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Even in Chicago, a city
steeped in mob history and legend, the Family Secrets case
was a true spectacle when it made it to court in 2007. A top
mob boss, a reputed consigliere, and other high-profile members
of the Chicago Outfit were accused in a total of eighteen
gangland killings, revealing organized crime's ruthless grip
on the city throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
Painting a vivid picture
of murder, courtroom drama, family loyalties and disloyalties,
journalist Jeff Coen accurately portrays the Chicago Outfit's
cold-blooded--and sometimes incompetent--killers and their
crimes in the case that brought them down. In 1998 Frank Calabrese
Jr. volunteered to wear a wire to gather evidence against
his father, a vicious loan shark who strangled most of his
victims with a rope before slitting their throats to ensure
they were dead. Frank Jr. went after his uncle Nick as well,
a calculating but sometimes bumbling hit man who would become
one of the highest-ranking turncoats in mob history, admitting
he helped strangle, stab, shoot, and bomb victims who got
in the mob's way, and turning evidence against his brother
Frank.
The Chicago courtroom took
on the look and feel of a movie set as Chicago's most colorful
mobsters and their equally flamboyant attorneys paraded through
and performed: James "Jimmy Light" Marcello, the
acting head of the Chicago mob; Joey "the Clown"
Lombardo, one of Chicago's most eccentric mobsters; Paul "the
Indian" Schiro; and a former Chicago police officer,
Anthony "Twan" Doyle, among others. Re-creating
events from court transcripts, police records, interviews,
and notes taken day after day as the story unfolded in court,
Coen provides a riveting wide-angle view and one of the best
accounts on record of the inner workings of the Chicago syndicate
and its control over the city's streets.
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