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How a Mobster's Son and the FBI Brought Down Chicago's Murderous Crime Family
Broadway
March 2011
On Sale: March 8, 2011
336 pages ISBN: 0307717720 EAN: 9780307717726 Hardcover
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Operation Family Secrets is the chilling true story of how
the son of the most violent mobster in Chicago made the
unprecedented decision to work with the FBI and the U.S.
Attorney’s Office to incriminate his own father and to help
bring down the last great American crime syndicate—the
one-hundred-year-old Chicago Outfit. The Calabrese family of Chicago is a close-knit,
middle-class, multi-generational Italian-Irish-American
clan. They operate family businesses. They work day and
night striving for the American Dream. All three sons forge
a bond with their controlling father, Frank Sr., and their
soft-spoken favorite uncle, Nick. As a boy, the oldest son,
Frank Jr., realizes that his father and uncle are also
“made” members of another close-knit family: the outfit.
In Operation Family Secrets Frank Calabrese, Jr., tells
the turbulent tale of a family dominated by a violent
patriarch who breaks a longstanding unwritten outfit code
and “brings the street into his home” by enlisting two of
his sons into the outfit’s 26th Street/Chinatown crew. Frank
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, and plotting the slaying of a fellow gangster,
while they commit 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 make them both a dreaded criminal gang and the
object of an intense FBi inquiry. Eventually Frank Jr., his
father, and Uncle Nick are convicted on racketeering
violations, and “Junior” and “Senior” are sent to the same
federal penitentiary in Michigan. Upon arrival, Frank Jr.
makes a life-changing decision: to go straight rather than
agree to his father’s plans to resume crew activities after
serving his sentence. But he needs to keep his father behind
bars in order to regain control of his life and save his
family. 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 helps create the government’s
“operation Family Secrets” campaign against the Chicago
outfit. The case reopens eighteen unsolved murders and also
implicates twelve La Cosa Nostra soldiers and two outfit
bosses. it becomes 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.
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