Authors: Steve Bogira
LOCALLO AND HIS STAFF
move to a large sixth-floor courtroom on the morning of October 15. The early birds among the reporters and sketch artists are soon staking out territory in the jury box, while Locallo doles out continuances in other cases.
Sam Adam Jr. briefly takes a seat next to me in the jury box. He tells me he thinks the “magic number” today is five. A five-year sentence for Caruso will “appease both sides,” he says, meaning those calling for Caruso’s scalp and those lobbying for mercy. This seems to be wishful thinking on Adam’s part. Given the credits inmates can get on their sentences, a five-year term can be completed in two years. That would hardly be viewed as the strong message against hate crimes that the newspapers have been demanding.
Adam also informs me of plans for a campaign to knock Locallo off the bench in next month’s election should the judge slam Caruso today. Bruno Caruso has arranged for “Dump Locallo” buttons and flyers to hit the streets overnight, Adam says, if the sentence is too stiff—that is, more than five years.
This was a mess of Locallo’s own making, Adam says, one he could have avoided simply by sentencing Caruso after the election. The Carusos’ wrath is understandable, he thinks. “If you were paying your lawyer a hundred grand or two hundred grand or whatever, and he doesn’t even have a chance to look at a full transcript before he has to come up with his post-trial motion, wouldn’t you be pissed? Why couldn’t he [Locallo] wait, so it wouldn’t look like this was a political decision?” Adam, who’s only four months out of law school, solemnly adds, “There must not just be the reality of justice, but the appearance of justice.”
The gallery is packed when the hearing begins a short time later, with Adam Senior standing at the defense table and making the oral argument for a new trial.
When Adam began trying cases here in the 1960s, he’d kill time while a jury was deliberating by poring over the dusty transcripts of 1930s trials that were stored in the courthouse basement. Locallo looks up to Adam, respecting his experience and legal knowledge. The judge studied hard for the Caruso trial, anticipating the issues Adam would raise and researching the relevant cases. “Every time he came up with a [legal] proposition, I
came up with a proposition that countered it,” the judge told me proudly after the trial. He boned up again for this hearing, and now, as Adam cites one case to back a point, Locallo parries with a different one; when both men agree that a particular case is the controlling precedent, Adam says it means one thing, Locallo says it means another. The spectators are yawning and squirming. The sketch artist on my right in the jury box is sketching the crowd on the instructions of the TV reporter he’s working with. “I hate doing crowd scenes even worse than juries,” he says. “At least jurors sit still.” He adds that the fruit of his labor will be on the air “for two and a half seconds.”
Locallo may look up to Adam, but when it’s time for a decision in their courtroom debates, Adam must look up at Locallo. It’s like a veteran manager arguing a call with a younger ump. To no one’s surprise, certainly not Adam’s, Locallo ultimately concludes that all of his trial rulings were correct, and he denies the motion for a new trial.
The fidgeting in the gallery abates as the sentencing hearing begins, with the prosecutors putting on several witnesses to testify about other offenses allegedly committed by Caruso in Bridgeport. Judges are allowed to consider mere allegations in deciding a sentence.
A woman tells Locallo she saw Caruso and another youth deck a white fourteen-year-old near her Bridgeport home in 1994 and kick him while he lay on the ground. Caruso was fifteen then. Genson later calls two friends of Caruso’s who say they saw the fight and that Caruso wasn’t involved. Eighteen-year-old Lionel Johnson—one of the two African American youths who testified at Caruso’s trial that Caruso called them niggers, skunks, and coons at Armour Square Park—tells the judge Caruso also menaced him with his car near the park one day in 1995. Johnson says he was walking down the street when a car sped up behind him. The car kept coming even after he raced to the sidewalk; it leaped the curb and swerved just past him. Caruso, who was behind the wheel, yelled out his window, “Fucking nigger, get out of my neighborhood,” Johnson says. Genson later calls a private investigator to the stand who says he questioned Johnson about this incident, and Johnson told him he didn’t know the name of the driver of the car.
Caruso, sitting amid his five lawyers at the defense table, is in civilian clothes—white shirt, brown tie, gray slacks. As during his trial, he betrays no emotion when these allegations are made against him, or at any other time during the hearing. He mainly studies the edge of the table, sometimes stealing glances at a witness.
Cedric Banks, a tall, twenty-six-year-old African American, describes an encounter with Caruso at Armour Square Park in 1995 or 1996. One
summer afternoon Banks, then a youth worker, brought a group of kids to the park to use its pool. The children, most of whom were black, ranged in age from six to thirteen. After several children complained to him that Caruso was calling them racial names, Banks told Caruso to leave the kids alone, he says. When he and the children were ready to leave the park, a phalanx of twenty to thirty white youths, armed with sticks, bats, and chains, was waiting on the stairwell outside the pool’s locker room, he tells Locallo. Caruso was at the bottom of the stairs, holding a stick or a bat. “They gave us one little pathway to walk through.… I had to walk through sideways,” Banks says. He adds that as he passed Caruso, Caruso said, “Now, big guy, you ain’t so tough out here.” On Genson’s cross, Banks allows that neither he nor any of the children were struck by anyone.
Mandeltort concludes the aggravation evidence by reading to the court the victim-impact statements of Clevan Nicholson’s and Lenard Clark’s mothers.
Jennifer Nicholson says in her statement that at first she feared that Clevan’s and Lenard’s attackers would get away with the crime—she’d heard of other minorities being victimized in Bridgeport and no one being punished. She hopes the case will show “that race will not make a person above the law.” She says Clevan wants Caruso to get the maximum.
Mandeltort tells Locallo she understands that the judge has received a letter purportedly written by Clark’s mother, Wanda McMurray. Mandeltort says she’s shown that letter to McMurray—who’s sitting in the gallery this morning—and that McMurray said she didn’t write it or sign it. Then Mandeltort reads the official McMurray statement: “What Frank Caruso did has changed our lives forever. Frank Caruso should receive the maximum sentence that can be given by the court. Judge Locallo, please spare other children and their families the grief caused by Frank Caruso Jr.”
AFTER LUNCH
Genson’s mitigation witnesses describe an entirely different Frank Caruso Jr. Kathie Moy, a forty-eight-year-old Bridgeport resident, relates how Caruso and his parents helped with the neighborhood’s food and clothing drives, which benefited the parishioners of a poor black Baptist parish east of Bridgeport. Moy has known Caruso since he was small and considers him a “sweetheart.” Moy’s son, a fitness instructor at Armour Square Park since 1996, follows his mother to the stand and tells the judge he’s never seen Caruso cause any trouble at the park.
Reverend Floyd Davis, president of the Southside Branch of the NAACP and pastor of a Baptist church just east of Bridgeport, tells Locallo that Caruso should be shown leniency because it’s wrong to use people as “sacrificial lambs” to try to solve society’s racial problems.
This comment infuriates Locallo, although he hides his anger on the bench. “It was just unbelievable that somebody would come up with that thought,” he says later. “A sacrificial lamb is by definition an innocent. I was tempted to just turn to him and start cross-examining him myself.” (A few days after this hearing,
Davis will resign his NAACP post. His successor will stress that the support shown Caruso was Davis’s personal position and not that of the NAACP.)
Genson’s final witness is the Reverend B. Herbert Martin. Tall and broad-shouldered, with cropped black hair and a bushy gray mustache, Martin is dressed in his cleric’s black suit and white collar. He is the minister who led the “racial healing” prayer services, promoted by Caruso Senior, in Bridgeport and in his own African American community east of Bridgeport, after the Clark beating.
Martin tells Locallo that although he himself was once the victim of a racial beating, he believes in the “power of forgiveness” and recommends mercy for Caruso. In a letter to Locallo, Martin had also said he thought some form of nonprison punishment would be “more rehabilitative, redemptive, and transformative for this young man’s life and future.”
Martin was nineteen when he sustained the beating he alluded to, he tells me later. He and his best friend were jumped by a half-dozen young white men on a country road outside his hometown, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, on a summer evening in 1962. He remembers being hit in the head with an ax handle, then awakening in a ditch to the moans of his friend. The friend had been kicked repeatedly in the groin and clubbed in the head. Neither Martin nor his friend reported the attack to police, because all of the officers in the county were white. Martin and his friend had been working to register blacks to vote, and he thinks this precipitated the attack. He says he didn’t thirst for vengeance because he’d absorbed Martin Luther King’s exhortation to turn the other cheek. “You let go of the hurt, let go of the pain, and the enemy gets destroyed by your nonviolent response.”
He’d met the Carusos in the late 1980s, when they participated in those food and clothing drives for his church that Kathie Moy testified about. Martin knew that the Carusos were union heavyweights. He thought an alliance with them could yield more than canned goods and hand-me-down coats; he thought it could translate into jobs for his parishioners. And in fact, before the Bridgeport attack, Bruno Caruso had found jobs for some of the applicants Martin had sent his way, Martin would tell me. Martin had realized that the Carusos, likewise, had more on their minds than helping poor blacks—they’d seen advantages in a relationship with Martin. In the 1980s Martin probably had more political clout than any
African American minister in Chicago outside Jesse Jackson and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. He was private pastor to Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, who named him chairman of the city’s public housing authority. Under the next African American mayor, Eugene Sawyer, Martin served as head of the city’s Commission on Human Relations. Martin thinks the Carusos saw him as a conduit to the mayor’s office. “They saw opportunities for contracts and all kinds of stuff with the city. I’m not naïve about that.” Sometimes he was able to get them access to the mayor, and sometimes he wasn’t, he’d tell me.
The Bridgeport attack had imperiled this alliance, what with so many African Americans, including many of Martin’s parishioners, demanding that Caruso and his codefendants be severely punished. He led the “racial healing” services in part to soften that sentiment.
Now, on cross, Mandeltort says, “So I’m clear here, sir, you believe in the ‘power of forgiveness,’ is that correct?”
“You’re right,” Martin says.
“And you forgive the enemy, is that correct, sir?”
“You’re right.”
“And in the world of racism, the enemy would be racists, would that be fair to say, sir?”
“You’re right.”
Martin thinks Mandeltort is implying, with her questions and incredulous tone, “that something is wrong with forgiveness,” he’d say later. This doesn’t surprise him. “She’s out to win a case; she’s not out to transform a life. That’s the difference between my profession and hers.”
Genson, on redirect: “There are people that do things that are wrong … that are entitled to mercy and compassion, is that right?” Martin says there are indeed.
“And even though Ms. Mandeltort seems to think all black people should hate everyone—” Genson begins, but Mandeltort breaks in with an angry objection that Locallo sustains.
“There is nothing inconsistent with your religion and your ministerial and pastoral calling to come into court and ask for a judge to exercise mercy and compassion, is there?” Genson asks.
“There is nothing wrong with that, and I have done it on many occasions,” Martin says.
But Martin would later tell me that while he’d written letters on behalf of other defendants, he could think of only one other defendant he’d testified similarly for—a wealthy slumlord named Louis Wolf. Wolf owned dozens of buildings in Chicago, some of which he’d allowed to become “
environmental disasters and toxic waste dumps,” thereby propelling
“whole neighborhoods into urban decay,” a lawyer for the city said at his sentencing in federal court in 1993. Wolf had failed to pay property taxes on real estate he owned. Then, after the property was sold at a tax auction, he’d bought it back through various fronts, which freed him of the tax liens, bilking the government out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in property taxes. He pled guilty to racketeering and mail fraud. At the behest of Wolf’s lawyer, Martin urged the judge not to imprison Wolf but to allow him instead to redeem himself by donating his time, money, and one of his properties to Martin’s church. “We feel that this would better serve to rehabilitate the man,” Martin told that judge. The judge ultimately sentenced Wolf to a year in prison and fined him $400,000, directing that half the money go to Martin’s church for its outreach programs, the other half to a social service agency. Martin’s church got stiffed, however.
Wolf later pointed out in a letter from prison that the judge had no authority to direct a defendant to pay a fine to anyone but the U.S. government, and that therefore the fine was illegal; thus, he maintained, he didn’t owe a dime. An appeals court accepted only the first part of this argument, mandating that the fine be paid to the federal government. Martin would tell me later that he now realizes he was “misused” by Wolf. “I don’t mind quid pro quo enterprises. However, it didn’t work out that time.”