Bit player in mob crackdown gets 6-month sentence
A bit player snared in the government's Operation Family Secrets crackdown on the Chicago mob was sentenced Tuesday to six months in federal prison for converting video games into gambling devices.
Dennis Johnson, 38, of Plainfield was also placed on three years probation following his release for his part in the video gambling racket run out of suburban Cicero by alleged mobster Michael ''Mickey'' Marcello.
U.S. District Judge James B. Zagel said that while Johnson was anything but the mob leader that some of his Family Secrets co-defendants were, he was instrumental in a multimillion-dollar scheme.
''It was in and of itself no small-time operation,'' Zagel said. He refused to give Johnson straight probation without any prison time.
But Zagel sentenced Johnson to the minimum under the federal guideline range, saying he deserved credit for pulling himself together and changing his lifestyle since a June 2007 guilty plea.
Prosecutors did not press for a stiff sentence.
''He was a small cog in the large wheel of the Outfit,'' said Markus Funk, one of three prosecutors who secured convictions against alleged top-echelon Chicago mobsters at the landmark Family Secrets trial.
Johnson told Zagel before the sentencing he was ''very disappointed in myself -- I used some bad judgment.'' But he said he has changed and is ''a totally different person.''
''Take a chance on me,'' he urged Zagel in asking for a break. ''I'm a great person -- a good person. I help people out whenever I get a chance.''
Johnson and his brother, Thomas Johnson of Willow Springs, both worked for Marcello's Cicero-based M&M Entertainment.
The two acknowledged they altered video games so they could be used as gambling devices, placed them in taverns and clubs and collected the proceeds. Bogus records hid the profits, they said.
Thomas Johnson and Marcello have also pleaded guilty. Thomas Johnson is awaiting sentencing. Marcello got eight years after admitting he tried to buy the silence of jailed mobster Nicholas Calabrese -- the government's star witness -- by paying his wife $4,000 a month in hush money.
The crimes the Johnson brothers were convicted of are tame beside the orgy of murder attributed at the Family Secrets trial to such alleged top mobsters as Joseph ''Joey the Clown'' Lombardo, Frank Calabrese Sr. and Marcello's brother, James ''Jimmy'' Marcello.
They were among five men found guilty by a jury and are now awaiting sentencing. Among the victims of 18 mob hits that went unsolved for years was Tony ''The Ant'' Spilotro -- the Outfit's longtime man in Las Vegas and the inspiration for Joe Pesci's character in the movie ''Casino.''
He and his brother Michael were found buried in an Indiana cornfield in June 1986.