Authors: Charlie Newton
Chief Jesse’s tone is formal, like he’s speaking to a microphone. "As of 0-600 today, the FBI is officially in. They are investigating three cases our governor in his infinite-election-month wisdom deems related. Case one: the mayor’s assassination attempt. Case two: the kidnap of ASA Richard Rhodes. And case three: the discovery of Annabelle Ganz’s body. The FBI incorrectly agrees with the governor that all three cases are related."
"Sir—"
"There is no evidence to tie these three cases together other than Assistant State’s Attorney Rhodes and Annabelle Ganz once lived in the same Calumet City home eighteen years ago. This is political character assassination. And your friends in the media are standing in line to help."
"Sir—"
"Get on the highway to Joliet. You can do that, can’t you?"
"Why are you mad at me?"
Silence.
I’m way out of line and know it. He doesn’t know I’m in a car wash eating soap while teenage gunmen try to figure me out. He doesn’t know about me and Calumet City because no one does.
"Sorry. I’m on the way to Joliet. Sir."
"The Stateville condemned unit has a convict doing double life who says he has ’urgent’ information regarding ASA Richard Rhodes. This convict will only talk to you. Explain that."
"Ah, I’d like to. Who’re we talking about?"
"The
Herald
’s Tracy Moens—your friend, and teammate I believe—has called everyone in this building,
and the FBI,
to verify that you and this convict have a standing relationship. If that’s true, it had better be arrest related."
I wince at FBI—the G as we call them, and Tracy’s incessant need to know.
"Sir, what convict?"
"Danny del Pasco."
"Danny D from Canaryville? The biker?"
"You do know him."
"And he wants to see me?"
"Only you. Why?"
I have no idea and say so. None. Zero.
"This is not a good time to bullshit me, Officer Black."
"I’m not, Chief, sir. I’ve never seen Danny D. Just heard about him forever."
Silence or the pay phone’s stopped working. Then:
"The FBI’s organized crime unit is out at Stateville now, attempting to coerce an interview—they believe these three cases—the mayor’s assassination attempt, the ASA kidnapping, and Annabelle Ganz’s body—are part of multiple kidnappings and murders dating back to 1987 in Calumet City. The FBI believes these three cases will lead them to ’an extensive coverup and corruption within the state’s attorney’s office’ and ’continuing criminal activity within the Chicago Police Department’—"
"Not the Republicans or the blacks; now it’s CPD or the state’s attorney’s office who tried to hit the mayor? Even the G’s not that stupid."
More silence makes me wish I hadn’t said that, although the conclusion’s hard to avoid…Movement—the three street gangsters are fanning but not away. I show my pistol but don’t aim.
"The coming election is a time for settling old disputes—local, state, and federal. I want a call one second after the del Pasco interview’s over." The superintendent pauses for my agreement. I give it, then he adds, "No press, no nothing. And not so much as a ’hello’ to the FBI." Click.
I flash on me and Richey as foster kids. Richey on top when they made him…STOP IT. Until this moment I never knew Richey and Richard Rhodes were the same person. Jesus, and what if it’s true? What if the FBI’s right and all three cases
are
related…? And what if Chief Jesse
knows
they are? What if—no way. Go to the death house in Joliet, hear Danny del Pasco, then tell Chief Jesse your story.
Can’t do that
. My hand crushes the phone.
You have to;
Richard Rhodes may die if you don’t. No he won’t; the kidnap isn’t related, it’s an accident, an awful coincidence. Coincidences happen; no need to tell. Not now, not ever.
Trust your friends. Tell Chief Jesse now
. I feed the phone quarters, hoping it jams, hoping Chief Jesse doesn’t answer. The gangsters watch. One turns away and I lose sight of his hands. The phone rings but doesn’t answer. The bar across the street behind the gangsters has an Old Crow sign in the window.
No. Get outta here
.
The two gangsters facing me notice my meltdown and pull the third one back. He has a cell phone as he turns, not a pistol and I don’t shoot him. My Smith rises into their faces and helps them add a quick twenty feet. The one with the phone is nodding small and keeps talking to his phone. He’s marking me, sure as I’m standing here. Could be because of the dead GDs at Gilbert Court, but I don’t have time to know or deal with it.
Among the many things I wonder as I bail the neighborhood and try to outrun my new need to confess, is why hasn’t IAD grabbed me for the alderman’s charges on the GD shooting and Ruth Ann’s
assault
. That worry lasts one block; I’ve got bigger wonders now, like how many FBI agents it takes to investigate a foster home. How many days do I have before the whole city knows my story? Before I have to publicly face the truth about Patti Black?
Me and my thoughts finish thirty-seven miles of interstate at a prison town trying hard not to be. Other than a sprawling weapons arsenal, Joliet is known for one thing—the just-shut-down 1858 Penitentiary, a limestone nightmare used in every movie that needed to scare the shit out of the audience with just silence and pictures. It and its successor guard the city’s flank and troubled history, brooding out there on the northern outskirts, past the visitor motels and their sticky vinyl coffee shops, past the roads that lead there and stop.
Among the criminal classes "Joliet" still means more than prison—it’s a condition, a level of punishment. Architects liked Joliet so much they copied it for most U.S. facilities of the era; Joliet didn’t have running water or indoor bathrooms for the first sixty years.
Now the newer Stateville CC (1925) is the maximum-security facility. The Condemned Unit is here, except they don’t call it that while the courts and the politicians try to figure out how to house prisoners they want to kill, people who deserve it, like Danny del Pasco. The other inmates who have to share this prison would know how to
house
them. Staring at the outer fence and its rolls of concertina wire, I for sure do.
The front gate on Highway 53 is a brick guard shack separating a long, uphill in/out asphalt drive. Bilingual signs bolted to the bricks explain that
all
persons give up their rights to search and seizure when they drive onto the property. By its looks, this gate is probably unmanned on most days. Today it has state police cars parked across the entry and exit.
I show my star and a photo ID. Both are checked against a clipboard list by a guard who could’ve been a postman in blue-black. A man and a woman approach my car from both sides—they have to be reporters. Strange that press credentials can’t get them inside.
One yells, "
Patti. Patti
. Why does Danny del Pasco want you?"
The guard hands me my ID and waves me onto the road.
"Have you been charged by Internal Affairs? Is Richard Rhodes alive?"
The state police car backs out of my way. I slip through and two troopers step in behind my car, separating me from my freedom and the reporters in my mirror.
That quick
and you’re no longer a citizen; you’re a captive. I feel "captive" on my skin and shiver at what it’s like to face this place for real, for ten years or forever. I’ve been sending people here—you’d think I’d know.
I 5-mph into a shadow cast by thirty-three feet of poured concrete wall. As the wall takes more and more of the sky I focus on
captive.
Assistant State’s Attorney Richard Rhodes flashes in restraints, but as a boy, not as an adult: cow-eyed and hairless and naked. No telling how bad it is for him right now, but there’s no hiding from how bad it was when he was just "Richey."
One of two guards outside the visitors’ intake building eyes my white-knuckled steering wheel and plastic expression, then points my car through to the near end of the "staff" lot, then talks to her radio. I park without a problem, but it takes five minutes of gritted teeth and denial to piece my own walls back together. Richey as a boy is not a picture I want to carry.
The visitors’ building is shut down for the day; I’m pointed next door to the staff entrance and buzzed inside by a large, mid-forties German with a smile that doesn’t fit his geography or the day’s precautions.
I see his name tag and think I hear Officer Leo Didier say, "Got fifty dollars?"
"Excuse me?"
"Fifty." He uses both hands to frame the shape of a bill. "About so big and green."
"Ah…probably not."
"Have to take your pistol then."
"For fifty I could keep it?"
Headshake and another honest smile. "Nah, I just need the fifty."
A comedian was not what I expected at the ticket booth of a horror movie. I sign in my Smith and raise both arms to be searched. Officer Didier smiles again, almost shy, and says,
"Would love to, but I’d be lying. You’re juiced in, superintendent to warden. Just show me an ID," he nods over another guard’s weightlifter shoulder to his glass back door, "and you’re
behind the Wall
."
Across a fenced internal roadway is the Wall. Beyond it are the ghosts of John Wayne Gacy and Richard Speck and a living, breathing Ralph Andrews.
Officer Didier adds, "Careful in there. Talk fast; today’s not going well."
I don’t ask but should have.
"Inside" begins with an escort across the road to the main entry, then through Gate 1 to the Guard Hall in the Admin building. I pick up the rhythm of a working building and become a cop again. The deep breaths, harsh lights, and linoleum help reduce the dungeon effect to tolerable. Not much has been spent on décor for the inmates’ visitors, about like community hospitals but without the two-year-old magazines. The staff looks at me closer, though, like I’m an accident that hasn’t happened yet.
My escort stops, apologizes, and says we have to backtrack back through Gate 1 to the warden’s conference room. We do. Three gentlemen in dark suits are waiting. One interrupts my trip.
"Officer Black?" He offers his hand. "Special Agent Stone, FBI, Organized Crime Unit."
We shake. My escort watches; she knows that often these meetings don’t go well.
Special Agent Stone says, "We should talk before you see Mr. del Pasco." He hands me a copy of an old Tracy Moens article. "And then right after."
"Sorry. I report to my boss; it’s procedure. You can talk with him."
"Would that be Kevin Ryan in District 18 or the superintendent?" He adds what might be a leer with "superintendent."
"Pick ’em." I don’t mention the second phone transfer.
The guard waves me forward; either she’s impatient or she has the same animosity for the G that most cops do. "Sorry…my appointment."
We walk through linoleum halls that smell the same as most city buildings before they open; the walls are as blank as the floors. The interview area we’re using is between Gate 2 and 3 in the attorney visitation rooms. Mine is 9 x 14 with a glass door. A worn, wooden table sits long-ways in the center, separating two chairs. My escort points me inside and turns to leave.
I touch her shoulder. "There a problem in here…today?"
She purses her lips and nods, finishes her turn, and walks down the wide hall. Alone in the room it feels, I don’t know…odd? Like I’m the one who’s guilty. I notice Tracy’s Op-ed article in my hand and read while I wait.
ŠTracy Moens,
Chicago Herald
January 16, 1996
Danny del Pasco already had a name in Canaryville.
But he carved it in stone on Christmas Day, 1995. And that’s hard to accomplish south and west of Comiskey where the channel workers and slaughterhouse stockmen live cramped and angry, the Irishmen who built this city but were too poor to live in it.
On that Christmas Day Danny del Pasco had been drinking just the one Harp for an hour and slowly smoking Pall Malls to his fingertips, lighting one with the other. Tobin’s Corner Bar was humid with sweat and full of loud conversations. The stools on either side of Danny were empty. No one knew it yet, including Danny, but he’d kill nine people before Dallas beat the Cardinals 37–13. He said he thought it would be two dead, maybe three. But it all depended on them. Under his leather jacket he wore a sleeveless denim with
Gypsy Vikings MC
in an arch and
Chicago
at the bottom. He washed it in 1990, "had to, DNA thing."
Like Danny, Canaryville and this pub had history, Chicago’s version of Hell’s Kitchen and the Five Points, a neighborhood that housed and hid Irishmen who fought overseas, as well as contract killers who did, and do, the Outfit’s bidding when the Italians want their hand hidden. There are good people here, poor and hardworking, who keep out of the bad business unless they’re forced into it. They knew Danny, knew him all his life, just like the bad ones knew Danny. That’s why the stools were empty.
By halftime the sun was down and Dallas had covered. Danny left five silver dollars stacked in a pile, walked outside into 28 degrees, added tight gloves, and waved up an ’82 Bonneville. Inside he pointed the 24-year-old driver west to Cicero. Over his shoulder he was handed a second Glock that he checked, and a hand grenade. The pin was tight and he loosened it.
At the trial the family of the victims testified that Danny del Pasco walked into the house after knocking twice and dislodging their Christmas wreath, pulled the grenade’s pin one-handed, and asked for $38,000. Half the room consisted of women and children, all first- or second-generation Mexican-Americans. The men didn’t move. He asked again, then tossed them the grenade and started shooting.
Seven of the dead were male, ranging in age from 54 to 20, all armed with a gun, knife, or razor. The two women were both minors. It was a crystal meth deal gone awry. A matter of honor, the Gypsy Vikings said.
And here he comes, shouldered by two titanic guards, neither touching him. One looks me over, more with respect than A-male dick wagging. The other introduces himself. I decide that prison guards are not accurately portrayed in the movies or professional wrestling. The prisoner, on the other hand, is right out of Central Casting.