**Seems like it was just last summer when we last saw the Calabrese name in the papers. Oh, those were the days...**

SQUEEZED? | Alleged hit man told to break owner's hands: feds

January 25, 2008
BY STEVE WARMBIR Staff Reporter/swarmbir@suntimes.com
An alleged mob hit man ordered that a Lockport tattoo shop be shut down and its owner's hands broken because the underage daughter of a mob boss had been tattooed there, according to court records.

The new revelation in the case of the reputed mob killer, Anthony Calabrese, came as Calabrese is set to go to trial next month on charges he took part in three suburban robberies.

If convicted, Calabrese, 47, could effectively spend the rest of his life in prison. He is a suspect but not charged in two more serious crimes: the 2001 Outfit murder of top mobster Anthony Chiaramonti at a Brown's Chicken & Pasta in south suburban Lyons and the 1997 attempted murder of a woman in Naperville. If Calabrese is convicted of the robbery charges, authorities want to use that leverage to get him to tell them who hired him for the murder and attempted murder.

Calabrese's attorney, Steven Hunter, has said if investigators had any solid evidence on the murder and attempted murder, prosecutors would have charged him.

The recent court filings provide the most detail yet about Calabrese's alleged connections to organized crime.

An informant has told investigators that Calabrese not only paid street tax to Outfit members but also did them various criminal favors, according to a court filing.

One favor was the July 2001 strong-arm robbery of the Metamorphous Tattoo parlor in Lockport, authorities say.

Calabrese allegedly approached one of his partners in crime, Edmond Frank, who is cooperating with the feds, and asked him about putting together a crew for criminal work.

Frank allegedly turned to his drug dealer and asked him if he was interested in a job. The drug dealer agreed and recruited a few other men who took part in the tattoo parlor robbery, authorities say. During the robbery, the tattoo parlor owner was beaten up, but his hands were not broken -- even though that was the order. The mob boss is not named in the court papers.

Calabrese would repeatedly test Frank's loyalty to him by beating him -- one instance of which the government secretly recorded, authorities say.

Calabrese also allegedly stuck a loaded handgun in Frank's mouth and asked Frank if he would go to prison for him.

The poor tattooist would'nt know if the girl had a mob father or indeed was under age surely?

What a dodgy career to be in

Yogi:

You are indeed correct to assume that the business of tattooing is a dodgy sort of career!

People come in drunk, demanding to be tattooed, and then they come back two days later, after they've sobered up and realized that they've had something highly tasteless or very embarrassing permanently engraved into their living flesh... and sometimes they bring a baseball bat with them!

I have a friend in this business, and he is very cautious. He won't immediately tattoo any customer who is drunk, or for whom this is the first-ever tattoo. Instead, he makes such people pick out a design, and then come back a couple of days later-- just to be sure that the customer cannot later blame him for being taken advantage of.

He's also very, very careful about tattooing young women. Not only is there the pitfall of a possible under-aged customer (who may or may not also feature a hot-tempered gangster for a father) but also, one might also face prosecution and loss of one's operating license in addition to the potential broken hands or pulverized noggin.

Even after the young female customer presents convincing proof of her age, if this is her first tattoo my friend will also make her come back after reconsidering her choice for a couple of days. Finally, he has an acid test that sometimes sends them screaming, never to return: he merely tells them that being tattooed hurts (and it does, it does) and then tells them that he wants to hit them with a needle that has not been dipped in ink... just to make sure they'll sit through the entire painful process. That way, if they decide that it's too much for them to handle, they will at least not be permanently marked up.

Regarding me with a wolfish grin, he told me that about one in three of such clients gets just a slight taste of his needle and suddenly changes her mind about being tattooed. He doesn't seem to mind the loss of business one little bit. He can always find some other sucker to work on instead, especially nowadays since tattoos are so popular.

Tattooing the wrong person can also apparently get you killed, especially if you do bad work, or have ripped the customer off somehow...

Here's a little story that has made the rounds for a few years. I don't know if it's true or not, but it goes like this:

There was a fellow in the Midwestern United States who ran a motorcycle repair shop. One day three members of an infamous motorcycle gang stopped by as one of their bikes was malfunctioning and they were on the road and far from home.

The mechanic agreed to fix the motorcycle, and the other two gang members decided to also leave their bikes with him overnight, while he effected the repairs. The three outlaws then departed by taxicab to go party in the city they were in.

When the gangsters came back the next day, they found the shop completely empty. All the tools, parts-- and all three of their motorcycles-- were gone. The shop owner had cleared out and flown the coop under cover of darkness.

Needless to say, they were outraged and their organization began to search for the mechanic who had ripped them off. But they couldn't seem to find him.

About two years later, these three bikers-- along with several of their counterparts-- went to Sturgis, South Dakota, to attend a very major motorcycle rally that takes place there annually.

One of the gang members found some guy doing tattoo work out of a tent at one of the campgrounds that hosts the visiting bikers. The bike gang member was very drunk, and he decided that he wanted a tattoo that commemorated his presence at the Sturgis Rally.

So he told the tattooist that he wanted a tattoo that read "Sturgis, 1989"...

The tattooist must have been just as drunk as his customer, for when the hapless gangster came to the next morning, he found that he had somehow become the butt of many jokes. His guffawing friends pointed out that his tattoo was a very ugly, amateurish job, and worse, that instead of reading "Sturgis, 1989" it read:

Stugis, 1898

!!!

His friends were telling him that he was a stooge who went to Stugis in 1898! They had plenty of fun at his expense, and the biker pretty much blew his stack about it...

So the biker decided that he would return to the tattooist, and force the man to provide him with a tasteful cover-up. And after that, he and his friends were going to beat the guy senseless.

A group of these bikers made their way to the tent, and two of them were the same people whose motorcycles had been stolen years before by the crooked motorcycle mechanic... who, unfortunately, turned out to be one in the same as the incompetent tattoo artist!

You can guess what happened after that!

So yeah: tattooing is a dodgy sort of profession... especially if one is an incompetent fool with a penchant for stealing things from people who never forgive or forget!