Authors: Steve Bogira
Locallo begins the court day by reading aloud the ruling he’s written in the one-ton marijuana case. The defendants, four Hispanics in dress shirts and slacks and shiny black shoes, are clustered around an interpreter in the jury box. Their private lawyers are at the defense table. The defendants have been free on bond since shortly after their arrests, having posted $30,000 each.
Police say they caught the four men unloading bundles of marijuana from a van in a south-side garage. The officers had no search warrant, however. In a hearing on the defendants’ motion to suppress the evidence, one
officer testified that the garage door was open, allowing him to watch the unloading from his position behind a stockade fence, and that he could see and smell the marijuana because some of the bundles were open.
Locallo recounts the testimony for twenty-five minutes, the interpreter in the jury box struggling to keep pace. Finally, on page thirty of his thirty-one-page ruling, the judge reaches the bottom line. “This court does not believe the police version of the events surrounding the unloading of the van,” Locallo says. “The first time the bundles of marijuana were observed was when the police made a warrantless entry into the garage.… The first time the smell of marijuana was detected was when the officer entered the garage.” He suppresses the evidence. When the defendants learn this from the interpreter, they tactfully suppress their glee. The charges against them will soon be dropped.
Locallo has another drug case on his docket this morning, involving two white defendants, Larry Ramacci and Richard Wilson. Both have private lawyers and both are free on bond. They were arrested in 1995. The case has been continued thirty-two times, and today it’s continued for another three weeks. Ramacci and Wilson are charged with possessing with intent to deliver 1,163 grams of cocaine. The defendants in the marijuana case were charged with possessing with intent to deliver 2,182 pounds of marijuana (989,733 grams). Bates is waiting nervously in the gallery while Locallo dispenses with these other defendants. His case involved 0.4 grams of cocaine. Soon after the marijuana defendants get their good news, and Ramacci and Wilson leave with their continuance, Locallo calls Bates to the bench. Bates meekly asks the judge if he’d consider assigning him to outpatient instead of inpatient treatment so he won’t have to wait in the jail for a treatment bed to open. Locallo says no, and Guerrero escorts Bates to the lockup.
THIRTEEN
Fixes
“
HAVE ANY OF YOU
seen a cold-blooded killer before? Let’s take a look over here,” prosecutor James McKay is telling a jury in 302 one July morning. McKay steps behind the defense table and brushes Dino Titone’s shoulder lightly with one hand. “This man, sitting over here with the suit and the glasses on, is a cold-blooded killer. What the evidence is going to show you, ladies and gentlemen, is that Dino Titone is an executioner.”
Titone, who’s sharply dressed in a gray suit that his mother had tailored for him for this trial, is repelled by McKay’s touch. But he knows the prosecutor would love to have him fume in front of the jury, so he remains stone-faced, doesn’t flinch.
It used to be easier to provoke him, Titone says later. As a youth, “I was always one to fight. But I’m more laid-back now. Over the course of time you learn that fighting’s not the way you solve things, and that you can do more with kindness than with anger.”
Titone is solidly built, just under six feet tall but over two hundred pounds. He has a broad face, a small mouth, and a full head of wavy black hair that’s graying at the temples. There was no gray when he was arrested in 1982 for the double murder for which he’s now on trial for a second time. But he was twenty-two then; now he’s thirty-eight, and much has happened in the interim. The judge at his first trial is in prison for taking bribes, and the lawyer who represented him is on parole for giving them.
ON THE MORNING
of December 12, 1982, a forest preserve ranger was patrolling a secluded tract of land near the Des Plaines River for illegal
duck hunting. This was in unincorporated Lemont Township, fifteen miles southwest of Chicago and barely within Cook County. Around nine-fifteen
A.M
. the ranger came upon a powder-blue Oldsmobile on the river’s south bank. He parked his patrol car and walked toward the Olds, planning to look through its windows for hunting gear. As he approached, he heard banging from inside the trunk and a voice:
I’m running out of air! Get me out of here!
The ranger radioed for help. A Lemont police car arrived, then an ambulance. The ranger and a police officer used a tool from the ambulance to pop open the trunk. Inside were two blood-spattered men, one writhing and moaning, the other pale and still. Their hands were tied behind their backs. A .38 revolver lay in the trunk. Police later found another gun, a small semiautomatic, on the ground not far from the car.
The motionless man, thirty-nine-year-old Aldo Fratto, had been shot in the head, chest, back, abdomen, and shoulder. He was dead. The other man, Fratto’s nephew, twenty-six-year-old Tullio Infelise, had four bullet wounds in his chest and abdomen. The two men had been shot about six hours earlier. As paramedics worked on Infelise in the ambulance, the police officer asked him who had done this to him. Infelise’s gasping response sounded to the officer like “Robert Gotch.” In the emergency room at the hospital, Infelise said another offender was “Dino.”
Police determined that Fratto and Infelise had lived on the south side, in Bridgeport. Soon their prime suspect was twenty-eight-year-old Robert Gacho, who lived with his wife and two young children in Bridgeport. Police brought Gacho in for questioning that afternoon, and by evening he confessed. He implicated two other men: twenty-year-old Joseph Sorrentino and twenty-two-year-old Dino Titone.
Gacho said the two victims had come to his house on the evening of December 11 with three-quarters of a kilo of cocaine they’d arranged to sell him. But Gacho, Sorrentino, and Titone had decided to take the cocaine instead of buying it. They pulled guns on Fratto and Infelise and bound their hands. In the early morning hours of December 12, they drove them from Bridgeport to the secluded spot near the Des Plaines River. Sorrentino and Titone shot them while Gacho and his mistress waited in a second car. Back at Gacho’s house, the three men split up the cocaine and the $1,500 that Sorrentino and Titone had taken from the two victims.
Police also arrested Sorrentino on December 12, and he gave a similar confession. According to Sorrentino, at the Des Plaines River, Titone ordered Fratto and Infelise to climb into the trunk of the Olds, which was Fratto’s car. Titone told Sorrentino that if he didn’t shoot anybody, “he
would shoot me, and he started firing about three times on Aldo,” Sorrentino said. He said he himself then shot Infelise. Then he threw his gun aside, and Titone dropped his into the trunk.
Police located Gacho’s mistress, Katherine De Wulf, and brought her to the station. According to police, her account of the crime matched Gacho’s and Sorrentino’s. She wasn’t charged.
That same evening, December 12, officers went to the home of Titone’s parents, in west suburban St. Charles, but his father told them Dino wasn’t there. The next morning Titone, accompanied by his father, turned himself in at a police station. He declined to answer questions. After De Wulf picked him out of a lineup, he was charged with murder and attempted murder. Gacho and Sorrentino had already been charged. With Infelise’s death two weeks later, the three defendants were facing a minimum of natural life if convicted and a possible death sentence.
In separate trials two years later in the courtroom of Judge Thomas Maloney, all three defendants were convicted—Gacho and Sorrentino by juries, Titone by Maloney. Sorrentino’s jury sentenced him to natural life. Gacho’s jury sentenced him to death, and Maloney condemned Titone as well. Gacho’s and Sorrentino’s convictions were upheld on appeal. Gacho’s death sentence was then vacated because of a procedural error by Maloney, and he was resentenced to natural life.
Titone’s conviction and sentence were upheld on appeal. But on a January morning in 1990 a new lawyer for Titone stood before Judge Maloney asserting that his client deserved a new trial. He had novel grounds for his claim. The lawyer contended that Titone’s father had given Titone’s trial lawyer $10,000 to fix the case—money the lawyer was supposed to pass on to Maloney—and that Titone had been convicted and sentenced to death because the fix had gone bad.
The new lawyer, Ian Ayres, was just thirty and a novice attorney when he made these charges. Titone, in fact, happened to be Ayres’s first client. After graduating from Yale Law School in 1987, Ayres had come to Chicago to teach law at Northwestern. He’d volunteered his services to the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty, which had asked him to represent Titone. Maloney on this January morning was sixty-four and a thirteen-year veteran of the bench. Prosecutors and defense lawyers alike considered him rude, contemptuous, and state-minded.
He once scolded a jury from the bench for acquitting a defendant. He was a former boxer. Ayres was aware of Maloney’s reputation and didn’t expect him to retreat timidly to his corner when confronted with these allegations. Ayres had brought his own lawyer to court in the event Maloney tried to jail him for contempt.
And indeed, Maloney “went ballistic,” recalls Ayres, now a law professor at Yale. The judge asked him where he was born, how old he was, and how long he’d been practicing law. When Maloney learned that Ayres was barely out of law school, he berated him for his naïveté. Ayres remembers the judge saying that when Ayres got some experience, he’d realize that such charges by a defendant “were ‘just a bunch of crap,’ or words to that effect.” Maloney soon summoned Ayres and the prosecutor to his chambers, where the judge resumed his tirade against the defense lawyer, now lacing it with profanity.
Ayres supported his charges with affidavits from Titone and from his father, Salvatore. Salvatore Titone said in his affidavit that his son’s trial lawyer, Bruce Roth, had told him after Dino was indicted “that Dino could walk if I paid him some extra money”—money that would be passed to Maloney. According to Salvatore Titone, Roth originally said the fix would cost $60,000, but after the elder Titone said he couldn’t come up with that, Roth said Maloney would take care of the case for just $10,000. This was in addition to the $20,000 Salvatore Titone had agreed to pay Roth for his legal services. The elder Titone said he gave the $10,000 to Roth in March 1983.
Dino Titone said in his affidavit that Roth had told him after he was indicted that he “would find a judge that he could work with” to preside over the case. The case originally was assigned to a different judge, but it was transferred on Roth’s motion.
In August 1983, before the case came to trial, an ongoing federal probe of corruption in the Cook County courts—
Operation Greylord—became public. Dino Titone theorized in his affidavit that Greylord had scared Maloney out of following through on the deal, and that the judge had convicted him and sentenced him to death to prove his integrity. Titone said it was also possible that Roth had made a deal with Maloney but had pocketed the $10,000. In either case, Titone said, he believed he hadn’t been convicted because of the evidence against him but because either Roth or Judge Maloney had reneged.
On the January morning Ayres confronted Maloney with these allegations, he also asked him to transfer the case to a judge who could consider the petition for a new trial without bias. The chief judge at 26th Street later reassigned the case to Judge Earl Strayhorn, a twenty-year veteran of the bench known for his honesty.
Ordinarily the Titone allegations would have been written off as the desperate fictions of a defendant and his father. But certain developments during the 1980s lent credence to the claims. When the case reached Judge Strayhorn, Titone’s trial lawyer, Roth, was already serving a ten-year federal
term for bribing judges and extorting defendants in other Cook County cases, having been convicted in 1987. And federal agents were completing an investigation into other fixes involving Maloney, a probe that would result in the judge’s indictment in 1991.
In 1990 Judge Strayhorn vacated Titone’s death sentence and ordered a new sentencing hearing based on Roth’s woeful work for Titone at sentencing. Ayres had learned that Judge Maloney had warned Roth that if he left the sentencing decision up to him, he’d condemn Titone. Roth had nonetheless advised Titone to put his fate in Maloney’s hands. Roth had then offered no mitigating evidence in Titone’s behalf, and Maloney made good on that promise. But Judge Strayhorn denied the request for a new trial that was based on the fix allegations.
In 1992 the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed Strayhorn’s rejection of a new trial for Titone, observing that his fix allegations hadn’t been proven. The federal charges pending against Maloney were “
not germane” to Titone’s case, the court said.
In 1993
Maloney, by then retired, was convicted in federal court of taking bribes to fix four cases, three of them murders. He was sentenced to fifteen years and nine months. One of the cases involved a failed fix remarkably similar to the one alleged by the Titones. According to testimony at Maloney’s trial, a leader of the El Rukn street gang had paid the judge $10,000 to acquit one of two gang members charged with a double murder. But on the last day of the trial Maloney returned the bribe, perhaps because of the presence of numerous FBI agents in his courtroom, the FBI having been tipped to a possible fix. Maloney then convicted the defendants and sentenced them to death.
In 1996
another 26th Street judge granted the El Rukn defendants a new trial because of Maloney’s proven corruption in that case. By this time Ayres—the lawyer who’d raised the corruption issue in Titone’s case—had left Chicago for a job at Stanford University. Titone’s new lawyer was Thomas Geraghty, director of the Northwestern University Legal Clinic (the lawyer who now represents Leroy Orange). After the El Rukns were awarded their new trial, Geraghty went before Judge Strayhorn and said Titone deserved as much.