Authors: Steve Bogira
In those years the investigation of corruption in state courts was left to local prosecutors. But
local prosecutors weren’t about to expose the corruption of judges with whom they usually teamed for convictions.
Federal laws passed in the 1970s made investigations such as Greylord feasible.
In 1980 a judge at 26th Street became
the first judge in the nation to have his chambers wiretapped by federal agents. On a November night that year Greylord agents hid a microphone in the desk of Judge Wayne Olson, who presided over a first-floor courtroom in which preliminary hearings were conducted in drug cases. Greylord investigators had heard he was taking bribes. On the first day court was in session after the bug was planted, it picked up a conversation between Olson and a defense lawyer—Bruce Roth.
“I love people that take dough, ’cause you know exactly where you stand,” Judge Olson told Roth.
“Sure, that’s the way to do business,” Roth replied.
Olson pled guilty in 1985 to racketeering, extortion, and mail fraud and was sentenced to twelve years. Locallo’s present clerk, Duane Sundberg, worked for Olson for three years when the judge was assigned to divorce court. Sundberg thinks too much has been made of Olson’s transgressions. “When every fish in the brook is swimming downstream, it’s hard to swim upstream,” the clerk says. Besides, he adds in Olson’s defense, “He
never fixed a murder case.”
As a prosecutor, Locallo learned from colleagues about a ruse that defense attorneys employed to squeeze money out of clients—a ploy known as “selling the judge” or “
selling the prosecutor.” A defense lawyer who knew that the judge would sentence the defendant to probation, given the facts of the case, would warn his client he was in for a prison term—a term that could only be averted if the client gave the lawyer a bribe to pass to the prosecutor or the judge. When the client got his probation, he’d figure
he’d bought it, not knowing that the bribe had gotten no farther than the defense lawyer’s wallet.
Before Greylord, Cook County judges often were mere patronage products, chosen for their political clout more than their legal ability. Politics still matter today but less so; Locallo says Greylord convinced political bosses to sponsor more capable candidates.
He feels sympathy for most of the judges who got convicted. Several of his friends have gone to jail. One was Maloney, whom Locallo got to know when he was a prosecutor. Federal judges and prosecutors have called Maloney a
“mafia factotum,” a “racketeer sending men to the death chamber in the name of the state,” “one of the most ruthless judges,” and “depraved.” Locallo says he has doubts about Maloney’s guilt and still considers him a friend.
THE STATE
’
S KEY WITNESS
against Titone, Robert Gacho’s former mistress Katherine De Wulf, takes the stand after lunch on the trial’s first day.
De Wulf, now forty-four, tells the jury that Gacho called her on the night in question and summoned her to his house in Bridgeport saying he needed a “backup car.” She parked in the alley behind his house, as he’d directed over the phone. Joseph Sorrentino pulled up behind her in a light-blue Olds—Fratto’s car. Then Fratto and Infelise, their hands tied behind their backs, were marched out of the house by Titone, who ushered them into the backseat of the Olds. Titone got into the front passenger seat, next to Sorrentino, and Gacho got into her car. She says Gacho told her they were going to “take Aldo and Tullio somewhere, and they were going to have to waste ’em.”
They followed the Olds through Bridgeport to the Stevenson Expressway—Interstate 55—and then southwest, De Wulf tells the jury. After a short drive off of I-55, they reached the area near the Des Plaines River in Lemont. She says Sorrentino drove down into a gully, while Gacho, who was driving her car, parked nearby. Gacho told her he was waiting to hear shots. After fifteen or twenty minutes, they did. Then Titone and Sorrentino got in the backseat of their car. Gacho “asked if it was over,” De Wulf says. And Titone “said, ‘Yes, they’re gone. They’re dead.’ ”
McKay asks De Wulf if she noticed anything about how Titone reported that they were dead.
“He was laughing, like he was bragging about, that he had shot them,” De Wulf says. “He seemed like he was proud about it.… He said that they were begging for their lives, that they were pleading for him not to shoot them.”
Through his questions on direct, McKay lets the jury know that De Wulf
left the state twice in 1984 to try to avoid testifying at a previous “proceeding.” McKay knows that Cohn will be going into this on cross, to cast doubt on De Wulf’s trustworthiness. De Wulf explains that she still loved Gacho back then, and that he’d told her that if she didn’t testify, the case against him would be dropped. Authorities found her both times she fled and brought her back to Chicago, and she testified against all three defendants.
On Cohn’s cross, De Wulf acknowledges that when police questioned her about the shootings, she worried about getting charged herself. Cohn is suggesting to the jury that she may not have told police what really happened. And, yes, she knew it was a crime for her to flee the state, she says, but she did it anyway.
BRIBING THE JUDGE
is usually a last resort for fixing a case. It’s easier and cheaper to get to the witnesses.
While Gacho was in jail awaiting trial in 1983 and 1984, he wrote long, adoring letters to De Wulf, invariably signing them “Your Future Husband.” Next to his signature he’d draw a heart and write inside it, “Bob and Kathy 4-Ever.” In the letters he told De Wulf he planned to marry her just as soon as he beat the case and got out of jail—which he could do only if she stayed off the witness stand. He asked De Wulf to leave Illinois and hide from authorities, and De Wulf complied, fleeing to Gacho’s sister’s home in Arkansas. “The state made just about their whole case around you,” he wrote De Wulf after she fled. “Now they are going to have to change their plans, and they don’t have all that much time with all their other cases.” But authorities found the time, and De Wulf.
Most witnesses comply with their subpoenas. But it’s not rare for a witness to get cold feet or amnesia, or even to disappear, as a trial nears. One witness did so in another Titone case, in fact.
In 1980—two years before Titone was arrested for the shootings of Fratto and Infelise—he was charged with the armed robbery of a northwest-side trucking dock. Titone and his brother-in-law, Robert Caparelli, were accused of tying up a dock employee at gunpoint and taking 116 cartons of clothing worth an estimated $60,000. The two men were taken in for questioning the day after the offense and picked out of a lineup by the victim.
Before the case came to trial at 26th Street, Titone and Caparelli replaced their original lawyer with Bruce Roth.
On the morning of the trial, the employee who’d been tied up informed prosecutors that he could no longer identify the defendants as the culprits. “It caught us totally by surprise,” recalls Jeffrey Pattee, one of the prosecutors. Pattee, now in private practice, says Titone was smirking throughout
the bench trial that day. “Usually a defendant on trial for a serious offense is a little worried,” Pattee says. “He wasn’t the least bit concerned.” Without the witness’s identification, Judge Robert Collins acquitted Titone and Caparelli.
Titone told me he did in fact commit this robbery. He said he didn’t know exactly how his acquittal was won—just that his father had told him not to worry about the case, that he’d take care of things.
THE DOUBLE-MURDER CASE
against Titone turns out to be an exception to the axiom that cases get harder to prosecute as they age. Fourteen years after the first trial, not only is the state’s chief witness, Katherine De Wulf, still available to testify against Titone, but now she’s joined by Robert Gacho’s former wife.
Judy Gacho testified at her husband’s trial in 1984 that although she was home on the evening in question, she mainly stayed in her bedroom and didn’t hear if anyone stopped by.
But she and Gacho are now divorced. On the second day of Titone’s retrial, she tells the jury that Titone and Sorrentino did indeed stop by the Gacho home on the evening in question. She heard them talking with Gacho about how Fratto and Infelise were going to bring over a large quantity of cocaine. She recalls Titone saying that although he didn’t have money, “he wanted the drugs anyway.” Fratto and Infelise arrived later. She was in her bedroom but could smell cocaine being smoked. Later, when she got up to use the bathroom, all five men were gone.
Cohn badgers her on cross about the differences between her testimony in 1984 and her testimony today. She acknowledges that she knew she was committing perjury back then. On redirect, McKay asks her who instructed her to lie in 1984. “My husband Bob and his lawyer,” she says.
Her testimony not only corroborates De Wulf’s, it torpedoes Titone’s alibi that he was playing cards that night and never went to Gacho’s house.
Although the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed Titone’s 1984 conviction (before evidence surfaced that Maloney and Roth were crooked), one justice, Seymour Simon, vehemently dissented. Simon had observed that the case rested entirely on De Wulf—an untrustworthy witness, he said, given her own involvement in the crime. “I do not understand how, based on the testimony of such a witness, the defendant could properly be convicted of murder,” the justice wrote. This dissent underlined an irony that Titone had thought of many times since the first trial: had there been no fix attempt, and had the 1984 trial been before a jury or an uncompromised judge, he could well have been acquitted. Now, with the testimony of Judy Gacho, the chances of that have greatly dimmed.
• • •
“
CORRUPTION ISN
’
T GONE
from 26th Street—it just went underground,” Titone says. “That’s the way they do business, not just in Chicago but everywhere.”
Locallo disagrees. “In Dino’s world, at the time his case first came in, corruption very well may have been happening. But today I just can’t see it.” The
salaries of circuit judges in Cook County have risen markedly since Greylord (from $65,500 in 1984 to $150,000 in 2004). Locallo thinks this makes judges less vulnerable to bribery and less willing to put their seat at risk. He also thinks Greylord taught ward bosses “that they’re not supposed to be calling [judges] seeking favors” and taught judges not to accept such calls. “If any of my colleagues are accepting phone calls from committeemen with respect to cases—I mean, it’s the highest of stupidity. The bottom line is, ‘I can’t help you. Don’t call me.’ ” Locallo says the only person who ever sought a favor from him was an acquaintance who asked him to intercede on his behalf with the judge who was presiding over his divorce case. Locallo politely but firmly told the person he couldn’t. “For the most part, I think it’s a pretty straight ship,” Locallo says. “But if the authorities get lax, corruption can always resurrect itself.”
Greylord showed that a key to corruption was the ability to get a case assigned to a corruptible judge, which defense lawyers accomplished by
bribing clerks in the presiding judge’s office. The clerks would ignore the results of the Randomizer—the computer program that determines which trial judge gets a particular case—and assign the case to the judge chosen by the bribing lawyer.
After the Greylord revelations,
a commission was formed to recommend anticorruption measures for the court system. One of the recommendations was that the random assignment system “be routinely audited to ensure that the cases assigned through the computer are, indeed, assigned on a random basis.” But
no audit has ever been instituted. And Marcus Ferguson, the clerk who’s been running the Randomizer at 26th Street since 1996, says a dishonest clerk could still “easily” subvert the system. No one looks over the clerk’s shoulder to make sure the judge’s name that appears on his monitor after he runs the Randomizer is the name he calls out to the prosecutor assisting him with the process. Ferguson says it would be even easier for a prosecutor to direct a case to a preferred judge (as defense lawyers here have long suspected prosecutors sometimes do). On occasion the assistant state’s attorney working with Ferguson instructs him to send a case to a certain judge. There are valid reasons to bypass the Randomizer; if the defendant is already on probation, for instance, his new case is supposed to be sent to the judge who gave him probation. But there’s no
one checking to ensure that the reason given by the assistant state’s attorney is bona-fide. “They can make it sound official and I would never know,” Ferguson says. Although defense lawyers can watch the randomizing process that’s conducted every weekday, he says they never do.
COHN PUTS ON
his defense witnesses after lunch on the trial’s second day. The audio feed to the gallery isn’t working, so Locallo asks Deputy Rhodes to open the gallery doors so the spectators can hear.
The first witness is Titone’s brother-in-law, Robert Caparelli. He’s the man who was acquitted with Titone of the 1980 armed robbery of the trucking dock.
Caparelli, who testified for Titone at his first trial, says he and Titone and two other friends were playing cards on the evening of December 11, 1982, at a home on Chicago’s northwest side. The game began at about eight-thirty
P.M
. and went on until four the next morning, he says, and Titone was there the whole time.
On cross, Caparelli acknowledges that he never told police that Titone had been with him on the evening of the murders. He says Titone’s lawyer, Roth, instructed him not to tell anyone about the card game until he testified.
The next witness, Thomas Caccavele, also testified for Titone at his first trial and also recalls playing cards with Titone that night. (The man who testified at the first trial that he’d hosted the game, Michael Wesley, died two months before this retrial.)
Titone takes the stand after Caccavele. He tells the jury he didn’t shoot Fratto or Infelise. He was playing cards at Mike Wesley’s that night.
He acknowledges that he knew Gacho before all this. They worked for the same trucking company. Titone says he stopped working for that company five years before the murders. Then, about two weeks before the crime, he says Gacho called him and asked him to meet him at a motel on Chicago’s southwest side. Titone says he drove from his parents’ home in St. Charles to the motel. When he arrived, Gacho was already there, and De Wulf was with him. He says they asked him to help them rip off a large amount of cocaine from some men but that he declined. Gacho called him a week later, asking him to reconsider, he says, but again he said no.