Free Republic

With the national media finally interested in Illinois corruption, it's too bad they were focused on Springfield's dancing monkey show and not on what happened in a federal courtroom in Chicago on Wednesday. That wasn't a monkey dancing on a string. It was an ape. The kind of ape that pulls the strings on the dancing monkeys. His name is Frank Calabrese, the former Chicago Outfit Chinatown crew boss, convicted of racketeering conspiracy involving seven murders in the FBI's historic Operation Family Secrets case of 18 unsolved hits. Six other bodies were attributed to Calabrese at his sentencing.

CHICAGO - A federal jury found five aging men guilty Monday in a racketeering conspiracy that involved decades of extortion, loan sharking and murder aimed at rubbing out anyone who dared stand in the way of the ruthless Chicago mob. The verdicts capped an extraordinary 10-week trial that laid bare some of the inner workings of The Outfit. The prosecution's star witness was an admitted hit man who took the stand against his own brother to spell out the allegations, crime by crime. The jury heard about 18 unsolved killings, including the beating death and cornfield burial of Tony "The...

CHICAGO - Do you believe "The Clown" or an admitted hit man? Jurors will have to decide when they begin deliberations Tuesday in Chicago's biggest mob trial in years. They got the case Thursday night after prosecutors made a last pitch to sway them to believe the testimony of their star witness, admitted hit man Nicholas Calabrese. Defense lawyers have pegged Calabrese as "a walking piece of deception" whose testimony shouldn't be believed, even suggesting that if Calabrese says it's raining, someone ought to go outside to check. But prosecutors say it's the five men on trial who can't be...

CHICAGO - It didn't take Chicago mobster Tony "The Ant" Spilotro long to realize his time was up. "Time to say a prayer," government witness Nicholas Calabrese quoted Spilotro as saying moments before his fellow mobsters beat and strangled him in a suburban Bensenville basement on a June afternoon 21 years ago. An eyewitness account of the mob hit that helped inspire the movie "Casino" emerged Wednesday as Calabrese returned to the stand at the trial of his brother Frank and four other alleged members of the Chicago Outfit. Spilotro was the model for the Joe Pesci character in the...

CHICAGO - It seemed like a good idea at the time. A gang of burglars decided in December 1977 to break into the home of Tony Accardo, one of the most powerful men in organized crime history, and rob his basement vault. Accardo was not amused. Six men Accardo blamed for the heist were swiftly hunted down and murdered, according to papers filed by federal prosecutors in preparation for Chicago's biggest mob trial in years, scheduled to begin Tuesday. And that's only one of the grisly tales jurors are likely to hear at the trial stemming from the FBI's "Operation...