Operation Family Secrets

The chilling true story of how the son of the most violent mobster in Chicago helped bring down the last great American crime syndicate: the one-hundred-year-old Chicago Outfit. In Operation Family Secrets, Frank Calabrese, 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. As members of the outfit, they plotted the slaying of a fellow gangster, committed the bombing murder of a trucking executive, the gangland execution of two mobsterswhose burial in an Indiana cornfield was reenacted in Martin Scorseses blockbuster film Casinoand numerous other hits. The Calabrese Crews colossal earnings and extreme ruthlessness made them both a dreaded criminal gang and the object of an intense FBi inquiry. When Frank Jr., his father, and Uncle Nick are convicted on racketeering violations, Junior and Senior are sent to the same federal penitentiary in Michigan. It's there that Frank Jr. makes the life-changing decision to go straight. But he needs to keep his father behind bars in order to regain control of his life and save his family. So 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 helped create the governments Operation Family Secrets campaign against the Chicago outfit, which reopened eighteen unsolved murders, implicated twelve La Cosa Nostra soldiers and two outfit bosses, and became 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.