Nicholas Calabrese was a made member of the Chicago Outfit who took orders from his older brother, Frank Calabrese Sr., and then became the first made member of the organization to testify against it. In May 2007 he pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge James Zagel to racketeering conspiracy and admitted that he had taken part in planning or carrying out 14 of the 18 murders charged in the conspiracy. The killings ran from 1970 to 1986 and included the June 1986 deaths of Anthony Spilotro, the Outfit's representative in Las Vegas, and his brother Michael.
His testimony at the 2007 federal trial of five men helped produce convictions for racketeering conspiracy against all of them, his own brother among them, and murder findings against three. On March 26, 2009, Zagel sentenced him to 12 years and 4 months, a term the judge tied chiefly to his value as a witness. He entered federal witness protection. Word of his death at the age of 80 emerged on March 13, 2023.
Calabrese was born in the early 1940s. He belonged to the Outfit's Chinatown crew, also called the 26th Street crew, which was led by his brother Frank Sr., and he had taken the organization's oath as a made member. His work for the crew included collecting money owed to loan sharks, and in his plea he said he took orders from his brother.
In 1995 he was charged with Frank Sr. and two other relatives in a federal loan-sharking indictment. All four pleaded guilty to roles in the family business.
The route to the murders came from inside the family. In 1998 Frank Calabrese Jr., who was serving a sentence alongside his father, wrote to the FBI's Chicago office offering to help. He agreed to record conversations with his father in which the older man spoke about unsolved killings. Those recordings began a seven-year FBI investigation of the Outfit.
The two killings Calabrese described most fully both fall in the second half of 1986. On June 14, 1986, Anthony Spilotro and his brother Michael Spilotro died in Bensenville, Illinois. Calabrese told jurors in 2007 that he took part, together with other Outfit members, and that mobsters had been angry with Anthony Spilotro for drawing too much attention to the organization. His testimony was the first eyewitness account of those killings.
On September 14, 1986, John Fecarotta died in Chicago. Calabrese carried out that killing himself. His nephew, Frank Calabrese Jr., has said the two of them planned it together and that his uncle then decided to act alone. The evidence against Frank Sr. in the Fecarotta killing also implicated Nicholas Calabrese.
At trial he also described a killing in Cicero in 1983 in which two people died. He said he felt he had no choice but to take part: "In my mind, I knew I had to do this because if I didn't, my brother would have flattened me." He accused another defendant, Paul Schiro, of taking part in the June 1986 killing of Emil Vaci in Phoenix, Arizona.
The Fecarotta killing exposed Calabrese to the death penalty. He had been in federal custody since November 2002, and that year he contacted the FBI. Facing the evidence in that case, he agreed to cooperate and gave investigators details of 18 previously unsolved mob killings. In return he received an agreement under which he avoided a death sentence.
Michael Marcello, a brother of the Outfit leader James Marcello, pleaded guilty shortly before the 2007 trial and admitted paying Calabrese $4,000 a month to stay silent about unsolved murders.
On April 25, 2005, prosecutors in Chicago announced a federal indictment of 14 reputed Outfit figures, covering 18 previously unsolved murders and one attempted murder between 1970 and 1986. The FBI called it the largest indictment of its type in the Chicago area in three or four decades. Arrests were made in Illinois, Arizona and Florida, and two of those charged were retired law enforcement officers. Calabrese's cooperation was central to it.
Of the 14 charged, two died before trial, six pleaded guilty and one was too ill to be tried. Five went to trial: Frank Calabrese Sr., James Marcello, Joseph Lombardo, Paul Schiro and a former Chicago police officer, Anthony Doyle.
Calabrese pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Chicago in May 2007, a few weeks before the trial began. The charge was racketeering conspiracy. The conspiracy covered 18 murders, and he admitted taking part in planning or carrying out 14 of them. Some of the killings, he said in his plea, had been committed to protect the Outfit from people who gave information to law enforcement.
Federal guidelines called for at least 24 years, and the charge allowed life. Prosecutors agreed to recommend a reduction in return for his cooperation, without fixing the amount.
The trial began in June 2007 before Judge Zagel and lasted about ten weeks. The government called more than 125 witnesses. Calabrese testified over five days in July as the star witness. He described the family business and the killings in which he and Frank Sr. took part, and said that his brother had been the dominating figure who pressed him to join. He called himself "a killer" but not "a serial killer." He tied every defendant except Doyle to at least one killing.
The defense argued that Calabrese had made up his account to please prosecutors and keep his agreement, that he was cooperating only to escape the death penalty, and that he had admitted lying to authorities in the past. One defense lawyer called him a "grim reaper."
On September 10, 2007, after four days of deliberation, the jury found all five defendants guilty on all counts, including racketeering conspiracy. The jurors then spent eight days on the question of who was responsible for each murder. On September 27, 2007, they held Frank Calabrese Sr. responsible for seven murders, James Marcello for the two Spilotro killings and Joseph Lombardo for the September 1974 killing of Daniel Seifert: ten in all. They could not agree on the remaining eight murders or on Schiro. Doyle was convicted of the conspiracy but was not accused of any killing.
None of the defendants was charged with murder as a separate count. The convictions were for racketeering, with the murders alleged as acts within it.
Zagel sentenced the men Calabrese had helped convict in early 2009. Frank Calabrese Sr., then 71, received life plus 240 years on January 28, 2009, in the Dirksen Federal Building; a son disowned him in open court. James Marcello and Joseph Lombardo each received life in the first week of February 2009. Frank Calabrese Sr. died on December 25, 2012, aged 75, in federal custody in North Carolina.
Calabrese was the last of the defendants to be sentenced. His hearing had first been set for January 26, 2009, and was held on March 26. By then he had been in federal custody for more than six years.
Relatives of victims in the case spoke to the court. The son of Richard Ortiz, killed in 1983, said he had no faith in the justice system and that Calabrese had never apologized to the families. The widow of Paul Haggerty, killed in 1976, called him "the devil." A son of Nick D'Andrea, killed in 1981, told him that his eternity "may be very unpleasant," while saying he had seen some sorrow in Calabrese and leaving judgment to others.
Calabrese told the court that he had chosen the wrong path and had been a coward consumed by fear. "I can't undo what I done," he said.
Zagel sentenced him to 12 years and 4 months, with credit for time served and for good behavior, so that he was expected to leave custody in under five years, at about the age of 70. The judge said Calabrese had committed terrible crimes but had shown remorse, and that without leniency for those who cooperate, informants would not come forward. The term amounted to less than a year for each of the 14 lives he had admitted taking. The first assistant U.S. attorney, Gary Shapiro, said that as a victim he would be "totally unsatisfied with this sentence" and that Calabrese had "got a break." The defense lawyer, John Theis, answered that cooperation depends on some benefit.
Zagel added a warning: the Outfit "will not forgive or relent in their pursuit of you." Calabrese was to enter witness protection under a new identity.
Calabrese was last said to be in federal witness protection. He died at the age of 80, apparently of natural causes; word of it emerged on March 13, 2023.
The Chicago Outfit is the city's organized crime group, which the FBI describes as running loan sharking, extortion, gambling and murder. It worked through street crews, among them the Chinatown crew to which the Calabreses belonged. Murders of the kind charged in 2005 had rarely been solved: the Chicago Crime Commission counted only 14 of 1,111 mob-related murders solved since 1919.
The 2007 defendants were tried for racketeering conspiracy, with the murders as alleged acts, and the jury was asked in a second stage to decide each defendant's responsibility for each killing. Calabrese's own conviction took the same form: a plea to racketeering conspiracy, with 14 killings admitted as part of it. An FBI agent said the cooperation of the family helped remove three crew bosses and the acting head of the Outfit.
The defense at the 2007 trial argued that Calabrese had invented his account to please prosecutors and keep his agreement. The jury accepted enough of it to hold three defendants responsible for ten murders and left the other eight undecided.
Of the 14 killings he admitted, the ones publicly tied to him are the Spilotro killings, the death of John Fecarotta and the 1983 killing he described at trial. Paul Schiro, whom Calabrese accused of taking part in the Vaci killing, was not found responsible by the jury.
1970 to 1986: span of the 18 murders charged in the Outfit conspiracy.
1983: A killing in Cicero, Illinois, in which two people died, later described by Calabrese at trial.
June 14, 1986: Anthony and Michael Spilotro die in Bensenville, Illinois.
September 14, 1986: John Fecarotta dies in Chicago.
1995: Calabrese, his brother Frank Sr. and two other relatives plead guilty to federal loan-sharking charges.
1998: Frank Calabrese Jr. writes to the FBI offering to help.
November 2002: Calabrese is in federal custody; he contacts the FBI and begins to cooperate.
April 25, 2005: Indictment of 14 Outfit figures covering 18 murders is announced.
May 2007: Calabrese pleads guilty to racketeering conspiracy before Judge Zagel.
June to August 2007: Trial of five defendants; Calabrese testifies in July.
September 10, 2007: The jury convicts all five of racketeering conspiracy.
September 27, 2007: Jurors hold three defendants responsible for 10 murders.
January 28, 2009: Frank Calabrese Sr. is sentenced to life plus 240 years.
Early February 2009: James Marcello and Joseph Lombardo receive life.
March 26, 2009: Nicholas Calabrese is sentenced to 12 years and 4 months.
December 25, 2012: Frank Calabrese Sr. dies.
March 13, 2023: Word of Nicholas Calabrese's death at 80 emerges.