The Family Secrets Trial Part 1

Gangland Wire

Gary Jenkins: Mafia Detective

True Crime, Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 623 Ratings

🗓️ 6 June 2022

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In Part one of a two-part series, Chicago Outfit historian James Imlach tells how he attended the entire Family Secrets trial in 2007. The Family Secrets investigation started on July 27, 1998. Outfit associate Frank Calabrese Jr. mailed a letter from prison to the FBI and said he was willing to cooperate and help the FBI make murder cases on his father, Frank Calabrese Sr. Hence, the codename of the investigation became Family Secrets. Frank Jr. requested to meet in person with FBI agents and promised he could give good information about his father’s murders and other Outfit activities. Frank Jr. had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash from his father to feed his lifestyle and cocaine habit. He was afraid his father would eventually have him murdered. During the next few months, Frank Jr. “wore a wire” on his own father inside the prison. The agents reviewing these tapes heard Frank Sr. bragging about his many crimes to his son. One of the most significant intercepts was details about the murder of Outfit member Frank Fecarotta in 1986. Frank Jr. also told them he had returned to the scene and retrieved the gun. More importantly, they learned that Frank Sr. lost a blood-stained gove at the scene. They reviewed the Chicago PD evidence and found they had recovered a blood-stained glove close to the murder scene. James Imlach provides a colorful and personal view of what it was like to sit through this two-month log trial. Some of the tidbits are a first-hand view of watching Frank Calabrese Sr. and Joey Lombardo testify in their own defense. Another is getting a first-hand account of watching a son testifying against his killer father in the same room less than a few yards away, that would be something to see. Venmo me @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee” To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup click here To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here. To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos. To subscribe on iTunes click here, please give me a review and help others find the podcast.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome all you wiretappers out there back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. As you can tell,
0:05.3	a nice warm spring day. It might be even warmer by the time I get this out, but it's beautiful.
0:10.4	Today I think it's going to be maybe 75 here in Kansas City. I played golf yesterday and getting ready
0:16.6	to start back into the golf season. We play at least once during the weekend every Sunday.
0:23.0	Today I have an interesting show. I got to talking to a man I met on I see post a lot and
0:31.6	make comments and seems to know a lot about the outfit in up in Chicago on the Facebook pages up there on Mike Burns,
0:40.0	uh, Chicago outfit new and recent articles or something. I could never remember the name of that.
0:46.7	I would joke with Mike that, you know, you need to have a shorter name for your,
0:49.9	your Facebook page. And the other ones, the Chicago outfit, old and new, I believe.
0:57.6	And then there's another one just about the Chicago outfit.
1:00.2	I tell you guys in Chicago, you've got a lot of Facebook action going more than any other city, I think.
1:05.8	And it's really, everybody's a lot of active people on.
1:09.4	People know a lot about the outfit, people know a lot about the outfit people that were
1:11.7	involved with the outfit in some peripheral manner at least and uh so they're they're great
1:18.0	Facebook pages but you know James got hold of me and he's told me that did I say your name
1:24.8	James Emlich welcome Welcome, James.
1:30.3	Welcome, thank you. Okay.
1:37.5	Good to have you on the show, and I appreciate you getting hold of me and tell me about all those trials you've been to. Now, James goes to a lot of the different trials, and so we were
1:43.0	discussing different ones they went to about
1:45.1	maybe doing a show on it, give a, you know, a fly on the wall kind of view of what happens at some
1:51.0	of those big mob trials and they've gone to the Family Secrets trial. And of course, that being the
1:55.4	biggest one, I'm going to lead off with the biggest one. We've got some others that will probably
	...

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