Murder in Canaryville

by Jeff Coen

  Townsend, Haberkorn, and Curtin went off by themselves, Furmanek told the agents and prosecutors. And within ten minutes of Mary making a positive identification, there was a phone call. Furmanek told the FBI he learned it was a call from the mayor himself. The case wouldn’t be progressing, at least that day. Nick Costello walked out of the police station.

  For the FBI agents investigating the Jarrett hit, the information Furmanek brought them had no intelligence value in their Outfit case. Furmanek’s recollections were recorded on little more than two pages of their file. It’s unclear whether the name Nick Costello even meant anything to them or what they thought about the murder of a teenager near four decades earlier.

  The name may have meant something to the Cook County prosecutor who was in the Furmanek meeting, however. The state’s attorney’s office had failed to bring any charges in the Hughes case in the immediate years after his death, but some in the office had picked the case up again in 2000, when a special prosecutors group reviewed it.

  An assistant state’s attorney named Linas Kelecius was among them. He was part of a cold-case team, and in 2000 he was assigned to the organized crime unit of his office. Even then efforts were being made to link the killing of John Hughes to at least one person with connections to Chicago organized crime.

  Kelecius was a veteran prosecutor who, in 2002, would try a case even older than the Hughes murder. Kelecius earned a conviction against Kenneth Hansen, a horseman accused of bludgeoning and strangling John Schuessler, thirteen; his brother Anton, eleven; and their fourteen-year-old friend Robert Peterson at a Northwest Side stable. Their naked bodies had been found on a horse path in a forest preserve in 1955. Hansen was found to have kidnapped, molested, and killed the boys in the infamous case, one that many felt had stripped 1950s Chicago of some of its innocence. Clearly the office was comfortable with bringing a murder case to a jury after decades had passed, and was aiming to do it in the Hughes case.

  “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” Kelecius said to a group of grand jurors at Chicago’s main criminal courthouse that day in 2000. “We are not seeking an indictment at this time. We are seeking the testimony at this time of [this witness] regarding a … ‘John Doe’ murder investigation, the murder occurring on May 15 of 1976 at about 1:15 in the morning in the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago at Root and Lowe.”

  Bringing testimony without seeking an indictment meant that the office didn’t have the goods to immediately charge anyone or to ask that particular grand jury for a true bill. But the office did often use grand juries as an investigative tool and as a way to lock in testimony during investigations that could be lengthy or in which a witness might be at risk. It was a safeguard of sorts. If a witness died and prosecutors wound up charging their target, they would have a way to read into the record that witness’s account at trial. Defense lawyers would protest not getting an opportunity for a cross-examination, but judges often allowed the maneuver anyway.

  The witness in question testified that she was thirty-nine that day and that she was divorced from a man named Nick Costello. They had separated fifteen years earlier.

  As Kelecius began his line of questioning, he put one thing on the table. He asked whether the witness might be related to Hughes, the victim. And in an answer that perhaps highlighted the interwoven nature of family relationships and connections in Bridgeport, she said that she was. John Hughes was the cousin of her aunt.

  That’s part of the reason the witness said she wound up having conversations about the shooting with Costello while they were together. There had been a few talks, she said, and she definitely remembered the first one. It had been a few weeks after they started dating, around, say, May 1980, she told Kelecius.

  “Can you tell us why you asked about the murder of John Hughes?” Kelecius asked.

  “Because when I told my family who I was dating, my mother told my grandmother, my grandmother told my aunt, and my aunt said that he was implicated in the murder of her cousin. So my mother said that to me. So, of course, I had asked him,” the witness said. Specifically, she asked Costello whether he had anything to do with it.

  “He said, ‘No, I was accused of it by a girl that said she seen me pull the trigger and shoot the gun out of a car, and I didn’t do it. And I’ve suffered and my family has suffered because I have been accused of it,’” she recalled.

  It was not certain whether Costello was referring specifically to Mary Mestrovic in the conversation the witness described, though it was probable. Mestrovic was a key eyewitness by all accounts. But she had never told authorities that Costello was the shooter, only that she had seen him in the passenger seat of the car from which the fatal shot was fired. He was either purposefully inflating the Mestrovic account to better his denial or wasn’t clear on what Mestrovic had said about him.

  A savvy defense lawyer might have eventually used the couple’s divorce to suggest the woman Kelecius was questioning before the grand jury was trying to get her ex-husband in trouble as some sort of revenge, but there was also no sign of her exaggerating what she said next.

  “Did he tell you who he was with at the time that John Hughes was killed?” Kelecius asked.

  “He said he was with his friends, two friends that he did mention, yes, names that I recall he mentioned,” the woman said.

  One was a teen named Paul Ferraro, the witness told Kelecius and the grand jury, and the other was Rocco LaMantia.

  “Did he tell you where he was with Paul Ferraro and Rocco LaMantia at that time, the time when John Hughes was killed?” Kelecius asked.

  “They were just out,” she answered. “They were out driving around, I guess.”

  “Riding around in what?”

  “In a car.”

  She described Costello as being sad about the topic when it would come up. He would say he had been through a lot and not answer questions about it. “He went through a lot of pain and anguish and he felt bad about everything that happened,” she said.

  Kelecius asked next about Costello’s friendships with the two teens he had mentioned to her. One, Ferraro, had stayed his friend. In fact, Ferraro had been invited to the couple’s wedding. But her then husband’s relationship with LaMantia had cooled.

  “Was there any reason why Mr. LaMantia was not his friend during Mr. Costello’s relationship with you?” Kelecius asked.

  Yes, came the answer.

  Could she tell the grand jury what it was?

  “He murdered my first cousin,” the witness said.

  “Who was your first cousin?”

  “Martha DiCaro.”

  LaMantia was dating DiCaro at the time, the witness said. He had been charged with the murder but ultimately acquitted. Kelecius asked why that was, and the witness said she could offer an opinion: “Well, that [LaMantia] had enough money to get in front of the right judge and get a not guilty verdict.”

  “Do you remember who the judge was?” Kelecius asked.

  “Maloney,” she answered.

  And what wound up happening to Maloney? “He was sentenced, I believe, to jail, for taking bribes for fixing murder trials,” she said.

  Kelecius asked if the witness had spoken to anyone in the last days or weeks about what she had just testified to. She said detectives had knocked on her door about a week earlier. She had told her mother and a few girlfriends that she had been approached.

  Her testimony was winding down. She clearly had been called to lock in her exchange with her former husband as the case was being recirculated once again.

  One grand juror had a question: Did Costello ever say he knew John Hughes?

  He knew of him, the witness said. They weren’t friends but knew each other because they were in the same age group. She said she never got any details from her ex-husband about what had led up to Hughes being killed. She only heard from relatives what they thought had led up to it.

  “Were you reluctant to talk about the John Hughes murder with him after having conversed
about it in the beginning of your relationship?” Kelecius asked as he wrapped up the session.

  The witness said yes, she was.

  And why was that? “Because it upset him. He became very saddened and despondent,” she answered. “He didn’t want to talk about it. That was part of his life that he wanted to forget about.”

  4

  A CASE TO LOOK INTO

  When John Hughes was killed, Jim Sherlock was in sixth grade at St. Adrian Grammar School near Marquette Park in Chicago. St. Adrian was the local Catholic church, most famous perhaps for its 7 PM mass on Sunday evenings, the one parents could still get to if they had too much fun on Saturday night.

  As far back as he remembered, Sherlock had wanted to be a Chicago police officer. It was in his blood. His grandfather and great-grandfather had both been cops. He still had a photo of his great-grandfather in an old Chicago park police uniform with an old-time hat. Another big guy from Ireland—Limerick, to be specific.

  But it was his grandfather in whose steps he felt he was following the closest. His name was also Jim Sherlock, and he too was an officer and detective in some of the city’s toughest areas. He had lied about his age to get on the department in the first place. “How old do I have to be?” that Jim Sherlock had asked. He got an answer and replied, “Well, that’s how old I am.”

  He took a break from policing to fight in WWII as a tank commander in Africa and then returned and worked a long police career until 1969, the year after Chicago and its department were rocked by the protests and response at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The nation had watched as Chicago cops in their light-blue riot helmets had bludgeoned young protesters at Mayor Richard J. Daley’s direction.

  Sherlock’s father had gone to the police academy but took a different career path. Both of Sherlock’s sons, however, Jack and Jim Sherlock IV, would also join the department.

  Sherlock would think of his grandfather on nights he found himself in Woodlawn, one of the spots the elder Sherlock had worked. The neighborhood was home to Mount Carmel High School, another all-boys school that all four Jim Sherlocks had graduated from.

  Things moved quickly for Sherlock after he left the school, headed for Purdue University in Indiana. His girlfriend became pregnant at eighteen, and they married. She stayed home while he went to Purdue for a criminology degree, knowing he was headed for CPD. He took and passed the department’s qualifying exam in 1984, but it would take five years for him to get on the job.

  In the meantime, he waited while working for the Cook County sheriff’s office. And after finally fulfilling his dream of becoming a police officer in Chicago, he was sent straight to Englewood, where he made friends and took to the job quickly.

  Over his thirty-year career, Sherlock would prove to have a knack for being in the orbit of major events in the department’s history, including some of its great tragedies. The pattern started early.

  His best friend working for Cook County was a fellow recruit named John Knight. The two had worked together whenever they could after both made it to CPD and finished their training. Eventually Sherlock went to gangs, and Knight went to Morgan Park, the Twenty-Second District.

  When Sherlock, now a detective, arrived for work on January 9, 1999, he noticed things seemed a little quieter than normal. As he sat down at his desk, someone said solemnly, “I guess you didn’t hear the news. John was killed.”

  “John who?” Sherlock answered, before the information sank in. Suddenly the room was noisy again as he tried to quickly gather what had happened.

  Knight had gone to work as usual in the Twenty-Second District, sniffing out crime as a tactical officer in an undercover car with a partner. On that snowy day, he was planning to leave early to make it to a wedding. He had barely started the shift when he and his partner noticed a parked car with its trunk lock punched out and two men slumping inside as if they didn’t want to be seen.

  The unmarked squad approached, and the suspicious car lurched forward, as quickly as it could considering the slick streets. It was not a long chase. The snow proved too slippery for a getaway, and the car crashed in the intersection of Ninety-Ninth and Parnell near the Dan Ryan Expressway. Both occupants jumped out, but one of them, a man named James Scott, had drugs on him and had no intention of being arrested. Before the officers could get out of their car, Scott turned and pulled out a 9mm handgun with a laser sight and fired. Knight’s partner returned fire and hit Scott, who was arrested after responding officers followed a trail of blood in the snow. He was later convicted by a jury.

  Knight had been struck twice in the head. He was thirty-eight and left a wife and three children. It was a death that affected Sherlock deeply, even two decades later as he recalled his friend. He often called it his single worst day on the job.

  Even his years working on a strike force unit in the mid-1990s hadn’t produced a tragedy of that magnitude. Sherlock had been a young buck on one of the most aggressive parts of CPD, with just a few years as a cop. Most of the guys working with him had been on for ten or fifteen years and were much more experienced. They worked stopping cars and making arrests, looking for guns and drugs.

  It was there that Sherlock got to know another member of this rock ’n’ roll police crew, an officer by the name of Jerome Finnigan. To Sherlock then, Finnigan was just another young, aggressive cop. But he was an officer who would take a drastic turn, going on to claim an infamous place in CPD history and eventually sparking the end of what came to be called the special operations section.

  In a group like SOS, tactical officers were given nearly free rein to work informants and drug networks to locate narcotics and guns on the street—the kind of job that often put large amounts of cash and drugs at their fingertips, with little supervision. The only accounting would take place when it came time to inventory what they had seized, giving crooked officers the chance to skim what they had found or pocket it outright. When something went missing, drug dealers either would not complain, fearing reprisals and chalking it up to the cost of doing business, or would be in a situation in which it was their word against an officer’s. Finnigan and his small circle took things even further, crossing into home invasions and theft from regular citizens they came across on the job. They were even accused of robbing and beating a Chicago firefighter.

  Complaints and lawsuits from people with little or no criminal record led to much more scrutiny. Authorities started looking and noticed the Finnigan group would often make drug arrests but never show up in court. Then the city settled a 2002 lawsuit filed by a man who contended Finnigan and other cops pulled him from his truck before robbing and threatening him.

  Finally, in 2006, Finnigan and several other cops, including an officer named Keith Herrera, were charged as a criminal ring, accused of burglary, aggravated kidnapping, and other crimes. Finnigan, who had previously won an award for valor, had been on the department for seventeen years.

  The allegations were spectacular, placing the Finnigan crew in the pantheon of the worst Chicago police officers ever. They were accused of planting drugs on people and forcing them to turn over cash they had in their homes. Often, they targeted immigrants with little ability to defend themselves. In one event, they stopped a man at a gas station and demanded his home address. One officer drove him around while the others went to his house. There they found shopping bags containing more than $450,000, which they would later split up. But the money wasn’t drug proceeds, it was the result of a real estate transaction in Mexico, and the victim had proof. The crumbling of the police crew led Cook County prosecutors to drop more than one hundred cases they had worked and charged.

  Then, in 2007, federal authorities accused Finnigan of crossing yet another line. They alleged he had tried to take out a hit on a fellow officer who had flipped against him. He and Herrera had discussed hiring someone to do it, but Finnigan didn’t know Herrera was wearing a wire for the FBI at the time. The chatter had started with Finnigan telling Herrera that membe
rs of a Chicago street gang would take $5,000 to do the killing, which he coded as a “paint job.” Finnigan later told investigative reporter and author Hillel Levin in the April 2012 edition of Playboy that he called it that in reference to the book I Heard You Paint Houses, based on the accounts of Frank Sheeran, who claimed to have bumped off Jimmy Hoffa. Sheeran’s story was the basis for the hit movie The Irishman.

  Finnigan later started to switch off of the idea, telling Hererra, “I’m lookin’ for better prices for painting.” He wanted an option less risky than the gang members. “Professional painters, dude,” Finnigan was recorded saying. He told Herrera he was looking at someone with no connections to him that would not create a trail, a person who “has done a lotta paint jobs.”

  Finnigan would plead guilty to federal crimes and get twelve years, though he later contended he did not concoct the murder-for-hire plan. Herrera got a light sentence in exchange for his cooperation.

  Finnigan was released from prison in 2018 and spoke to Sherlock, who recalled better times with him. They had found money and guns back when they worked together, and taking things for themselves hadn’t crossed their minds, at least as far as Sherlock knew. Still coming into his own as a cop, Sherlock had marveled at the way Finnigan moved through the city. If Finnigan was growing too close to some sources at that time, it hadn’t stood out to Sherlock.

  Once, after the two had stopped working together, Sherlock and another group of officers were working near California and Flournoy in a tough neighborhood. They cuffed someone they had arrested and put him in their car, but one of them forgot they had placed their handheld radio on the car’s roof.