by Sam Giancana
The venerable Rick Halperin, Joey Lombardo’s lawyer, deferred his opening statement until he was ready to present his case to the jury later on in the trial. When, nearly, two months later, he addressed the jury on his client’s behalf, he implored them to “Keep an open mind” and, point blank, “Joey Lombardo did not kill Daniel Seifert,” and “Joey Lombardo is not, was not, and has never been a capo or member of the Chicago Outfit.” Halperin, who admitted that Lombardo had run a popular neighborhood dice game for many years and chalked up his imprisonment in the 1980s for illegal activity relating to Las Vegas to a poor selection of friends and business associates, told the jury that upon release from prison in 1992 his client went clean. “He decided to withdraw from the life,” he said. The new Joey Lombardo was, “older, smarter, wiser.”
Opening arguments concluded the following Monday afternoon and the first group of witnesses were ready to be called. The tip of the iceberg had only been lightly nicked. There was an entire avalanche forthcoming and defendants and attorneys alike braced themselves for what would end up being the legal ride of their lives.
FIRST up on the witness list was Jim Wagner, former FBI organized crime squad leader and at that time, head of the Chicago Crime Commission. Wagner who was called by prosecutors to kick off their case by outlining the history and structure of the mob in Chicago, so jurors could get a basic understanding of the landscape the trial would be set in. Following Wagner, who was clear and concise with his breakdown of The Outfit, William “Red” Wemette was called to the stand. Starting with Wemette, it appeared that the prosecution was intent on building the first portion of its case against Joey Lombardo, the most high profile of all the defendants.
The owner of an adult bookstore in the Old Town area of the city, Wemette testified to being extorted by the mafia for the fourteen years he had been in business. Having voluntarily worn a wire for a period of time, he explained that to operate in the industry he was forced to get permission from Joey Lombardo and pay 50 percent of his gross profits to Lombardo’s collectors. When asked by prosecutor Mitch Mars if he could see the man he knew as Lombardo in the courtroom, before Wemette could point him out for the record, Lombardo stood up and smiled.
To augment its charge of extortion, the prosecution played a tape of a conversation between Wemette and Frank Schweihs in which Schewis informed Wemette to ignore overtures from other mobsters like Michael “Mikey the Fire Bug” Glitta, who were trying to shake him down for protection money and to continue to pay Lombardo, who at the time was in prison.
“Mike (Glitta) has nothing to do with this joint,” Schwies told him. “If Mike fucks with you, he’s in a world of fucking trouble with me. Serious fucking trouble that he won’t overcome. . . . This is a declared fucking joint. He has no business fucking with it and he cannot ever come back and tell us he didn’t know. . . . Lumbo [another nickname for Lombardo] said it’s real fucking clear to him and he’s not to fuck with ya. . . . So what does he think, that things have fucking changed cause Lumbo’s sitting in the fucking joint? He knows how things work. . . . This guy is never to come in here no more and he’s not to call ya. If he should call you, say listen don’t call me, I’ve made other arrangements, bye. That’s all you tell’em. Ok? . . . All right, you’re with us, you’re with me and there ain’t no one gonna fuck with you. Ok? Case closed.”
The next afternoon, another audio surveillance excerpt was played—this one involving Lombardo himself. In a conversation with longtime St. Louis-based mob attorney Morris Shenker regarding the lawyer’s potential sale of his shares of stock in the Dunes Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Lombardo implored him to go along with The Outfit’s wishes.
LOMBARDO: We’re at a point now where its shit or get off the pot, you know what I mean. We either get what we got coming to us or we don’t get what we got coming to us.
SHENKER: Nobody’s telling me what to do.
LOMBARDO: Excuse me, I’m just here to bring back a message. And let me tell you something, if they make a decision and they tell me to come back and give you a message to pay, you can fight the system if you want, but I’m gonna tell you one thing: You’re 72 now, right....If you defy it, I assure you you won’t reach 73.... Allen [Allen Dorfman, his contact with The Outfit before meeting Lombardo] is meek and harmless. The people behind him are not.
Alva Johnson Rogers, a one-time Outfit lieutenant under Lombardo, was brought in to testify. Rogers, a native of Texas who met Chicago mobster Marshall Caifano in prison and then followed him back to the Windy City after his release to work for Lombardo, was a mainstay in The Outfit for a portion of the 1970s. Nicknamed “Johnny the Rabbit,” he aided Lombardo in the syndicate’s takeover of the area’s porn industry and testified to being in The Clown’s presence the morning after the 1974 murder of Danny Seifert. According to Rogers, while he, Caifano, and Lombardo were at a local driving range hitting golf balls, Lombardo said, “That son of a bitch won’t be testifying against anyone now,” referring to Seifert’s intent to take the stand against him in the pension fund fraud case he was indicted in.
In one of the most powerful moments to take place during the entire trial, Seifert’s widow, Emma, took the stand to conclude the first week of testimony. Describing her husband’s slaying, an incident in which she and her son were held at gunpoint in the couple’s office, while masked and armed assailants chased him through the parking lot, eventually killing him, she said in an emotional, yet assertive tone, “I screamed, but obviously not loud enough, because Daniel didn’t hear me. . . . They killed my husband.” Before leaving the witness box, Seifert testified that the physical size and build of one of the masked men, as well as the way he moved on his feet, made her believe it was Lombardo.
The month of July started out with a former electronics store salesman identifying Lombardo as the man he sold a police scanner to around the time of the Seifert murder and an FBI fingerprint expert testifying that a fingerprint from Lombardo’s left middle finger was found on an application for a car title for a brown Ford LTD that was used as the getaway vehicle in the Seifert hit. However, following the fingerprint analysis, the prosecution switched the gears in its case. While the opening section of its witness list focused on Joey Lombardo, they now set their sites directly on Frank Calabrese, preparing to pepper the courtroom with the most riveting material available in its arsenal over the next two and a half weeks.
On the Tuesday before the July 4th holiday, which was going to bring a three-day break from trial proceedings, the government’s first star witness, Frank Calabrese Jr., a burly and balding man who bore a stunning resemblance to his father, was called to the stand. Frank Jr., who was now living in Arizona, told the jury the story of his childhood, playing football at Elmwood Park’s Holy Cross High School, working at a local pizzeria as a teenager, and becoming a member of his dad’s crew, doing collections with his uncle Nick. He spoke of developing a bad cocaine habit and stealing money from his father, which he used on drugs, various exotic vacations, and for opening a restaurant—La Luce, located on the corner of Lake and Ogden—that eventually floundered.
According to Frank Jr., this resulted in physical abuse at the hands of his father. “My father cracked me and started yelling at me,” he testified. “He pulled out a gun and stuck it in my face. He said, ‘I’d rather have you dead than have you disobey me.’ I started crying. I started hugging and kissing him. I said, ‘Help me, help me do the right thing.’ ”
When everyone returned from their holiday the next Monday morning, Frank Jr. continued delivering the lurid details of living under the thumb and in the gargantuan shadow of the man they called The Breeze. He said that by the time he reached his thirties, his dad had begun grooming him to eventually take over his crew.
“One day everything will be mine,” Frank Jr. said his father once told to him. As a result, his responsibilities increased to handling most of the bookkeeping for crew finances, the acquiring and stashing of artillery in strategic locations,
and looking after day-to-day business of the crew’s rackets when his dad or uncle were indisposed.
He was also schooled in the fundamental rules and traditions of life in The Outfit. “You could never leave,” Frank Sr. told his son. “Once you’re in, you’re in for life.” While enduring glares and loud scoffs from his father just a few feet away at the defense table, Frank Jr. said that his dad explained to him that, “One of the rules of The Outfit was that your family, your Outfit family came before your blood family . . . and also came before God.”
Fed up with his dad’s bullying and bravado, Frank Jr., in the midst of serving his almost five-year sentence in federal prison for being a member of his crew, told the jury how he decided to turn against his father—after his promise to go straight was broken—and help the government build a case that would keep the already imprisoned Calabrese Sr. behind bars forever.
To conclude his direct examination, the prosecution played their first trump card of the trial, a virtual smoking gun—the tapes Frank Jr. made of his father basically talking his way into a life jail sentence. He explained that he baited his dad into pouring his heart and mind out to him by feigning interest in becoming more involved in his rackets and by pitting his father, a bitterly jealous and spiteful man, and uncle against each other. The jury was thoroughly enthralled as well as disgusted by some of the many jarring portions of audio surveillance played for them.
Upon cross-examination, Frank Jr. admitted to loving his father, yet at the same time detesting his life in the mafia. “I love him, but not some of his ways,” he said to his dad’s attorney, Joe Lopez, who did his best to paint his client as a harmless blowhard whose boasts were mostly empty of any substance. Constantly pounding home the fact that Frank Jr. was an admitted thief and drug addict, not to mention a failed professional actor, Lopez tried his best to discredit him to little avail. The fact remained that no matter how many insults he threw the younger Calabrese’s way in his effort to undermine his testimony, the tapes and Frank Sr.’s own voice on them didn’t lie.
FRANK Calabrese Jr. was excused from the witness box on July 13. He was soon followed by Michael Talerico, the fifty-five-year-old reputed Chinatown Outfit heavy, who at one point in the 1980s was suspected by the FBI to be acting as a currier of syndicate skim money from Las Vegas to Chicago. Talerico, Angelo and Jimmy La Pietra’s nephew and a former son-in-law of Frankie Schweihs, testified that at the behest of his uncles, he paid street tax to the Calabrese crew and was physically attacked by Ronnie Jarrett in 1997 when he stopped due to Frank’s and Nick’s incarceration.
Then when the near-twenty jurors might have thought they couldn’t hear anything more disturbing than what they heard when Frankie Breeze’s own son testified against him, his brother and former collaborator in chaos, Nick, was called to testify on the late afternoon of July 16—enter government star witness number two. Wearing a gray sweatsuit, Nick Calabrese, arguably the most important cooperating witness in the history of Chicago crime, took the stand to the sound of a hushed courtroom. As Calabrese made the approximately ten-foot walk from the door to the witness box, nobody present could take their eyes off him. He was the living, breathing sound of annihilation to the five defendants sitting before him and possibly many more in the future. The silence of anticipation was deafening. The testimony everybody had been waiting for since the day Nicky Breeze switched sides from the bad guys to the good guys nearly five years earlier, was about to begin.
Even though the first day of his testimony lasted a little more than an hour, it definitely lived up to the hype. To start things off, Calabrese admitted that he was in fact a made member of the mafia and described The Outfit’s leadership and protocol up until the time he became a witness for the government in 2002. He recounted how he got his start in the local underworld by working for his brother Frank, and then openly copped to each murder in the indictment that he played a part in personally. Explaining how he quickly learned that killing was just another part of the job, he said, “If you got an order to kill someone, you had to do it or you’d get killed yourself.” Later on in his testimony, he would talk about his official entry into the mafia through a making ceremony overseen by Joey Aiuppa and Al Tornabene that he, his brother, Jimmy Marcello, Frank Belmonte, “Little Tony” Zizzo, Albert Tocco, and Rocky Infelice went through inside a closed restaurant basement in 1983.
The next morning Calabrese, dressed in a starched, white, button-down shirt and blue jeans, was back on the stand and while being carefully guided by Mitch Mars, began detailing all of the aforementioned murders. Resembling more stockbroker than sociopath, wearing thin spectacles with his gray hair shortly cropped, he first spoke of participating in the August 1970 homicide of Michael “Hambone” Albergo. Calabrese told of being asked by his brother to help him dig a hole to put a body in, thinking it was a joke because he had only been working with his crew for a few months. It wasn’t.
Instead, according to Nick, he was taken to a construction site near the old Comiskey Park and once there aided Frank in shoveling a large-size crevice into the earth where a soon-to-be dead gangster would be placed. Continuing the tale of his inaugural slaying, Calabrese recalled how one of his brother’s cronies, Ronnie Jarrett, lured Albergo into a stolen four-door Chevrolet and while on the way back to the construction site, he helped Jarrett hold Albergo’s arms behind his back while Frank strangled him to death. Albergo was stripped of his clothes and eventually thrown into the hole that Frank and Nick had dug earlier. “At this point, I wet my pants, I was so scared,” Nick said of the burial.
Noticeably shaken, he told the story of planting a bomb underneath the car of Michael Cangoni and then watching as his wife drove their children to school, barely missing being blown up themselves by avoiding driving past a plant car housing a detonation device inside it. Shortly thereafter, he watched as Cangoni was blown to pieces as he drove onto the expressway.
He spoke of the 1978 double homicide of Vincent Moretti and Donald Renno in a Cicero bar, where he, his brother, and others (Jimmy La Pietra, Tony Borselino, Butch Petrocelli, Frank Saladino, Joe Ferriola, Ronnie Jarrett, John Fecoratta, and John Monteleone) beat, stomped, and strangled the pair to death in retribution for the break-in at Tony Accardo’s house a few months earlier. Moretti was involved in the conspiracy to rip off the Big Tuna, but Renno just happened to be with him when his time was up. “I was pulling one end of the rope and I had my foot against his head,” Nick said of helping carry out the savage murder of Vince Moretti. “Then I noticed Goomba [Saladino] got on and started jumping on him . . . three or four times on his chest.”
Previously, Calabrese testified about how his brother Frank told him never to speak of the murders they committed together after their completion and to either refer to them in code or by using the term it. After the Moretti and Renno hits, the brothers referred to it as “The Strangers in the Night,” due to the fact that it was the song playing on the bar’s jukebox when the killings took place.
Calabrese talked about the murder of John Mendell, the ringleader of the Accardo break-in, who was beaten and strangled death to death by Nick, Frank Sr., Goomba Saladino, and Ronnie Jarrett in Ronnie Jarrett’s mother-in-l aw’s garage and the slayings of Richard “Chico” Ortiz and Arthur Morawski in 1983, where Nick and Jimmy Di Forti blew the pair away with shotguns.
He talked about the Butch Petrocelli murder where the Calabrese brothers, Jimmy La Pietra, and Frank Santucci jumped Petrocelli in a Cicero storefront down the street from a social club frequented by Angelo La Pietra: “It happened so fast,” Nick recalled. “He was on the ground. I don’t remember if we taped his legs or not, but I do remember holding him down and my brother choking him.”
He talked about the Nick D’Andrea murder in which, according to him, D’Andrea was killed when Nick, Jimmy Marcello, Sam Carlisi, Angelo La Pietra, and Tony Chiaramonti accidentally beat him to death while interrogating him for details regarding the botched assassination attempt on Al Pilotto’s
life: “The bat just bounced off him like I was hitting him with rubber,” he said about being instructed by Carlisi to beat D’Andrea with a Louisville Slugger. “So, I dropped the bat and jumped on him . . . I had my arms around his neck and I finally worked my way to having some leverage and he fell on top of me . . . the guy was moaning and Carlisi was hitting him with the back end of a shotgun.”
He talked about the Emil Vaci murder where according to Calabrese, with Paul Schiro and Jimmy Di Forti standing lookout, he killed Vaci in a van that was being driven by Joey Hansen: “He says ‘oh, no,’ ” Nick remembered. “He says ‘I promise I’m not going to say nothing.’ . . . I shot him in the head.”
During the most high-profile testimony of the trial, he recounted the Spilotro brothers double homicide. He told of being nervous as he waited in the basement of a suburban residence for the brothers to be brought down under the ruse that they were each receiving a promotion. “At this time I’m wound up,” he said. “I’m tense . . . I’m focusing on what I’m going to do.”
He remembered greeting Michael Spilotro with a handshake before holding him down as Louie Eboli strangled him and then hearing Tony Spilotro unsuccessfully request a final prayer before being killed.
When he told his brother Frank that he had been assigned to be one of the Spilotros’ killers before the murders took place, he recalled his brother being upset that he wasn’t included in the bloodletting. “Why didn’t they ask me, I want to be there too,” he testified that Frank said to him. Nicky Breeze also talked about going out to eat at local Baker’s Square with Jimmy La Pietra, Joe Ferriola, and John Fecoratta after the murders and being advised by La Pietra, his captain at that time to “have your brother give you a raise,” in return for the good job he had done.