Free Republic

Frank "Lefty'' Rosenthal was a Chicago bookie who was sent to Las Vegas by the mob and helped turned sports betting into a billion-dollar business. The manager of several well-known casinos, his life inspired the Martin Scorsese movie "Casino.'' Rosenthal, 79, died Monday after a heart attack at his Miami Beach condo. Born in 1929 in Chicago, Rosenthal got involved in illegal bookmaking and eventually connected with mobsters. His nickname stemmed from a 1961 Senate hearing on gambling and organized crime at which he invoked the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination 38 times. Throughout his testimony, he kept his left...

CHICAGO - A federal jury found five aging men guilty Monday in a racketeering conspiracy that involved decades of extortion, loan sharking and murder aimed at rubbing out anyone who dared stand in the way of the ruthless Chicago mob. The verdicts capped an extraordinary 10-week trial that laid bare some of the inner workings of The Outfit. The prosecution's star witness was an admitted hit man who took the stand against his own brother to spell out the allegations, crime by crime. The jury heard about 18 unsolved killings, including the beating death and cornfield burial of Tony "The...

CHICAGO - Do you believe "The Clown" or an admitted hit man? Jurors will have to decide when they begin deliberations Tuesday in Chicago's biggest mob trial in years. They got the case Thursday night after prosecutors made a last pitch to sway them to believe the testimony of their star witness, admitted hit man Nicholas Calabrese. Defense lawyers have pegged Calabrese as "a walking piece of deception" whose testimony shouldn't be believed, even suggesting that if Calabrese says it's raining, someone ought to go outside to check. But prosecutors say it's the five men on trial who can't be...

CHICAGO - It didn't take Chicago mobster Tony "The Ant" Spilotro long to realize his time was up. "Time to say a prayer," government witness Nicholas Calabrese quoted Spilotro as saying moments before his fellow mobsters beat and strangled him in a suburban Bensenville basement on a June afternoon 21 years ago. An eyewitness account of the mob hit that helped inspire the movie "Casino" emerged Wednesday as Calabrese returned to the stand at the trial of his brother Frank and four other alleged members of the Chicago Outfit. Spilotro was the model for the Joe Pesci character in the...

The way Albert Caesar Tocco was tried and convicted of racketeering and extortion — the way his jurors remained nameless for safety's sake and the way his wife sang her heart out from the witness stand — were the stuff of Chicago mafia legend. His motto should have read "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's," because this ferocious south suburban mob boss demanded a cut from every vice operator south of 95th Street. His Chicago Heights-based empire shaking down gambling and prostitution houses and chop shops stretched from Calumet City south to Kankakee, from Joliet over the Indiana border to...