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.
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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.
