Calabrese Mob Brothers Exchange the Judas Kiss for Christmas

It was Christmas Eve 1996, and reputed Outfit hit man Frank Calabrese Sr. was seeing his brother Nicholas out the door after breaking out the Napoleon brandy, when his brother made an unusual request.

"He walks to the door and says, 'Can I kiss you on the lips?' " Calabrese Sr. recounted to jurors in the Family Secrets trial Monday. "He kissed me on the lips," Calabrese Sr. said. Only later, Calabrese Sr. testified, would he realize "the kiss he gave for Christmas was a Judas kiss."

That night would be the last one when Calabrese Sr. would hear his brother talk at length -- until Nicholas Calabrese, now a confessed Outfit killer, took the stand in the Family Secrets trial to bury his brother and tell jurors how they murdered people together for the mob.

Calabrese Sr., on trial for allegedly killing 13 people for the Chicago mob, struck back against his family on Monday after first hearing his brother, Nicholas, and then his son, Frank Jr., testify against him.

Frank Calabrese Jr. told jurors how he secretly recorded his father while they were both in prison. Then jurors heard those recordings of Frank Calabrese Sr. apparently describing in detail various mob murders.

On Monday, in his first full day of testimony, Frank Calabrese Sr. tried to counter his family's testimony and explain his own recorded words.

Calabrese Sr., accused of being a mob crew leader, said his brother Nicholas was really in charge and compared him to the weak brother, Fredo, in the 1972 mob movie "The Godfather."

Except Calabrese Sr., in one example of many verbal slips throughout the trial, used the name "Alfredo."

"My brother was like Alfredo in 'The Godfather,' " Calabrese Sr. testified. "If he wasn't running things and screwing things up, he wasn't happy."

Weak though Nicholas Calabrese may be, he still turned Calabrese Sr.'s two eldest sons, Frank Jr. and Kurt, against him, Calabrese Sr. testified.

Calabrese Sr. accused his oldest son, Frank Jr., of repeatedly leading him into conversations while they were both in prison to make him sound like a murderous gangster. "He can make Jesus look like the devil on the cross," Calabrese Sr. said.

On one secret recording, Calabrese Sr. describes how top mobsters inducted him into the Chicago Outfit as a full member, how his finger was cut, how a holy card was burned in his hand.

On the stand, Calabrese Sr. scoffed at the notion that he was a made member.

So how did he know the ritual? "The Valachi Papers," Calabrese said, referring to the 1968 memoir by gangster Joseph Valachi. "I seen that in the book."

In another recording, Calabrese Sr. tells his son that he stripped the clothes off a man he had just killed. "I told him that to humor him," Calabrese Sr. explained.

Other times, Calabrese Sr. said, he just lied to scare his son out of mob life.

Calabrese Sr. blames his family for conspiring to keep him in prison, so they could steal his money. "Joe, I love my kids and my brother . . . it's just that they gotta grow up," Calabrese Sr. told his lawyer, Joseph R. Lopez.

Calabrese Sr. has strived to appear even-tempered, but his anger flared earlier in the day when the judge refused to let him detail how his family stole from him.

Calabrese Sr. snapped after the judge upheld another prosecution objection to his testimony.

The judge declined to let Calabrese Sr. testify about matters he couldn't prove and threatened him with contempt. "Your honor, how am I supposed to defend myself?" Calabrese Sr. said, his jaw clenched, his lower lip quivering with rage, the face of the kindly grandfather long gone.

"My brother was like Alfredo in 'The Godfather.' If he wasn't running things and screwing things up, he wasn't happy."

Thanks to Steve Warmbir

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Announcement on Mafia 2 Made

2K Games, a publishing label of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: TTWO), today announced that it will publish MAFIA II, a sequel to the original Mafia title that sold more than two million copies worldwide and helped popularize the gangster genre. Featuring a deep mobster-driven narrative packed with both behind-the-wheel and on-foot action, Mafia 2 is the sequel fans have been clamoring for. The game is being developed by Illusion Softworks, developers of the original Mafia title, for next generation consoles and Games for Windows.

Like the original Mafia title, MAFIA II immerses players in the mob underworld of a fictitious late 1940's-early 1950's scenario. Players will easily become engaged in the game's cinematic Hollywood movie experience with strong, believable characters in a living, breathing city. By fusing high octane gunplay with white knuckle driving and an engaging narrative, Mafia 2 looks to be the industry's most compelling Mafia title to date.

"As the original Mafia was a big success, we are excited to leverage the power of next generation console technology to create an all-new experience, while embracing the elements that resonated with the previous game's fans," said Christoph Hartmann, President of 2K. "The 'wow' factor of MAFIA II is definitely the benchmark-setting visual quality and action that you expect to see only in Hollywood movies."

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No Goodfellas in this Sordid Crew

Chicago mob trial exposes zero honour among thieves
By Josh Casey
Outfit enforcer 'Butch' Petrocelli before and after his alleged murder by the Calabrese brothers.


Forget about the clichés and the movies, the wiseguys and their broads, the snappy suits and sharp one-liners. Most of all forget about the men of honour concept laid bare for the risible oxymoron it always was in what has been billed as the biggest mob murder trial in U.S. history.

Instead, what has been playing out in the 25th Floor courtroom in front of Judge James B Zagel is a story of men barely above the morality of hyenas, who kill each other by the most barbaric methods for the flimsiest and most debased of motives.

And even those motives, such as they are, rarely seem to be more than the crude suppositions of simple minds reacting to rumour and guesswork no more profound than fishwives gossiping on a street corner. The difference is that gossips might sometimes smear a reputation a little, but with the characters exposed in the ‘Family Secrets’ trial, it can result in medieval murder, nearly always over money, or the notion that the victim might have betrayed them or might do so sometime in the future. And if they got it wrong - so what? The guy shouldn’t have been in the wrong place at the wrong time…

And that is what separates them from civilised citizens. It was once written by a political philosopher that the rule of law succeeded not generally because of a citizen’s fear of the consequences of not abiding by it, but because the majority of citizens recognised and accepted the necessity of restraints required for civil co-existence.

That essentially is the measure of decent people as opposed to those who reject restraints and disregard the rules others accept and comply with, however resentfully from time to time. We would all rather drive at whatever speed we felt like now and then, not wear crash helmets or seat belts, even party naked in the park from time to time, and might feel like wringing the neck of that noisy neighbour on the odd occasion. But that is a figure of speech; we don’t actually plan to force men to the ground and strangle and cut their throats open for any reasons, let alone unsubstantiated reasons all rooted in greed.

The difference with the people depicted in this trial is that they just will do that and so much worse, and without regard for either the rules of society, humanity, or for life itself.

In the movies, bad guys don’t get killed, they get ‘whacked’. It is usually depicted as exciting, even sexy: the set-up, the tension, the shooting, over and done, he had it coming anyway…ratatatat! A body in the street…the screeching of tyres…Warren Beatty, Harvey Keitel, Lee Marvin, Pesci, and DiNiro have kept us appallingly entertained with their apparently cinema verite depictions of gangsters who terrify and excite in the same measure, along with other actors and film makers who have used their skills to insinuate the image of these semi-romantic outlaw figures in our minds.

The reality of the Family Secrets crew is of two men wrenching on either end of a rope looped around a man’s neck, each with a foot braced against the victim’s skull, throttling him to death and then slicing his throat open for good measure. Butch Petrocelli, himself an Outfit enforcer, forced to the ground, strangled, his throat slashed, then doused in lighter fuel and burned. Or the Spilotro brothers, again held down and strangled and beaten with fists, boots and knees, or the unspeakable murder long ago of a man hung from a meat hook pierced through his rectum, then tortured to death over three days.

This is not the territory of the Godfather or The Soprano’s, the former risibly portrayed hoodlums as noble peasants elevating themselves by the only means available through some imagined re-creation of an alternative Roman Empire (a notion re-attributed to defendant, Frank Calabrese, in the testimony of his son recently), and the latter escaping all true evaluation by rarely departing from a slick caricature in black comedy.

Better cinematic representation can be found in The Funeral, a largely overlooked almost Shakespearean tale directed by Abel Ferrara, featuring the extraordinary talents of Christopher Walken and the late Christopher Penn in whose character is distilled the despair and depravity of the gangster’s life and fate. The two actors portray siblings in a criminal family of the 1930s, but the awful moment of truth of this film is stolen in just a few seconds of masterful portrayal by Annabella Sciorra. Playing Walken’s screen wife at a time of violent crisis, she talks to a younger woman while tearfully despairing of and rejecting the inevitability and brutality of their occupations, speaking words to the effect of: “…all because they have failed to rise above their illiterate and savage origins…”

That was the message underpinning the entire film - and it serves the so-called ‘Family Secrets’ trial in Chicago also - both portray gangsters as they should be seen, as squalid, uncivilised savages, not as handsome, slick suited outlaws. Such men (whether those in the courtroom or not, the jury have yet to decide) are just sadistic thugs who commit murder not for noble cause but for squalid greed and that should never be forgotten.

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