Mob hit detailed on tapes

By Liam Ford
Tribune staff reporter
Published July 11, 2007, 4:20 PM CDT
On secretly recorded tapes played in a Chicago federal court today, reputed mobster Frank Calabrese Sr. described his role in the 1983 slaying of two men in Cicero, and bragged to his son about how he could have become head of the Outfit's 26th Street Crew.

Tapes played in court today were made from April 1999 through early 2000, as Frank Calabrese Jr. was getting set to be transferred to another federal prison after being incarcerated with his father at Milan, Mich.

Calabrese Sr. told his son how he, his brother Nicholas Calabrese and James DiForti killed Richard D. Ortiz and Arthur Morawski as they sat in a parked car outside a Cicero tavern. Calabrese Sr. said they had gotten shotguns and tested them out near a club in the west suburbs before using them in the hit.

"All the signs [near there] were shot up," Calabrese Sr. said in the recording. "We used to do that to try the guns."

The hit was to be on Ortiz, a drug dealer who had at one time paid street tax to the mob, but who started making juice loans without Outfit approval. Calabrese Sr. described how he drove his brother and DiForti to the location of the hit, and they killed Ortiz and Morawski, even though Morawski was an innocent bystander.

Calabrese Sr. also told his son that he never wanted to become an Outfit leader, but that he was in line to become head of the 26th Street Crew and probably was passed over because of illness.

As Calabrese Sr. reminisced about achievements such as getting members of the Outfit to talk in crude codes and giving them nicknames, he tried to figure out whether federal authorities were investigating his Outfit operations, his son testified today.

Despite his worries about a looming federal probe tied to the killing of John Fecoratta that involved Nick Calabrese and himself, Calabrese Sr. told his son that "I still don't believe that those Wandies [federal investigators] will tie me to it."

Calabrese Sr. also scoffed in one conversation with his son at the idea that Anthony Centracchio, identified in some news reports in the late 1990s as the leader of an Outfit crew, was in the mob hierarchy. Centracchio wasn't even a "made" member, Calabrese Sr. told his son.

lford@tribune.com