Tony Ortiz sat on the edge of a bench in a federal courtroom in Chicago on Wednesday, eyes intent, as he listened to a secret prison tape recording of a reputed mob hit man, Frank Calabrese Sr.
Calabrese Sr. was allegedly describing how shotgun ammunition obliterated Ortiz's father, Richard, when he was killed in 1983.
"Tore 'em up bad," Calabrese Sr. said on the recording, played during the Family Secrets trial. "Big, big bearings," he said. "So them, them will f - - - - - - tear half your body apart."
Calabrese Sr. was describing the murder to his son Frank Calabrese Jr., whom he was grooming to take over his Outfit crew.
Instead, Calabrese Jr. was on the stand Wednesday, explaining the recordings he secretly made of his father while they were in prison in 1999. Calabrese Jr. wants his father, accused of 13 hits, in prison for good.
"God works in mysterious ways," Tony Ortiz said after the testimony.
Calabrese Sr. "bragged about the bullets tearing up my dad," Ortiz said. "It had to be tearing him up inside to see his son testify against him."
Calabrese Sr. contended Ortiz was killed because he was dealing drugs and doing juice loans without Outfit permission.
Tony Ortiz was only 12 when his father died and said he doesn't know what his father did, besides run a bar in Cicero. Ortiz, now 36 and with four kids of his own, just knows his dad didn't deserve to die, and so brutally.
Also slain was Ortiz's friend Arthur Morawski, who had nothing to do with Outfit life but happened to be with his friend in Ortiz's car.
"The Polish guy that was with him was a nice guy, OK?" Calabrese Sr. said on the tape. "But he happened to be at the wrong place."
Morawski sold Ortiz glasses for the bar Ortiz ran in Cicero on 22nd Street, the His 'N' Mine Lounge.
The two friends had just returned from the racetrack when Calabrese Sr. pulled up beside them with two Outfit killers in the car -- his brother and Outfit hit man Nick Calabrese, and the late reputed mob killer James DiForti.
Calabrese Sr. said the two gunmen froze when they pulled up to kill Ortiz. Calabrese Sr. said they had been stalking Ortiz for nine months.
Calabrese Sr. recalled how he had to nudge the men to leave the car. "OK now, out. Out, out, get out," Calabrese Sr. said on tape with a chuckle. "He was laughing about it," Tony Ortiz said. "That's what kills me the most."
Next to Ortiz in the courtroom was his mother, who wiped away tears, and his uncle, who sat stoically.
Calabrese Sr.'s attorney, Joseph Lopez, will begin cross-examining Frank Calabrese Jr. today. While Lopez hasn't addressed the Cicero killings, he has argued that much of the tape is a father making false boasts.
Calabrese Sr. detailed how the men prepared for the hit, from testing the shotguns to making sure the gunmen emptied their weapons into the victims.
Tony Ortiz said he got a little satisfaction watching Calabrese Sr.'s son testify against him.
"You can tell on the tapes he really loves his son," Ortiz said. "He still has the opportunity to talk to his son, although I doubt that will ever happen," Ortiz said. "I would give anything in the world to go out to the racetrack one more time with my dad."
Thanks to Steve Warmbir
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Monday, July 16, 2007
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Romantic Fling and Side Deals Led to Spilotro's Murder
Mobster Tony "The Ant" Spilotro was pocketing money he made from side deals behind the mob's back and boasting that some day he would occupy the throne of organized crime in Chicago. Making things worse, Spilotro was having a romantic fling with the wife of a Las Vegas-based mob associate.
"Right then a nail went in the coffin," convicted loan shark Frank Calabrese is heard saying on a tape made secretly — by his own son — and played Tuesday at the trial of Calabrese and four others accused in a conspiracy that included 18 murders, including Spilotro's. "Right then, that was one nail," Calabrese repeats.
Spilotro was known as the Chicago mob's man in Las Vegas and inspired the Joe Pesci character in the movie "Casino." He and his brother, Michael, were murdered in June 1986 and buried in an Indiana cornfield.
Calabrese says on the tape that sex with the wife of a mob member violates a code. "That is a no-no, that is a no-no, that is a friend and that's a commandment," he tells his son, who secretly recorded the conversation to help the FBI gather evidence against his father.
In short order, Spilotro and his brother both were murdered — on orders from the big boss of the mob at the time, Joey Aiuppa, Calabrese says. "Joey Aiuppa had a meeting before they all went to jail and he told them he wanted him (Spilotro) knocked down," Calabrese says, then quotes Aiuppa as saying: "I don't care how you do it. Get him. I want him out."
Calabrese, 69, is on trial along with James Marcello, 65; Joseph (Joey the Clown) Lombardo, 78; convicted jewel thief Paul Schiro, 70; and retired Chicago police officer Anthony Doyle, 62. They are charged with taking part in a racketeering conspiracy that included the murders of the Spilotro brothers and 16 others.
Aiuppa was the top boss of the Chicago mob. He died in 1997 at age 89, shortly after his release from prison where he served time for a casino skimming conviction. Lombardo was convicted in the same case.
The tapes that have been played for three days now were made at the Milan, Mich., federal correctional center where Calabrese and his son, Frank Calabrese Jr., were serving time for a loan-sharking conviction.
Unknown to the elder Calabrese, his son was helping the FBI, saying he believed his father would never leave the mob and he wanted to "expose my father for what he is." Jurors also have seen videos made at the prison.
On one tape, Calabrese Sr. also says it was Aiuppa who got Edward Hanley a position with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union. Hanley rose to become international president of the union, which represented employees ranging from bartenders to room maids.
Hanley, a one-time member of the AFL-CIO executive board, was repeatedly investigated by federal prosecutors but never charged. But experts often cited the union as an example of mob influence in labor.
On the tape, both Calabreses refer to Hanley — who retired from the union in 1998 and died in a Wisconsin auto accident — as "Uncle Ed" and the father says Aiuppa got him his first union job. "He started him off in the Cicero local," Calabrese Sr. says.
The tapes are a catalog of Chicago mob murders.
Calabrese Jr. interprets some of his father's remarks as confirming that he was on hand, watching from a scout car, when former mob enforcer William Dauber and his wife, Charlotte, were murdered in Lake County July 2, 1980. And likewise for the Sept. 14, 1986, murder of mobster John Fecarotta, allegedly by Calabrese Sr. brother Nicholas Calabrese, who has pleaded guilty to racketeering and is expected to be a prosecution witness.
Calabrese Jr. also testified that his father once drove him past a South Side parking lot and "gave me a nudge."
"I understood there was a dead body there," the son testified.
He apparently referred to the last remains of Michael "Hambone" Albergo, a mob figure whose body has long been sought by the FBI. Agents dug up a parking lot near U.S. Cellular Field, home of the Chicago White Sox, several years ago but have not said exactly what they found there.
Calabrese Sr. attorney Joseph Lopez said in his opening statement that they found "thousands of bones" but none traceable to Hambone Albergo.
"Right then a nail went in the coffin," convicted loan shark Frank Calabrese is heard saying on a tape made secretly — by his own son — and played Tuesday at the trial of Calabrese and four others accused in a conspiracy that included 18 murders, including Spilotro's. "Right then, that was one nail," Calabrese repeats.
Spilotro was known as the Chicago mob's man in Las Vegas and inspired the Joe Pesci character in the movie "Casino." He and his brother, Michael, were murdered in June 1986 and buried in an Indiana cornfield.
Calabrese says on the tape that sex with the wife of a mob member violates a code. "That is a no-no, that is a no-no, that is a friend and that's a commandment," he tells his son, who secretly recorded the conversation to help the FBI gather evidence against his father.
In short order, Spilotro and his brother both were murdered — on orders from the big boss of the mob at the time, Joey Aiuppa, Calabrese says. "Joey Aiuppa had a meeting before they all went to jail and he told them he wanted him (Spilotro) knocked down," Calabrese says, then quotes Aiuppa as saying: "I don't care how you do it. Get him. I want him out."
Calabrese, 69, is on trial along with James Marcello, 65; Joseph (Joey the Clown) Lombardo, 78; convicted jewel thief Paul Schiro, 70; and retired Chicago police officer Anthony Doyle, 62. They are charged with taking part in a racketeering conspiracy that included the murders of the Spilotro brothers and 16 others.
Aiuppa was the top boss of the Chicago mob. He died in 1997 at age 89, shortly after his release from prison where he served time for a casino skimming conviction. Lombardo was convicted in the same case.
The tapes that have been played for three days now were made at the Milan, Mich., federal correctional center where Calabrese and his son, Frank Calabrese Jr., were serving time for a loan-sharking conviction.
Unknown to the elder Calabrese, his son was helping the FBI, saying he believed his father would never leave the mob and he wanted to "expose my father for what he is." Jurors also have seen videos made at the prison.
On one tape, Calabrese Sr. also says it was Aiuppa who got Edward Hanley a position with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union. Hanley rose to become international president of the union, which represented employees ranging from bartenders to room maids.
Hanley, a one-time member of the AFL-CIO executive board, was repeatedly investigated by federal prosecutors but never charged. But experts often cited the union as an example of mob influence in labor.
On the tape, both Calabreses refer to Hanley — who retired from the union in 1998 and died in a Wisconsin auto accident — as "Uncle Ed" and the father says Aiuppa got him his first union job. "He started him off in the Cicero local," Calabrese Sr. says.
The tapes are a catalog of Chicago mob murders.
Calabrese Jr. interprets some of his father's remarks as confirming that he was on hand, watching from a scout car, when former mob enforcer William Dauber and his wife, Charlotte, were murdered in Lake County July 2, 1980. And likewise for the Sept. 14, 1986, murder of mobster John Fecarotta, allegedly by Calabrese Sr. brother Nicholas Calabrese, who has pleaded guilty to racketeering and is expected to be a prosecution witness.
Calabrese Jr. also testified that his father once drove him past a South Side parking lot and "gave me a nudge."
"I understood there was a dead body there," the son testified.
He apparently referred to the last remains of Michael "Hambone" Albergo, a mob figure whose body has long been sought by the FBI. Agents dug up a parking lot near U.S. Cellular Field, home of the Chicago White Sox, several years ago but have not said exactly what they found there.
Calabrese Sr. attorney Joseph Lopez said in his opening statement that they found "thousands of bones" but none traceable to Hambone Albergo.
Mob Past Memories Are Dusted Off for Trial
In the biggest organized crime trial here in years, jurors scribbled dutifully in notebooks Monday as the son of a reputed mob leader offered a rare, almost surreal how-to lesson about growing up in the “Chicago Outfit.”
The witness, Frank Calabrese Jr., defined terms like “work cars” (untraceable cars for use in crimes), “juice loans” (“high interest loans,” he said, from “the Outfit”) and “underbosses” (akin, he explained, to “vice presidents of companies”).
Mr. Calabrese also told of hidden Uzis, shotguns and rifles in a wall of the home he once shared with his grandmother. And, in his nasal Chicago tone, he outlined essential mores of the Outfit, like, “You weren’t supposed to steal without permission.”
On trial here are five men, including Mr. Calabrese’s father, Frank Sr., who federal prosecutors say were powerful leaders in the city’s organized crime operations in decades gone by. The men are accused of taking part in a racketeering conspiracy that included gambling, loan sharking and 18 killings that, until now, had never led to charges.
Among those deaths: the fatal beatings in 1986 of Tony Spilotro, a chief enforcer in Las Vegas known as the Ant, and his brother, Michael, who were found buried in an Indiana cornfield.
Fourteen men, including some in their 70s, were indicted in the case when it began in 2005, but time and age, among other things, has thinned the numbers. Two of the initial defendants died. One is too sick to stand trial. Six others have pleaded guilty.
On Monday, five men — some balding and one, Joey Lombardo, known as the Clown, who was rolled into court in a wheelchair — listened intently as the younger Mr. Calabrese, 47, repeatedly broke another of what he described as the Outfit’s dos and don’ts: “A lot of things you weren’t supposed to talk about.”
Mr. Calabrese, whose testimony began last week and is expected to go on for days to come, told of discussions he said he had overheard about killings, including those of the Spilotro brothers. He said his father and an uncle, Nicholas, had once planned out a shooting by setting up two chairs in their office like the front seat of a car and practicing how it would come down. He said the same uncle had once asked him to fish a murder weapon out of a Chicago sewer; he was working for the city’s sewer department at the time, Mr. Calabrese said, and retrieved the gun while out on the job.
The elder Mr. Calabrese, 70, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges, said nothing aloud in court Monday, but he repeatedly whispered to his lawyer, Joseph Lopez, and sometimes smiled or smirked or shook his head as his son spoke. Mr. Lopez, in an opening statement when the trial began last month, suggested that his client and his son simply did not get along.
“It’s very difficult for any parent to see his child testify against him,” Mr. Lopez told reporters last week. But on the stand, the younger Mr. Calabrese (whose code name was Jr. on the elaborate handwritten spreadsheets for collecting “street taxes” and counting cuts in gambling operations that were flashed on a large screen before jurors) said he had sought his father’s promise a decade ago that he would “stop his ways” and “semi-retire from the Outfit.”
Total retirement, the son explained, was impossible. “Stepping back,” where people were called on only once in a while, was allowed. But while father and son were both in prison for loan sharking, the younger Mr. Calabrese testified, it became clear that the elder man was not planning to quit at all. That, the witness said, was when he wrote a letter to the F.B.I., offering all that he knew.
If the trial, which is expected to last much of the summer, seemed to some full of faded organized crime images — white-haired men in failing health and nicknames out of a forgotten book — it did not, apparently, to others.
Last week one witness, Joel Glickman, went to jail for refusing to testify against the defendants. He said he was afraid of what might happen to him if he talked.
On Monday, Mr. Glickman, 71, came to court — appearing grumpy but willing to talk about the hundreds of thousands in “street taxes” he said he had paid as a bookmaker since the 1960s. Mr. Glickman had nothing unpleasant to say, though, about Mr. Calabrese or the other men on trial. Under questioning by Mr. Lopez, he took pains to say that Mr. Calabrese had always been cordial and diplomatic and that he had never threatened him in the least.
Loyalty, Mr. Calabrese, the son, explained to the jury, was another of the dos and don’ts he had learned from his father.
He recalled that after the Spilotro deaths, he pledged he would avenge the death of his father and his uncle if they were ever similarly killed.
“One of the rules of the Outfit was that your Outfit family came before your blood family,” he said. He added, “It also came before God.”
But the trial has shown that family ties, whatever the family, don’t always hold. Later in the trial, Nicholas Calabrese, the uncle, is also scheduled to testify — for the prosecution.
Thanks to Monica Davey
The witness, Frank Calabrese Jr., defined terms like “work cars” (untraceable cars for use in crimes), “juice loans” (“high interest loans,” he said, from “the Outfit”) and “underbosses” (akin, he explained, to “vice presidents of companies”).
Mr. Calabrese also told of hidden Uzis, shotguns and rifles in a wall of the home he once shared with his grandmother. And, in his nasal Chicago tone, he outlined essential mores of the Outfit, like, “You weren’t supposed to steal without permission.”
On trial here are five men, including Mr. Calabrese’s father, Frank Sr., who federal prosecutors say were powerful leaders in the city’s organized crime operations in decades gone by. The men are accused of taking part in a racketeering conspiracy that included gambling, loan sharking and 18 killings that, until now, had never led to charges.
Among those deaths: the fatal beatings in 1986 of Tony Spilotro, a chief enforcer in Las Vegas known as the Ant, and his brother, Michael, who were found buried in an Indiana cornfield.
Fourteen men, including some in their 70s, were indicted in the case when it began in 2005, but time and age, among other things, has thinned the numbers. Two of the initial defendants died. One is too sick to stand trial. Six others have pleaded guilty.
On Monday, five men — some balding and one, Joey Lombardo, known as the Clown, who was rolled into court in a wheelchair — listened intently as the younger Mr. Calabrese, 47, repeatedly broke another of what he described as the Outfit’s dos and don’ts: “A lot of things you weren’t supposed to talk about.”
Mr. Calabrese, whose testimony began last week and is expected to go on for days to come, told of discussions he said he had overheard about killings, including those of the Spilotro brothers. He said his father and an uncle, Nicholas, had once planned out a shooting by setting up two chairs in their office like the front seat of a car and practicing how it would come down. He said the same uncle had once asked him to fish a murder weapon out of a Chicago sewer; he was working for the city’s sewer department at the time, Mr. Calabrese said, and retrieved the gun while out on the job.
The elder Mr. Calabrese, 70, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges, said nothing aloud in court Monday, but he repeatedly whispered to his lawyer, Joseph Lopez, and sometimes smiled or smirked or shook his head as his son spoke. Mr. Lopez, in an opening statement when the trial began last month, suggested that his client and his son simply did not get along.
“It’s very difficult for any parent to see his child testify against him,” Mr. Lopez told reporters last week. But on the stand, the younger Mr. Calabrese (whose code name was Jr. on the elaborate handwritten spreadsheets for collecting “street taxes” and counting cuts in gambling operations that were flashed on a large screen before jurors) said he had sought his father’s promise a decade ago that he would “stop his ways” and “semi-retire from the Outfit.”
Total retirement, the son explained, was impossible. “Stepping back,” where people were called on only once in a while, was allowed. But while father and son were both in prison for loan sharking, the younger Mr. Calabrese testified, it became clear that the elder man was not planning to quit at all. That, the witness said, was when he wrote a letter to the F.B.I., offering all that he knew.
If the trial, which is expected to last much of the summer, seemed to some full of faded organized crime images — white-haired men in failing health and nicknames out of a forgotten book — it did not, apparently, to others.
Last week one witness, Joel Glickman, went to jail for refusing to testify against the defendants. He said he was afraid of what might happen to him if he talked.
On Monday, Mr. Glickman, 71, came to court — appearing grumpy but willing to talk about the hundreds of thousands in “street taxes” he said he had paid as a bookmaker since the 1960s. Mr. Glickman had nothing unpleasant to say, though, about Mr. Calabrese or the other men on trial. Under questioning by Mr. Lopez, he took pains to say that Mr. Calabrese had always been cordial and diplomatic and that he had never threatened him in the least.
Loyalty, Mr. Calabrese, the son, explained to the jury, was another of the dos and don’ts he had learned from his father.
He recalled that after the Spilotro deaths, he pledged he would avenge the death of his father and his uncle if they were ever similarly killed.
“One of the rules of the Outfit was that your Outfit family came before your blood family,” he said. He added, “It also came before God.”
But the trial has shown that family ties, whatever the family, don’t always hold. Later in the trial, Nicholas Calabrese, the uncle, is also scheduled to testify — for the prosecution.
Thanks to Monica Davey
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