Columnist Jeff German: Dead ‘Ant’ helped take down mob

Wednesday, April 27, 2005 | 11:04 a.m.

Mark Kaspar still remembers the last time he saw Tony "The Ant" Spilotro 19 years ago.

The 63-year-old retired FBI agent had spent a decade doing nothing but investigating Spilotro, the Chicago mob's diminutive but tough-talking rackets boss in Las Vegas.

Kaspar said he ran into Spilotro at the end of May 1986 in the hallway of the old federal courthouse here, where the notorious crime kingpin was standing trial on racketeering charges.

"He came up to me, shook my hand and, with a smile, said, 'Hey Mark, how are you doing?' " Kaspar recalled. "I've always felt that he was kind of reaching out to me knowing that he was facing some problems back in Chicago."

The trial ended in a hung jury, much to the delight of Spilotro and his lawyer, now-Mayor Oscar Goodman. But a couple of weeks later, on June 16, the badly beaten bodies of Spilotro and his younger brother, Michael, turned up in an Indiana cornfield.

This week federal authorities in Chicago charged top crime figures there with a string of unsolved slayings, including those of the Spilotro brothers.

The killings date back to 1970 and involve Chicago crime family members well known to Tony Spilotro. Some worked under Spilotro and at least one, Joey "The Clown" Lombardo, was said to have been his supervisor in Chicago.

"I'm happy to see that the Chicago FBI kept pursuing this case," said Kaspar, who now lives in a small town near San Antonio, Texas. "It came down to a couple of breaks and a 21st century way of gathering evidence with DNA and everything else."

One break involved obtaining the cooperation of key Chicago mob member Nick Calabrese who, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, told federal authorities that he participated in the Spilotro killings.

Calabrese has contradicted the most popular version of how the Spilotro brothers died -- that they were beaten in the Indiana cornfield where they were buried. The brothers, Calabrese has reported, were beaten in a basement in Bensenville, a Chicago suburb, and then transported across the Illinois border to the cornfield.

Kaspar said that when he first heard about Tony Spilotro's disappearance he wasn't surprised.

"I had a premonition years earlier that his own people were going to take care of him before we got to him," Kaspar said. "And that turned out to be the case."

Kaspar's biggest fear in 1986 was not being able to find Spilotro's body so that FBI agents could close the extensive criminal case they had built against him. Spilotro officially would have been listed as a fugitive.

"Those bodies were never supposed to have been found," Kaspar said. "It was just a stroke of luck that a farmer uncovered them."

Kaspar subscribes to the accepted theory that Spilotro's death was ordered by his Chicago crime bosses because he had botched things in Las Vegas.

Some members of Spilotro's organization had begun to cooperate with the FBI, and Spilotro, with Goodman as his legal and media point man, was maintaining a high profile fighting the government.

"He was there to take care of Chicago's interests, but everything was being exposed," Kaspar said. "Basically, in their (his bosses) eyes, he didn't do his job."

Nineteen years later Kaspar sees irony in Spilotro's death.

"In a way," Kaspar said, "Spilotro assisted us in putting away the people we couldn't put away when he was alive."