Family Secrets

The Case That Crippled the Chicago Mob

Jeff Coen

• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• eBook ISBN:
  9781569762462
• Year: 2009

Even in Chicago, a city steeped in mob history and legend, the Family Secrets case was a true spectacle when it made it to court in 2007. A top mob boss, a reputed consigliere, and other high-profile members of the Chicago Outfit were accused in a total of eighteen gangland killings, revealing organized crime's ruthless grip on the city throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
            Painting a vivid picture of murder, courtroom drama, family loyalties and disloyalties, journalist Jeff Coen accurately portrays the Chicago Outfit's cold-blooded--and sometimes incompetent--killers and their crimes in the case that brought them down. In 1998 Frank Calabrese Jr. volunteered to wear a wire to gather evidence against his father, a vicious loan shark who strangled most of his victims with a rope before slitting their throats to ensure they were dead. Frank Jr. went after his uncle Nick as well, a calculating but sometimes bumbling hit man who would become one of the highest-ranking turncoats in mob history, admitting he helped strangle, stab, shoot, and bomb victims who got in the mob's way, and turning evidence against his brother Frank.
            The Chicago courtroom took on the look and feel of a movie set as Chicago's most colorful mobsters and their equally flamboyant attorneys paraded through and performed: James "Jimmy Light" Marcello, the acting head of the Chicago mob; Joey "the Clown" Lombardo, one of Chicago's most eccentric mobsters; Paul "the Indian" Schiro; and a former Chicago police officer, Anthony "Twan" Doyle, among others.
            Re-creating events from court transcripts, police records, interviews, and notes taken day after day as the story unfolded in court, Coen provides a riveting wide-angle view and one of the best accounts on record of the inner workings of the Chicago syndicate and its control over the city's streets.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• 1 A Killing Between Friends
• 2 The Surprise Letter
• 3 Witness of a Lifetime
• 4 United States vs. the Chicago Outfit
• 5 This Is Not The Sopranos
• 6 Testimony and Tapes
• 7 Alva and Emma
• 8 A Son Against His Father
• 9 Nick
• 10 A Killer Tells His Tale
• 11 Explosion on the Tollway
• 12 From Cicero to Las Vegas
• 13 One and Two
• 14 The Beak, the oven, and the Dentist
• 15 Joey
• 16 Cross-examination
• 17 Frank Sr.
• 18 Twan
• 19 Closing Arguments
• 20 End of a Trial, End of an Era
• Acknowledgments
• Key Figures
• Chronology
• Map
• Index