Jon Burge and the Theater of Corruption

by Libby Hellmann

Studs Terkel once said Chicago is not the most corrupt American city… it’s the most theatrically corrupt.”

If that’s so, turn on the stage lights and cue the actors. The dénouement of one of the Chicago’s longest running police scandals is about to unfold. The villain is former Police Commander Jon Burge; the hero is U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald; and a supporting role will be played by Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow. If past is indeed prologue, we’re in for high drama next spring.


For those of you who aren’t familiar with the scandal, Jon Burge was a police commander in Area Two on the South Side of Chicago. For over 20 years, mostly during the ‘70s and ‘80s, he and his men allegedly tortured over 200 suspects into confessions for crimes they may or may not have committed. We’re not talking about your run of the mill police pressure, interrogations, or threats. We’re talking cattle prods. Alligator clips attached to body parts. Electric shocks. Suffocation. Radiator burns. Mock executions. And, of course, beatings, as described in the following trailer of a 2007 documentary:




Never before has there been such an extraordinary pattern of police abuse and brutality. Once the rumors and reports about the behavior surfaced, a series of complaints, investigations, and lawsuits followed. Burge was tried for police brutality in 1989 -- he was acquitted – and then tried again for civil rights violations. But he was never convicted of a felony, and after he was fired in 1993, he moved to Florida where he’s lived – unrepentant and free and collecting his police pension -- for 15 years. To date over 30 million dollars has been spent by the city and CPD in settlements and legal fees. Many believe Illinois’ stay on death row executions by former Governor George Ryan was prompted by Burge’s behavior.

Enter US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. On October 21 Fitzgerald finally arrested Burge in Florida and charged him -- not with torturing his victims-- but with lying. Fitzgerald, an aggressive, rising legal -- and probably one day political-- star is best known for his work on dramatic cases like the first World Trade Center bombing, the Valerie Plame scandal, and sending George Ryan to prison after the licenses for bribes scandal. (In Illinois you truly can be a hero one day, a felon the next. In fact, the story of Ryan’s career would make for great theater too… but I digress.)

Fitzgerald’s charges are themselves interesting. Because the statute of limitations on the actual torture ran out, the prosecutor used Burge’s denial of the torture in a 2003 federal civil rights case as fodder for charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. In his announcement, he compared Burge’s arrest to that of Al Capone who was arrested for tax evasion, rather than his mob and prohibition-related crimes.

It turns out Friend-of-the-Outfit (ours, not Capone’s) and best-selling author Jonathan Eig is writing a book about Capone and the man who nailed him (It wasn’t Elliot Ness). Eig says while the practice of using one crime to pay for another started with Capone, it wasn’t a slam dunk. Indeed, there was high drama there, as well.

They weren't crazy about the idea and they weren't sure it would work. Even the tax charge against AC was fairly weak. In the end, it worked, of course. My book will show that Capone actually got screwed during the trial. If he had a better lawyer he might have beaten the rap… It doesn't have to be tax evasion. Barry Bonds was indicted with the Capone method; instead of nailing him for steroids they (the IRS again) are after him for perjury. Countless terrorism suspects have been arrested for visa violations and locked up for long stretches on the assumption that they're probably dangerous. Burge fits the pattern perfectly.

When he's not pleading the 5th, Burge has – of course - said he's not guilty. The trial is set for May 1st and the judge is none other than US District court judge Joan Lefkow, whose husband and mother were tragically murdered three years ago by a disgruntled plaintiff. High drama there, too.

So, the pieces are in place. The characters’ back stories are fascinating; the issues are fraught with conflict, tragedy, and not at all pre-ordained. Stay tuned. This is going to be some show.

What about you? What corruption cases would make great theater in your neck of the wood?

Remember When the Words Were New?

By Kevin Guilfoile

There are far too many words written about sports, and I'm partially to blame.

I come from a baseball family. My dad was a Major League Baseball executive for forty years. I spent five years in the sports information department at the University of Notre Dame and parts of three seasons with the media relations departments of the Pittsburgh Pirates and Houston Astros, dedicating each working day to convincing journalists that they should write even more words about sports than they do. And I loved my job. I loved going to the ballpark every day. I loved sitting in the press box. I loved being part of a team, and not in the artificial, corporate Tiger Team sense. I loved that at the end of every day (or lots of days anyway) we won or we lost. I loved the highs and the lows.

But as much as I love sports, I don't listen much to sports radio or watch the highlight shows and I generally don't write much about sports myself because the beauty of athletic competition is that it doesn't need any context. Every game is a perfect little live drama that sets the stage for the next game all by itself. Last night tiny Davidson College with all of 1,700 students, was down by two and had the ball with 15 seconds left, time for one shot to send the number-one seeded Kansas Jayhawks home from the NCAA tournament. One shot that could put the Davidson Wildcats--Davidson!--into the Final Four with Memphis, North Carolina, and UCLA.

William Faulkner couldn't improve upon that drama with words, but this morning there will be literally millions of them spent describing the Jayhawks' escape, in newspapers and SportsCenters and on talk radio. Maybe more words than were written and spoken about V-E Day on May 8, 1945.

Today is the opening day of baseball season. More words are probably written about baseball than all other American sports combined. And possibly the most discussed baseball event took place sixty-one years ago, when Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier.

Of all the events in sports history, though, that might be one about which not enough has been said.

The day Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers it was for millions of Americans, millions of white, ethnic Americans, millions of Italian and Irish and German Americans--my Bay Ridge grandparents among them--the first time that they needed a black man. The first time they shared a common purpose with a black man. The first time they cheered a black man.

When Dodgers President and GM Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson, he was asking him to shoulder more burden than any man should have to accept. Rickey asked him to absorb both the high expectations and skepticism of Dodgers fans as well as the outright hostility of everyone else. But Jackie Robinson is not a hero because of what he was asked to do. Jackie Robinson is a hero because of what he did next. He delivered. Under the most difficult circumstances, Jackie Robinson helped lead the Dodgers to a World Series, and handled the insults and epithets and even death threats with public grace.

Last year Chicago writer Jonathan Eig wrote one of the finest accounts of that season in his bestselling book Opening Day, which is out in paperback tomorrow.

Even if you're not a baseball fan, it's a milestone worth contemplating during a year in which we might be electing an African-American President of the United States. It seems like such a trivial thing, but if Jackie Robinson hadn't been a great baseball player, if he had turned out to be an average baseball player or even a merely good one, the trajectory of the civil rights movement between then and now might have been radically changed.

Now that's something worth talking about.