25 December 2018

Outfit killer Calabrese dies on Xmas 2012

On this date in 2012...

Frank J. "Frankie Breeze" Calabrese, Sr., seventy-five, a convicted leader of the Chicago Outfit, died December 25, 2012, at the Federal Medical Center of Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina. He was serving a life sentence.

Prison officials said he had been in poor health, with heart disease and other afflictions. Calabrese, himself, outlined an assortment of medical problems, including an enlarged heart, during a sentencing hearing in 2009.

There were reports that Calabrese had been seriously ill for more than a year. His attorney told the Chicago Tribune that Calabrese had been taking seventeen different medications for a variety of health problems.

The attorney, Joseph Lopez, recalled Calabrese as "quick-witted, smart and street-savvy." He said his client was "difficult at times because he was used to getting his way."

Lopez said Calabrese's Christmas Day death felt "odd" because that day was Calabrese's favorite holiday: "He always talked about how much he loved spending Christmas with his family."

Calabrese was born on Chicago's West Side to James and Sophia Calabrese on March 17, 1937. His early childhood was spent on Chicago's West Erie Street.

Beginning his criminal career as a teenager, Calabrese was convicted and imprisoned for possession of stolen cars in 1954. Calabrese was back in the streets and running a lucrative loan sharking enterprise by the early 1960s. Loan customers were charged interest of ten percent each week. In that period, he became a protege of the Chicago Outfit's South Side boss Angelo "the Hook" LaPietra. His loan sharking operation continued into the 1990s, as Calabrese grew in importance within the Outfit.

On July 28, 1995, Calabrese and eight members of his underworld crew were indicted for racketeering, conspiracy, extortion, mail fraud, witness tampering and impeding the IRS. Federal prosecutors said the group operated an extensive loan sharking racket in the Chicago area, using threats and violence in the course of business. Calabrese pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a long term in federal prison.

Calabrese's son, Frank Jr. also pleaded guilty and went to prison in the loan sharking case. During their time in prison, Frank Jr. began cooperating with federal authorities and helped assemble evidence that was used against Calabrese and other Outfit leaders in the Family Secrets trial of 2007.

Calabrese was convicted of racketeering and racketeering murders in that trial. Witnesses against him included his son and his brother. Calabrese took the stand in his own defense, admitting to loan sharking but denying Outfit membership and participation in killings.

The jury found him guilty of involvement in seven killings. The victims were racketeer Michael Albergo (disappeared in 1970), trucking executive Michael P. Cagnoni (car bomb 1981), informant ex-mobster William E. Dauber and his wife Charlotte Dauber (shotgunned 1980), racketeer and former union business agent John Fecarotta (shot 1986), bar owner Richard Ortiz and his friend Arthur Morawski (shotgunned 1983). The jury could not reach a decision on six other killings Calabrese was accused of taking part in.

Cagnoni car-bombing. Chicago Tribune.


Two other Outfit leaders, James Marcello and Joseph Lombardo, along with codefendants Paul Schiro and Anthony Doyle also were convicted of racketeering conspiracy in the case. Marcello and Lombardo were convicted of racketeering murders.

Calabrese was sentenced January 30, 2009, to life in prison.

In early April, Calabrese and three others convicted in the "Family Secrets" case were ordered to pay more than $24 million in fines and restitution to the families of their victims.

Part of Calabrese's debt was paid in March of the following year, when FBI agents executed a search warrant at the former Calabrese home in Oak Brook and discovered a secret compartment in the wall behind a framed collection of family photographs. Envelopes in the compartment were found to contain $728,000 in cash. The compartment also held one thousand pieces of jewelry (many still in store display boxes or with price tags still attached), seven firearms, twelve audio microcassettes and a collection of handwritten notes and ledgers.

Sources:
  • Coen, Jeff, Liam Ford and Michael Higgins, "10 murders laid at feet of 3 in mob," Chicago Tribune, Sept. 28, 2007.
  • Donato, Marla, "Cicero revisits '83 double slaying," Chicago Tribune, April 12, 2000.
  • Koziol, Ronald, and John O'Brien, "A deadly trick for mob figure," Chicago Tribune, Sept. 16, 1986, p. 19.
  • O'Brien, John, and Lynn Emmerman, "Mob violence: Bullets riddle hit man, wife," Chicago Tribune, July 3, 1980, p. 1.
  • Unger, Rudolph, and Philip Wattley, "Radio-control bomb kills suburbanite," Chicago Tribune, June 25, 1981, p. 1.
  • United States Census of 1940, Illinois, Cook County, Chicago, Ward 28, Enumeration District 103-1767.
  • Weber, Bruce, "Frank Calabrese, 75, hit man for the mob in Chicago," New York Times, Dec. 27, 2012, p. 22.
  • "A look at 18 murders detailed in mob case," Rock Island Dispatch-Argus, Sept. 11, 2007.
  • "Chicago Crime Commission calls FBI raid on Calabrese home major blow to organized crime," Prnewswire.com, March 28, 2010.
  • "Frank Calabrese, notorious Chicago mob hit man, dies in prison, authorities, say," CBS News, Dec. 27, 2012.
  • "Members of 'street crew' indicted Norther District of Illinois," United States Attorneys' Bulletin, September 1995, p. 304.
  • "Mob hitman Frank Calabrese Sr. dies in prison," Chicago Tribune, Dec. 26, 2012.

23 December 2018

Murdered on Christmas Eve

On Christmas Eve, 1992...

Rosemarie & Thomas Uva
Thomas and Rosemarie Uva headed out on the morning of Thursday, December 24, 1992, to finish up their Christmas shopping. Before leaving their apartment at Eighty-Third Street in Ozone Park, Queens, Rosemarie spoke briefly on the telephone with her sixty-one-year-old mother-in-law, Fannie Accomando Uva of the Bronx.

Traffic was heavy - holiday motorists mixed with the usual Thursday morning rush-hour congestion. The Uvas, in a four-door maroon Mercury Topaz, were less than a mile from home at nine o'clock when they stopped for a traffic light at 103rd Avenue's intersection with Ninety-First Street.

Bullets cracked in rapid succession through the Topaz's windshield. Three slugs struck twenty-eight-year-old Thomas in the head. Three others hit Rosemarie, thirty-one. They died instantly.

Their automobile, no longer restrained by the force of a living person's leg on its brake pedal, began to move through the intersection. It continued eastward several blocks, colliding with another vehicle at Woodhaven Boulevard and finally coming to rest against a brick wall and fence surrounding a residential property at Woodhaven and 103rd Avenue.

Police, press and public had no idea at that moment why the young couple had been killed. Members of some New York crime families understood the reason, but they weren't yet talking about it. Fannie Uva seemed to be the first to have an inkling. When she spoke with the local press, she remarked that the shooting sounded like something the Mafia would do. But she told reporters that her son Thomas had no connection to organized crime. ..

Read more at Mafiahistory.us:

19 December 2018

'Chin' Gigante dies in prison hospital

On this date in 2005...

Vincent "Vinny the Chin" Gigante, longtime boss of the Genovese Crime Family, died December 19, 2005, at the United States Medical Center for Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri. The seventy-seven-year-old was serving a racketeering sentence at the time of his death.

Prison staff found Gigante unresponsive at five-fifteen in the morning and attempted without success to resuscitate him through CPR. A cause of death was not announced, but prison officials noted that Gigante had a history of heart disease.

Gigante was born in New York on March 29, 1928. His family lived for many years on Thompson Street in Manhattan's Greenwich Village neighborhood. In his late teens, Gigante was a prizefighter. He later became a protege of crime bosses Vito Genovese and Tommy Eboli, and he is generally believed to have been the gunman who wounded Frank Costello in May 1957.

After serving a five-year sentence for a 1959 narcotics trafficking conviction, "Chin" Gigante advanced to leadership positions in the Genovese Crime Family. He was one of the key figures - along with longtime friend Venero "Benny Eggs" Mangano - in the organization's powerful Greenwich Village crew. Gigante ran his criminal rackets from the Triangle Social Club.

About a decade after the narcotics conviction, Gigante first made use of feigned mental illness. When charged with attempting to bribe the police department, he managed to convince doctors that he was mentally unfit to stand trial.

Gigante gradually took over the Genovese clan in the early 1980s, as boss Philip "Benny Squint" Lombardo moved into retirement. (Venero Mangano substituted for Gigante in 1988, when the boss had surgery for a heart ailment.) Gigante deflected attention first by having East Harlem-based Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno pose as crime family leader and, after Salerno's 1992 death, by publicly portraying himself as severely mentally ill. Family and close acquaintances insisted that he suffered with Alzheimer's disease, dementia and/or paranoid schizophrenia.

Gigante did his best to back up the amateur diagnoses through his actions. He regularly checked into hospitals seeking treatment for hallucinations and dementia. He often wandered the streets of Greenwich Village in pajamas, robe and slippers, was observed carrying on conversations with himself and once was found hiding under an umbrella in his bathroom shower. The New York press dubbed him "the Oddfather."

The Chin's act was largely successful until the July 25, 1997, conviction for racketeering, extortion and plotting (but not carrying out) a murder resulted in a twelve-year prison sentence. In 2003, Gigante admitted in Brooklyn federal court that he had been feigning mental illness in order to obstruct justice. Three more years were added to his prison sentence following that admission.

Sources:
  • Marzulli, John, "Last of the old dons gone," New York Daily News, Dec. 20, 2005, p. 36.
  • Newman, Andy, "Analyze this: Gigante not crazy after all those years," New York Times, April 13, 2003.
  • Pyle, Richard, "Imprisoned mob boss Vincent Gigante, 77," Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec. 20, 2005, p. B9, "Vincent Gigante, mob's 'Oddfather,'" Arizona Republic, Dec. 20, 2005, p. 10.
  • Raab, Selwyn, "Vincent Gigante, mob boss who feigned incompetence to avoid jail, dies at 77," New York Times, Dec. 20, 2005, p. 29.

See also:

18 December 2018

Legs Diamond's Last Dance



On this date in 1931, gangster Dutch Schultz finally got his wish. "Ain't there nobody that can shoot this guy so he don't bounce back?" Dutch once asked about his rival, Jack "Legs" Diamond. Old Legs, whose other nickname was "Clay Pigeon," had this annoying habit of surviving assassination attempts.

By 1931, Legs had moved to Upstate New York to start bootlegging and narcotics operations. He spent the night of December 17th partying in Albany after having just beaten the rap in a kidnapping trial. He left his girlfriend, showgirl Marion "Kiki" Roberts, around 11 PM, and went back to the boarding house on Dove Street where he had been staying. Around 5:30 AM, two men entered the boarding house, went to the second floor room where Diamond was sleeping it off, shot him in the head multiple times and fled the house.

The murder of Legs Diamond remains unsolved, but there were multiple theories about who was responsible. Dutch Schulz was an obvious choice. Lucky Luciano was another likely candidate. Some think it was local Albany thugs, or that the hit on Legs was ordered by Dan O'Connell, the head of the notorious Albany Democratic Machine. The Machine not only controlled politics in Albany, they also ran the local rackets. And they weren't open to the idea of competition. This being the case, the hit may have been carried out by members of the Albany Police Department. Double-crossed ex-partners are always a good bet too, and Legs had some of those out there gunning for him. The best theory I've seen so far can be found in Pat Downey's book, Legs Diamond: Gangster, available from Amazon in paperback and ebook editions.

The picture above, which I took nine years ago today, is of the house at 67 Dove Street in Albany, where Legs Diamond was killed. It now belongs to author William Kennedy.

Further reading:

Wikipedia - Jack Diamond (gangster)

Gangster City - Jack "Legs" Diamond

Brooklyn Daily Eagle - DIAMOND IS SLAIN AFTER ACQUITTAL

My 2012 interview with author Pat Downey