Authors: Steve Bogira
This morning he tells me again that this is a political prosecution. The powers-that-be in Chicago want Frank Junior’s head, whether he’s innocent or guilty, he says, because they fear the racial fallout if he’s acquitted. He says the authorities have made their attitude clear ever since Frank Junior was arrested fourteen months ago. County officials have badgered the family with phone calls, ostensibly to make certain Frank Junior isn’t breaking his curfew. State’s attorney’s investigators follow Frank Junior’s mother, Sherry Caruso, when she goes shopping, he says. Sherry had also come to court for every pretrial date until recently, when she started experiencing chest pains—which Caruso Senior attributes to the harassment.
“There’s a saying the Romans had,” he says. “I know it better in Italian, but it’s like, ‘When the people who are supposed to protect us become the aggressors, the world is in turmoil.’ ”
The allegations in the papers about the family’s mob ties are entirely unfair to Frank Junior, he says. Not only are they mere innuendo, but they concern Frank Junior’s relatives and ancestors as opposed to Frank Junior himself—yet they’re used to tarnish Frank Junior.
There’s no way Frank Junior will get an open-minded jury, his father
goes on, given how reporters have convicted him in their stories. The reporters have focused on the racial prejudice involved in the Bridgeport attack, while fostering another kind of bigotry, he says—the idea “that if you’re Italian, you must be guilty of something.”
THE CHARGE THAT
the Carusos are mob connected has usually been made by law enforcement sources, who maintain that Frank Junior’s father has been an active member of the “outfit,” as the mob is usually called in Chicago, and that his grandfather was an outfit gambling boss. But the family’s mob connections are older than that.
Frank Junior’s great-grandfather,
Bruno Roti, came to Chicago from Italy in 1909, at the age of twenty-eight. He was a beer distributor and a leader of the
Democratic Club in the city’s First Ward—a ward not known for its integrity. He was questioned about numerous murders and bombings, including a bombing in front of a judge’s house in 1932, and each time he was cleared.
In the 1940s a growing number of blacks were moving into the neighborhood near the Rotis’ home, on 23rd Street near Princeton—nine blocks due north of where Lenard Clark would be beaten and stomped a half century later. A series of arson fires in 1946 drove many blacks from the neighborhood. The city’s black-owned newspaper, the
Chicago Defender
, suggested that the wave of fires had at least the tacit approval of local politicians and noted that the community was dominated by the
“sometimes paternal, sometimes ominous influence of Bruno Roti.” The
Defender
acknowledged that Roti and his sons, most of whom were on the city payroll, had come to the aid of burned-out victims, arranging relief and offering them jobs. But the paper was suspicious of the Rotis’ professed ignorance of the origin of the fires, noting that the Rotis would “give the go signal or the halt signal” for whatever happened in the neighborhood.
When Bruno Roti died in 1957, at age seventy-seven, he was sent off in style, with a marching band, fourteen flower cars, a dozen limousines, and scores of Cadillacs. “Hoodlums, politicians, and police characters from all over the Midwest” attended his funeral, according to the
Chicago Daily News
.
Several of his six sons were murder suspects—one was picked up regarding the slaying of a black man, another for allegedly killing a Chinese man, another for allegedly killing a Mexican—but all were cleared.
His son Fred had a little less luck with the law, going to federal prison in 1993, at the age of seventy-three, for fixing a civil court case and a city zoning change. Before his conviction, Fred Roti had been a state senator for six years and a Chicago alderman for twenty-two.
Upon Bruno Roti’s death,
control of gambling in the area near the Roti home was inherited by a son-in-law, Frank “Skid” Caruso—Frank Junior’s grandfather. As the outfit’s boss of the 26th Street Crew, Skid Caruso was
arrested repeatedly for gambling but spent little time in jail. In 1970 a state investigative commission listed him in the “
upper stratum” of Chicago juice racketeers. (
Juice racketeering
consists of making loans with exorbitant interest rates and relying on threats and violence when necessary to collect payments.)
Skid’s son Frank, also known as “Toots”—the present Caruso Senior—worked in the 26th Street Crew when he was younger, moving up to a supervisory role when Skid died in 1983, according to federal authorities. Caruso Senior has also held office in
several Chicago unions representing low-skilled laborers. He quit one post in 1995 the day after investigators probing that union notified him that they wanted to question him about his alleged mob ties. But now, in 1998, he’s still an associate director of a $775 million union pension fund.
At a hearing in 1997 on mob influence in the Chicago affiliate of the Laborers International,
Charles Bills, an outfit turncoat, described growing up with Toots Caruso. Bills said that Toots’s father had assigned him to look after Toots, making it clear to Bills his intention to “kill everybody if anything happens to Toots or if he gets in any kind of trouble.” Bills said he sometimes got in fights on Toots’s behalf, fights that started when “somebody looked at his girl funny.” Toots Caruso never had to pay a dime in any of the neighborhood restaurants in which he ate, and he could get served in any bar before he was of drinking age, according to Bills. “He was like a little prince in the neighborhood,” Bills said.
Toots Caruso has never been convicted of any crime. In 1982
he and three Bridgeport friends were charged by federal authorities with extortion, but all four men were acquitted.
“
NOBODY GIVES A SHIT
whether he’s guilty or innocent,” Ed Genson says at the defense table, about his client Frank Junior. It’s ten forty-five, but Locallo hasn’t returned from the boot camp graduation yet. Like the elder Caruso, Genson seizes every opportunity to lobby for Frank Junior in the court of public opinion. “People say, ‘It will deter other racists if he’s convicted,’ ” Genson says. “This is what you get from the government all the time—‘We need to send a message’—as opposed to considering the individual case. I find it obscene when people want to fuck a guy up for principle.”
The anti-Caruso sentiment is such that even friends and family urged Genson not to take the case, he says. “My wife, my kids, people I work
with—they all said, ‘It won’t be good for your reputation.’ I was having dinner at a country club in Atlanta, and two people at the table wouldn’t talk to me when they found out I was involved in this case. If ever a lawyer is supposed to take a case, it’s when it’s unpopular. I was brought up to believe that if you don’t take a case because it’s unpopular, you’re not being a lawyer.”
The suggestion in the newspapers that Mike Cutler was killed because he was a witness against Caruso is another example of the prejudice his client must contend with, Genson says. There’s no reason to believe the killing was related to anything but a robbery attempt, he says: “Don’t you think if it was a hit, police would have said so? Do you know how much the police wanted it to be a hit? Do you know how much the prosecutors wanted it to be a hit?”
He’s made repeated change-of-venue motions. In one such motion he wrote that due to the media reports about the Bridgeport attack, “any prospective juror would perceive that a vote of not guilty would constitute a vote against the Mayor of the City of Chicago, a vote against the head of Operation PUSH [Jesse Jackson], a vote against racial relations, a vote in favor of race riots, indeed, a vote against the President of the United States.” Locallo has rejected all the change-of-venue motions. He has pointed out that under the law jurors needn’t be unfamiliar with a case; as long as they promise to put aside what they’ve heard, and to base their verdict on what’s presented in court, they can serve. Locallo has told Genson he expects to be able to find enough jurors who meet that standard here in Cook County. The judge also distrusts Genson’s requests to move the trial, he’ll say later. He figures Genson simply wants the case moved to a whiter county from which he can pick a whiter jury. In one pretrial hearing, Locallo facetiously offered to move the case to Cairo, a majority-black city in southern Illinois.
Genson tells me this morning that he’s pessimistic about Caruso’s chances. He says he’s told Caruso and his parents the best they should expect is a hung jury, which would force a retrial. The second-best outcome, he’s told them, would be an acquittal on the attempted murder charge—which carries a term of six to thirty years—but conviction on the lesser charges of aggravated battery (two to five years) and hate crime (one to three years). That would result in a shorter sentence, but it’d still mean prison. Genson says his pessimism isn’t based on the evidence against Caruso. He sees enough holes in the case that Caruso could win a complete acquittal, he says, if not for the drumbeat for his scalp. “There are certain kinds of cases where emotions override the facts,” he says.
A fair resolution of the case would be a five-year sentence for Caruso “with a lot of restitution so the kid [Lenard Clark] gets some money,” he
says. If the prosecutors offered a deal like that, he says he’d probably take it—except that Caruso’s parents “truly believe their son is innocent” and might not agree to such an offer. The issue is moot, however, he says, because the prosecutors aren’t about to plea-bargain, what with all the attention on the case. The state is hoping to send Caruso away for twenty years, he says.
Genson recalls representing a black man in a civil suit stemming from a racial beating. The man’s car broke down in a white neighborhood, and when he went into a tavern to call a mechanic, “he got the shit beat out of him.” The men who beat the black man were convicted in criminal court, but they “only got a year, year and a half,” Genson says. “If this [the Bridgeport case] was a case without heat, it wouldn’t be worth anything.”
GENSON HAS SPARSE
, curly red hair and a thin beard. He suffers from dystonia, a genetic disorder most prevalent in Ashkenazi Jews and their descendants (his father was a Russian Jew) that makes his head bob incessantly. It bobs more vigorously when a judge, a prosecutor, or a witness annoys him, a frequent occurrence. The disorder also causes him to limp. Prosecutors have noticed his limp growing more conspicuous during jury trials. Genson says jury trials wear him out, and the limp worsens as he tires, and he’d never exaggerate it to win sympathy from jurors.
His father was a bail bondsman who dearly wanted his son to become a lawyer. Genson was not yet ten when his father began bringing him to 26th Street. He got sweet rolls for deputies and ran messages between courtrooms for clerks. His father parked him on a gallery bench for many a heater case. Genson was struck by the way lawyers could trap and humiliate a witness on cross. “
That’s
what I want to do,” he told himself.
His father brought home books discarded by lawyers for his son to read. Genson devoured them, even those laden with the dry and obscure prose of the criminal code. The writings of and about Clarence Darrow moved him. He pictured himself winning justice for the downtrodden. When he started practicing at 26th Street in the mid-1960s, many of his clients were poor. But in 1973 he won a federal fraud case for Jimmy “the Bomber” Catuara, rackets boss for the outfit on the far southwest side and in the southwest suburbs. Soon reputed mobsters were displacing the downtrodden as his clients. Then came politicians charged with corruption, businessmen accused of fraud, and indicted judges and lawyers—clients who could afford him.
Genson prepares for cases prodigiously. He’s a fierce cross-examiner, and he pulls out all the stops for his clients. He once begged a jury to send his client home to his wife and kids, gesturing to a young woman and her
three children in the gallery. The client was actually childless, the woman the client’s girlfriend. Genson says one of his goals when trying a case “is to make sure that no one on the other side wants to ever try a case against me again.”
He’s already helped Frank Junior avoid jail once since he was charged with the Bridgeport beating. In August 1997, after a Bridgeport restaurant owner said Frank Junior had threatened to burn her place down, prosecutors asked Locallo to revoke his bond and jail him. In a hearing before Locallo, the restaurant owner, an elderly woman, testified that a young man had parked his car in her lot and seemed about to leave. She hollered to him that the lot was for customers only and that the car would be towed if he left it there. She said the young man yelled back, “Fuck you, motherfucker, I’ll burn you,” before returning to his car and screeching away. She saw the license plate:
ITALIA
. That plate was registered to a car belonging to the Carusos. But Genson argued that many cars bore decorative
ITALIA
plates, and that the woman might have seen a car with one of those. And Locallo ruled that since the restaurant owner wasn’t asked right after the incident to pick the offender out of a lineup, the evidence was insufficient to revoke Caruso’s bond. But the judge added that although he’d granted previous requests to extend Caruso’s curfew to allow him to attend novenas and to visit his grandparents, he’d no longer do so.
It was Genson who defended Caruso Senior when he was charged with extortion in 1982. During that trial jurors heard undercover recordings in which one of Caruso’s codefendants threatened to stick an
ice pick into the head of a man who was tardy on a juice loan, or to cut his heart out. In his closing argument Genson mocked the government’s case: “It’s
a lot of nonsense and it’s a lot of Hollywood and it’s a lot of showtime.… What you got is guys that hang around the street corner in the old neighborhood. You don’t got no juice gang.” He asked the jury “to stop this right now and send Frank Caruso home to his family.” And the jury did.
LOCALLO RETURNS
from the boot camp graduation at 11:10 and, after quickly disposing of a couple of other matters, calls the Caruso case.