Chicago Police Memorial

Arrest of a life time: Eddie Jackson (shot 1977, died 2003) finally to be inducted into the Chicago Police Officers Memorial on September 13, 2016. see below articles:

http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2011/01/27/police-officers-head-out-for-gunmans-parole-hearing/

Parole Denied For Man Who Shot Chicago Cop

January 27, 2011 5:33 AM

Filed Under: 1977, Chicago Police, Lee Jones, Officer Eddie Jackson, Parole Hearing, shooting, Springfield, Susanna Song

Chicago Police Officers head to Springfield to fight against parole for a man

Updated 01/27/11 – 3:29 p.m.

CHICAGO (CBS) — Parole has been denied to a man convicted of shooting a Chicago police officer more than 30 years ago.

Dozens of Chicago police officers traveled to Springfield on Thursday to attend the parole hearing for Lee Jones, who was convicted of attempted murder for shooting Officer Eddie Jackson on Oct. 14, 1977.

Jones was denied parole on Thursday and won’t have another parole hearing for three years.

Jones was sentenced to 50 to 100 years in prison for shooting Jackson in the head during a traffic stop on Oct. 14, 1977. Jackson survived the shooting, but was left paralyzed and in a wheelchair until his death in 2003.

As CBS 2’s Susanna Song reports, 27 officers took off on a bus from Chicago Police Headquarters, 3510 S. Michigan Ave., around 4:15 a.m. to attend Jones’ parole hearing in Springfield.

For the past three years, Jones has been up for parole, and each year, officers have gone to Springfield to make sure he remains behind bars.

“Everybody, pretty much, who was with him at that time has retired from the job,” said Chicago Police Sgt. Frank Iglinski, “so these are all officers that are representing him and his family at a parole hearing. We just want to establish that we don’t forget what Mr. Jones has done to us. Officer Jackson … is still part of our community.”

The officers wore their uniforms to the hearing. They did not plan to testify, instead planning to stand silently during the hearing.

PEOPLE v. JONES

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No. 78-2017.

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88 Ill. App.3d 629 (1980)

410 N.E.2d 1122

THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. LEE JONES, a/k/a/ Lee A. Momient, Defendant-Appellant.

Appellate Court of Illinois — First District (4th Division).

Opinion filed September 18, 1980.

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·         View Case

·         Cited Cases

·         Citing Case

Attorney(s) appearing for the Case

Ralph Ruebner and Gordon Berry, both of State Appellate Defender's Office, of Chicago, for appellant.

Bernard Carey, State's Attorney, of Chicago (Marcia B. Orr and Iris E. Sholder, Assistant State's Attorneys, of counsel), for the People.

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Judgment affirmed.

Mr. JUSTICE JOHNSON delivered the opinion of the court:

Defendant, Lee Jones, also known as Lee Momient, was charged by information with attempt murder (Ill. Rev. Stat. 1975, ch. 38, par. 8-4) and three counts of aggravated battery (Ill. Rev. Stat. 1975, ch. 38, pars. 12-4(a), 12-4(b)(1)). Following a trial by jury, defendant was found guilty of all charges. Judgment was entered upon attempt murder and defendant was sentenced to a term of 50 to 100 years' imprisonment. From the conviction, defendant appeals and raises the following issues: (1) His assignment to a special recidivist court was prejudicial and unconstitutional;

[88 Ill. App.3d 631]

(2) the jury was prejudiced by seeing him in handcuffs and under guard of a deputy sheriff; (3) it was error for the State to be allowed to present evidence of identification where no issue of identification was raised; and (4) his election between sentencing codes was not intelligently made.

We affirm the judgment of the trial court.

On October 14, 1977, Chicago Police Officers Alfred Williams, Rudolph Winston, Karl Manuel and Eddie Jackson were assigned to a detail to arrest prostitutes. The patrol involved officers wearing civilian clothes and driving unmarked cars.

At approximately 1 a.m., the officers arrested Cassandra Brooks for prostitution at 800 North Clark Street, in Chicago. Brooks was placed in the car driven by Officer Jackson. Leaving the scene of the arrest shortly thereafter, Officer Jackson turned west onto Elm Street and stopped at the intersection of Elm and LaSalle Street. While he was waiting at the stop sign, a gray Lincoln Continental automobile, traveling north on LaSalle, swerved at the intersection and then came to a stop in the middle of the street, approximately 4 or 5 car lengths north of the intersection. Officer Jackson turned the corner, northbound onto LaSalle Street, and drove between the Lincoln and another car parked at the curb. The officer's car and the Lincoln were about 8 or 12 inches apart. The driver of the Lincoln lowered his electric window on the passenger side and yelled, "You almost hit me." Officer Jackson responded that he did not. The driver repeated his taunt and Officer Jackson again responded. After the verbal exchange had taken place a third time, the driver leaned over, raised his hand with a gun in it, and fired one shot which struck Officer Jackson in the head. The driver of the Lincoln, who was later identified as defendant, sped away.

Officer Manuel testified he saw the car in question when it and Officer Jackson's car were stopped next to each other, but he could not hear the conversation. He heard a loud noise and when he saw the Lincoln drive away he followed it. Officer Manuel was able to see the license number, ILL 269.

Verna Jones, defendant's wife, testified at trial. She said defendant left their apartment early in the morning on October 14, 1977. He was driving her 1977 Lincoln Continental which had license plates, ILL 269. Defendant called her later that day and told her to report her car stolen. The witness stated defendant's voice sounded nervous and scared.

Chicago Police Officers Wayne Johnson and (Tim McGady) John Rice responded to a radio call to locate the Lincoln in question. Officer Johnson and his partner (Tim McGady) apprehended and arrested defendant farther north. When Officer Rice arrived at the scene, he looked inside the car and found a pistol lying with the "butt up" against the transmission hump. The gun and defendant were taken to the police station.

Later that same morning, a lineup was held. Defendant was identified

[88 Ill. App.3d 632]

by Officers Williams and Winston. Cassandra Brooks also picked defendant out of the lineup but was uncertain of her identification.

Officer William Scanlon of the mobile unit crime lab of the Chicago Police Department examined the car driven by Officer Jackson. A bullet was found on the rear seat. Officer Scanlon also examined the recovered weapon. It was a .357 python revolver. Two cartridges and two casings remained in the cylinder. Donald Ginell, a firearms examiner for the police department, performed test firings of the weapon and determined the bullet found in the car driven by Officer Jackson had been fired from the gun recovered at the time of defendant's arrest.

A stipulation by the parties was admitted into evidence. It stated that if Dr. Vinod Sahgal, a neurologist, were called, he would testify Officer Jackson received a bullet wound in the left frontal area and an exit wound in the upper rear area of his head. Part of his skull was lost and substantial brain damage occurred. Jackson was left paralyzed on his right side, including loss of vision in his right eye.

After hearing the evidence, the jury found defendant guilty of attempt murder and aggravated battery. Judgment was entered only for attempt murder.

At the post-trial hearing, defendant testified, in mitigation, that the shooting was an accident. He had stopped his car because he wanted to avoid an accident. He said he "pulled the pistol and it went off." Defendant said he had obtained the gun 6 hours earlier at a gambling house and did not intend to harm the police officer.

Defendant's primary contention is based upon the fact that prior to trial defense counsel was denied a motion for change of venue and reassignment. The motion was filed because the trial court was a specially created recidivist court to which defendant objected on various grounds. He argues that assignment to such a special court was unconstitutional and created an unacceptable risk of prejudice. The State responds that the special courts are not unconstitutional.

In review of this issue of first impression, we turn to the authority of the Illinois Supreme Court. The court has set the standard for determining prejudice where, as here, there may be prior knowledge by jurors of facts and issues to be heard. In People v. Black (1972), 52 Ill.2d 544, 557, 288 N.E.2d 376, 384, the court held:

Jurors need not be totally ignorant of the facts and issues involved. It is sufficient if the juror can lay aside his impression and render a verdict based on the evidence presented. Irvin v. Dowd, 366 U.S. 717, 6 L.Ed.2d 751, 81 S.Ct. 1639; People v. Williams, 40 Ill.2d 522.

The United States Supreme Court has held that a State may distinguish between classes of offenders and employ differing schemes of prosecution in order to facilitate, expedite, and reduce expense. (See Johnson v.

[88 Ill. App.3d 633]

Louisiana (1972), 406 U.S. 356, 32 L.Ed.2d 152, 92 S.Ct. 1620.) The court has also upheld recidivist statutes as constitutional. (See Spencer v. Texas (1967), 385 U.S. 554, 17 L.Ed.2d 606, 87 S.Ct. 648;Oyler v. Boles (1962), 368 U.S. 448, 7 L.Ed.2d 446, 82 S.Ct. 501.) Though these cases may be factually distinguishable from ours, they do represent authority for State judicial systems to categorize offenders and prosecutorial procedures.

• 1 The constitution of this State provides:

Subject to the authority of the Supreme Court, the Chief Judge [of the circuit court] shall have general administrative authority over his court, including authority to provide for divisions, general or specialized, and for appropriate times and places of holding court. (Ill. Const. 1970, art. VI, § 7(c).)

The establishment of special courts for recidivist cases is in line with our interpretation of the Illinois Constitution. So long as the expedience and efficiency sought to be achieved are not accomplished at the expense of undue prejudice to defendants, such procedures are proper.

• 2 Moreover, defendant suggests we reverse the judgment because recidivist courtrooms create an "unacceptable risk of prejudice." We will not reverse the trial court on such a speculative standard. The record does not reflect nor does defendant argue actual prejudice. The motion for change of venue and reassignment was properly denied.

Defendant contends that his being viewed in handcuffs was error. It is preferable for defendants not to be seen in handcuffs and in custody of the sheriff. However, the fact that jurors may see a defendant in handcuffs is not so inherently prejudicial as to require a mistrial. People v. Hyche(1978), 63 Ill.App.3d 575, 583, 380 N.E.2d 373, 379.

• 3 Nor was it reversible error for the trial court to allow Officers Williams and Winston, who witnessed the shooting, to testify they identified defendant in a lineup. Identification of a defendant as the person responsible for a crime is a key issue in a criminal case. Although identification may not have been directly at issue, defendant still had to be proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. He was not shown to have been harmed or prejudiced by the identification testimony.

Finally, defendant urges that a trial court be required to disclose what sentence would be imposed under alternate sentencing codes, prior to or at the time of election. To support his position, defendant cites authority which requires the accused to be allowed to make an informal election between such codes. We see a distinction between defendant's argument and what he purports to be the rule.

Because defendant shot Officer Jackson in 1977, prior to the effective date of the new sentencing code, he was entitled to elect between the sentencing provisions in effect at that time (Ill. Rev. Stat. 1975, ch. 38, pars. 8-4(c)(1), 1005-8-1(b)(2)), or the provisions in effect at the time of trial,

[88 Ill. App.3d 634]

under which he could be sentenced as a repeat offender and given an extended term (Ill. Rev. Stat. 1977, ch. 38, pars. 8-4(c)(1), 1005-5-3, 1005-8-1(b)(2), 1005-8-2). Defendant is given the right to elect under section 8-2-4 (Ill. Rev. Stat. 1977, ch. 38, par. 1008-2-4).

Defendant filed a motion, asking the court to reveal what sentence the judge intended to impose under each code. The judge declined, stating he would make such a disclosure only if he felt it essential to an intelligent election.

• 4, 6 We agree with the trial court that disclosure of the actual sentences to be imposed under each statute is not required for an intelligent election between sentencing codes. Although a trial judge should explain old and new provisions on the maximum penalties provided under each code, the defendant does not have the right to be sentenced under both laws and then to choose the sentence he prefers. (People v. Puckett (1979), 70 Ill.App.3d 743, 748, 388 N.E.2d 1293, 1297; People v. Dozier(1979), 67 Ill.App.3d 611, 615, 385 N.E.2d 155, 158.) Instead, the burden is upon counsel, not the court, to explain and suggest what appears to be the best course. (People v. Warfel (1979), 67 Ill.App.3d 620, 627, 385 N.E.2d 175, 180.) There is no error in the trial court's refusing to disclose the specific sentences it would impose under each statute.

For the foregoing reasons, the judgment of the circuit court is affirmed.

Affirmed.

LINN, P.J., and ROMITI, J., concur.

Discovered: Amazing Al Capone fixed roulette table shows how Chicago mob rigged casinos to make millions

Rigged roulette wheel almost certainly used by Al Capone's Chicago gangster mob is discovered by UK games expert  by Stephen Jones

Rare table discovered packed with hidden wires, trip switches under tiny screws and batteries secreted in its legs enabled 'Scarface' to cheat gamblers spinning the wheel.

It will come as little surprise that notorious mafia boss Al Capone not only didn't pay his taxes fairly but also his gambling addict customers.

But the lengths the gangster went to cheat them are exposed with the amazing discovery of a rigged roulette wheel that was used in Chicago casinos in the 1920s - at the height of the reign of the criminal infamously known as Scarface.

The rare table used by the underworld was the unlikely 'once-in-a-lifetime' discovery of a games company owner from Chertsey in Surrey, UK.

A restoration he ordered revealed it was fitted with four hidden buttons powered by batteries encased in the table legs which nudged the spin of the ball - technology that in some ways was ahead of its time, so few players would suspect.

It gave the croupier the power to decide where the ball fell on the roulette table by activating tiny pins, invisible to the human eye of a 'well-oiled' gambler.

These actions vastly increased the odds of the House to win and subsequently helped make Capone and his Chicago Outfit their vast fortune during the prohibition era

Alexander Walder-Smith, of The Games Room Company , only discovered the table's hidden secrets when it was taken apart for restoration. Constructed from American walnut, he bought it in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, from a man who'd stored it in his barn for decades unaware of its dark secret

The restorers discovered two pressure pads and two push buttons disguised as tiny screw heads alongside a number of hidden channels for wires. It was a highly-sophisticated invention which allowed the croupier to wander around the edges of the table yet still be able to affect the course of each game.

Somewhat ironically the four Ever Ready batteries were wrapped in newspapers of the day regaling lurid tales of The Mob's activities - helping date the table to having been used in the city from 1929-1931.

Finding such a table is incredibly rare as they were usually destroyed by authorities or The Mob themselves.

Mr Walder-Smith, who makes two or three buying trips to the US every year, said: "It was quite a find - and it's been a real labour of love getting it working again - but it's incredibly dodgy! No one expects to see this again.

He added: "In those days The Mob was generally acknowledged to run the casinos but many a punter must have left the table cursing his misfortune, little realising that the mafia had gone to such great lengths to ensure that he never stood a chance."

Capone, aka Scarface, ordered the murder of seven of his rivals in the infamous St Valentine's Day Massacre. He was eventually arrested for tax evasion in 1931 and died in 1947 - a story retold in the Robert De Niro film The Untouchables.

The fully restored table has now been bought by an unnamed wealthy American collector - with the cheat-mechanism made fully operational using modern batteries.

Mr X added: "He has assured us that he will not be using it to cheat his friends!"

You have been warned!

Prolific jailhouse snitch alleges he's victim of wrongful conviction

  

Steven Mandell and Tommy Dye. (Chicago Tribune file photos)

 

Steve MillsContact ReporterChicago Tribune

More than two decades ago, testimony by a jailhouse informant named Tommy Dye helped Cook County prosecutors obtain a death sentence for murder against a former Chicago cop who had reputed mob connections and had washed out of the department.

When Dye refused to testify at a retrial, though, the case fell apart, ultimately leading to Steven Manning's release from prison. Two weeks later, then-Gov. George Ryan declared a moratorium on all executions in Illinois, citing the troubling use of jailhouse snitches among many reasons.

Now, Dye finds himself in the middle of another potentially wrongful conviction — his own. A top prosecutor in the San Diego County district attorney's office said it is examining a burglary case to determine if Dye — in prison in California since 2004 — was wrongly convicted.

The Cook County state's attorney's office played a role in securing Dye's conviction in San Diego — a fact Dye blamed on retribution for his refusal to help prosecutors here salvage their death penalty case against Manning, who now is known as Steven Mandell.

In a telephone interview, Dye disputed the account of a Cook County state's attorney's investigator who said that he confessed to the burglary. Dye, who has been in and out of trouble for decades, said he is far too savvy about the criminal justice system to ever confess.

If not for the involvement of Cook County law enforcement officials, "I never would've had to deal with this," Dye said from the California Institution for Men in Chino, the southern California prison where he is being held. "This case had no evidence."

The use of jailhouse snitches by prosecutors across the country has been criticized as among the most persistent and pernicious problems of the criminal justice system. In most cases, they trade information for leniency, raising questions about their credibility. With so many wrongful convictions involving testimony by jailhouse snitches, Illinois and other states have restricted their use in court.

Dye, now 55, was a prolific snitch. As the Tribune described in a 1999 story that was part of an investigation into Illinois' use of the death penalty, he had deep credibility issues, however. He used a series of aliases and had a string of arrests and convictions, mostly for petty crimes. A handsome charmer by nature and a restaurant waiter by trade, he often swindled women out of their money or jewelry.

His testimony against Mandell was pivotal. A onetime Chicago cop until his arrest in an insurance fraud scheme, Mandell became a suspect in a number of homicides, including some with purported organized crime ties. He was charged with the 1990 murder of James Pelligrino, a trucking firm owner whose widow testified at trial that he had warned her that Mandell might kill him. Dye had secretly recorded conversations with Mandell while both were held at Cook County Jail, but the hidden recording device worn by Dye had malfunctioned, leaving jurors to rely on his word against Mandell.

Still, Mandell was convicted in 1993 and sentenced to death, but five years later, the Illinois Supreme Court granted him a new trial. Shortly after the Tribune story on Dye, he refused to be a witness against Mandell at a retrial, and Cook County prosecutors dropped the charges in early 2000. At the time, that made Mandell the 13th inmate exonerated in Illinois, one more than the state had executed since the reinstatement of the death penalty in the 1970s.

After a separate case in Missouri — the kidnapping of a drug dealer — was overturned by the courts, Mandell was set free in 2004.

Mandell sued the two FBI agents who had investigated the cases, saying they had framed him. A jury awarded him $6.6 million, but a federal judge in Chicago set aside the judgment on technical grounds. Dye, while insisting in his testimony that Mandell had confessed to him, also alleged during the trial that the agents had acted improperly by feeding him information about the case.
Mandell's freedom was short-lived. He was charged in 2012 with planning to kidnap and dismember a suburban businessman as part of an extortion plot. Mandell alleged the FBI had targeted him because of his lawsuit, but secretly made audio and video tapes provided hours of evidence that persuaded a federal jury to convict him.

He was again sentenced to life in prison.

Dye, meantime, was convicted in San Diego County of residential burglary, even though he was living with a woman in the apartment where the crime allegedly occurred. He was sentenced to 23 years in prison, but just days after Dye's testimony in Mandell's lawsuit against the FBI, San Diego prosecutors appealed the sentence. The appeals court found Dye was subject to California's three-strikes law, and he was resentenced to 167 years. That was later reduced to 51 years to life.

A key piece of evidence against Dye was testimony from John Duffy, an investigator with the Cook County state's attorney's office who said Dye had confessed the burglary to him. In the recent interview, Dye, however, said Duffy "orchestrated everything from top to bottom" to help obtain his conviction.

In addition, a Dye lawyer said in an affidavit in 2013 that Duffy told her that he believed Dye was targeted because of his role in Mandell's case.

"Mr. Dye was clearly targeted for more harsh treatment based on his having gone 'sideways' on the federal government in the (Mandell) case," another one of Dye's lawyers, Emry Allen, wrote to Deputy District Attorney Brent Neck of the San Diego office's conviction review unit.

Duffy could not be reached for comment. A Tribune Freedom of Information Act request in late February for documents from the state's attorney's office that might reflect involvement of any of its employees has, so far, failed to turn up any records, said the office's open records officer.

Neck said the conviction review unit's examination was focused on the San Diego case, not what happened with Dye in Cook County.

"This case will turn on the facts out here, not the ones from there," Neck said.

Dye said he can appreciate that many people might have little sympathy for him because of the role he has played in the criminal justice system. He said, though, they should be as critical of what has happened to him as they are of others who have been victimized by the system.

"Is it karma to the outsider? Yeah, maybe," he said. "But to me ... it's wrong."

smmills@tribpub.com
Twitter @smmills1960

Burglary at mob boss' vacation home adds to mystery of missing violin

Jason MeisnerContact ReporterChicago Tribune

For five years, an enduring mystery has surrounded the story of a prison chaplain who conspired with a convicted hit man for the Chicago Outfit to recover a supposedly rare 18th century Stradivarius violin said to be hidden in the mobster's vacation home.

The violin, once purportedly owned by entertainer Liberace, was likely worth millions of dollars if authentic, but it has never been found.

The FBI came up empty-handed during at least two searches of mobster Frank Calabrese Sr.'s Wisconsin lake house after the feared killer was charged in 2005 in the landmark Operation Family Secrets investigation.

His son, Frank Calabrese Jr., told the Tribune he'd heard his dad talk of a precious violin given as collateral for a juice loan decades ago, but he had never seen it himself. The only trace of it was paperwork uncovered in a 2010 raid of Calabrese's Oak Brook home that referred to a violin with a "Stradivari" label.

Now, in a court filing asking a federal judge to sentence the chaplain, Eugene Klein, to probation later this month, attorneys for the mild-mannered Roman Catholic priest have offered an intriguing new theory. The violin — if it existed at all — could very well have been stolen during a burglary at the Wisconsin home in 2004, they said, years before Klein plotted to find the hidden instrument for Calabrese.

To bolster the claim, Klein's attorneys made public for the first time a decade-old report by police in Williams Bay, Wis., that documents a break-in at the residence that had all the hallmarks of a mob-connected job.

Inside the basement of the tidy, three-bedroom colonial, the burglar had discovered a secret room by cutting a hole in peg board and then breaking through the cinder block wall, according to the report. Whatever might have been stashed there was gone.

Klein's attorney, Thomas Anthony Durkin, argued in the filing that federal prosecutors have overreached by putting the violin's value at $1 million, a figure that would jack up Klein's sentence.
"There is significant evidence that if the Calabrese family owned an expensive violin, it was long since gone from the Wisconsin residence before Calabrese was indicted," Durkin wrote in the filing.
Prosecutors have not yet made a public court filing saying how long a prison term Klein should be given at his April 14 sentencing in U.S. District Judge John Darrah's courtroom.

Calabrese's son, meanwhile, agreed the violin was likely not at the house by the time of his father's indictment, but not because of a burglary. In a telephone interview on Friday, the younger Calabrese said his father had grown paranoid and confused after years in prison and had likely just forgotten he'd moved the violin to another location. Calabrese was 75 when he died in prison on Christmas Day 2012.

A small production company is developing a movie about the Calabrese family, whose patriarch was one of Chicago's most feared mobsters, Deadline.com is reporting.

The story will center on Kurt Calabrese, whose father Frank Calabrese Sr. was found in a federal court to be responsible for 13 murders...
 

A small production company is developing a movie about the Calabrese family, whose patriarch was one of Chicago's most feared mobsters, Deadline.com is reporting.

The story will center on Kurt Calabrese, whose father Frank Calabrese Sr. was found in a federal court to be responsible for 13 murders...
(Tracy Swartz)

 

"He had hiding spots all over the place," his son said. "It's probably still out there somewhere."
A scribbled note

Klein, 67, entered a surprise guilty plea in February 2015 on the day his trial had been set to begin. He admitted in a plea agreement with prosecutors that he violated especially restrictive prison security measures placed on Calabrese at the federal penitentiary in Springfield, Mo., where Klein was one of the only people allowed to meet with him face-to-face.

Calabrese, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2009 for more than a dozen mob slayings, was first placed under special administrative measures after he was allegedly seen in court mouthing, "You are a f------ dead man," at a prosecutor.

Calabrese was known to have stashed assets in secret hiding places across the country. Testimony in the Family Secrets trial revealed he'd had a fleet of vintage cars parked in an airplane hangar in rural Kane County. The year before Klein met Calabrese in prison, federal agents raided his former home in Oak Brook and discovered a cache of guns, $750,000 in cash, jewelry and loose diamonds hidden in the wall behind a family portrait.

In early March 2011, Calabrese gave Klein a handwritten note hidden in religious materials that instructed Klein to contact Calabrese's friend, Daniel Casale, a longtime restaurateur from North Barrington who grew up with Calabrese in the old Italian-American neighborhood on Chicago's West Side. Calabrese told Klein to ask him about the status of the Wisconsin home, according to court records. At the time, the government had put the home up for sale, with any proceeds to be used to compensate relatives of Calabrese's murder victims.

At their next Communion visit, Calabrese passed Klein a scribbled note that included specific instructions for Klein and Casale to team up with Joseph Myles, a private investigator who had worked on Calabrese's criminal case.

Calabrese proposed that they pose as buyers and that Myles distract the real estate agent while the other two headed to an upstairs bedroom to look for "a little pull out door about 3 1/2 feet high," court records show.

"Be sure to have a little flashlight with you so you can see," Calabrese wrote. "Make a right when you go into that little pull out door. Go all the way to the wall. That is where the violin is."

Meeting in April 2011 to discuss the plot, the three believed that the violin once belonged to Liberace and could fetch millions of dollars on the black market. Citing a program he had "seen on the Discovery Channel," Casale estimated its value at $26 million, according to the court records.
Using Myles' cellphone, Klein called the real estate agent, who told him a buyer was scheduled to purchase the home the next day. Klein returned to Missouri, where he was confronted by FBI.
Neither Casale nor Myles was charged with any wrongdoing. When contacted by a Tribune reporter in February 2015, both declined to comment on the alleged plot. Records show Casale died of a heart attack at 76 in April 2015, two months after Klein pleaded guilty.

A black hat and pry bar
According to the Williams Bay police report, Calabrese's wife had summoned police in April 2004 to report a possible break-in, but no evidence had been found that any entry had been gained to the home.

A month later, however, she returned to the house with a key to the basement tool room. There, she discovered a large piece of fiberglass insulation had been pulled from the walls and ceiling. Along the west wall of the room, a hole had been cut in peg board, and the cinder block wall behind it had been broken out, exposing the hidden room, the police report said.

A black hat, found on top of an empty box, had sawdust on it, leading police to believe it had been worn by the burglar, according to the report. Also left behind was a 36-inch steel pry bar with the price tag still attached, the report said.
 

Records show that four years earlier, police had also been called to the home for a reported break-in attempt. Calabrese's wife had told police in June 2000 that she'd come up to the house to discover the telephone lines had been cut, according to a Williams Bay police report obtained by the Tribune in an open records request.

When she checked the outside of the house, the wife noticed "pry marks on the basement door," the report said. The officer, however, noted in the report that the pry marks looked old, and no evidence could be found of a break-in.

Calabrese's longtime criminal defense attorney, Joseph Lopez, told the Tribune last week that the mobster had blamed the Wisconsin break-ins as well as other thefts of his assets on his son, Frank Jr., whose decision to reach out to the FBI and cooperate against his father got the ball rolling on the Family Secrets probe.

In fact, one of the main elements of Calabrese's defense during his trial was that the testimony of his son and his brother, Nicholas Calabrese, whose cooperation with authorities broke the case wide open, was part of a conspiracy to keep him behind bars while they stole his hard-earned money.
When Calabrese took the witness stand in August 2007, Lopez tried to question him about the purported thefts, but U.S. District Judge James Zagel cut the testimony short, records show.
"They stole $2 million from me," Calabrese testified, according to a transcript. When prosecutors loudly objected, Calabrese's voice rose to a shout. "How am I supposed to defend myself?" he said.
After the judge sent the jury out of the room, Lopez told the judge the questions went directly to his argument that Calabrese's brother and son wanted him to remain in prison so he wouldn't come after them looking to get paid back.

"And in what way would he come after them?" Zagel asked.
"Well, I guess he would try to get them to sell their property, give him quitclaim deeds to get his money back," Lopez said.

"Right," Zagel said, skeptically.

"He wouldn't kill them, that's not what I'm saying," Lopez quickly added.

Knock-off Stradivarius violins
When the sensational charges against Klein were announced in 2011, Frank Calabrese Jr. told the Tribune the FBI had asked him if he knew of the violin's whereabouts.

"I was told if I did have it and tried to sell it, there would be a problem," Calabrese said at the time. "I told them I don't have it."

In his interview last week with the Tribune, Calabrese called the allegations that he was involved in the Wisconsin break-in lies. He said his father had several hiding spots in the house, including one in the garage, but by 2004 it was likely everything had been moved to other locations.

"The FBI did complete sweeps of that place. There was nothing there," he said.

Wherever the violin is, Durkin, Klein's lawyer, has said there were conflicting reports over its origins and whether it was an authentic 18th century Stradivarius as claimed by Calabrese.

The government's own records of what was seized in the Oak Brook raid indicate the instrument may have been made by Giuseppe Antonio Artalli, not Antonius Stradivarius, which would vastly decrease its worth, according to Durkin. Other Calabrese family records referred to a violin from the 1930s that was valued at about $70,000, he said.

After Klein pleaded guilty, Durkin said he received an unsolicited phone call from Jonathan Warren, chairman of the Liberace Foundation for the Creative and Performing Arts, whose collection includes several violins owned by Liberace and his brother, George, according to the defense filing.
"Each violin happened to be a 'knock off' or counterfeit Stradivarius worth only $300 or $400," the filing said.

Warren is willing to testify at Klein's sentencing hearing that Liberace never owned an authentic Stradivarius, according to the filing.

"It's kind of like looking for unicorns," Durkin told reporters last year. "How do you value a unicorn? I'm not quite sure."

jmeisner@tribpub.com
Twitter @jmetr22b

Book Presentations

Recently, I had the privilege to speak at the Westchester, Illinois Library on March 19th. What a great group. I want to thank Patrick Callahan for arranging this and his hospitality.

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On Cuba, JFK Was Married to the Mob

Posted on Mar 21, 2016

By Robert Scheer

 

Antonio Marín Segovia / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Editor’s note: As President Obama begins his historic visit to Cuba, we are posting some of Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer’s past writings about the U.S.’ relations with and actions toward Cuba. This article was originally published in the Los Angeles Times on Nov. 11, 1997.

You don’t need to rely on Seymour Hersh’s racy new book, “The Dark Side of Camelot,” to know that John F. Kennedy’s administration tried to assassinate Fidel Castro by using Mafia hit men. Denials by former Kennedy aides, led by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and speech writer Ted Sorensen, are simply wrong.

The entire nefarious business is documented in excruciating detail in “Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro,” a 133-page memorandum prepared in 1967 by CIA Inspector General J.S. Earman for Director Richard Helms. The supersecret report was so hot that after Helms read it, he instructed Earman: “Destroy all notes and other source materials” and “Destroy the one burn copy retained temporarily by the inspector general.” This left only one “ribbon copy” kept by the inspector general for “personal EYES ONLY safekeeping.”

Fortunately, that one copy survived; after lengthy lawsuits it was finally declassified in 1993. When Hersh came under attack last week for his new book, I dug out my copy of the CIA report, and there’s no question he got this point right.

I don’t know if Hersh is correct in his assertion that Chicago gangster Sam Giancana stole the 1960 election for Kennedy or that the president shared sexual intimacies with Giancana’s lady friend. But the CIA report makes it quite clear that during the Kennedy years, Giancana was a key player in the effort to overthrow Castro and that the president’s brother, the country’s top law enforcement official, knew all about it.

 

Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy was told about the Mafia’s assassination plot on May 7, 1962, by CIA agents who, according to the report, “briefed him all the way.” Castro’s revolution had wiped out organized crime’s Havana gambling empire and the revengeful mob was eager to return. But Castro had also nationalized other U.S.-owned businesses, incurring the enmity of American policymakers and thereby making an alliance with the Mafia seem all the more opportune.

Later, in his fateful candidacy for the presidency in 1968, Robert Kennedy would question the logic of unremitting U.S. hostility toward Cuba. But back when he was in his brother’s administration, the get-Castro mentality was all-pervasive. Even after being informed of the use of well-known mobsters in the plot to kill Castro, Robert Kennedy did not object except to wryly request of his CIA briefers that “I trust that if you ever try to do business with organized crime again—with gangsters—you will let the attorney general know before you do it.”

The efforts to kill Castro continued with the clear blessings of the administration. On Aug. 10, 1962, Secretary of State Dean Rusk convened a meeting of what was called the “special group” and, according to the CIA report, “[Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara broached the subject of liquidation of Cuban leaders. The discussion resulted in a Project Mongoose action memorandum prepared by [CIA operative] Edward Lansdale.”

Mongoose was the name of a general sabotage campaign against Cuba that, according to the memoir of a subsequent CIA director, William Colby, included the “sabotage of Cuban factories and rail lines” as well as “spreading nonlethal chemicals in sugar fields to sicken cane cutters.” Efforts to kill Castro with poisoned cigars, infected saccharine pills and explosives fit right in.

True, U.S. planning to kill Castro began during the Eisenhower administration, but it hadn’t amounted to much until the Kennedyites added their special macho zeal. As the CIA report states: “We cannot overemphasize the extent to which responsible agency officers felt themselves subject to the Kennedy administration’s severe pressures to do something about Castro and his regime.” The pressure “to do something” put the knights of Camelot in cahoots with the lords of crime whom Castro had booted out.

That was 35 years ago, but the arrogance of our Cuba policy has not changed. Only now the policy is so ossified that a president who was merely a teenager when his idol Kennedy initiated this policy of fitful revenge is held captive to its inherited inanity.

Last week, President Clinton sanctimoniously justified the continued isolation of Cuba despite his warm welcome for the leader of communist China. Clinton said that the embargo against Cuba must continue until Cuba could prove that “it can turn into a modern state.” Perhaps it isn’t too late for the Cubans to do a joint venture on gambling casinos with the mob to prove just how modern they are.

From gangster's moll to Hollywood hostess: the life and death of Virginia Hill

The heroic goodbyes shared by Annette Bening as Virginia Hill and Warren Beatty as Bugsy Siegel in the movie Bugsy were a romantic fantasy.

Paul Byrnes

Film critic

 
Virginia Hill has been portrayed in two movies so far, but neither of them did her justice. She's a hard case for a movie character: gangster's moll, Hollywood hostess, Mob courier, a gal with a smart mouth and bad attitude. Her friends said she was also charming, funny, flamboyant and gorgeous.

 Hers is a particularly American story – a kind of mirror inversion of Breakfast at Tiffany's, where Audrey Hepburn is Holly Golightly, a charming girl-on-the-make. Holly carries messages to her Mob benefactor in Sing Sing. She has her own secrets – a dirt poor southern childhood, a backwoods husband.

 Virginia Hill's secrets put Holly in the shade. They share the dirt poor childhood, but Virginia didn't stop at one mobster – she had a whole stable of the most powerful gangsters in America, and I do mean had. With flaming red hair, a sharp mind and very long legs, she moved up the chain of power – from Joe Epstein, a chubby bookie for the Chicago outfit in the early 1930s, to Joey Adonis, a capo for the Genovese family in New York, and finally to Los Angeles, where she was the girlfriend of Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, New York's man on the coast. He was shot to death in her house in June 1947, a crime that has never been solved, except that everyone believes his "friends" in the Mob killed him for spending too much of their money building the Flamingo Hotel and casino in Las Vegas. Hill had flown to Paris a few days before the hit – and may have known it was coming.
That's a far cry from the laughable final moment of Barry Levinson's otherwise excellent Bugsy (1991), where Annette Bening and Warren Beatty kiss and make up in the rain in Vegas, as he's about to fly back to Los Angeles, and a bullet in the head. It's a Casablanca finale – the plane propeller flashing as she offers to go with him, even though she's terrified of flying. The film is a fictionalised biography of Bugsy, with a brilliant performance from Beatty, who was nominated. Bening gives Virginia Hill a tonne of personality – spitfire one minute, sexpot the next. She loves this man deeply when she doesn't want to kill him. That might be true, or it might not. Solid information about her life is hard to come by, given all the cheap and racy stuff written about her. If she loved Ben Siegel, it was not enough to warn him before she flew to Paris.

Virginia Hill's hard-bitten story was a kind of mirror inversion of Breakfast at Tiffany's with Audrey Hepburn. Photo: Supplied
 

Hill was one of 10 children, born August 26, 1916, which makes this her centenary year. Michael Munn, in one of the aforementioned racy accounts (The Hollywood Connection: The Mafia and the Movie Business), says she was 15 when she arrived in Chicago from Bessemer, Alabama, with an older man she soon dumped. She began working as a waitress and prostitute. Joe Epstein, a bookie for Capone, is said to have called her The Flamingo because of her long legs. By some accounts he was crazy for her; by others, he was gay and never laid a finger on her, but became a lifelong friend. That's how he's portrayed by Allen Garfield in Virginia Hill, an atrocious 1974 TV movie in which Dyan Cannon sleepwalks through the role.

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From Epstein she moved on to Joe Fischetti, Capone's cousin, then to Adonis in New York, where she first met the handsome Siegel, who was a well-established killer and a long-time associate of Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano.

Hill was by now a dancer, a courier, a Mob tomato, but she thought she wanted to act. In Hollywood she did the rounds of the studios. She took a few small parts, notably as a hat check girl in Manpower (1941) with her friend George Raft (who was himself pretty close to being a gangster), but she didn't need the work. Once she hooked up with Bugsy Siegel, she had her hands full with parties, the racetrack and the Mob businesses Siegel was sent to take over in Los Angeles.

Annette Bening's Virginia Hill in Bugsy was an alluring firecracker. Photo: Supplied
 

The Warren Beatty movie perpetuates the myth that Bugsy looked at the Nevada desert and saw a gold mine – a paradise where gambling was legal. In fact, the Flamingo Hotel project was started by Billy Wilkerson, publisher of The Hollywood Reporter. When he got into debt, Siegel and Lansky saw an opportunity to move in. Construction costs rocketed to $6 million, most of which was Mob money. Siegel knew the rules: Mob loans came with stiff penalties for late repayment. In the movie, Hill is partly to blame for his death, because she has siphoned $2 million from the project to a Swiss bank account, without Siegel's knowledge. That seems fanciful. She would have been dead before him
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Virginia Hill went downhill after his murder. She stayed in Europe and tried four times to take her own life. In 1966, she succeeded, under a tree in a snowbank outside Salzburg. A few writers say she was murdered because she was threatening to sell her little black book, containing everything she knew about the Mob, to the US government. They were pressing for $80,000 in unpaid taxes. She died on March 24, 1966, 50 years ago this week, aged 49 years. It was a sad ending to an eventful, somewhat tragic life.

Twitter: @ptbyrnes