Four days before a recent Thanksgiving, Michael A. Roman, Jr., 26, a West Side Cleveland man walked with a friend behind the Flats district bar where Roman worked part-time. If it wasn�t for the many city lights washing the skies purple at 1 a.m. Nov. 20, it would have been possible for him to see the stars amid the scattered clouds. Temperatures hovered in the low 40s, which was almost tropical for Cleveland, considering the season.

     Perhaps Roman wasn�t thinking about the weather. Maybe his mind was on the football game just 12 hours away, between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Cleveland Browns, who were in first place in the Central Division with an 8-2 record. Or, he may have been looking ahead to spending Thanksgiving with his wife and parents, as well as his little son who shared his first name.

     Roman wasn�t on the clock at the Flat Iron Cafe. Instead, he was doing what thousands of others were doing in Cleveland�s Flats on a late Saturday night and early Sunday morning -- bar-hopping.

     But few parts of the Flats are as shadowy as this part. Near the heavily industrialized section, at the southern extremities of the city�s riverside entertainment district, two massive viaducts soared overhead to cast their shaded images on the gritty urbanscape below. The concrete-arched Detroit-Superior High-Level Bridge and the viaduct for the Regional Transit Authority�s Red Line to the airport offered dark places for nocturnal creatures to hide.

     Three of those creatures emerged to confront Roman and his friend. The latter man soon got in a car and drove away. An argument reportedly had broken out between Roman and the three men. A gun was pulled, then a trigger -- three times. Each of the three bullets exploded into Roman�s chest, knocking him backwards to where he would soon die. The three men were seen running off, back into the shadows.

     Three years and two months later, on a typically frosty January day in Northeast Ohio, Samuel Bulgin, then a 25-year-old Richmond Heights resident, was driving with a friend into a rest area along Interstate 90 in east-suburban Lake County. In their possession were nine ounces of cocaine and more than $10,000 cash. There they would strike a deal with potential customers.

     But, rather than buy some of the white powder, their customers turned out to be undercover narcotics detectives who slapped handcuffs on the young men. Detectives described Bulgin as a major cocaine supplier in the lakeshore counties east of Cleveland. While Bulgin and his buddy were being interrogated, Lake County detectives learned Bulgin had a secret to tell -- he was responsible for the murder of Roman. Law enforcement officials indicted him a month later on a single count of aggravated murder. Police got their killer. Or did they?

     Newspaper articles and television programs may lead some people to believe Cleveland�s last Mafia-related murder occurred Oct. 6, 1977. That�s when a car bomb exploded in Lyndhurst, extinguishing the life of Irish gangster and Mafia competitor Danny Greene.

     More knowledgeable mob historians will tell you that Cleveland�s most recent mob hit was probably in the early 1980s. Five murders had occurred in those years -- a result of men double-crossing drug kingpin and Cleveland Mafia associate Carmen Zagaria and his vicious enforcer Hartmut "The Surgeon" Graewe.

     The most recent mob hit may have been much later than those. While movies like "Natural Born Killers" and "The Professional" were playing in the nation�s movie theaters, Cleveland�s de-facto mob boss reportedly was planning to eliminate a snitch. The year was 1994.

     The roots of the killing apparently began growing six years earlier when, in 1988, Joseph "Loose" Iacobacci Jr. and Alfred "Allie" Calabrese Jr. were in Milan, Mich. federal prison together. They had been incarcerated for unrelated cocaine offenses. Calabrese was sent away in 1984 for cocaine conspiracy. Similar charges were levied in 1988 against Iacobacci and his drug distributing associates Anthony Delmonti, Floyd Federico, Angelo Foti, Brett Jones and Dominic Nichols.

     While in prison together, Iacobacci, Calabrese and a third man, unidentified by authorities, allegedly hatched a plan to defraud several New Jersey banks out of millions of dollars. That third man may have been Paul J. Weisenbach, reportedly a friend of Calabrese�s. Weisenbach and two associates, including a New Jersey man, had gone to prison in late 1988 for defrauding Society National Bank of $210,000 by pledging counterfeit shares of stock as collateral to secure three loans. Weisenbach was facing the longest jail term -- 70 years.

     Iacobacci and Calabrese served their times and were out of prison by the early 1990s, about the same time Weisenbach walked free. According to federal sources, boss Iacobacci and associate Calabrese went right back to rebuilding the Cleveland Mafia, which was decimated by deaths and imprisonments from the 1970s war with Greene and the 1980s collapse of Zagaria�s drug ring. One of the ingredients needed to rebuild the Cleveland mob was money, which Iacobacci and Calabrese allegedly hoped to steal from the New Jersey banks.

     According to the FBI, Iacobacci was to use his influence with Mafia figures in New Jersey to open large bank accounts. Allegedly, one of his friends is Philip C. Abramo, a high-ranking member of the New Jersey-based DeCavalcante crime family and a man whose tentacles extend into Wall Street�s financial circles.

     The scheme was relatively simple. Bogus checks totaling $3 million would be deposited into the New Jersey bank accounts, with all the money soon transferred to another account, then wired to an offshore bank. But the FBI found out about the scheme before it could be carried out. An FBI spokesman declined to identify how they learned of the scheme.

     Sources say, however, that Weisenbach had become a snitch for the feds, in exchange for a reduced prison sentence. Those same sources said Iacobacci found about Weisenbach becoming an informant, and Loose wanted him killed. But Weisenbach had a protector in Calabrese. They reportedly were friends -- Calabrese considered Weisenbach to be solid and reliable. Calabrese apparently didn�t believe Iacobacci�s contention that Weisenbach was the snitch, and a rift formed between the two mobsters. Finally, the sources allege Weisenbach was the friend walking with Roman shortly before Roman was gunned down.

     Though it is not certain why Roman was killed instead of Weisenbach, it appears that Iacobacci was willing to spare the life of Calabrese�s friend, but still wanted to scare Weisenbach silent. Bulgin could not be reached for comment whether he did Iacobacci�s bidding. If sources are correct, Roman did nothing to anger anyone or otherwise cause his murder except that he was walking with the wrong person at the wrong time.

     Near the end of 1995, Iacobacci took responsibility for his actions and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bank fraud. Federal District Court Judge David D. Dowd Jr. took that into consideration when he sentenced Iacobacci to more than two years in prison. He could�ve gone to prison for more than twice that sentence, which is what Calabrese would serve, in addition to the remainder of his 1984 drug sentence. He faced the full time as he had violated his parole from the earlier cocaine conviction.

     Iacobacci got out of prison in 1998, and reportedly went back to work reviving the Cleveland organized crime family. He would do so without the help of Calabrese, who was 56 when he died of a stroke in August 1999 while in federal prison.

     In the end, the murder of Roman may have spared Iacobacci some years in prison and perhaps gave him more time to work at picking up the pieces of Cleveland�s organized crime family. But it was Roman�s family that was left to pick up the pieces of their innocent lives following the young man�s senseless murder. No explanation of motive, regardless how intriguing it may be, can mend their loss.

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