and The Outfit:Feb 14, 1999
FRANK JR.: I’m talking about in his own mind. Its his biggest enemy, ya know.
FRANK SR.: Yeah, because you know what, Frankie? He created
fear in himself. He created fear because he knows his thinking ain’t right. You don’t see me fearing anything do you? I’m not scared of dying in prison, if I have to. I don’t want to. Believe me, I don’t want to.
FRANK JR.: Well, I don’t think anybody does.
FRANK SR.: But the thing is, if I have to, if I have to. But am I gonna, am I gonna put other people away. No, I can’t do that. No.
March 13, 1999
FRANK SR.: Isn’t uncle Nicky acting funny?
FRANK JR.: See, that’s what scares me. So, what are they gonna do? What do you think? They’re gonna come to you and see if you got a problem....
FRANK SR.: Frank, remember one thing. When you make your bed, you better sleep in it.
FRANK JR.: I understand that. Okay. I understand.
FRANK SR.: And in his case, in his case, he’s been doing a lot of shooting his mouth off....I told you before, I put it in God’s hands. That’s the only thing place, that’s the only person we have going for us. I don’t want to see anything happen to him, but I’m gonna tell you something. If somebody feels that its them or him, he’s gone. That’s the bed he’s made.
FRANK JR.: ...Are they gonna make sure that you got no problem with that, if they had to go to that extreme, because they don’t want a problem with you? That’s your brother.