My Crime Beat Column: The Outfit's Family Secrets, The Case That Crippled the Chicago Mob

In Martin Scorsese's great crime film Casino Joe Pesci plays a vicious mob enforcer and hit man in Las Vegas who reports to the bosses "back home," as Pesci's character describes them in the film's voice-over narration.

 

The bosses are portrayed in the film as a group of elderly and infirm men who hang around eating, playing cards and collecting money from their criminal underlings.

 

Pesci's character, based on on a very real gangster named Anthony "Tony Ant" Spilotro, is brutally murdered, along with his brother Michael, in a mid-west cornfield in the film. Their murder, along with several other murders, were ordered by the bosses back home.

Back home is Chicago, home of the criminal organization known as "the Outfit."

 

Family Secrets: The Case That Crippled the Chicago Mob (Chicago Review Press) covers the Spilotro murders and much more in this revealing look at organized crime. The book, written by  Chicago Tribune reporter Jeff Coen, covers the trial of the outfit bosses in 2007.

 

"The scale of the case was unprecedented, for the first time naming the Chicago Outfit itself as a criminal enterprise under federal anti-racketeering laws and alleging a conspiracy that was born with Al Capone and flourished from the 1960s forward," Coen wrote in the book. "The case included fourteen defendants, eighteen murders and decades of bookmaking, loan sharking, extortion and violence."

 

The investigation of the Outfit began in 1998 when the FBI received a letter from Frank Calabrese, Jr., son of one of the Outfit's most violent bosses, Frank Calabrese, Sr.

 

Due to a sour relationship with his father, the son told the FBI that he was willing to wear a wire and gather evidence against his father while they were incarcerated together. The father enjoyed explaining how the Outfit worked to his son. He also allowed his son to observe how he conducted business from the prison yard.

 

The FBI was later able to turn Nicholas Calabrese, a hit man for his brother Frank Calabrese, Sr., into a key witness against the Outfit bosses.

 

The FBI called the seven-year investigation "Operation Family Secrets." According to the FBI, the list of those charged read like a "Who's Who" of the Chicago mob.

 

After several mobsters pleaded guilty, the remaining five defendants were Frank Calabrese, Sr., James "Jimmy Light" Marcello, the reputed boss of the Outfit, Joey "the Clown" Lombardo, a tough, old-school mob boss, Anthony "Twan" Doyle, a former Chicago police officer accused of leaking information to Frank Calabrese, Sr., and Outfit enforcer Paul "the Indian' Schiro.

 

In September of 2007 the jury convicted the five men on broad conspiracy charges.

 

Jeff Coen does a fine job of covering the trial and he offers vivid descriptions of the defendants, the witnesses and the prosecutors, who are as colorful as the gangsters.

 

Reading the book makes you feel like you are sitting in the courtroom. This is a very good true crime book.

 

Note: The above column originally appeared at Greathistory.com. 

My On Crime & Security Column: Burnsville Police Sgt. Says Business Watch Program Stops Crime

The online magazine Businessknow.com, published my On Crime & Security column today.
 

The column featured a police officer from Burnsville, MN, Sgt. Witte, who suggested that small business people should join a local Business Watch program to help prevent crime.
 

You can read the column here  

Five Authors More Badass Than The Badass Characters They Created

Cracked.com has a funny piece on five authors more badass than the badass characters they created.

 

The link to the piece is below:

 

http://www.cracked.com/article/152_5-authors-more-badass-than-badass-character-they-created/

To visit my web page go to: http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/site/

 

My Crime Beat Column: A Soviet Serial Killer and a Secret Speech Provides Suspense in Tom Rob Smith's Two Thrillers

Andrei Chikatilo is not as well known as his fellow serial killers Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, and if the Soviets had their way, no one would have ever heard of him.

According to the Soviets, crime did not exist in their worker’s paradise. But as the dead bodies piled up, the killer who came to be known as The Rostov Ripper was finally caught and convicted of brutally murdering 52 women and children between the years 1978 and 1990.

Chikatilo told the Soviet court that he performed a service for the Soviet system by eliminating what he called “worthless people.” Chikatilo was executed in 1994.

HBO made a good film about Chikatilo called Citizen X and Tom Rob Smith has written a good fictional account of the Chikatilo case, called Child 44.

The 30-year-old writer said he was researching a screenplay when he came across the Chikatilo case.

“The more I dug into the case, the more clear it became that he evaded capture not because he was ingenious but because the Soviet criminal system was reluctant to admit he even existed,” Smith wrote in his web page http://tomrobbsmith.com/.

“Their preconceptions about their society were as important, if not more important than stopping these terrible murders,” Smith continued. “Reading the nonfiction account of the investigations was incredibly frustrating. My reaction was so strong I knew I wanted to tell my own version of the story.”

Smith wrote that he moved the story back in time, from the 1980s to the 1950s, reasoning that the pressure on the hero would be greater under Stalin’s regime.

The hero in Child 44 is a war hero turned MGB officer named Leo Demidov.

 

The MGB, which later became the KGB, was the state security service that the Soviet people justifiably feared. As an MGB officer, Demidov was a privileged man in Stalin’s 1953 Soviet Union.

 

He lived with his beautiful wife Raisa, who is a teacher, in a comfortable apartment (by Soviet standards). Demidov, his wife and his parents all ate well, shopped in MGB stores and lived a much higher standard of living than the average Soviet worker.

But hero may be the wrong word for Demidov, as he routinely arrests people for political crimes such as owning a Western book or speaking critically of the state. The unfortunate people that Demidov arrest are often tortured and then executed or shipped off to the Gulags, the cruel and inhuman prison system run by the Soviet state.

When a young boy is found dead on train tracks outside Moscow, apparently hit by a train, the boy’s father, a low-ranking MGB member, insists that his son was chopped up and murdered. Demidov is assigned to explain to the grieving father and his family that they are mistaken. For a brutal crime like that would not, could not, happen in the Soviet Union.

Demidov also has a problem with another MGB officer who claims that a traitor has named Raisa as an associate. To save his career, Demidov has to denounce his wife or risk becoming a suspected traitor as well.

Although his marriage is complicated and strained, Demidov refuses to denounce his wife and he is demoted to a lowly position in the Militia and sent to a small industrial town.

While on duty in this small town he comes across two children who have been mutilated and murdered just like the boy near Moscow. Against the orders of his bosses, Demidov begins to investigate and discovers that the boy killed outside Moscow was the 44th victim of a serial killer.

Demidov fights his former MGB officers and the Soviet system as he tracks down the serial killer.

In Smith’s follow up novel The Secret Speech Demidov has been allowed to form a homicide unit in Moscow. The year is 1956. Stalin is dead and the new Soviet ruler, Nikita Khrushchev, delivers a speech condemning Stalin for his use of state murder and other atrocities.

 

The secret speech is leaked to the West and within the Soviet Union the people are hearing something new and fresh — criticism of Stalin and the Soviet state.

When former MGB officers are found dead and other MGB officers are threatened by packages that contain photos and records of their past actions, Demidov begins to investigate. Demidov is also left a package that contains evidence of his former work as an MGB officer.

The deaths appear to be in reprisal against Stalin’s secret policemen. Demidov’s investigation leads him to the Vory, the criminal gangs that will later evolve into the Russian Mafia.

Demidov goes undercover as a prisoner and he is transported by a prisoner ship to an isolated and very cold Gulag. He eventually ends up in Hungry during the uprising against the Soviets in 1956.

Smith’s novels bring to mind Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park and his series of thrillers with Militia investigator Arkady Renko, but Smith also gives a nod to Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow, a classic book about the Soviet Union’s forced famine of the Ukraine, as a book that influenced him.

I enjoyed both Child 44 and The Secret Speech. They are good thrillers and the historical backdrop will perhaps introduce younger readers to the inner working of the “Evil Empire” of the Soviet Union.

Younger readers might even learn to be thankful that the United States and the West won the Cold War.

After reading Smith’s thrillers, one should go on to read Conquest’s book and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle, Cancer Ward and The Gulag Archipelago.

My On Espionage Column: The Secret History of History at The International Spy Museum in Washington D.C.

You can read my column on the International Spy Museum here

My On Crime & Security Column: Omaha Police Officer Explains Why Local Businesses Should Join Business Crime Watches

My latest On Crime & Security column, which appears in the national web site Businessknowhow,  covers the reasons why small businesses and home business people should join a local Business Watch.

Angie Echtenkamp, the Business Watch Officer from the Omaha, Nebraska Police Department, explains why you should join or start a local Business Watch.

The link to the column is here

My On Espionage Column: Secret Wars: One Hundred Years of British Intelligence Inside MI5 And MI6

The Weider History Group's web page GreatHistory.com published my column on Gordon Thomas' book Secret Wars: One Hundred Years of British Intelligence Inside MI5 and MI6.

This past August marked a century of the two oldest and most powerful secret intelligence services in the world: the British Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Thomas, an author who has covered intelligence and espionage for more than 50 years and has published 40 books, interviewed a wide array of current and former intelligence chiefs and officers for this book.

He interviewed the former directors of the British security services as well as the former directors and senior officers of the American CIA and the Israeli Mossad. He also interviewed the legendary spymaster East German Stasi espionage chief Markus Wolf.

You can read the column here.