April 14--A former prison chaplain averted prison Thursday as a federal judge sentenced him to time served -- a single day in custody -- and ordered him confined to his home for six months.
U.S. District Judge John Darrah found that federal prosecutors had failed to prove that a violin that the priest, Eugene Klein, had attempted to help an imprisoned Chicago Outfit hit man recover was a rare 18th-century Stradivarius or even worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Klein's lawyer, Thomas Anthony Durkin, had argued that prosecutors had overreached by putting the violin's value at $1 million, a figure that would jack up Klein's sentence.
Before the judge imposed the sentencing, Klein apologized in court for his actions, saying he knew he'd "let a lot of people down."
"I put an inmate first," said Klein, 74, dressed in a clerical collar and using a cane for support. "I let my curiosity get the better of me. It and alcohol have gotten me into a lot of trouble."
Klein had pleaded guilty to violating the most restrictive prison security measures possible that had been placed on Frank Calabrese Sr. at the federal penitentiary in Springfield, Mo., where Klein was one of the only people allowed to meet with him face to face.
Calabrese was first placed under special administrative measures after he was allegedly seen in court mouthing, "You are a (expletive) dead man," at a federal prosecutor.
Calabrese was known to have stashed assets in secret hiding places across the country. The year before Klein met Calabrese in prison, federal agents raided his former home in Oak Brook and discovered a cache of guns, $750,000 in cash, jewelry and loose diamonds hidden in the wall behind a family portrait.
But the violin has never been found. Calabrese's son, Frank Calabrese Jr., told the Tribune he'd heard his dad talk of a precious violin given as collateral for a juice loan decades ago, but he had never seen it himself.
The only trace of it was paperwork uncovered in a 2010 raid of Calabrese's Oak Brook home that referred to a violin with a "Stradivari" label.
In March 2011, Calabrese gave Klein a handwritten note hidden in religious materials that instructed Klein to contact Calabrese's friend Daniel Casale, a longtime restaurateur from North Barrington who grew up with Calabrese in the old Italian-American neighborhood on Chicago's West Side.
Calabrese told Klein to ask him about the status of a Wisconsin vacation home, where the violin purportedly had been hidden, according to court records.
At the time, the government had put the home up for sale, with proceeds to be used to compensate relatives of Calabrese's murder victims.
At their next Communion visit, Calabrese passed Klein a scribbled note that included specific instructions for Klein and Casale to team up with Joseph Myles, a private investigator who had worked on Calabrese's criminal case, authorities said.
Meeting in April 2011 to discuss the plot, the three believed that the violin once belonged to Liberace and could fetch millions of dollars on the black market. Citing a program he had "seen on the Discovery Channel," Casale estimated its value at $26 million, according to the court records.
In a recent court filing asking for probation, Klein's lawyers argued that the instrument -- if it existed at all -- could very well have been stolen during a burglary at the Wisconsin home in 2004, years before Klein plotted to find the hidden instrument for Calabrese.
To bolster the claim, Klein's attorneys made public for the first time a decade-old report by police in Williams Bay, Wis., that documents a break-in at the residence that had all the hallmarks of a mob-connected job.
Inside the basement of the tidy, three-bedroom colonial, the burglar had discovered a secret room by cutting a hole in pegboard and then breaking through the cinder block wall, according to the report. Whatever might have been stashed there was gone.
jmeisner@tribpub.com
