by Sam Giancana
Even after Zagel warned that any further testimony regarding anything that wasn’t fact would end up with him being held in contempt of court, his temper continued to flair. “Your honor, how I am supposed to defend myself if I can’t tell the truth,” he asked, his face turning more red by the second. “How am I supposed to prove something to this jury if I keep getting objected. . . . They stole two million dollars from me.”
Taken to task for how poorly he treated his two sons by prosecutor John Scully during his cross examination, Calabrese vehemently insisted that it wasn’t true, that he pled guilty to loan-sharking charges in 1995 in order to save his sons jail time.
“He’s [Frank Jr.] been lying to you people real good,” he said. “I would never want to be affiliated with the mob. There’s my son! [He pointed to Kurt, seated in the gallery]. Ask him, he’ll be glad to tell you.”
Challenged on his use of the words I and we while discussing murder on the prison recordings made by Frank Jr., he got snarky with Scully over semantics. “Who is we?” Scully asked
“It’s not me,” Calabrese replied.
“So we is not you? ” Scully said.
“No, it’s not,” Calabrese shot back.
“So the I is not really I?” a bewildered Scully questioned.
“Correct,” Calabrese said.
THE final defendant to take the stand in his own defense was Anthony Doyle, the former Chicago cop charged with passing valuable information to Frankie Breeze while he was in prison. Doyle outright denied doing anything illegal during his visits with the jailed mobster, claiming that he was only going to see Calabrese out of loyalty to a boyhood friend. He categorized the visits as boring and difficult to comprehend as Calabrese would often talk in code. At one time assigned to the Chicago Police Department’s evidence storage facility, Doyle admitted to divulging the date that the bloody glove from the John Fecoratta murder scene was handed over to authorities from the FBI, yet claimed to not know the specifics of the evidence taken by the feds.
Most of the blame for passing information to and from the imprisoned Calabrese, in his opinion, deserved to be placed on Michael Ricci, his fellow Chicago police officer charged in the Family Secrets case, but who, to Doyle’s great convenience, was dead. While being cross-examined by prosecutor Markus Funk, he refuted the implication that a recorded conversation between him and Calabrese, where he responded to Calabrese’s comment that his brother Nick should see a psychiatrist by saying he needed “shock treatment,” meant that he endorsed physical harm to the mega-i nformant.
Fearing the jury could be getting restless and numb from more than two months sitting in the same courtroom, the defense rested on Thursday, August 24, after spending less than two weeks presenting its case. Short and sweet was the name of the game. Attorneys for Lombardo, Schiro, Calabrese, Doyle, and Marcello hoped that that the jurors’ deliberations were anything but.
CLOSING arguments began on Monday, August 28. The prosecution team, first up to bat, replayed the audiotapes of Frank Calabrese talking about his involvement in the various murder plots charged. Standing behind Frankie Breeze, who was brandishing his trademark smirk, Markus Funk responded to one particular portion of the tapes that heard Calabrese breaking out in a hardy laugh regarding one of his homicide victims. “You can hear that man laughing, laughing about the murders,” he said. “There’s nothing funny about that is there? It was not laughable. It was outrageous. . . . Frank Calabrese, the man with the smile. There’s nothing to smile about in this case.”
Funk questioned why, if Calabrese had nothing to hide, was he so outwardly terrified of his brother possibly defecting to the FBI and why, if he was not the murderer he was alleged to be, was he heard constructing an alibi on one of the tapes played. When it was Mitch Mars’s time to speak, he told the jury that Joey Lombardo “dummied up” by not acknowledging the extent of his knowledge relating to The Outfit and then outlined seventeen reasons he should be convicted of the Daniel Seifert murder, including his fingerprint on the title application for the rental car used in the hit; testimony by Seifert’s brother Ronald, who said that Lombardo called him in the weeks leading up to the hit and told him to straighten his brother out; and the fact that he didn’t relay his police station alibi to the FBI agents who came to question him on the evening of the murder.
“I submit to you it’s now time to hold accountable four defendants, Joseph Lombardo, James Marcello, Frank Calabrese, and Paul Schiro, who have gotten away with murder for far too long,” Mars said.
Joe Lopez, attorney for Frank Calabrese, lived up to his nickname “The Shark” by immediately going into attack mode as soon as he got up to address the jury. He called Frank Calabrese Jr. a lousy son and a compulsive liar who manipulated his dad into telling him stories about murders he only knew from newspaper articles. “He lies and lies and continues to lie because he’s nothing but a liar,” Lopez said of his client’s offspring. He bashed Nick Calabrese, calling him “The Grim Reaper,” saying that his murderous ways put a wrench into any possibility of him being able to rebut any of his allegations via trial testimony. “The witnesses I could have called in this case, they’re all dead,” he said. “Nick killed them all.”
Despite admitting that his client probably wasn’t being completely truthful on the witness stand—falsely telling prosecutors that he couldn’t identify certain mobsters because he was “frightened to death” of the jury. Afraid they weren’t going to give him a “fair shake.” Rick Halperin, Joey Lombardo’s attorney, insisted that Lombardo had never been a made member of the mob and had ceased any mob-related activities a long time ago. “We’re not talking about redemption here, we’re talking about a decided change in lifestyle,” he said, continuing to try to employ the so-called withdrawal defense.
Jimmy Marcello’s lawyer, Marc Martin, focused his closing argument on repeatedly trying to undermine the testimony of Nick Calabrese, contending that he said what he said only to save himself from the death penalty. “Do you think he would lie to save himself?” Martin asked. “Do you think he would lie to save his own life? ”
Deliberating for four days, the jury finally reached a verdict on Monday, September 10—guilty on all counts for all five defendants. With the guilty verdicts secured, the jurors were sent back to deliberate on finding specific culpability for each individual murder. Before reconvening in the jury room, they were once again addressed by prosecutors, who reminded them of the specifics of the homicides alleged to have been committed by Calabrese, Lombardo, Marcello, and Schiro. As Mitch Mars recounted Calabrese’s reputed underworld exploits, he told the jury that Frankie Breeze “has left a trail of bodies, literally.”
Upset by the categorization, Calabrese shouted out “Them are lies!” from his seat at the defense table. It would later come out that several jurors saw Calabrese whisper, “You’re a fucking dead man,” to Markus Funk while he delivered a portion of his closing argument. The ship was going down and in typical, yet pathetic, manner, Calabrese was still trying to bark and bully his way to shore. (Interestingly enough, Funk would go toe-to-toe with another co-defendant just a few months later when at Frankie the German Schweihs’s pretrial hearing, Schweihs sneered at him from a wheelchair and barked, “You making eyes at me? . . . Do I look like a fag to you,” in the moments leading up to Judge Zagel taking the bench.)
Following an additional eight days of deliberations, the jury came back with guilty verdicts for ten of the eighteen murders in the case and three of the four defendants charged—Calabrese, Lombardo, and Marcello were found liable for the homicides, while jurors deadlocked on Schiro’s culpability. Joey Lombardo was found guilty of the Daniel Seifert murder; Jimmy Marcello was found guilty of the murders of both Spilotro brothers; and Frank Calabrese was found guilty of murdering Michael Albergo, William and Charlotte Dauber, Michael Cangoni, Richard Ortiz, Arthur Morawski, and John Fecoratta.
Over a year after the guilty verdicts came down, in December 2008, Judge Zagel began h
is sentencing of the defendants. In the time since the trial ended, longtime and highly revered U.S. prosecutor and mob nemesis Mitch Mars passed away from lung cancer and Frank Schweihs, one of the original co-conspirators who was still awaiting his day in court after being severed from the first trial due to illness, died of cancer. Surprising no one, Zagel was harsh in handing out punishment—Calabrese, Lombardo, and Marcello were all sentenced to life in prison. Paul Schiro, who the jury was undetermined about in regards to his role in the Emil Vaci murder, got a harsh twenty years. Twan Doyle got twelve years.
“In the end we’re judged by our actions, not by our wit or our smiles,” Judge Zagel said to Lombardo during his February 2009 sentencing. “In cases like this we’re judged by the worst things we have done. And the worst things you have done are terrible.”
“The last time I remember seeing my father, I was sitting in the back of a police car,” said Joe Seifert at Lombardo’s sentencing hearing. “It was sunny out and he was lying twisted in the grass. As I think about that image today, I wonder if I ever said good-bye.”
It was a dark day for The Outfit, but far from crippling. The positions held by each of the defendants on the street had long been filled way before the Family Secrets trial had even began. Anyone who believed differently was simply fooling themselves.
“Winning the case was a great victory for us, yet despite our best efforts, the stain on the community that is the Chicago Outfit will never be totally wiped clean,” said John Scully, looking back on the prosecution team’s outstanding accomplishment and peering forward to combating the mafia in the future. “Family Secrets wounded The Outfit, no doubt about it, but it did so more in shining a light on its activities and making people aware it is still around and kicking, than actually putting a dent into the entity as a whole. There’s no question in my mind that The Outfit will and probably already has come back strong from what happened at the trial. It’s our job, both as prosecutors and as ordinary citizens, to do everything we can to combat them and what they try to do and make their job as hard as humanly possible. There’s no one, singular victory that’s going to abolish the mob in Chicago. But it’s the little victories, the everyday chinks we can put in the armor of The Outfit, that will slowly undermine the organization and minimize its overall effect.”
19.
Now and Forever
Where Is the Outfit Today and Where Does It Go from Here?
Judge James B. Zagel issued his final sentence in the case in March of 2009 when Nick Calabrese, the only made member of the Chicago mafia to ever turn government witness, was given twelve years in prison. With credit for time already served, he will be out within four years and then be given a new identity and disappear into the witness protection program. Not counting the inevitable forthcoming appeals, after over a decade in the making, the Family Secrets case—all 125 witnesses and 225 exhibits—was finally over. The good guys won and the bad guys were all locked up. But what amount of damage had The Outfit really endured? Was the legal strike against the crime family a bite-size nick or a staggering blow, as intended?
The answer is probably somewhere in between. By no means has the mob in Chicago been slowed down. The Outfit’s assembly-line-type efficiency and multilayered command structure were designed to withstand these kind of government assaults. Yet, at the same time, it’s hard to believe that entire ordeal hasn’t provided considerable agitation and worry either. At the very least, the information revealed at trial—most shockingly the feds’ contention that current don, John Di Fronzo, was an integral participant in the murder of the Spilotro brothers—has informed The Outfit that other major investigations are in the works, information that certainly sent jitters up the syndicate pecking order.
Just like the former political machines that resided and ruled the city of Chicago throughout much of the last century, since its inception the mafia in the Windy City has developed its own machine—a multitiered power base with extreme depth and extraordinary reach that is still pumping today at full capacity. While some crime families across the country have dwindled in power and prestige in the recent past, The Outfit has remained strong. Although it will never regain the monumental influence and strength it once had, for La Cosa Nostra in America, the modern-day Chicago mafia is as good as it gets. The overall stability The Outfit has been able to display through the years is a epic feat and demonstrates the syndicate’s resiliency and everlasting durability, a trait that plays well in the mob’s always ongoing battle against the federal government.
However, there are still those who have their doubts about how far the current crop of Windy City mobsters can take The Outfit in the midst of the changing times.
“This new group of wiseguys will never be as successful as their predecessors, there’s just too much working against them,” said Richard Stilling, “A lot of these guys today plain don’t have the work ethic to be great criminals. There are a few that do, but they’re getting up in age and are on the way out in the next decade. In terms of quality mob guys, I don’t know how many are left. The new breed is get rich quick, bed as many broads as possible, and leave a good-looking corpse. A growing percentage of them are heavy into the drugs. I’m talking both selling and for personal use. They don’t have the code embedded in them like the old guys did. The old-school guys were around when the whole thing was built so they took more pride in the sanctity of the Family, living by the rules and stuff like that. Everybody today wants to get as much money as they can in the smallest amount of time and that mentality makes for letting your greed blind you from some traps you might not otherwise fall into. The old-timers knew it was a marathon, not a sprint. I’m not sure if these guys do.”
Others see socioeconomic issues as playing a major role in why The Outfit today will never be as powerful as it once was.
“Because of what I call the ‘suburbanization’ of the area over the last thirty-plus years among a host of other reasons, the mafia in Chicago will struggle to regain its former status,” said Robert Lombardo, a former cop and current professor of criminal justice at Loyola University of Chicago. “The core neighborhoods in the city are all gone. Places that have traditionally been fertile mob breeding ground have been virtually abandoned. Families that would have at one time selected to live close to their roots in the city now almost exclusively choose to live in the surrounding suburbs. The result is kids don’t grow up around The Outfit like they used to, they aren’t exposed to the wiseguy lifestyle that was at one time embedded and woven through all these former neighborhoods and fostered ambition in its young. Now, the wannabe wiseguys learn all they know about the mafia from movies. Its just not the same. The recruiting pool is raided and in turn, the organization loses the ability to grow.”
As long as the three pillars of the underworld—gambling, loan-sharking, and extortion—exist, organized crime and the mafia in one form or the other will be around and a force to be reckoned with. The market is bulletproof, a never-ending cycle that will eternally bear fruit. There will always be people who want to place a bet on a game, there will always people who can’t go to a bank to get a loan and must instead turn to the street, and there will always be weaker people to exploit and shakedown. The mob’s wheelhouse is never vacant. And in traditional mafia hot spots like Chicago, it often works overtime.
On the flip side of the coin, there are a limited amount of endings for those who choose to live there life by the code of the street. A majority of the time it’s not pretty or painless. How our story’s four main characters—Frank Calabrese, the ringleader; Nick Calabrese, the rat; Tony Spilotro, the rogue; and Joey Lombardo, the relic—concluded their tenures as top-of-the-line crime figures represent the three most likely scenarios. You will either be dead like Tony Spilotro, in jail like Frank Calabrese and Joey Lombardo, or in the witness protection program like Nick Calabrese. Instances of having careers in crime—like Outfit boss Tony Accardo, Jewish godfather Meyer Lansky, or East Coast don Carlo Gambino—never going t
o jail and dying peacefully—are few and far between.
Taking the hit from the Family Secrets bust and trial in stride, The Outfit has dusted itself off from the fall and moved forward. There are simply too many spokes on the proverbial wheel to have one bust take that much of a toll on the bottom line—which is what everyone in the game knows is the upper-echelons of the crime family making its money. For each crew boss and mob administrator in the city that is taken off the streets, there are dozens more behind him willing and able to take his place. Even in light of the tremendous amount of legal hassles you will be prone to encounter as a mafia skipper, there is simply too much money to be made and power to be had for people not to covet the job
“At some point you have to put the elation of the Family Secrets victory, no matter how satisfying it was and how proud you are of it, behind you and start building more cases and opening new investigations because the fight is always going to be there,” said FBI agent Ross Rice in late 2008. “By no means is organized crime in Chicago gone and we certainly know that. Maybe a bit weaker, but not gone. So, you just got to go back to work and fight the good fight. And there’s lots of them to fight, and that will probably never change. The Outfit in the new century is growing in a lot of different directions. New scams and shakedowns are being jump-started every day on some street corner, and the old staples are always going to be there for the mob to suck dry. It’s an interesting time in The Outfit’s history since a big chunk of the post-Accardo bigwigs are getting up in years and a new transition is going to be on the horizon soon. There are some middle-aged guys that have been around long enough to start to know what they’re doing and enough veterans on the street right now that can run a tight ship if we let them. It’s our job not to let them.”