While it's always a good thing for criminals to pay for their crimes I am a little worried when the actual killer turns rat and will presumably get a lighter sentence while the alleged lookout, whom the jury didn't find guilty of the murder, gets 20 years. I also have a problem with the "preponderance of the evidence" standard instead of "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard. There's got to be a better way of doing this. Two articles below
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090127/ap_on_re_us/mob_trialCHICAGO – A longtime organized crime figure accused by the government of helping to murder a friend to keep him from talking was sentenced Monday to 20 years in prison by a judge who called the punishment lenient.
Paul Schiro, 71, of Phoenix was the first to be sentenced among five men convicted in September 2007 at Chicago's biggest organized crime trial in decades.
"When somebody said we want you to help us kill your friend there was no evidence of hesitation," a stern U.S. District Judge James B. Zagel told Schiro.
Schiro, described by prosecutors as a career criminal, was sentenced to 5 1/2 years just seven years ago after pleading guilty to being part of a gang of jewel thieves led by the Chicago police department's former chief of detectives, William Hanhardt.
The Family Secrets trial was a major effort by the federal government to knock out some of the leaders of the Chicago Outfit, as the city's organized crime family calls itself, and bring them to justice for 18 murders that went unsolved for years.
The jury found Schiro guilty of being part of a racketeering conspiracy that included murder, gambling, loan sharking and squeezing business for "street tax."
Jurors, however, deadlocked on whether Schiro was to blame for the June 1986 murder in Arizona of Emil Vaci, the maitre d'hotel at a Phoenix restaurant. Vaci was a potential witness in an organized crime investigation, prosecutors said.
Star witness Nicholas Calabrese testified that Schiro served as a lookout while Vaci was pulled into a van, shot three times in the head and dumped in a canal.
Calabrese said he pulled the trigger himself.
Calabrese was the only witness to tie Schiro to the Vaci killing. But Zagel said that testimony was convincing enough to warrant a 20-year sentence. He called it lenient since Schiro helped in the murder of someone who had been a friend.
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http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2009/01/man-gets-prison-time-in-mob-case.html Convicted mob thief Paul "the Indian" Schiro was like a sleeper agent, a federal judge said today, an Outfit associate who did little but lie in wait for years before suddenly getting an order to do something horrible.
When the direction came, it was to help a team of hit men kill his good friend Emil Vaci, and Schiro coldly did as he was told.
"There was no evidence of his hesitation," U.S. District Judge James Zagel said.
Zagel sentenced Schiro today to 20 years in prison, making him the first defendant in the landmark Family Secrets mob conspiracy case to learn his fate.
A veritable who's who of the Chicago Outfit -- mob bosses James Marcello, Joey "the Clown" Lombardo and Frank Calabrese Sr. -- are scheduled to be sentenced within days.
A federal jury convicted Schiro of racketeering conspiracy in the Family Secrets trial in 2007 but was unable to unanimously agree on whether he was responsible for Vaci's murder in Arizona in 1986.
Zagel found that Schiro was involved in the killing by a preponderance of the evidence, making him eligible for the 20 years, the most he could face on the racketeering count.
Schiro told the judge he had no idea why the jury found him guilty in the conspiracy.
"I went to trial with co-defendants I never met in my life," said Schiro, 71.
Family Secrets marked Schiro's second conviction in a major Outfit case in the last decade. He was convicted in 2001 for his role in the mob-connected jewelry theft ring headed by William Hanhardt, a former Chicago police chief of detectives, and sentenced to 51/2 years in prison.
Marcello, Lombardo and Calabrese are all eligible for life terms. The jury convicted them in a conspiracy stretching back to the 1960s, linking them to numerous gangland slayings.
Assistant U.S. Atty. Markus Funk argued that it would be "utterly inappropriate" for Schiro to be sentenced to anything but the maximum. He was a career criminal and Outfit associate who helped on surveillance of Vaci.
"He knew his friend would be killed that day," Funk said.
Outfit turncoat Nicholas Calabrese, the government's star witness at the trial, said Vaci was killed to silence him from talking to a grand jury about the disappearance of a man tied to an enormous mob skimming operation at a Las Vegas casino. Calabrese testified that he pulled Vaci into a van and shot him in the head.
Schiro's lawyer, Paul Wagner, sought a sentence below the maximum, saying Schiro hoped to see his grandchildren someday. He argued that the jury didn't believe Calabrese, calling the admitted multiple murderer "the worst of the worst becoming the best friend of the government."
