Operation Family Secrets: How a Mobster's Son and the FBI Brought Down Chicago's Murderous Crime Family

While in prison with his father, Frank Calabrese Sr., on racketeering charges, Frank Jr, a former member of the Chicago crime syndicate known as the Outfit, offered to help the FBI keep his father in prison for life ("so that he could get the psychological help he needed" is his questionable explanation) by testifying against him. Now in the federal witness protection program and living in an undisclosed location, Frank Jr. gives an insider's view of the Outfit and how he helped expose its crimes. Wearing a wire in the prison yard in 1999, he recorded his father implicating himself in several murders, detailing shotguns and shells ("Big big bearings. So them will fuckin' tear half your body apart"). The sessions were not without danger; one day his father asked to see a new tattoo on his back and reached for the sweatshirt concealing the recorder. Those tapes enabled the FBI to solve dozens of murders and send top mobsters to prison, while giving Frank Sr. multiple life sentences. This suspenseful account, punctuated with riveting excerpts from the tapes, reads like a thriller. (Mar. 8)