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Title details for Operation Family Secrets by Frank Calabrese, Jr. - Available

Operation Family Secrets

How a Mobster's Son and the FBI Brought Down Chicago's Murderous Crime Family

by Frank Calabrese, Jr.
Keith Zimmerman
ebook
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The chilling true story of how the son of the most violent mobster in Chicago helped bring down the last great American crime syndicate: the one-hundred-year-old Chicago Outfit.
In Operation Family Secrets, Frank Calabrese, Jr. reveals for the first time the outfit’s “made” ceremony and describes being put to work alongside his father and uncle in loan sharking, gambling, labor racketeering, and extortion. As members of the outfit, they plotted the slaying of a fellow gangster, committed the bombing murder of a trucking executive, the gangland execution of two mobsters—whose burial in an Indiana cornfield was reenacted in Martin Scorsese’s blockbuster film Casino—and numerous other hits.
The Calabrese Crew’s colossal earnings and extreme ruthlessness made them both a dreaded criminal gang and the object of an intense FBi inquiry. When Frank Jr., his father, and Uncle Nick are convicted on racketeering violations, “Junior” and “Senior” are sent to the same federal penitentiary in Michigan. It's there that Frank Jr. makes the life-changing decision to go straight. But he needs to keep his father behind bars in order to regain control of his life and save his family. So Frank Jr. makes a secret deal with prosecutors, and for six months—unmonitored and unprotected—he wears a wire as his father recounts decades of hideous crimes. Frank Jr.’s cooperation with the FBI for virtually no monetary gain or special privileges helped create the government’s “Operation Family Secrets” campaign against the Chicago outfit, which reopened eighteen unsolved murders, implicated twelve La Cosa Nostra soldiers and two outfit bosses, and became one of the largest organized crime cases in U.S. history.

Operation Family Secrets intimately portrays how organized crime rots a family from the inside out while detailing Frank Jr.’s deadly prison-yard mission, the FBI’s landmark investigation, and the U.S. attorney’s office’s daring prosecution of America’s most dangerous criminal organization.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 8, 2011

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780307717740

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780307717740
      • File size: 3881 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 10, 2011
      While in prison with his father, Frank Calabrese Sr., on racketeering charges, Frank Jr, a former member of the Chicago crime syndicate known as the Outfit, offered to help the FBI keep his father in prison for life ("so that he could get the psychological help he needed" is his questionable explanation) by testifying against him. Now in the federal witness protection program and living in an undisclosed location, Frank Jr. gives an insider's view of the Outfit and how he helped expose its crimes. Wearing a wire in the prison yard in 1999, he recorded his father implicating himself in several murders, detailing shotguns and shells ("Big big bearings. So them will fuckin' tear half your body apart"). The sessions were not without danger; one day his father asked to see a new tattoo on his back and reached for the sweatshirt concealing the recorder. Those tapes enabled the FBI to solve dozens of murders and send top mobsters to prison, while giving Frank Sr. multiple life sentences. This suspenseful account, punctuated with riveting excerpts from the tapes, reads like a thriller.

    • Kirkus

      January 1, 2011

      The inside story of a notable organized-crime prosecution, in which a son turned on his ferocious father.

      For decades, organized crime in Chicago—the so-called "Outfit"—remained a feared and mysterious cabal. In 2007, prosecutors scored a huge coup in the "Family Secrets" trial, sentencing several key mobsters to long sentences for racketeering and numerous old murders. Improbably, the process began when imprisoned Outfit member Frank Calabrese Jr. contacted the FBI, wishing to cooperate in order to prevent his also-jailed father's return to his crooked ways: "I feel I have to help you keep this sick man locked up forever." Both Calabreses had pled guilty to federal racketeering charges in 1997, having run a successful "juice loan" business for years. Amazingly, the younger Calabrese recorded conversations with his father in prison, and the surveillance provided the core of the prosecution's case. The book offers a startling narrative of Outfit mayhem—the Calabrese crew was involved in a long string of killings, some notorious, like that of Tony Spilotro (fictionalized in Martin Scorsese's Casino). Calabrese Jr. particularly regrets the involvement of his uncle, Nick, a quiet Vietnam veteran who became ensnared in his brother's business, ultimately transforming into a hit man (Nick also turned state's witness and testified). The author still seems bewildered by his father's ability to be simultaneously a loving patriarch, a ruthless Outfit boss and a cold-blooded killer. As with most mob memoirs, Calabrese Jr. performs exculpatory gymnastics in order to blur the extent of the narrator's criminal involvement, and the writing is workmanlike, if wry at times. Still, this is an undeniably engaging tale, capturing the nitty-gritty of daily life in the "crews" of the Outfit.

      A useful and readable addition to Mob Lit.

      (COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

    • Kirkus

      January 1, 2011

      The inside story of a notable organized-crime prosecution, in which a son turned on his ferocious father.

      For decades, organized crime in Chicago--the so-called "Outfit"--remained a feared and mysterious cabal. In 2007, prosecutors scored a huge coup in the "Family Secrets" trial, sentencing several key mobsters to long sentences for racketeering and numerous old murders. Improbably, the process began when imprisoned Outfit member Frank Calabrese Jr. contacted the FBI, wishing to cooperate in order to prevent his also-jailed father's return to his crooked ways: "I feel I have to help you keep this sick man locked up forever." Both Calabreses had pled guilty to federal racketeering charges in 1997, having run a successful "juice loan" business for years. Amazingly, the younger Calabrese recorded conversations with his father in prison, and the surveillance provided the core of the prosecution's case. The book offers a startling narrative of Outfit mayhem--the Calabrese crew was involved in a long string of killings, some notorious, like that of Tony Spilotro (fictionalized in Martin Scorsese's Casino). Calabrese Jr. particularly regrets the involvement of his uncle, Nick, a quiet Vietnam veteran who became ensnared in his brother's business, ultimately transforming into a hit man (Nick also turned state's witness and testified). The author still seems bewildered by his father's ability to be simultaneously a loving patriarch, a ruthless Outfit boss and a cold-blooded killer. As with most mob memoirs, Calabrese Jr. performs exculpatory gymnastics in order to blur the extent of the narrator's criminal involvement, and the writing is workmanlike, if wry at times. Still, this is an undeniably engaging tale, capturing the nitty-gritty of daily life in the "crews" of the Outfit.

      A useful and readable addition to Mob Lit.

      (COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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