Operation Family Secrets: How a Mobster's Son and the FBI Brought Down Chicago's Murderous Crime Family

Operation Family Secrets is the chilling true story of how the son of the most violent mobster in Chicago made the unprecedented decision to work with the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys Office to incriminate his own father and to help bring down the last great American crime syndicatethe one-hundred-year-old Chicago Outfit. The Calabrese family of Chicago is a close-knit middle-class multi-generational Italian-Irish-American clan. They operate family businesses. They work day and night striving for the American Dream. All three sons forge a bond with their controlling father Frank Sr. and their soft-spoken favorite uncle Nick. As a boy the oldest son Frank Jr. realizes that his father and uncle are also made members of another close-knit family: the outfit. In Operation Family Secrets Frank Calabrese Jr. tells the turbulent tale of a family dominated by a violent patriarch who breaks a longstanding unwritten outfit code and brings the street into his home by enlisting two of his sons into the outfits 26th Street/Chinatown crew. Frank Jr. reveals for the first time the outfits made ceremony and describes being put to work alongside his father and uncle in loan sharking gambling labor racketeering and extortion and plotting the slaying of a fellow gangster while they commit the bombing murder of a trucking executive the gangland execution of two mobsters whose burial in an Indiana cornfield was reenacted in Martin Scorseses blockbuster film Casino and numerous other hits. The Calabrese Crews colossal earnings and extreme ruthlessness make them both a dreaded criminal gang and the object of an intense FBi inquiry. Eventually Frank Jr. his father and Uncle Nick are convicted on racketeering violations and Junior and Senior are sent to the same federal penitentiary in Michigan. Upon arrival Frank Jr. makes a life-changing decision: to go straight rather than agree to his fathers plans to resume crew activities after serving his sentence. But he needs to keep his father behind bars in order to regain control of his life and save his family. Frank Jr. makes a secret deal with prosecutors and for six monthsunmonitored and unprotectedhe wears a wire as his father recounts decades of hideous crimes. Frank Jr.s cooperation with the FBi for virtually no monetary gain or special privileges helps create the governments operation Family Secrets campaign against the Chicago outfit. The case reopens eighteen unsolved murders and also implicates twelve La Cosa Nostra soldiers and two outfit bosses. it becomes one of the largest organized crime cases in U.S. history. Operation Family Secrets intimately portrays how organized crime rots a family from the inside out while detailing Frank Jr.s deadly prison-yard mission the FBIs landmark investigation and the U.S. attorneys offices daring prosecution of americas most dangerous criminal organization.