From the "Bright One" (that's the hip, new catch title for the Sun-Times)

'Business as usual'
According to Frank Calabrese Jr.'s frighteningly detailed testimony Monday, when Nicholas Calabrese told brother Frank Sr. he had to kill someone out West, the mob boss' sentiment was little more than ...

July 10, 2007
BY STEVE WARMBIR Staff Reporter/swarmbir@suntimes.com
Frank Calabrese Jr. was being groomed to take over the family business when he learned he was going to have to step up and take more responsibility.

His uncle, Nicholas Calabrese, was leaving his day-to-day duties temporarily to handle a job out West.

Nicholas Calabrese had to go kill somebody, he told his brother, Frank Calabrese Sr., and nephew, Frank Jr.

What was Calabrese Sr.'s response?
"Business as usual," Frank Calabrese Jr. said in testimony Monday during the Family Secrets mob trial.

Calabrese Jr. described to jurors in compelling detail the crime family's alleged usual business of muscling people for street tax, squeezing them on juice loans and, when necessary, killing people.

Outfit hit man Nicholas Calabrese was assigned to kill Anthony Spilotro, the mob's man in Las Vegas, who was bringing too much heat.

Eventually, after some missteps, the Outfit got the job done, by luring Anthony Spilotro to a Bensenville-area home where they told him his brother, Michael, was to be "made."

In the basement were top mob killers, including Nicholas Calabrese, who told his brother, Frank Calabrese Sr., and nephew, Frank Jr., what happened next.

As Anthony Spilotro and his brother Michael came downstairs, the killers jumped them and strangled them.

Anthony Spilotro put up a fight, telling the mobsters, "You guys are going to get in trouble." Michael Spilotro submitted to his fate.

Calabrese Jr. went from collecting quarters at mob-controlled peep shows when he was a teenager to role-playing in planning scenarios set up by his father and uncle as they plotted out how to kill someone. Calabrese Jr. once retrieved his uncle's murder weapon that had been thrown in a sewer, made easier since Calabrese Jr. ran a city sewer crew.


'To see if you'd budge'
Calabrese Jr. isn't charged in the Family Secrets case but secretly recorded his father while they were in prison together on another case in 1999 and is testifying against him at trial. It's the only way he can get the man out of his life for good, he indicated.
Before Frank Calabrese Jr. was sentenced to prison in the mid-1990s, it became clear he had a cocaine problem, and father and son had an emotional meeting before they headed to prison.

They hugged. Calabrese Sr. begged his son to stop using drugs.

The son agreed, but in return asked his father to step back from Outfit life.

His father agreed but soon was up to his old tricks, Calabrese Jr. said.

"At that point, I realized there was no hope. My father wasn't going to change his ways," Calabrese Jr. said.

So Calabrese Jr. got his ever-cautious father to talk of murders and mob rituals while recording him.

In one February 1999 conversation, Frank Calabrese Sr. allegedly told his son how he got made with other men.

"Their fingers get cut and everybody puts the fingers together and all the blood running down, then they take pictures. Put them in your hand. Burn them," Frank Calabrese Sr. said.

"Pictures of?" Frank Jr. asked.

"Holy pictures," Frank Calabrese Sr. said. "And they look at you to see if you'd budge. . . . And they . . . wait till they're getting down to the skin. Then they take them out of there."

"What happens if you budge?" Frank Jr asked.

"Then it shows fear," the father replied. "You have fear."

Earlier in the day at trial, a surprise witness hit the stand -- longtime bookie Joel Glickman who refused last week to testify even after being given immunity.

Glickman did not say what made him change his mind. But after eight days of solitary confinement, Glickman hit the stand.

He admitted under the prosecution's prodding he was afraid to testify because of Calabrese Sr.