In with the Devil

by James Keene

  Keene replied, “You ain’t tearing nobody up, punk.” The two stood staring at each other, but by this time their shouting had drawn a few guards. Finally, the weight lifter backed away and Jimmy backed off, too.

  The whole experience with the alphabet crew was a wake-up call for Keene. No matter how soft Milan seemed, he always had to stay on guard. Keene explains, “Most prison fights are over stupid shit and that’s totally unexpected.” A few weeks later, for reasons that were never explained, B, C, and L were thrown into solitary and then shipped to different prisons around the country. Keene still had to watch his back around black gangbangers, but he had also become friendly with the leader of the prison’s Black Muslims, which may have afforded him some added protection.

  Since being alone no longer seemed like such a privilege, Keene welcomed the arrival of a cellmate even though he was old enough to be his father. At sixty, Frank Calabrese Sr. had the stocky build and bulldog look of a graying Tony Soprano, but unlike James Gandolfini, he was the real thing, considered by federal prosecutors to be among the most vicious killers in the homicidal history of Chicago’s Mafia, known as the Outfit. Keene saw a very different side to Calabrese and says, “He was very mellow. An easygoing guy, kind of jolly and fun.” Calabrese loved that Jimmy had an Italian grandmother and practically treated him like a nephew, dispensing advice and offering to buy him food in the commissary. At night, they would sit around their hot plate with the commissary snacks and vegetables that Jimmy had rustled from his friends in the kitchen. “I taught him a few recipes I learned to cook in prison, and he showed me a few, too,” Keene remembers. “We made some goofy concoctions, just talking and hanging out.”

  Calabrese did not brag about the murders he had committed, but he didn’t deny them either. “He’d say, ‘So we had to whack the guy.’ But in his mind it was justified for the sake of the organization because they caught the guy stealing money from them. It was the price you paid for being in the mob.” Usually, Calabrese didn’t divulge any of the details of the hits, except in the case of Tony Spilotro, the Outfit’s out-of-control enforcer in Las Vegas. He was played with foaming-at-the-mouth fury by Joe Pesci in Martin Scorsese’s Casino, but the movie’s portrayal of Spilotro’s execution—along with that of his brother—was wrong, Calabrese told Keene. “Everybody thinks they were killed out in that cornfield. But they were really killed in a basement in Bensenville and then buried in a cornfield.” They were not buried well and were found by a farmer a few days later. Calabrese’s younger brother confessed that he killed the mobster who botched the burial.

  A few months after Calabrese became Jimmy’s cellmate, his son, Frank Jr., also arrived in Milan. He, too, started hanging out with Keene in the prison yard and the dining hall. A younger, bigger version of his father, with a little more hair on his bald pate, Junior did not seem to be as tough as the other mob guys. From Frank Jr.’s perspective, Keene was not like the other prisoners, either. “You’re more like the guys I hung around in college,” he told Jimmy. “Guys who were always going to parties and chasing girls.”

  As Keene and Frank Jr. began spending more time together, Frank Sr. suggested that his son become Keene’s cellmate instead. But it was Jimmy—not the big-time mobsters—who had to make the new arrangements happen. “There’s a myth about the clout that mobsters have inside federal prison,” Keene says. “Even though there were a lot of Chicago mobsters in Milan, none of them got shit.” Jimmy went to Surf, the guard he had befriended, and he switched Frank Jr. for Frank Sr. in Keene’s cell.

  In time, Jimmy got to know the mild-mannered son as well as he did his tough-talking father and felt as close as a member of the family to them. They even offered him a job in one of their restaurants when he got out. Despite the contrasts between father and son, Keene never saw any friction between the two men. “They were perfectly good friends,” he remembers. “We all hung around in the same group out on the prison yard. We’d walk the track together for hours and hours.”

  Much of the time, Keene says, the Calabreses discussed how they could get Frank Jr. out of prison. “They knew that the old man was going down for a long, long time, and nothing was more important for the father than seeing that his son didn’t do that time with him. The plan was for Junior to roll on his dad.”

  A decade later, in a Chicago courtroom, Frank Jr. did indeed testify against Senior in a celebrated federal case known as Family Secrets. Among other charges, Calabrese was accused of participating in eighteen contract killings—most notably Spilotro. Frank Jr. and other witnesses, including Frank Sr.’s younger brother, testified that the father often beat his son as he was growing up and forced him into crime. For some of the media covering the trial, Junior’s testimony was an oedipal act of betrayal, and they reported that Senior responded to it with contempt and red-faced fury. But as far as Keene is concerned, it was all an act. “He absolutely loves Junior, and he was doing what any good father would do for his son. My father would have done the same for me.”

  For the time that Jimmy was in Milan, his father somehow managed to remain a constant presence in Jimmy’s life. Big Jim would visit two or three times a month, usually making the four-hour trip himself, but sometimes bringing Jimmy’s brother or sister for company. “Once he came up and didn’t arrange for the visit the way you’re supposed to,” Keene remembers, “so he went right to the warden and told him how he used to be a cop, and the next thing you know, they had me see him that day in a private conference room—something that almost never happens.”

  While Keene’s mother might speak to him once a week, he usually talked to Big Jim three times a day. “Sometimes other inmates would be waiting for the phone and they would get mad at how much time I was taking. I would tell them I was talking to my attorney, so they’d cut me a little slack.” But the phone company didn’t cut any slack for his father. Big Jim’s toll for all the collect calls could be as high as $1,000 a month. “We better get you out of there soon,” he’d say to Keene, “because these phone bills are killing us.”

  Despite Big Jim’s obsession with getting his son out of prison, surprisingly he did not think Jimmy should accept Beaumont’s deal. After ten months at Milan, when Keene was summoned back to the Ford County Jail, he was not supposed to tell anyone about the secret mission. However, it proved impossible for him to keep his father in the dark. He swore him to secrecy and broke the news. Instead of being overjoyed, Big Jim was terrified. “Once you go down there,” he said, “they’ll own you. They could shoot you up with a drug and then say you tried to kill a guard. They write it down in your file and the next thing you know, they tack ten more years onto your sentence. It happens all the time. Guys go in those places for a few years and they never come out. They get lost in the system.”

  As always, Big Jim’s concerns struck home with Jimmy and were compounded by a delay in the processing of his transfer to Springfield. The problem, Beaumont explained, was that no federal prisoner had ever requested a transfer from a lower-security facility to the highest-security prisons known as U.S. Penitentiaries. “You tell a prison inmate that he’s going to a penitentiary,” Keene says, “and you might as well tell him he’s going to a hellhole.”

  Although some of the prisoners Keene met at Milan had long sentences, few had a life sentence.* But a penitentiary was full of lifers who had little to lose. Although Keene had been jumped in Milan, it was probably more likely to happen in Springfield, and the legal consequences for winning a fight might be worse than the physical consequences for losing it.

  As Keene’s doubts grew, the alternative of returning to Milan did not seem so bad, especially compared to the wretched conditions he was then experiencing in his temporary jail cell. “Ford County,” Keene says, “was like solitary confinement for six people.” Each pod, as they called it, had three tiny cells with two metal bed slabs hanging from the wall and an exposed toilet. “If the other guy took a shit while you were sleeping,” Keene says, “you literally woke up gag
ging with the smell.” The cells shared a dayroom less than twenty feet long with an exposed shower to one side. Making matters worse, his roommates tended to be illegal immigrants, most of whom were Mexicans and, in one case, a Cuban. Camaraderie was nonexistent. Their rudimentary English and Jimmy’s rudimentary Spanish did not make for long conversations and, in the case of the Cuban, led to incomprehensible games of Scrabble. “He’d put the most screwed-up words on the board, and I’d go, ‘Carlos, that is not a word, man,’ and he’d go, ‘It’s a word. It’s a word,’ and I’d say, ‘Okay, but you don’t get points for it.’ ”

  The pod left literally no place for privacy. Whenever Keene picked up the accordion folder with the material about Hall, he says, “One of the guys would be looking over my shoulder, asking, ‘What do you got? What do you got?’ ” His only time for study came at night, when he could read the file by the light from the hall that shone into his cell. The more he studied Hall, the stranger the case seemed to him. Keene put a lot of stock in his ability to win people over, but he wondered what he would have in common with this odd janitor from Indiana. Also, the FBI agent had placed all these conditions on approaching Hall, even demanding that Keene wait six months before talking with him. Six months could be a lifetime in Springfield.

  Keene finally decided to heed Big Jim’s advice. He would turn down Beaumont’s offer and return to Milan. But when he called his father to tell him about his decision, there was no answer. He left message after message and couldn’t get through to his brother, Tim, either. Finally, a call was picked up by his stepmother, whom Big Jim had married a year before. In a halting voice, she told Jimmy that Big Jim had had a stroke, but he didn’t want Jimmy to hear the news over the phone. He wanted to get out of the hospital first so that Jimmy could see he was okay.

  A few days later, Tim wheeled Big Jim into the visiting room. “Even thinking about it now makes me want to break down and cry,” Keene says. “The whole left side of his face drooped, especially the corner of his mouth. His eye was almost closed and the left side of his body was slumped over. Here was Superman hurt worse than I ever could imagine, and I knew it was a direct result of what I had done to him—all the worry and all the aggravation. We both just sat there for a while, looking at each other through the glass and crying. And I said, ‘Dad, I am so sorry. I’m going to get out of here.’ ”

  Then Big Jim spoke in a weak slur that was a sickening contrast to the deep, commanding voice he had once had. “Son, it’s not your fault. It’s my fault that you never got out of that life. I know you did it to help me. But someday, I’m going to find a way to help you get everything back.”

  “There he was practically dying in front of my eyes,” Keene says, “and what was his last wish? To help me.” Despite all of Big Jim’s financial reversals, he had always seemed physically indestructible. Now Jimmy wondered if his father would still be alive by the time he got out of prison.

  When Jimmy returned to his cell, he says, “All I had in my mind was that vision of my father slumped in the wheelchair. I couldn’t concentrate on the serial killer stuff or anything else, but finally I realized that this wasn’t just about me anymore. It was about him, too. I had to do everything in my power to get out of prison as soon as I could.” The next morning, he called his lawyer, Jeff Steinback. “I was very determined, like I was on a mission. I said, ‘Jeff, get this whole deal straightened out with Beaumont. Even if he doesn’t promise us what you want. I’m ready to go to Springfield.’ ”

  For Jimmy Keene, those few hours of passage from the Ford County jail to Springfield, Missouri, floated by like a dream. A team of three U.S. marshals retrieved him just as the sun was setting on a hot, humid day in August of 1998. It had taken Beaumont three months to get the necessary approval from the Bureau of Prisons and his higher-ups at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. Keene was led from the jail in the usual handcuffs and shackles, but once inside the van, to his amazement, the restraints were all removed and the marshals handed him a set of civilian clothes. Then, stunning him even further, they stopped at a nearby family restaurant and all went inside for a meal. While they ate, Keene remembers, “the marshals tried to school me. They kept saying, ‘Remember what Beaumont and the FBI agent told you. Don’t approach this guy too quickly.’ ”

  But Jimmy was only listening with half an ear. He couldn’t help but look around at the other diners, chatting or just eating their food, immersed in the humdrum of their daily unfettered lives. No one observing the four men at his table would have suspected that one was a prisoner and the others his guards. He says, “It made me feel like I was free again.”

  After dinner, they got back in the van and drove a few hours to an airport. They arrived just before midnight. When Keene had previously flown as a prisoner, he was chained inside a ratty old Con Air cargo plane. But this time, his ride was a sleek corporate jet with eight plush leather seats and carpeted walls. On board, the marshals served him snacks and soda. For much of the ninety-minute flight, he forgot about the danger and uncertainty that awaited him. It was almost as though his mission were already over.

  They landed at a little airport where a van with two other marshals was waiting for them. It was not yet dawn, so they still had some time to kill and drove around aimlessly for a few hours, stopping for some fast food. After they ate, they drove down tree-lined country roads. As daylight started to break, Jimmy could look out the window and see verdant green farmland to each side and moisture rising from it like steam. Once again, a warm feeling welled up inside him, and as he chatted and joked with the marshals, he says, “I felt like a normal guy again.”

  Most of the marshals didn’t look that much different from Jimmy. They were roughly his age and, like him, were fitness fanatics with big arms and tapered torsos. But when he actually tuned in to their conversation, “it started to bother me,” he says. “They had all these other things going on in their lives with family and career. They didn’t have to worry about going back to prison and dealing with some serial killer. In my mind we were all the same kind of guys. I could have been one of them. How did I end up on the other side?”

  All the reveries and regrets about his past life were suddenly wiped away when the van turned a corner and headed up a parklike drive. In the distance, jagged blocks of redbrick buildings rose incongruously from the Missouri plain, glowing in the early-morning haze. As they drove closer, he could see guard towers and fences of razor wire, all illuminated by shafts of light, sweeping back and forth.

  “This sure ain’t no Milan,” Keene murmured under his breath. Although built in a Depression-era institutional style with a white steeple topping off the central structure, the lighting and fences cloaked it in an ominous aura. “It was like some creepy medieval castle,” he remembers, “in the middle of nowhere.”

  The marshals had stopped talking, and when Jimmy brought his gaze back inside the van, he realized all eyes were on him. The driver executed an abrupt U-turn. “They could see how nervous I was getting and said they had to drive around a little more for me to relax.” But finally, at five o’clock, they circled back toward the entrance road. The marshal in charge solemnly announced that the time had come for Jimmy’s entrance.

  But as he stared again at the glowing redbrick complex, Keene had a serious case of cold feet. “Look, man,” he said, “I can’t do this. I can’t. This whole thing’s off. Let’s just go back.”

  All of the marshals chimed in to change his mind. “They were actually pleading with me,” Jimmy remembers. “They were saying, ‘Please, please give it a try.’ ”

  But Keene now focused on his worst-case scenario. “What if Beaumont backs out?” he asked. “Then I’ll be stuck here.”

  The marshals insisted just as vociferously that Beaumont would not back out; that no matter how tough the prosecutor seemed, they could vouch that he was always good for his word. Now the marshals glanced anxiously at their watches, too. They had a narrow window for his delivery, just as th
e guard shifts changed—so there wouldn’t be too many questions about the transfer—and just before the early morning alarm rang to wake the prisoners.

  Finally, the supervising marshal took charge. He had a buzz cut and was slightly older than the others. He had also met with Jimmy a few times before the pickup to prepare him for the transfer. “We can’t wait any longer,” he said firmly. “We’ve all put a lot of time and effort into this operation; me especially. If you’re going to do this for anyone, do it for me. I assure you it will be in your own best interest.”

  Seeing the aggravation in the marshal’s face, Keene realized that the Feds—and Beaumont in particular—would not soon forgive him for a last-minute scrub. There really was no backing out. “Okay,” Jimmy said. “Then let’s do this.”

  The driver used a card to buzz them through a sliding mesh gate. As they got closer, Keene could see other five-story buildings behind the central one, all joined by walls that circled a vast prison yard. They stopped at the prisoner intake dock, but as they climbed out of the van, one of the marshals put a hand on Keene’s shoulder and said, “Sorry, Jim, but we got to put you back in cuffs now.” As Keene felt the metal click into place around his wrists, his little dream of freedom popped like a soap bubble. The door to the prison opened, and Keene says, “From that second, I was just another scumbag prisoner again.”