Four years ago, Catholic priest and former prison chaplain Eugene Klein was charged with trying to help imprisoned Chicago mobster Frank Calabrese Sr. recover what they believed was a 250-year-old Stradivarius violin.
Years earlier, Calabrese hid the violin in his then Wisconsin summer home to prevent its sale by the government, which believed it to be worth as much as $26 million.
Calabrese was sentenced to life in prison in 2009 for 13 murders, including by strangling some victims with a rope and slashing their throats. He was also ordered to pay $4.4 million in restitution.
Calabrese died in a federal prison in North Carolina in 2012 at age 75.
Federal authorities continued to search for Calabrese’s assets after his imprisonment. The longtime Mafioso wanted to ensure that agents could never get hold of the violin that reputedly once belonged to entertainer Liberace, saying he would rather Klein profited from its sale.
So the gangster and the priest hatched a plan while Klein was administering communion to Calabrese at a Missouri prison in 2011.
Calabrese at one point passed Klein a note – wrapped in religious materials – through the food slot of his cell. It directed Klein to look in a second-floor bedroom, behind a pull-out door and against a wall in his home in Williams Bay, Wisconsin.
Klein took the message to an associate of Calabrese’s in Chicago. But their plot to pose as potential buyers of the Wisconsin home, then distract the realtor and snatch the violin, was foiled when the home sold before they could take a tour.
A federal search of Calabrese’s Chicago-area home in 2010 turned up $1 million in cash in a wall behind a family portrait. But despite searches at the Wisconsin home, no violin was found.
In the Chicago search, prosecutors also found a certificate indicating the violin may have been a less valuable one made in 1764 by Giuseppe Artalli, and not by the renowned Antonius Stradivarius. Calabrese seemed confident the violin was a Stradivarius.
On Wednesday, after spending the past four years denying the charges, the 65-year-old priest pleaded guilty in court, admitting he helped the prolific hitman try to find the violin. Klein’s trial was scheduled to start the same day.
Klein's attorney said the priest “made a mistake – he’s acknowledged that and he’s lost a job over it.
“He was a very good chaplain and you don’t find a lot of Catholic priests who are willing to go and be chaplains in penitentiaries, particularly with maximum-security inmates.”
Klein will face up to five years in prison at a June sentencing hearing.
