Authors: Steve Bogira
THE MURDER OF
witness Mike Cutler remains unsolved. Detectives investigating the killing concluded he was slain in the course of a robbery and not because he was a witness in the Bridgeport case. There’s been almost universal unwillingness to accept that conclusion.
The skeptics include state’s attorney Devine, prosecutors Mandeltort and Robert Berlin, Detective Stanley Turner, and Judge Locallo. In January 2000 a
Dateline NBC
feature about the Bridgeport case—“Witness for the Prosecution”—implied
that Cutler was killed because of the testimony he was going to give. In May 2003, near the fifth anniversary of Cutler’s death, the
Chicago Sun-Times
attributed the police department’s dismissal of the “hit” theory to the influence of organized crime. “
One can only speculate what phone calls were made, what favors called in, to squash” the police investigation, the paper said. The beating of Lenard Clark “was tragic to begin with—a terrible, racially motivated crime,” the
Sun-Times
said. But Cutler’s murder “was even worse—a young man, attending college, killed because he did the right thing and came forward after his friends committed an unspeakable act.”
The
Sun-Times
observed that the killers took Cutler’s high school class ring and quoted State Representative Jim Durkin, a former prosecutor, as saying that this was a “
classic mob hit tactic. You tell them to bring back the class ring to make sure they got the right guy.”
But a police spokesperson told me it wasn’t even clear that Cutler was wearing his class ring that night. The detectives investigating Cutler’s murder had pointed out that Cutler was shot once in the chest, not several times in the head, as one might expect in a hired killing. The
Sun-Times
suggested, however, that perhaps the hit men were instructed to make it look like a robbery, though this seemed at odds with the paper’s class ring theory.
The
Sun-Times
also reported in May 2003 that the FBI had opened its own investigation into Cutler’s murder. But later that year, special agent Ross Rice, spokesperson for the Chicago FBI, told me the Cutler slaying was “being investigated by local authorities. It doesn’t appear that there’s anything we have jurisdiction over.” I asked Rice if the FBI had ever opened an investigation into the killing, as the
Sun-Times
had claimed. “Generally we don’t comment on what we are or aren’t investigating,” Rice said. “But I have to say that a lot of times there’s a lot of misinformation in the media.”
If the murder merely stemmed from a robbery, “then it was one heckuva coincidence,” prosecutor Berlin told me late in 2003. But though it’s a less dramatic story, a coincidence may have been what it was.
DURING CARUSO
’
S TRIAL
, his uncle, union bigwig Bruno Caruso, told me that a prison term of any length would be a “death sentence” for his nephew, since black prisoners would target him because of the racial nature of the Bridgeport beating. But his nephew survived. Caruso began serving his term in the medium-security Sheridan Correctional Center. For the relatives and friends who wanted to visit him, this was a fortunate assignment: Sheridan is one of the closest prisons to Chicago, just fifty miles southwest of the city limits. Locallo sentenced Caruso to eight years,
but the standard day-for-day credit reduced the time he owed to four years. A six-month “meritorious service” credit, granted routinely to inmates because of the overcrowding in the prison system, trimmed his time to three and a half years. A three-month credit for attending school while in prison cut it to three and a quarter.
Within two years of parole, inmates are eligible for work-release and day-release programs. (In the latter they attend school or counseling sessions.) It’s
hard to get into these programs—there are a small number of spots and a multitude of eligible inmates. Caruso applied early in 2000. That April he was transferred from Sheridan to a day-release facility in Urbana, from which he attended school. He spent the last year of his sentence at home in an electronic detention program. He was paroled in December 2001, having spent a year and a half in a penitentiary. His most serious transgression while locked up was bringing ten pounds of raw hamburger into his cell block and refusing to explain where he got it or what it was for, an offense that earned him ten days in segregation.
On January 18, 2000—the day after Martin Luther King Day—the front page of the
Sun-Times
featured a photo of Caruso, then twenty, and Lenard Clark, sixteen, standing together in a visiting area of the Sheridan prison, Caruso’s arm resting on Lenard’s back, and Lenard grinning. The accompanying story reported that Lenard had visited Caruso at Sheridan twice. The newspaper didn’t say from whom it had obtained the photo. Lenard’s mother declined to talk to the
Sun-Times
about her son’s visits to Caruso. But Caruso family friend Dominic Di Frisco was willing to. Di Frisco was the public relations executive who Locallo said tried to persuade him in October 1998 to reduce Caruso’s sentence. The photo of Caruso and Lenard showed a
“historic thing—the fact that these two guys have come together and begun to heal,” Di Frisco told the
Sun-Times
. It was a “sincere effort … tantamount to placing a floral tribute on the tomb of Martin Luther King.”
Callers to a talk show on WVON, a radio station with a predominantly African American audience, dismissed the reconciliation as a sham. Interviewed by the show’s host, Cliff Kelley, Locallo suggested that the affair was orchestrated by Di Frisco, whom he labeled a “
spin doctor.”
Sun-Times
gossip columnist Irv Kupcinet, who’d run a half-dozen laudatory items about the Carusos in his column since the attack, called Locallo’s questioning of the reconciliation a “
shocking violation of judicial conduct.”
IN NOVEMBER
2003 Leslie McGee acknowledged to me in a phone interview that she lied in her confession about the circumstances that led her to shoot Jean François. McGee, who was in the Dwight Correctional
Center, said François wasn’t really just a cabbie she never met. They’d been in a relationship for nine months, and she shot him when he told her he was leaving her, she said.
They had met in the neighborhood, and he quickly let her know he was interested in her, she said. She was fifteen when they started going out. He took her to movies, pool halls, and arcades, gave her money, and bought her jewelry. He yelled at her once or twice but never hit her, she said. He told her that he loved her. He didn’t tell her he had a wife and three children.
She said she made up the story about François being a cabbie she didn’t know because she thought it made her sound less guilty. “It was the first story I came up with,” she said. “I couldn’t go back and change that lie. One lie led to another.” She said she didn’t tell the truth to her lawyer, Marijane Placek, because she feared that Placek would inform the prosecutors.
She said François first told her he had a wife and kids, and that he wanted to go back to them, on the evening of the shooting. “I asked him about twenty times, ‘Are you sure you’re gonna leave me?’ He said, ‘I have no other choice.’ I thought, If you’re not gonna be with me, then you’re not gonna be with anybody.” She had a gun on her because she was working nights as a cocktail waitress and felt she needed it for protection, she said; it was a coincidence, she insisted, that she’d started carrying it just two days before François told her they had to end their affair.
McGee, who turned twenty-four in 2004, has gotten her GED and a college-level certificate in computer technology while in prison, and she’s taken classes in cosmetology. She’s also been in disciplinary segregation repeatedly for fights and other violations. After she’s released in 2007 she plans to work in a beauty shop or to design clothes. “I’ve matured mentally,” she said. “I’m more patient today. I feel I have a very, very promising future.”
IN APRIL
2001 the
Illinois Supreme Court affirmed Locallo’s decision to deny Leroy Orange a hearing regarding his torture claims. The high court sent the case back to 26th Street for the new sentencing hearing Locallo had granted Orange. But that hearing was repeatedly delayed, and it ultimately became unnecessary because of a historic act by Illinois governor George Ryan.
In January 2000 Ryan had declared a moratorium on executions in Illinois, citing his
“grave concerns” about the state’s “shameful record” of sending innocent men to death row. Since Illinois restored capital punishment in 1977, almost as many condemned men had been freed (ten) as executed (thirteen). Ryan appointed a commission to study the system and suggest reforms.
Ryan, a Republican, had supported the death penalty throughout a long political career. Critics of the moratorium contended he was using the issue to
deflect attention from a scandal of his own—revelations of corruption in the secretary of state’s office he directed before becoming governor.
On January 10, 2003, three days before leaving office,
Ryan pardoned four death row inmates who’d maintained they were tortured at Area 2. One of the inmates was Orange. Ryan said the four men had not only been wrongfully convicted, but they were in fact innocent—they’d confessed to murders they hadn’t committed. The evidence he offered to back that assertion was mainly a synopsis of the defense’s claims in each of the cases.
The next day Ryan
commuted the sentences of Illinois’s 167 other death row convicts to natural life, saying they had been condemned under an unfair system.
Ryan was venerated and vilified for the pardons and commutations. He was
one of 165 nominees for the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize. But Cook County State’s Attorney Devine called the pardons “
outrageous and unconscionable,” adding that the courts and not a governor “should decide the issues in these cases.”
But when Ryan announced the pardons, he said he’d acted because the courts failed to: “I can see how rogue cops, twenty years ago, can run wild. What I can’t understand is why the courts can’t find a way to act in the interest of justice.” Despite “overwhelming” evidence of torture at Area 2, Ryan said, Orange was denied his request for a hearing concerning the circumstances of his interrogation. “How does this happen?”
“Ryan is not a lawyer,” Locallo later told me. “He has no understanding of the criminal justice system.”
In December 2003 Ryan was indicted on federal corruption charges for allegedly steering contracts and leases to family and friends during his tenure as secretary of state. Those charges were still pending in January 2005.
Orange and the three other death row convicts pardoned by Ryan are
now suing the City of Chicago, its police department, and the state’s attorney’s office for millions. In 2004
Orange received $161,000 unrelated to the lawsuit—he got the money through a law that allows those pardoned on the basis of innocence to be compensated by the state for their years in prison. But there were also problems for Orange in 2004.
In February he was arrested near his South Side home and charged with selling crack cocaine. While on bond for that case, he was arrested again four months later for possession of cocaine. In January 2005 Orange pled guilty to possession in both cases and was sentenced to five years in prison.
Illinois has enacted several laws in the last two years intended to make
wrongful convictions in capital cases less likely—including the videotaping of interrogations in homicide investigations.
In 2002 a special prosecutor began investigating whether Commander Jon Burge, or detectives working under him, had committed any crimes for which they could be prosecuted. “
We believe something happened,” the special prosecutor, Edward Egan—a former appellate justice and a former first assistant state’s attorney—told the
Chicago Tribune
a year into his investigation. “You’d have to be a chump not to.” But whether detectives committed crimes that could be proven in court was an “entirely different matter,” Egan said. His probe was still continuing in January 2005.
Burge, who turned fifty-seven in 2004, is retired and living in Florida. Because he’s never been convicted of any crime, he continues to receive a full police pension.
DAN YOUNG JR.
, the retarded man who confessed to participating in the 1990 sexual assault and murder of Kathy Morgan, continued serving his life sentence for that crime—until January 31, 2005, when the state dropped the case against Young and his codefendant, Harold Hill.
The state’s attorney’s office began reinvestigating the case in 2001 under pressure from the
Chicago Tribune
and from defense lawyer Kathleen Zellner. Zellner, who has represented numerous convicts who were later exonerated,
had taken on Young’s and Hill’s cases after she learned they’d confessed to committing the Morgan murder with a man who was locked up at the time, a man who had also given a confession but who wasn’t prosecuted.
DNA tests run on matter found on Morgan’s fingernails had identified two genetic profiles, neither of them matching Young or Hill (or the third man who confessed). DNA tests of hairs recovered from Morgan’s clothing, and of other crime-scene evidence, also excluded Young and Hill. Bite mark evidence used against Young at his trial was discredited as well.
In dropping the case against Young and Hill, prosecutors said they had not concluded the two were definitely innocent, only that dismissing the case was the proper action in view of the evidentiary discoveries. Hill remained in prison because he had three years left on an unrelated robbery sentence. Young went home, having been locked up for nearly thirteen years. The state’s attorney’s office and the Chicago Police Department each said it had no plans to investigate the detectives who obtained the confessions.
LARRY BATES
, the cocaine addict who got a third probation from Locallo in June 1998—this time with mandatory inpatient drug treatment—waited in jail for three months before a treatment bed opened for him in a south-side rehab center. His days in the center that fall consisted of “meetings,
meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings.” He found some of the talk helpful, but he was growing anxious “to get back to dealing with reality,” he said one evening that November. He also said he didn’t appreciate being treated like a child. The counselors prodded the clients to speak up in the meetings, but clients who said something a counselor disapproved of sometimes were directed to write a six-page essay as a “consequence.”