Authors: Steve Bogira
Genson tells the judge about the wedding and about Caruso’s desire to have his curfew extended that day until midnight, so he can also attend the reception. He adds that Caruso would be under his parents’ supervision the entire time. Prosecutor Ellen Mandeltort says the state would object to the curfew being extended.
Locallo says Caruso can go to the wedding but not the reception. The judge reminds Genson of the hearing to revoke Caruso’s bond last year and of his avowal then not to relax the conditions of Caruso’s bond for any
reason. “I’m not taking any chances with your client,” he tells Genson. Then he adds forcefully, “This court will not allow him to
party
with his family.… The motion is respectfully denied.”
AFTER THE CARUSOS
and Genson have left, Locallo and the lawyers in another case go to his chambers for a conference. During the break Deputy Guerrero and probation liaison Rhonda Schullo, standing near the jury box, appraise the judge’s decision regarding Caruso’s request. Schullo, who’s Italian American, thinks Locallo ought to have let Caruso attend the reception as well as the wedding. “Italian weddings are big things,” she tells Guerrero. Guerrero shakes his head. “When I was in the army, I missed a lot of holidays,” he says. “Sometimes there are things you gotta miss.”
Guerrero soon is waxing prophetic on the broader matter of Chicago’s ethnic conflicts. They’re deeper and more complicated than commonly understood, he says. “You see, your north-side Italians don’t like your south-side Italians,” he tells Schullo. And Mexican Americans such as himself, from the southwest side, often don’t see eye to eye with Mexican Americans from the southeast side or Mexican Americans from the north side.
Any Chicagoan who wants to stay safe needs to be aware of the variations in ethnicity and attitude from neighborhood to neighborhood, he says. He learned his lesson as a kid, when he and some Mexican American friends biked into Bridgeport and were chased out by threats, curses, and thrown bottles. Lenard Clark should have known better than to bike through Bridgeport, Guerrero tells Schullo: “I’m not saying he deserved to get beat like that. But you gotta know where you can go and where you can’t go. I mean, you can say you should be able to go wherever you want, but c’mon—this is Chicago.”
TWELVE
Defective Products
THE FIRST WEEK OF JUNE
, Locallo puts in especially long days. When he’s not on the bench, he’s tapping away on the computer in his chambers, finishing up the ruling he’s promised this month in a case involving more than a ton of marijuana, and updating the speech he gives each June on traffic-related law at Bradley University in Peoria. One day he gets to the courthouse at five-thirty in the morning and doesn’t leave until eleven at night.
The hours seem to be wearing on the judge. He’s unusually testy when Larry Bates is ushered before him the morning of June 4. Bates is in a jail uniform; he’s been locked up since March 25, when Locallo ordered him into custody after he was arrested for a new drug offense while on the judge’s probation. In April another judge found probable cause for the latest charge, and in May Locallo continued the case to this date at the request of Bates’s lawyer, public defender Kathryn Lisco. That gave Lisco time to have Bates evaluated by the county’s drug treatment agency,
Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities (TASC), to determine whether he was an acceptable candidate for treatment.
Now Lisco tells the judge that although the report hasn’t arrived in the courtroom yet this morning, TASC has informed her that Bates has been deemed suitable for treatment. Lisco wants the judge to give Bates probation with treatment in exchange for his guilty plea. Locallo responds that he thinks the county’s boot camp would be better for Bates—he believes its military regimen is more likely to turn a life around than a drug treatment program. (He also has a gentlemen’s bet with another judge regarding who will send more defendants to the boot camp this year.) But Lisco
points out that Bates, at forty-four, is too old for the boot camp—the maximum age is thirty-five.
Locallo frowns. He reminds Lisco he’s given Bates probation twice for drug cases, and both times Bates has been rearrested.
“You gotta give him a chance,” Lisco says.
“He’s had a chance. He’s had two chances,” Locallo says.
Locallo passes the Bates case pending the arrival of the TASC report. A group of students from Northeastern Illinois University have been watching the morning’s activities from the jury box. The judge now recesses court and invites the students to his chambers.
Lisco’s partner, John Conniff, arrives, and Lisco tells him about her colloquy with Locallo regarding Bates. If another judge were reluctant to grant a third probation to a defendant, no one would bat an eye. But Locallo usually leaps at the chance to quickly shed a minor case from his call. “You think he’s mad at us?” Conniff asks Lisco. “We haven’t been getting enough dispositions?”
In the gallery, Bates’s mother, sixty-five-year-old Ann Bates, waits patiently with one of his sisters for the judge to retake the bench. Larry Bates has what many defendants here lack: loved ones who show up for his court dates. His mother was also present for his brief appearance before Locallo last month, along with his daughter and girlfriend, and she’s visited her son in the jail every week. Larry was sick last week, she says—he was having trouble stomaching jail food: “I told him, ‘The food ain’t
supposed
to be any good—that’s part of your punishment.’
“Sometimes he gets very depressed,” she says. “He says, ‘I don’t like being in a place all closed up like this for this long. It’s tearing me down, Mom.’ I tell him, ‘Don’t let it do you like it does all those other people that’s stuck in jail.’ So many people, they just give up in there and then they come out worse than when they went in. I say, ‘Don’t you fall into that. You hold up.’ ”
The visits drain her emotionally, although she tries to hide it from her son. “He’s on one side of a window, you’re on the other, and you can’t touch him,” she says. At the end of their visits, they each press a hand against the glass.
She says Larry was an obedient boy who loved to work, even as a youngster, and who sometimes made the honor roll. She thinks his troubles started when he married the woman who ultimately drowned their baby daughter in 1977 and was subsequently diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, adjudged insane, and institutionalized. The sudden loss of his wife and daughter “tore him up all to pieces. He never was right after that,”
she says. He started “picking up different habits” like excessive drinking and drug use. “I don’t blame it all on that,” she says. “I told him, ‘We all lose people sometime, but you got to get over that and move on.’ But—some people are stronger than others.”
She says her son is foolish to be messing with drugs, but she thinks the war on drugs is foolish, too. “They can lock up Larry and thirty or forty thousand like him, it ain’t gonna do no good. All it does is make them more bitter and more resentful. They should get these people real jobs. But they just want to keep putting these Negro boys in jail.”
Locallo returns to the bench, and Lisco resumes her pitch on behalf of Bates. She tells the judge that Bates is the father of three and a widower whose wife died in 1995 after battling “depression” for years. In Lisco’s brief interview with Bates in the lockup, the drowning of his daughter by his wife hadn’t come up. Bates is a high school graduate with a city college certificate in auto mechanics, Lisco continues, and he’s worked as a drywaller, a roofer, and a machine operator. Neither of his previous probations included drug treatment even though he’s been using for at least a decade. He’s been working on his addiction in the jail’s drug treatment unit while this case has been pending, Lisco says.
Locallo asks her what guarantee there is that Bates will make it through a treatment program.
“Judge, there are no guarantees in life,” Lisco says. “I’m telling you that I think Mr. Bates is a good risk.”
Locallo says he doesn’t see what makes Bates a good risk considering how he keeps getting arrested.
Lisco asks Bates if he wants to tell the judge anything. Bates mumbles something the court reporter asks him to repeat. Raising his voice slightly, Bates says he’s never really tried to do anything about his addiction, but that now he sees the need. “I think everyone deserves a second chance,” he adds.
“You’ve had two already,” Locallo says.
Lisco pipes in: “Why rush to judgment on Mr. Bates on this?”
“Because he may be taking up a bed of someone who’s serious about addressing his problem,” Locallo says.
Lisco insists Bates is serious.
“Yeah, at the moment of judgment everybody’s serious,” the judge shoots back.
“Mr. Bates sounds sincere, and I believe he is sincere,” Lisco says. “And if he doesn’t do what he’s supposed to, you’ll be right and you can sentence him accordingly.”
With a sigh, Locallo surrenders. He tells Bates that for his guilty plea,
he’ll get probation and inpatient treatment. Bates will have to remain in the jail until a bed opens up for him in a treatment center. That could take weeks or months. Locallo gives Bates the guilty plea admonishments.
Bates whispers something to Lisco, and Lisco asks the judge if he’d consider freeing Bates next weekend so he can attend his son’s high school graduation.
“No sir,” Locallo snaps. “No sir.”
But then the judge’s thoughts shift to his own children. A year from now his daughter Lauren will be graduating from high school, his son Kevin from elementary school. He can’t imagine missing those events. And so he suddenly reverses himself. He tells Bates he’ll give him a recognizance bond next Thursday, the day before the graduation, allowing Bates to leave the jail for the weekend. When Bates returns to court the following Monday morning, he’ll be formally sentenced. Lisco thanks the judge on behalf of Bates. Inwardly, though, she’s disappointed about Locallo’s change of heart, as she says later. Now she’ll have to worry about Bates getting carried away during his weekend of freedom and failing to return to court, or getting brought back in handcuffs. Then this deal would be voided, and off to prison Bates would go. Plus, she’d never hear the end of it from Locallo, she tells herself.
In the gallery, Ann Bates is delighted. She understands the judge’s doubts about her son’s willingness to change; in fact, she shares them. “But with some people,” she says, “it takes three or four hits on the head before they learn them some sense.”
Larry Bates’s head is swimming as he’s ushered back to the lockup. One moment prison had seemed unavoidable; the next, the judge gave him not only the sentence he wanted but a weekend I-bond as well. Bates credits this to Lisco’s staunch lobbying in his behalf, he says later. He’s never had a PD fight so hard for him. The brief ten minutes Lisco spent quizzing him about his background through the lockup bars this morning was probably twice as long a conversation as a PD had ever had with him, he says. When I tell Locallo later about the drowning of Bates’s daughter by his paranoid schizophrenic wife, the judge is immediately sympathetic. It makes Bates’s struggles with drugs easier to understand, Locallo says. He adds that had he known about it, he’d have granted the request for probation and treatment a lot quicker.
LOCALLO AND HIS ONLY SISTER
and one of his two brothers did well in school, mostly avoiding the kind of youthful indiscretions that would have embarrassed their police officer father. But the oldest son in the family,
Victor, was a long-haired pot smoker in his teens who often clashed with his father. Shouting matches between the two were common in the house, and one of them culminated in Victor pulling a knife on August. This was when Victor was in his early twenties. The police were called, but the officers were hesitant about intervening; August ended the standoff himself by swatting the knife out of Victor’s hand with his billy club. Victor was taken to a hospital, diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, and institutionalized for two years.
In February 1975 Victor was home on a brief furlough to celebrate his mother’s birthday with his family. On the afternoon that Victor was to return to the hospital, the family gathered for birthday cake at the home of Locallo’s other brother. August and Victor left the party first—August was going to drop Victor back at the hospital on his way to work after a stop at home. Locallo drove his mother home a short time later. There was an ambulance in front of the house. When they rushed inside, they found blood sprayed throughout the dining room and the paramedics working on Victor, who was unconscious with a bullet wound near his temple. August almost always locked his gun up when he was home, but this time he’d left it on a dresser while taking a shower, and Victor shot himself with it. He died soon after his arrival at the hospital. He was twenty-four.
Given the friction between Victor and August, Locallo was relieved that Victor “didn’t take my dad out with him, which could have easily occurred.”
Locallo believed that his brother killed himself because he had “lost hope” and because he didn’t want to go back to the hospital. There was no question his death was a suicide, the judge says. But according to records from the Cook County medical examiner’s office, a
coroner’s jury ruled the death an accident. Locallo says he presumes the jury did so “as a favor to my father” because of the stigma of suicide.
In the years before Victor killed himself, Locallo says there were times when he and his other siblings had rued the burden he’d become, particularly to their parents. “In the back of your mind you’re feeling, ‘Jesus, I wish this problem would just go away.’ But when your thoughts become a reality, it’s a lot different situation. You wish you had the last moment to say, ‘I’m sorry about what’s happened to you.’ Because we didn’t understand.”
Locallo says he learned from Victor’s life and death “to be more compassionate and more tolerant of people who are different. My other brother and I, and my sister, we had the same parents as Vic. But unfortunately for Vic, he had a number of things that weren’t in his favor. The rest of us were able to be achievers, be successful in many aspects. Vic had a lot of good qualities, but God didn’t give him the same opportunities that we had.”