IPSN - Key Persons
Angelo Fosco, who ultimately succeeded his father Peter Fosco as union president.
Arthur Loevy achieved power in that union - International Secretary Treasurer - one of the two top men running the entire organization. A most powerful union.
Job Titles:
- 24th Ward Democratic Boss
Richard Elrod, the son of 24th Ward Democratic boss Arthur X. Elrod, narrowly defeated the qualified Under Sheriff Bernard Carey, a low-key former F.B.I. agent, in the 1970 election. As a City of Chicago corporation counsel assigned to the Police Department, Elrod was involved in a tragic mishap with a street demonstrator. It occurred while dispensing legal advice to Chicago Police officers assigned to riot duty during the 1969 "Days of Rage." Elrod attempted to tackle a youthful protester resulting in a paralyzing neck injury and life-long disability for his troubles. The sympathy and publicity surrounding this unfortunate encounter undoubtedly helped thrust Elrod over the top in a closely contested race with Republican Bernie Carey.
A new Illinois constitution was drafted in 1970, and for the first time the laws of the state were changed to allow the Cook County Sheriff to stand for re-election. Elrod, with the resources of the well-oiled Democratic machine behind him, rolled through four terms of office as Sheriff.
Reform and scandal characterized Elrod's stormy 16-year term. The new Sheriff pushed through many noteworthy changes during his first few years of office. Elrod opened a centralized police headquarters with an up-to-date crime lab and pistol range in Maywood in 1973. Prior to this time, the Cook County Sheriff's Police was headquartered in the sixth floor of the downtown county building, and the three geographically located substations in Bedford Park, Homewood, and Niles. Major changes were put into place within the Department of Corrections.
Sheriff Elrod, a product of his dad's legendary 24th Ward Democratic Organization, espoused a philosophy of honesty and integrity. To meet these ends, he instituted a policy of not appointing any person as a Special Deputy with the attending privileges unless that person was employed as a full time County employee. Unfortunately for the Democratic Sheriff, the patronage abuses associated with the issuance of deputy stars to 1,200 politically-connected Holiday Court deputies, compromised Elrod and surfaced in the press at a point in time when the "Operation Safe Bet" revelations were also beginning to hit the front pages.
Job Titles:
- Cicero President
- Cicero Town President
The harsh lights that lit the hot, cramped courtroom fell unkindly on the woman with the oversize glasses.
Her face stripped of its usual makeup, she looked pale. Her eyes were tired and anxious. She stood holding her elbows in a black short-sleeved shirt and jeans, glaring over her shoulder at reporters and spectators.
In her town, she would have been leading the proceedings, defiant and certain, blasting those who would accuse her and perhaps taking note for retribution.
But in this place, she was not in charge. She was not in her town, but leaning against a polished courtroom pew in downtown Chicago, a place she doesn't like, adrift in a sea of blue and gray suits.
Federal corruption charges could land Cicero Town President Betty Loren-Maltese in prison but likely won't sweep her out of office-at least not right away.
That assessment, though, didn't stop her most recent political challenger from calling for Loren-Maltese to step down immediately.
"How can you let someone who stole millions from you stay in your house?" said Cook County Commissioner Joseph Mario Moreno, a Democrat who was easily defeated in April by Loren-Maltese.
The federal charges could be the first step in loosening the tight political grip Loren-Maltese has held in Cicero since she was first elected in 1993.
A former Cicero police superintendent says the bloodletting in his old town has only begun.
"There was a looting of the town's dollars almost very day. . . . I really don't think this is the end of this," former superintendent David Niebur said Friday from his home in Missouri.
Niebur says he expects other indictments out of a town government where "a good majority" of the employees "had their own money-making schemes."
Last month a jury found that Niebur and another officer were unjustly fired by the administration of Betty Loren-Maltese in 1998. The jury awarded him $911,000.
Reputed mob killer Frank Calabrese Sr. was taking a walk with his son in the prison yard at the federal detention center in Milan, Mich., uttering words that should never have left his lips.
During that walk and others, Calabrese Sr. spoke of mob slayings - ones the FBI says he was involved in, according to sources familiar with the matter.
He discussed who was a made members of the Outfit and who wasn't.
And he described his own initiation rites into the Chicago mob, where he was a reputed "made" man.
De Forest Jayne, who was nicknamed "D," was considered an outstanding trick rider and gifted instructor. He took George under his wing, and the two developed a close relationship. D also did his best to keep his other brothers out of trouble. But in 1938, D's fiancée, Mae Sweeney, a former riding student, committed suicide by drinking arsenic. The day after she was buried, De Forest dressed himself in his rodeo costume, grabbed a 12-gauge shotgun, and headed to the cemetery. He shot himself at Mae's freshly turned grave.
D's suicide removed an occasionally moderating influence from Si's life; it also may have aggravated the antagonism between Si and George. Before she died of cancer in 1996, Marion Jayne-George's widow-told federal agents that Si had been furious because D supposedly left 20 acres of land at Waukegan Road and Caldwell Avenue in Morton Grove to George.
During World War II, Si, a convicted felon, was barred from the draft. Instead Si and the Jesse Jayne Gang turned a handsome profit in the black market by selling horsemeat as beef, which was rationed during the war. The gang also rustled cattle from farmers in the northern suburbs. The black-market action brought Si into contact with members of the Chicago Outfit, and investigators say that Si forged relationships that he maintained throughout his life.
Frank Calabrese's son, Frank Jr., put his life on the line every time he secretly tape-recorded his father, who was always cagey, always suspicious. The men were in prison together on a loan-sharking case the feds had brought against Calabrese Sr. and his crew. Calabrese Sr., who ran the crew, got nearly 10 years in prison. His son, Frank Jr., who had much less involvement in the matter, got more than 4 years.
Frank Calabrese Sr. was known for his brutality and ruthlessness, both on the streets and at home, ruling his family with fierce intimidation. To this day, Calabrese Sr. still tries to reach out and rattle family members, whether by getting messages passed out to relatives from the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago, where he is being held, or having rats put on the porch of another family member, sources said.
Frank Calabrese Sr. was extremely leery of even his closest associates, much less family, making it that much more of a challenge for the younger Calabrese to get him talking.
If Calabrese Sr. or any other prisoner found out the younger Calabrese was wearing a listening device in the prison yard, his life would have been in peril.
Frank Calabrese Sr. and his brother Nick Calabrese had a long history together and were tight. They would often do mob killings together, authorities said. But what was once a close partnership is now a blood feud, with Nick Calabrese confessing to 15 mob hits and helping the FBI.
The key conversation came one day when Frank Calabrese Sr. and Frank Jr. were in prison and discussing Nick Calabrese and whether he was cooperating with the feds. Nick Calabrese was not cooperating at the time, but relations were tense between the two brothers. Frank Calabrese Sr. was refusing to have his underlings send money to help support his brother's family, according to court testimony. And Nick Calabrese was still sore over how Frank Calabrese Sr. had treated his own sons, Frank Jr. and Kurt, in the loan-sharking case, effectively hanging them out to dry.
Frank Calabrese Sr. assured his son on the recording that he had gotten word out of the prison that if Nick Calabrese was helping investigators, then he would have no objection to his brother being killed.
Frank Calabrese Sr. said that this was the life he and his brother had chosen.
When the feds played that tape for Nick Calabrese, he began cooperating.
George Jayne knew that about his brother, yet some investigators suspect that George's decision to keep quiet about the boys' murders eventually cost him his life and the lives of five others.
George did take some precautions. He never ate at the same restaurant twice in a row; he would start his car with his feet sticking out, so a blast would blow him out instead of through the roof. "He knew he was a target," Schomburg says. "He'd walk up to the ring with a horse on either side of him. That way, if somebody took a shot at him, the horse would get killed."
John Konen was one of a team of sergeants assigned to the Chicago Police task force responsible for investigating the crime. He says the Schuessler-Peterson investigation was flawed from the start. None of the detectives and supervisors later assigned to the task force had visited the scene when the bodies were found. The scene itself was altered before police arrived-an overzealous coroner's aide had moved the boys' bodies for the benefit of newspaper photographers before any forensic evidence had been gathered.
Over the next two years, the task force interviewed thousands of people and compiled more than 6,000 pages of reports in hopes of catching the boys' killer or killers. Almost immediately, Konen says, it was obvious to him and others that the Idle Hour Stable was a likely spot for the murder scene. In 1955 the Chicago police knew little of Silas except that he was a foul-mouthed brute, Konen says. But several residents living near the Idle Hour had reported hearing children screaming in the vicinity of the stable on the night the boys disappeared, and one had heard a car peeling away.
"We realized the logical place [for the murder] would have been something adjacent to where the bodies were found," says Konen, who today is retired and lives in Tinley Park. "You look at the city map: right down Higgins Road off of River Road there is the stable, the Idle Hour."
Former F.B.I. Agent Joseph Woods, best known as the brother of President Richard Nixon's personal secretary Rosemary Woods, was picked by and succeeded Ogilvie in 1966. Woods, who was often spotted around town wearing some of Nixon's discarded suits, had toiled as the chief investigator for the Better Government Association (BGA). "Sheriff Joe" was a throw-back to the "rootin-tootin" flamboyance of John Babb in the early 1950s, but like the lamented Babb, very little of substance was accomplished during the four years of the Woods regime except a highly publicized and stormy battle with the County Board over manpower appropriations. Political overtones began to permeate decision making.
Joe Woods was an officious man with a good deal of pomposity. He antagonized some of the holdovers from the Ogilvie regime. He truly enjoyed the role of Sheriff, the acclaim and notoriety of office. But after his four years were up it was time for him to move on. Like his mentor, he ran against his old nemesis George Dunne for the presidency of the Cook County Board, but was easily defeated. A Richard B. Ogilvie, Joe Woods was not.
Lieutenant James Keating, the former head of the Criminal Intelligence Unit (C.I.U.) and a member of the Cook County Police since 1964, and Sergeant Bruce Frasch, a 16-year veteran who headed the sensitive vice control unit from 1978 until 1983, were convicted on 18 counts of racketeering conspiracy, extortion, and income tax fraud in U.S. District Court after four weeks of damaging testimony that exposed the sordid underbelly of suburban sleaze and police graft. The most damaging testimony against Frasch and Keating was supplied by government informants and undercover agents who recorded 40 secretly taped conversations revealing to the jurors the full extent of the cesspool of corruption.
Mike Sheahan, a former juvenile officer in the Chicago Police Department positioned himself as another reformer free of political entanglements but everyone in the know understands that he is Mayor Richard M. Daley's man. His campaign was expertly managed by his brother James "Skinny" Sheahan, a close ally of Daley and former State Senator Timothy F. Degnan, the Mayors right hand man and conduit to the ward organizations - many with questionable connections. Skinny Sheahan was named the Director of the Office of Special Events for the City of Chicago - a political thank you for his years of faithful service to the Daley organization.
Mike Sheahan was swept into office on the O'Grady debacle, and has enjoyed the warm support of the "Man on Five" ever since.
If the success of a Cook County Sheriff is measured solely by the absence of a major front-page scandal and nothing more, then Sheahan has earned a passing grade thus far and a second term of office. However, the ominous politicization of the department, a do- nothing police administration, dangerous overcrowding at the Department of Corrections culminating in several bloody confrontations between inmates and correctional officers, and the slow progress in identifying suburban law enforcement needs have not lent to a glittering administration.
But that wasn't the only factor contributing to Nick Calabrese's change of heart.
Nick Calabrese shot and killed Fecarotta, but Calabrese made a critical error. He left behind a bloody glove, which investigators recovered and kept. Years later, DNA tests tied Nick Calabrese to the glove and the murder.
Officer Rick Urso described for the court at one point, a conversation he had with Frasch at the Maywood headquarters involving the disbursement of bribe money. "I told him its not funny. I don't want to be involved in this. Let's turn the money in." Frasch replied: "It's no big deal. It happens every day. This is a way of life." And so it was.
Thomas Hett, the next judge assigned to Jahoda's case, also recused himself because he knew a member of Jahoda's family. In mid-April 1989, Hett was approached by Frank Belmonte, the Democratic Committeeman from Cicero and an administrative employee of the Circuit Court of Cook County, regarding Jahoda's case. Belmonte asked Hett if he had Jahoda's case, but Hett, who was still unaware [*7] of the reassignment, said he did not have the case. Hett recused himself at the next scheduled status call. When Jahoda told Infelise about it, Infelise said that Hett would have received $ 7,500 for taking care of the case.
Belmonte is a long term friend of Maltese. Belmonte told the FBI that he ran into Maltese one night in the spring of 1989 and Maltese asked him to find out if Jahoda's case had been assigned to Hett. Belmonte said he would try to find out. As described above, Belmonte contacted Hett the next day. After talking to Hett, Belmonte called Maltese to tell him that Hett did not have Jahoda's case.
Tony Accardo bragged that he never spent a night in jail, even though he was indicted no less than four times between 1948 and 1982. Each time the government failed in its mission to put him behind bars. In the celebrated 1982 labor-racketeering trial in Miami, Fla., Accardo and fourteen co-defendants were charged with conspiring to share in $2 million in kickbacks involving the placement of insurance business from the mob-controlled 550,000 member Laborer's International Union into the hands of a convicted swindler named Joseph Hauser of Beverly Hills, Cal. In stirring courtroom testimony, Hauser labeled Accardo as "the number one" power behind the union. He detailed the methods used by the Chicago mob leader to force the removal of secretary treasurer Terrance O'Sullivan in favor of his own man