by Jeff Coen
“What was that?” one of the cops said as they pulled away, not realizing it was the radio cartwheeling onto the asphalt behind them.
At the station they realized their mistake. It was a loss that might mean a paperwork headache—and that placed a radio in the field that someone could use to monitor police movements. A thought came into Sherlock’s mind. Call Finnigan.
“Give me half an hour,” Finnigan said when Sherlock reached him. That was fine. Sherlock decided to grab a bite to eat.
About forty-five minutes later, there was Finnigan with the radio. “Don’t ask me how I got it,” he said. Sherlock later learned Finnigan had put the word on the street ordering that the radio be returned. A contact had said the radio would be left under a garbage can at a certain address, and sure enough, that’s where it had been found. To Sherlock, Finnigan’s methods had been unusual, but never a sign of anything sinister.
Sherlock made detective in 1997, and one of his early tasks was working sting operations on L trains moving in and out of downtown Chicago. Once officers noticed a pattern of theft reports on a given train, they would move in with a small team. Undercover cops would dress in plain clothes and act drunk on the train while wearing a nice watch or leaving cash hanging from a pocket, hoping to lure a thief.
Many officers would work security jobs on the side to make extra money, and Sherlock was no different. One such job had him at a giant bar called the Baja Beach Club, which once sat inside the North Pier building in Streeterville. A fellow officer was walking in one day and asked Sherlock what he might be doing in the next twenty-four hours. There was a security spot if he could show up around the corner at the NBC Tower.
“There’s a TV show there called The Jerry Springer Show,” his friend told him. Sherlock had never heard of it.
Springer in its early days had been more like a straight-up talk show, like Donahue or many others on the airwaves. But its producers were working on a formula that would set the program apart for years to come. They would concoct situations that would push guests who sat with Jerry Springer to their breaking points so punches eventually would be thrown as the crowd went crazy. More often than not the premise of the show was taking apart a love triangle or otherwise exposing a secret affair. The audience came to expect a fracas, and Springer delivered, over the trademark chant of “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!”
Sherlock assumed when his friend asked him to stop in to work security that he would be guarding the lobby or something. But sure enough, Sherlock found himself in the front row of the studio audience.
His job, he learned, was to let the guests interact physically, but not to a degree where anyone was hurt too badly. Those running the show would prescreen guests for explosive situations, sometimes welcoming them from other states. The green room would be stocked with high-caffeine drinks to make sure everyone was good and wound up. They would keep the would-be combatants separated until they were on stage, boosting the element of surprise.
Sherlock was puzzled at first. How long was he supposed to let them fight? He was a police officer after all. But the instructions never improved. “I want action,” a producer would say, “but nobody better get hurt.”
The result was the security guards being yelled at one day for jumping on stage too early as they tried to head something off and then another day being yelled at for not interfering sooner after a solid punch was landed. Meanwhile, the audience ate it up.
In one instance, Sherlock found himself trying to separate a groom from his best man, after the best man had revealed to the bride that the groom had cheated on her with a stripper at the bachelor party. The place went up for grabs, and Sherlock had to contend with two young, athletic guys who were legitimately trying to strangle each other. It ended with Sherlock at the bottom of a pile of people with the groom in a headlock.
“What the fuck did you think was going to happen?” Sherlock said into the guy’s ear as they struggled. “You’re on The Jerry Springer Show, man.”
All the televised brawling eventually got the show sideways with local politicians, and it wore out its Chicago welcome. Internal struggles over production eventually pushed it to Connecticut, but not before Sherlock got tasked with doing some scouting for Jerry out of state. Producers wanted to put a guy on who claimed to have married and slept with his horse. Sherlock traveled to Joplin, Missouri, to see if it was real, and ended up in a trailer with the man and his love. There were wedding photos.
The double life was a bit of a head trip when Sherlock would leave the set at 4:00 PM and head to Area One to work homicides, but it helped pay the bills. And Sherlock counted Springer and the show’s producers as friends for years after the circus left Chicago.
Many of the homicides Sherlock handled were back-and-forth gang killings that have persisted in the city for decades, but a few stood out and made headlines. Among the most high-profile cases he dealt with was the murder of an off-duty cop named Brenda Sexton, who worked as a patrol officer in the Chicago Lawn district after joining the department in 1997. She was killed by her boyfriend, Samuel Lupo Jr., who attacked her with a baseball bat during a fight in August 2000. Lupo bludgeoned Sexton in the head and face, striking her at least nine times and leaving her with fatal injuries that shook even the most hardened detectives.
Lupo fled to Wisconsin, and Sherlock was among the Chicago officers to swarm north of the border. The getaway vehicle had attracted some attention in the vacation town of Lake Delton, being a teal Pontiac Firebird and all. An officer had chased the fugitive Lupo after noticing his conspicuous car, which Lupo abandoned near a strip club named Cruisin’ Chubby’s.
He fled into the woods. The Chicago media was also in pursuit, and it was a television reporter and a cameraman who found Sexton’s 9mm service pistol in some tall grass near Lupo’s abandoned Firebird.
Dogs and a helicopter rigged with infrared sensors eventually flushed Lupo out of his hiding place and into custody. He was captured just a mile from where officers including Sherlock had staged their search. The case stuck with Sherlock not only for the terrible killing of a fellow officer but also for what happened next. The law enforcement team members were congratulating each other and having a bite to eat as they shook hands. But as they were saying their goodbyes, the helicopter team that had helped them took off and, in a tragic accident, immediately crashed, killing two Milwaukee County sheriff’s officers.
Lupo eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to sixty years.
By 2003, Sherlock was starting to work with federal authorities, first assisting the US Marshals group known as the Great Lakes Regional Fugitive Task Force, which did exactly as the name implies. High-stakes fugitives around the region were targeted for arrest, the group traveling far and wide to track down those who needed to be brought in to face their alleged crimes, including many from Chicago.
Sherlock often found himself on roving teams, looking for those who were trying their best to stay hidden or sneak into a new life. Other times the action came to them, like the time a group of kidnappers shot and killed a woman in Atlanta, took another captive, and began heading toward Chicago. They didn’t know the woman had managed to hide a phone on her body, and that she had used it to text a friend for help. Authorities began tracking the phone as it pinged from cell tower to cell tower while they headed north. The marshals eventually tracked it all the way to a motel in Zion, Illinois, where they rescued the woman and arrested three men.
As his time with the marshals was winding down, Sherlock began to work with the FBI. He was chosen to assist a violent crimes task force that was investigating a brazen burglary crew linked to the Chicago Outfit. Its members were knocking off big targets, including the stash houses of major drug cartels that were using Chicago as a national distribution center for their product. The crew would go as far as tracking dealers with GPS devices and wearing fake badges during confrontations.
The FBI eventually set up an elaborate sting to catch the crew. Agents created a fake st
ash house in the Hegewisch neighborhood on Chicago’s Southeast Side, and then put the word on the street through cooperating informants that kilos of cocaine were being stored there. The crew took the bait. The FBI was watching, including with a spy plane, as two reputed Chicago Outfit soldiers, Paul Koroluk and Robert Panozzo, moved in. Both were career criminals, with Panozzo linked to noted Outfit boss Joey “the Clown” Lombardo of the Chicago mob’s Grand Avenue street crew, who died in 2019.
Agents had leaked the fake tip that two men were working security on the house, and that they would go to lunch each day early in the afternoon. Koroluk and Panozzo had no idea the house had been wired with cameras when they kicked in a door, acting like cops themselves, with Koroluk wearing a silver police star around his neck. The FBI team waited for the pair to grab the packages of drugs before popping out of a nearby garage and taking them into custody. Both eventually took heavy prison terms.
For Sherlock, it was a thrilling later stage of his career. He was considered a top-notch detective, with sharp interviewing skills. And he was affable. The feds liked working with him as much as he liked working with them. In March 2016, the FBI asked Sherlock to assist them on a more permanent basis. He would work with the FBI’s CE-6, which stood for “Criminal Enterprise,” and specifically a cold-case homicide group. Most officers would go their entire career and never see such a plum assignment, working with some of the best investigators in the country with all the resources of the federal government at their disposal. Sherlock began working each day at the FBI’s Chicago headquarters near Roosevelt Road and Ogden Avenue.
To find cases to look at, Sherlock used his considerable network of current and former Chicago police officers—especially the former ones. They had long memories, and many had left some things unfinished. It was a retired commander who suggested, for example, that Sherlock have a look at the mysterious 1984 stabbing death of a City Colleges of Chicago professor who also served as a choir director at a Catholic church on the South Side.
Francis Pellegrini was a social science teacher and the choir director and organist at a church on South Prairie Avenue. And he was a bit of a community figure, a former director of the civic committee that organized Chicago’s Columbus Day parade each year. His body was found in the basement of a Bridgeport home he shared with his mother in May 1984. He had been bound and stabbed some twenty times in the head, arms, chest, and back.
There was no forced entry into the apartment on South Parnell Avenue and nothing was out of place, so police immediately put out information that they believed they were looking for an acquaintance or even someone Pellegrini knew well. Among their clues were that neighbors told them Pellegrini’s dog was somewhat unfriendly to strangers, and Pellegrini was known to put it in a back room when visitors he didn’t know well came by. Instead of finding the dog in that back room, police noted the dog was in the basement with Pellegrini and had sustained a stab wound of its own.
Sherlock learned a young student who knew Pellegrini from the church had confided in the choir director that a priest was abusing him and that Pellegrini supposedly was going to report it. He was attacked and killed before he did.
Sherlock looked into whether the motive was to protect the priest and others that were involved in some type of sex ring—an investigation that quickly started to sound like a plot from a movie thriller, where the cover-up goes all the way to the Vatican. What Sherlock learned was that the Pellegrini killing might be linked to at least two more deaths. The plot Sherlock investigated included the possibility that a suspect in the brutal murder was involved in the same sex ring, and that he had hired three hit men to kill a former roommate who could link him to Pellegrini’s slaying. On the way to do the job in the suburbs, the allegation went, the three men had been stopped by a Cook County sheriff’s officer, who was then shot and killed. The trio was arrested and later tried and convicted in the officer’s killing.
Concerned that he could be informed on and tied to Pellegrini and the botched hit job, the man who hired the group had supposedly hired yet another man to shoot him to make it look like he also had been attacked, as opposed to being the mastermind. But that hadn’t gone particularly well either, allegedly, as the shooting ruse was a little too convincing and the man died of his wound a few days later.
It was a mess for sure, and it wasn’t likely to result in any fresh charges. So Sherlock was considering moving on when that same retired commander called in a message to Sherlock that an FBI assistant wrote down on a piece of paper for him. The message included some information about the Pellegrini case, but on the same slip was a note that there was another cold-case killing Sherlock might consider looking into next. It was a murder from 1976.
Sherlock returned the call not long afterward and asked about it. There was a name: John Hughes. A teenager who had been killed, and nothing had been done.
And there was a word of caution. “When you start looking into this,” the retired commander told Sherlock, “buckle up.”
5
THE GORMAN FILE
Sherlock walked up the two flights of stairs at an evidence center on the South Side of the city as he had many times before, although on this summer day in 2018, it was with more anticipation than usual.
He was at the records center at Thirty-Ninth and Michigan to see the case file for X-178274. It was the record number for the murder of John Hughes. Sherlock waited as a clerk he was friendly with left to retrieve it.
Typically the file for any unsolved murder case stays at the CPD area handling it, basically forever. But in this instance, Area Three had closed. Most of its paperwork had been moved over to the evidence center, a three-story brick building with rows of block-glass windows to keep it safe. Sherlock knew much of the Hughes file must be there.
He waited. His mind wandered toward what he was about to do. He was essentially going to treat the case as if it were new: find anyone who was still alive to answer questions about what had happened in 1976. Certainly there were people out there who could help him. Now he was working with the FBI. That was different than just talking to another police detective who was showing interest in the case. More than forty years had passed, so some might think the danger in telling him what they knew had gone by the wayside.
But step one would be to digest the complete police file that had started piling up in 1976 and had surely been added to since. Were there signs that things had not been handled properly? Had a detective overlooked a witness then who could assist him now? Who knew how long it would take to pick through all of that paper.
The clerk reemerged. He handed Sherlock a thin manila folder.
“Um, where’s the rest of it?” Sherlock asked. “Where are the Bankers Boxes?”
But there were none.
A brazen murder in a public park that had taken a promising teenager from his family, which allegedly had been investigated by teams of detectives for years, and which supposedly involved supervisors and had been reviewed by prosecutors, had yielded only this meager paper trail. What should have been a massive file with notes and transcripts from dozens of interviews had been reduced to a few seemingly random sheets of paper from reports and a couple of photographs.
As the surprise wore off, Sherlock knew how his last months with the Chicago Police Department would be spent. He could have left the records center without the folder and cruised into retirement without taking on the case after all, and no one would have noticed.
Instead, he tucked the envelope under his arm and carried it outside.
Sherlock didn’t even drive back to the office before having a look at the file. He was still parked outside the records center when he started sifting through what there was of it—easily under twenty pages total. It began with an evidence report prepared the night Hughes died.
“Homicide,” it started. “Root & Lowe.” Police had arrived about ten minutes after the shooting. There was very little evidence to collect at the scene. There was no shell casing found from
the single shot, meaning either it had been ejected in the interior of the car or the gun used was a revolver.
The only photos taken were of Hughes’s ID, his wound, and the scene. One plastic bag of his clothing was logged and listed as going to the lab: a yellow shirt and a blue jacket.
“Above victim fatally shot by unknown persons while victim was standing with a group of his friends at Root and Lowe streets,” the report stated plainly. “Offenders were riding in an auto and shot was fired at random at the group. Victim printed at Mercy Hospital and wound noted in left chest area. Scene processed for pertinent evidence with negative results.”
Another page in the file was a sheet showing that a lineup had been conducted in the early morning hours the same night Hughes was killed. Nick Costello was in it. He had been stopped along with a carload of teens in a different vehicle that had been near the park in the couple of hours after the shooting. Costello appeared in the lineup in the third position, according to the paperwork.
“No positive identification made by persons viewing,” it stated. And accompanying it was a photo of the purported lineup. Costello seemed to be standing a half step in front of the other six teens with him in front of what looked to be a row of lockers. He had a shaggy Jim Morrison–style head of hair and was wearing a bright yellow leather jacket. He would have been hard to miss. According to the file, at least two teens had seen the lineup and not picked out Costello: Hughes’s friends Larry Raddatz and John Russell.
Sherlock thought the inclusion of the lineup report was unusual for more than one reason. The most conspicuous one was that CPD protocol was not to make detailed reports or photograph negative lineups. It was as if someone had tried to create a record that Costello had not been identified.