by Jeff Coen
Some of the guys quickly decided to go back to that area and try to find their longtime foes. There were rumors of other possible fights in other places. John Hughes, Raddatz, and some of their friends jumped back into Raddatz’s car as if they were going to join those looking to scrap with the Italians again. But secretly Raddatz didn’t want to ruin their night with another fight. He was perfectly happy to stay in the park and have fun. He knew his car wouldn’t turn over if he tried to start it after slipping it into neutral, so that’s exactly what he did. “My car didn’t start because I didn’t want it to start,” he remembered. “I didn’t want to go back and fight.”
If there had been a fight in the park, they would have stuck around—those were the unofficial rules of their neighborhood—but Raddatz didn’t feel obligated to go looking for trouble. Instead they got to stay at the park drinking beer. Several of his friends stood around his car a few dozen feet from the corner of Root and Lowe.
Not getting his car to start was a simple thing. And at the time, Raddatz thought he was continuing their night of fun and keeping everyone out of harm’s way for a time. That would change. And it would become a twist of fate that would stick with Raddatz. Sitting in Ricobene’s so many years later, he folded his hands and looked toward the ceiling as he remembered it. “I always felt kind of bad. That I did the thing with the car,” he said. “I always … It made me feel weak. That I didn’t want to go and fight. Would we have been there? I don’t know.”
It wasn’t long until the green Chevrolet slipped toward the park in the darkness. Raddatz could still see it in his mind’s eye. The car pulled up under a streetlight and sat there for what seemed like a long time, but it was probably just a few moments. The years have stretched the memory. What unfolded quickly at the time now feels movie-length for those who witnessed it.
Someone in their group noticed the car. There were shouts, both from the Chevy and from Irish kids in the dark of the park. Teens milled around a brick field house near the corner of the park. Some had bats, and it seemed likely that the fight Raddatz had been interested in avoiding was coming to them.
It was hard to fully hear the shouts coming from the car. But there were certainly curses. And suddenly, something unusual happened. Out of the corner of his eye, Raddatz saw the normally mild-mannered John Hughes and some others from his friend group make a break for the corner. John was sprinting for the car, in his full athletic run. And almost without thinking, Raddatz joined in.
“I saw him. I saw Johnny run that way,” Raddatz said, recalling his surprise. But it was quickly overcome by wanting to support his friends. “I remember Johnny running and me running toward the car.” Even in the dark, they covered the distance quickly, until John was just several feet from the car and Raddatz was trailing just a few feet behind.
Almost over John’s shoulder, through the car’s open window, Raddatz saw a flash of a face that he knew. It was a teen named NICK COSTELLO. In a fraction of a second, Raddatz’s brain made the connection. They hadn’t spoken, but Raddatz knew Costello from the softball leagues that used the parks, even right there at Boyce Field. Costello was a good player and was on a team called Rock Party that played against teams in Canaryville.
Sometimes there would be games under the lights at night. There would be beer there too, and of course tempers could flare. A lot of people would show up and there would be a lot of tension and sometimes even fights. Raddatz himself wasn’t very good, but he would watch. He had seen Costello play several times, often patrolling first base.
Costello bent in his seat.
Raddatz paused again. At this lunch so many years later, it was clear he was moving on to a memory loop that was never that far from his consciousness. He would describe this again, for a stranger.
In his memory there is no sound. There is no cracking of a gunshot and there is no flash. There is no gun, for that matter. There is Costello moving out of the way for someone behind him in the driver’s seat. And there is his friend John spinning in front of him as if an unknown force struck him and knocked him sideways.
“I saw him twirl around and fall,” Raddatz said. One of the people carrying a bat threw it, and it cartwheeled toward the back of the fleeing car.
In the chaos that followed, Raddatz leaned over his friend, who was now on his back in the street. Kids were screaming and running, but Raddatz’s memory is of his friend’s face. “There was blood coming out of his mouth,” Raddatz said.
He paused again, for longer this time. In a full restaurant, the pause was long enough that other sounds invaded the conversation. Nearby a table full of children yelled and laughed together. Raddatz overcame the welling emotion of retelling his story. The image remains imprinted in his mind, a horror that will always remain. “I’m sixty-two and I haven’t recovered.”
The next thing Raddatz knew, he was running.
A few blocks away, he knew there was a fire station. His feet were moving in the dark as fast as they would carry him. He was not about to wait for someone in the park to knock on the door of a house across the street and ask to use the phone. Running was all he could think to do. He ran to the other side of the park past Union, and a block past that to Emerald. A block after that was Halsted and the fire station. He pounded on the door and told the first person he saw that his friend had been shot in the park.
With that short mission accomplished, the rest of the night fell into a blur. He didn’t remember what the firefighter said to him, or how he got back to the park. The next clear image in his mind is the glaring lights inside nearby Mercy Hospital, where Hughes was taken in the back of a squadrol wagon.
Word spread among those who were at the hospital. John was dead. The shocking escalation of the evening gave way to a rushing disbelief.
Raddatz soon found himself struggling. The months that followed were filled with anger, and not a small amount of alcohol, as he tried to come to grips with what had happened. He was filled with sadness, especially at times when he would see John’s parents again. The friend group had always been at each other’s houses, not doing much but doing it together. Hanging out after school had often carried into the dinner hour, and whichever house they were in, they were all typically welcome for dinner.
He had often had dinner with John and his family, as John’s mother moved around the table serving them. “Thank you, Mrs. Hughes,” he would say. Now he saw this woman crushed. He saw her weeping at her son’s wake and funeral, the vision of it seared into his mind.
There was talk in the early days that the police would quickly move to figure out what had happened. There had been witnesses—after all, the groups had been fighting all night.
Within days, Raddatz was at the police district building on Lowe, viewing a live lineup. Costello was in it, standing right in front of him, he recalled. Raddatz recognized him instantly and said so to the police officers in the room with him. Names of others in the car—even the name of the shooter—were in the air all over the neighborhoods. No one believed this would be a tough crime to solve.
Weeks later, Raddatz was summoned to the main criminal courthouse at Twenty-Sixth and California. But, much to his puzzlement, he was sent home without testifying.
For years, Raddatz blamed himself. Even though he had told police what he saw, he thought he could have done more. He had been just feet away and couldn’t see into the dark car past Costello to who was holding the gun. “You feel guilty because you couldn’t say, ‘I saw that guy. That’s who did it,’” Raddatz said, rapping his fingers on the table. “You feel terrible about that, because—I was there.”
What did not cross his mind—or enter his friends’ thoughts either—was serious revenge. They were typical teens, and none of them had a gun or much of a clue how to get one. It just wasn’t something they would have been capable of doing. Beating someone up was one thing; shooting someone in retaliation was another. Raddatz’s thoughts were mostly of his friend, the one who should have gone to college and had
a family of his own. He was going to be class president and maybe follow an older brother into accounting—or even do something none of them had contemplated yet. All of that was cut short. Raddatz was instead left to marvel at the biggest wake he had ever seen, with hundreds of cars in procession.
John Hughes was big, but he wasn’t a bully. He was fun-loving but wouldn’t back down if someone challenged him. He was simply a great friend, and one that was taken away.
“I’ve probably thought about this every day. I see it every day,” Raddatz said, before pushing himself away from the table and walking back out into the bright light of a Chicago summer. “It’s true. We’ve lived with this our entire lives.”
3
A VISIT WITH THE FBI
In October 2005, John Furmanek found himself in an unusual place, especially for him.
He was a cop’s cop, CPD through and through, and from the school where the FBI wasn’t necessarily your friend. The Bureau’s agents weren’t the real police to someone like Furmanek. They had the snappy suits and the ability to walk into anyone’s case and take it over, which they sometimes did. They weren’t regular guys from Chicago with deep roots in the culture of law enforcement and connections in city neighborhoods. They were much more likely to be former accountants from Virginia who carried themselves with an air of superiority and butted in where they weren’t necessarily wanted.
That included sometimes investigating Chicago police officers themselves, handling police corruption cases and forcing officers to give up information on others. So talking to FBI agents usually meant something wasn’t going well for you. Or, at the very least, that some of the department’s dirty laundry was about to be aired. That definitely wasn’t Furmanek’s style. To him, in-house problems should remain in-house problems. The department should police itself, and individual officers should watch each other’s backs and hold each other accountable, he believed. Nobody needed the FBI or anyone else getting into department business.
Yet there Furmanek was, walking into an office building a few blocks from the Dirksen US Courthouse in Chicago’s Loop. It was the kind of unmarked building where federal authorities sometimes held sensitive interviews like the one Furmanek was about to sit down for. This was a Chicago officer talking to agents and a federal prosecutor who typically handled cases against the local Mafia—the infamous Chicago Outfit, a syndicate with direct lines to the organization of Al Capone. Better to meet away from the courthouse, where there was no chance of someone recognizing Furmanek in an elevator and wondering why he was there.
Furmanek was taking this step because he needed to get some things off his chest from nearly thirty years earlier, things that were clearly bothering him. When John Hughes was killed in 1976, Furmanek was a fairly new tactical officer, and he had assisted in the investigation, such as it was.
After he arrived at the courthouse, Furmanek spoke to two FBI agents, a prosecutor from the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, and Assistant US Attorney John Scully. Less than two years later, Scully would be one of the prosecutors to bring the sweeping conspiracy case known as Family Secrets against top Chicago mob figures, giving several of them life sentences and closing the books on a collection of homicides.
In fact, it was information related to the Outfit that the agents and prosecutors were looking for when they spoke to Furmanek that day. They logged their report on what Furmanek said under their case on the murder of mob hit man and bookie Ronnie Jarrett, who had been gunned down six years earlier, the first gangland slaying of its kind in several years in Chicago when it happened. Jarrett had been part of the gambling organization of the Twenty-Sixth Street or Chinatown street crew of the Chicago Outfit, and eventually met his demise in an apparent dispute with higher-ups including Johnny “Apes” Monteleone. When Jarrett ended a stint in federal prison, he had essentially started his own bookmaking circle, and it was unclear whether he was paying street tax to the Outfit. Just two days before Christmas in 1999, Jarrett was leaving his family home in Bridgeport near Thirtieth and Lowe, just a few blocks east of McGuane Park, when someone ambushed him and shot him several times. Jarrett had been on his way out to attend a funeral, not knowing he was on a direct path to his own.
The Jarrett killing was still officially unsolved, though it was clear from the federal report on the Furmanek interview that authorities had certain suspects they were looking to link to the murder or other crimes. Their case title made it clear it was an investigation of players in what had been the Chicago Outfit wing run by the late Frank “Skids” Caruso, of which Jarrett had been a part. Also listed in the heading was a man named Rocco “Rocky” LaMantia, the son of a longtime mob figure named Joseph “Shorty” LaMantia.
When Furmanek appeared, federal investigators and Cook County prosecutors already had collected information indicating that Rocky LaMantia was a key suspect in another killing: that of John Hughes. In fact, it indicated that he had been linked to Hughes’s murder by some in the early weeks after the shooting. Furmanek did not bring them that information, but he had other curiosities to share about the way the Hughes case was handled, things that had stayed with him to that day. As a police officer, he had been most bothered by the police work in the Hughes case.
And so he began describing what had happened. For starters, Furmanek told them, he and other police officers working the case had been instructed from the start of their efforts to produce only “information” reports as they worked, and not full case reports. That difference meant the reports would not be routed to any file with an actual case number, making them harder to track, if they were saved at all. Furthermore, their reports were not to be stored anywhere or submitted up the usual chain of command. Everything was to be given directly to a commander by the name of John Haberkorn, who led the Ninth District at the time.
Typically, Furmanek’s reports would go to a desk sergeant and eventually to the detectives who oversaw a particular investigation. But that never happened in the Hughes case, Furmanek told the FBI agents and prosecutors. In fact, none of his reports were given to the detectives, he said, and he knew many had wound up being destroyed.
Haberkorn was a Bridgeport native who started with the department in 1947. Mayor Richard J. Daley had personally asked that Haberkorn be assigned to the district, which had its headquarters building just a few houses away from the Daley home on Lowe. Unbeknownst to Furmanek on the day of the interview, an FBI file on Haberkorn already existed. In fact, the Haberkorn FBI file had been opened not long after Haberkorn began inserting himself into the Hughes probe.
Furmanek continued. Hughes had been shot in the early morning hours of Saturday, May 15, 1976. And the following Monday, when Furmanek arrived at the Ninth District, a desk sergeant told him he was being asked to report right away to a local restaurant.
It was called the Coral Key, and it sat on South Lowe, not far from the police district building. Of course, Furmanek went, and he wound up in what amounted to an off-the-books briefing, he said. He was ushered to the basement, where he found Sam Cuomo, a cop who went by “David” and ran the restaurant, who Furmanek knew also was assigned as a sergeant-at-arms to the city council; Furmanek’s partner Ed Gallagher; and John “Jack” Townsend, a clouted supervisor who had risen from being the chief of security for Mayor Richard J. Daley. Townsend would continue to rise through the ranks to deputy chief of detectives and later to first deputy superintendent of the entire department. There was also a fourth man there whom Furmanek did not know—and who was not introduced to him—and a woman with the last name of Mestrovic, who worked as a waitress at the Coral Key and was counting money in the basement. It’s unclear whether those who had summoned Furmanek there knew that Mestrovic had her own unlikely connection to the Hughes case or if she was there completely by chance as an employee who was all but invisible to the officers.
It was also unclear just how stunned Furmanek was by this scene, as the FBI agents did not include anything he might have said about his react
ion in the write-up they produced after interviewing him. Townsend’s presence at such an odd meeting might have been especially jarring. He was a right-hand man of sorts to the mayor, and everyone knew it. Townsend was himself a lifelong Bridgeport resident with deep connections there.
It was clear, however, what the purpose of the meeting was. Townsend, Cuomo, and the unknown man wanted Furmanek and Gallagher to share their progress on the Hughes murder. They wanted details. And Townsend especially wanted to know any information Furmanek had related to a Nick Costello.
Furmanek told the FBI he had learned the teen, Costello, was Townsend’s “nephew,” but apparently offered no more details. Or at least the FBI hadn’t recorded them.
A few days after the meeting at the restaurant, when Furmanek went to pick Costello up at home to put him in a lineup, he got another surprise. Nick Costello’s father answered the door, and Furmanek was stunned to realize he was the unknown fourth man who had been at the Coral Key getting information on the investigation. He was a lieutenant in the Chicago Fire Department. Having a direct relative of a suspect connected to a homicide investigation secretly getting information about the department’s progress on the case—with police supervisors present, no less—would certainly have been highly irregular. But again, the FBI agents Furmanek spoke to in 2005 kept to the basics in their reports and didn’t include his reflections on the unfolding events.
The unusual interest in Nick Costello wasn’t over. When Furmanek and Gallagher brought the teen in for the lineup at the Ninth District, the brass was all over it again. Townsend and Haberkorn both were present at the station, Furmanek recalled, as was Joseph Curtin, a lieutenant who later became a commander. Two assistant state’s attorneys also were present, one of them a key supervisor.
The group watched as an eyewitness to the killing viewed the young men in the lineup. She was Mary Mestrovic, a friend of Hughes who was in the park at the time of the shooting—and was the daughter of the waitress who happened to be in the basement of the Coral Key. She had been standing near the street when the green Chevrolet slowly rolled by, and she had recognized Costello immediately. It wasn’t hard. She had gone to grade school with him. She was close enough to speak to him as the car passed, and his window was rolled down. “Hi, Horse,” she had said, using his nickname. She told the police Costello was there in the lineup and that he had been in the passenger seat as Hughes was shot, but it wouldn’t be recorded that way.