Murder in Canaryville

by Jeff Coen

  According to a police report on the incident, officers responded to a robbery in progress at ABBA Jewelry and Pawn after three African American men started a smash-and-grab there in a daytime raid, reportedly using hammers to break the tops of glass cases. A fourth guy, who was White, stood to the side as if he was a random customer. Workers there told police that was LaMantia, who was apparently a regular. He was gone by the time the police arrived, as were the robbers, who seemed to have fled in a white Jeep, the workers said.

  The big plan started to come apart when responding officers spoke to a man who worked behind the pawn shop as a parking attendant. He had been behind the store when one White guy and three Black guys in a white Jeep pulled up and started to leave the vehicle in the wrong spot. The driver, the White guy, handed him five bucks and said they wouldn’t be long, according to police documents.

  Next thing the attendant knew, the place was being flooded with squad cars, and he heard about the robbery from employees, who told him about the three Black guys.

  “Was there a White guy with them?” he said. “An Italian?”

  While police were still there, LaMantia returned—in the same vehicle, police reported, which probably wasn’t the wisest of moves. He started to tell police he had been inside when the robbery went down, and now he was back to see if everyone was OK. They were, but the parking attendant was still there and pointed Rocky out.

  Police searched the Jeep and found “numerous items of jewelry matching items taken in the robbery and still bearing the victim business tags.” LaMantia was arrested.

  In the police lockup, he pleaded his case, according to notes of detectives who spoke to him. He was at a nearby shoe store, LaMantia claimed, when he went to the pawn shop to pick up a few things. “Rocco said that there were 2 or 3 black guys inside when he got there,” a detective wrote. “The next thing he knew they were smashing up the place and taking jewelry. Rocco said that one guy had a hatchet and that he thought they were going to kill him.”

  LaMantia told officers he left to find an uncle of his who was a cop, but when he couldn’t, he circled back to the store to check on everyone.

  “Rocco was then asked about the jewelry recovered from the back of his Jeep and after a short pause related that he had picked up the pieces of jewelry when the offenders were smashing out the cases.”

  That version of events apparently was not good enough. LaMantia was told he would be spending the night there while prosecutors talked to more witnesses. “You have more witnesses?” LaMantia asked, according to police reports. “I don’t give a fuck. I’m not going down for those three n——s.”

  But the police pressure did change the score a little bit for LaMantia, who adjusted his story and told investigators he never should have picked up those “shitheads,” but that he could take officers to where they lived.

  “He said that he was at the Dearborn Projects and ran into the three of them,” police noted. “They thought he was a cop until he told them it was him, Rocco. Rocco has recently lost 150 pounds.”

  They had asked for a ride to Roosevelt, LaMantia said. He agreed and parked behind the pawn shop. By the time he went in, they were already inside.

  “Rocco said he had no idea what they were going to do, that they just jumped up on the counters and started smashing the place with hammers and one had a hatchet,” a detective wrote.

  LaMantia later hired as his lawyer Joe “the Shark” Lopez, who had represented mob hit man Frank Calabrese Sr. during the Family Secrets trial that had so fixated LaMantia just a few months earlier. But his protests eventually gave way to a guilty plea, and he was sentenced to six years in prison.

  He was eventually released, but Sherlock would never get the chance to ask him where he was in the early morning hours of May 15, 1976, the night Hughes was killed. There would be no chance to discuss the DiCaro murder either. Sherlock would have been eager to bear down on the particulars of that crime, to use his interviewing skills to find inconsistencies and maybe to press LaMantia about the gun. Sherlock believed it may very well have been the same weapon from the Hughes shooting.

  But Rocco “Rocky” LaMantia died in 2017, at age fifty-eight, before Sherlock even took up the case. To Sherlock, LaMantia was mostly a name in piles of police reports.

  According to his obituary, services were held at a simple Catholic church just a few blocks from the house on Shields. LaMantia had spent his life in the orbit of mobsters. He was buried at Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Hillside, known for being the final resting place of Chicago gangsters like his father Shorty, Tony Accardo, and Al Capone.

  10

  THE LAST GREYLORD JUDGE

  Few single words in Chicago history resonate with the echoes of corruption like “Greylord,” conjuring a dark time when the tentacles of organized crime and greed crossed what many had assumed was an impenetrable barrier no one would dare try to breach.

  Named for “the curly wigs worn by British judges,” according to the FBI, Operation Greylord was a deep cut into the Cook County criminal justice system—or what passed for a justice system in the 1980s. What federal investigators found, using informants and secret recording devices, was a virtual shadow-court network in which judicial decisions allowing some to get out of criminal cases—including felonies—were being bought and sold as a commodity. Eventually, more than ninety people would be indicted, including a shocking seventeen judges and forty-eight lawyers, along with a host of court clerks, police officers, and sheriff’s deputies and one state legislator.

  When younger Chicagoans think of “Greylord” today, however, they often commingle a series of federal undercover efforts and cases that targeted corruption in the judicial system. That includes the later Operation Gambat, a name that is the shortened version of “gambling attorney,” which was a probe that snared another onetime judge, a state senator, and Fred Roti, the Chicago alderman at least one federal witness had placed at Shorty LaMantia’s club. That investigation included allegations that murder cases had been fixed.

  The “attorney” in that operation’s name was the “Eric Smith” from the case against LaMantia and the Outfit. He was government mole Robert Cooley, considered by some to be one of the most corrupt lawyers in the history of Chicago. He was bald and had an affinity for hats and oversized sunglasses, which added to his mystique. He was a bit of a contradiction, having started his work life as a Chicago police officer, like his father and two grandfathers before him. In fact, both of his grandfathers were killed in the line of duty. Whatever his motivations for drifting toward the criminal world, Cooley eventually outfoxed everyone, escaping the system that made him by cuddling up to the government.

  Prosecutors eventually credited him for helping to bring down the crooked network he once worked with. When corrupt deals were discussed at the infamous “Booth One” at the Counsellors Row restaurant near city hall, no one knew Cooley was helping the government. A busboy eventually inadvertently found a hidden camera the FBI was using to watch the table.

  Cooley’s efforts included wearing a wire, capturing himself delivering cash to fix court cases. Roti, whose father was a member of the Capone organization, eventually was convicted of racketeering and bribery for allegedly helping to fix cases involving mob figures. Pasquale “Pat” Marcy was accused by Cooley of having tremendous power behind the scenes in the old First Ward, which then included downtown Chicago, and in reality over much of city government. Marcy’s official squishy title was secretary of the First Ward Democratic Organization, but the feds believed he was in fact a made member of the mob who did its bidding at city hall and the courts. The federal investigation against Roti and Marcy went as far as producing a bogus civil case for them to “fix” without knowing the entire matter was a government construct.

  When Cooley volunteered to help the feds in 1986, just a few years after indictments in Greylord began to break, one of the tales he described for his handlers was a case Marcy was later accused of fixing. Harry Aleman,
perhaps the mob’s most feared hit man in his day, was blamed for numerous gangland killings in Chicago, including the 1972 murder of a Teamsters official named William Logan in his West Side neighborhood. Aleman had shotgunned Logan out of a car window in front of an eyewitness, Bob Lowe, a neighbor of Logan’s who had been out walking his dog, Ginger.

  Cooley told the government he once had been summoned to Counsellors Row when the topic was Aleman, who was being represented by none other than Thomas Maloney.

  “Marcy asked Cooley whether he had someone to take care of a murder case involving Harry Aleman,” prosecutors wrote in one filing. “Cooley told Marcy that he would check. At that time Aleman was charged with murder in a case pending before Judge Frank Wilson in the Circuit Court of Cook County. Aleman was represented in the case by Maloney at the time of the above-described conversation. After the Counsellors Row conversation, Cooley talked with Judge Wilson approximately three times about the Aleman case. Judge Wilson eventually agreed to accept $10,000 to fix the case. Judge Wilson told Cooley, however, that he wanted Maloney off of the case because Maloney had previously filed a motion for substitution of judges in which Maloney listed Judge Wilson as a judge who would be prejudiced against him.”

  Wilson thought it would look weird if Maloney stayed on the case and then took a bench trial in front of a judge he’d SOJ’d, so Maloney stepped aside. Prosecutors said Cooley later met up with Aleman, who, after telling Cooley he’d better be right about the case going well for him, told Cooley he could trust Maloney, and that Maloney was going to be made a judge. Which of course proved to be true.

  Cooley’s promise that the case would be fixed also proved to be true. Even with Lowe’s eyewitness testimony.

  Two veteran journalists described the case in their gripping 2001 book Everybody Pays: Two Men, One Murder and the Price of Truth. The tale by Maurice Possley, now a writer and researcher for the National Registry of Exonerations, and the Chicago Tribune’s inimitable Rick Kogan, should be on more Chicago classics lists.

  Deeply sourced on the remarkable story, Possley and Kogan described how Lowe saw a car Aleman was a passenger in move by him and watched as someone yelled for Logan to come to the car after Logan exited his home. Two shotgun blasts lifted Logan off the street as Lowe looked on in horror.

  Possley and Kogan described how Aleman eventually was indicted on Lowe’s identification, and how his lawyer, Maloney, filed his motion to switch judges and block Wilson from getting it. When Wilson did get the case and Maloney backed away, the authors recounted a conversation between the lawyer and a prosecutor who said that was too bad, that he had been looking to go up against Maloney in front of a jury.

  Maloney laughed. “What makes you think there’s ever going to be a jury trial?” the authors quoted Maloney as saying.

  Aleman waived his right to a trial by jury as the proceedings were about to begin in 1977, and he was acquitted by Wilson in a bench trial. The judge’s stunning decision raised eyebrows all over Chicago—some of which belonged to federal investigators. The Aleman trial was credited by many as lighting a fire under the investigation that would become Operation Greylord in the first place.

  Cooley told investigators he personally delivered the $10,000 to Wilson, who would commit suicide before facing charges.

  Cooley’s version of events has weight, considering Maloney became a judge shortly after leaving the Aleman case, and one of the cases he presided over was the trial of three New York gang members for a 1981 killing in Chicago’s Chinatown, in the First Ward. The feds alleged Maloney’s acquittal of those men was the result of a fix, and charged Roti and Marcy with taking in some $75,000 for their roles. Cooley testified he got $25,000. Popping up again in that case was the On Leong Chinese Merchants Association; the group acknowledged it was behind the bribe to fix the case when it pleaded guilty in its own racketeering and gambling case in 1994.

  Maloney would remain a judge until leaving the bench in 1990. But if he thought he could lay low, he was wrong. A federal grand jury indicted him for bribery a year later, in 1991, and he was formally accused of fixing three murder cases, becoming the first Cook County judge to face that accusation.

  One of the cases, from 1982, he reduced to manslaughter, and there was the Chinatown gang murder case in which he acquitted the trio from the New York kill squad. But perhaps most spectacular was the allegation that he fixed a case against two ranking members of the Chicago’s then powerful El Rukn street gang.

  The organization, which operated under the guise of a religious group, was once so influential its leaders, including supreme boss Jeff Fort, were convicted of conspiring with officials from Libya to commit terrorist acts inside the US in exchange for cash. And it was violent, known for not hesitating when it came to taking out its enemies, which were many. It was one of the first supergangs in Chicago during the period, acting almost like a corporation in structure.

  Two members of the El Rukns had been charged in 1986 with the murders of two members of another large Chicago gang, the Gangster Disciples, from a division known as the Goon Squad, which Fort had targeted for moving in on El Rukn turf. The charged El Rukns were Nathson Fields and Earl Hawkins, a reputed “general.” Cooley, already working for the government, had taped a fellow lawyer in a bathroom at the criminal courts building at Twenty-Sixth and California named William Swano. Maloney had taken $10,000 from Swano a full three years after Operation Greylord went public, and maybe he thought better of it. Whatever the reason, he had given the money back before the El Rukn trial, believing federal agents could be onto him. Cooley’s bathroom recording captured Swano asking Cooley what was the worst thing that could happen to someone and then providing his own answer: a judge taking a bribe from you and then giving the cash back. Maloney apparently swung hard the other way, at least for appearances, convicting the men of murder and sentencing them to death.

  Swano contended the gang had given him $10,000 for the original Goon Squad acquittals, saying so at Maloney’s trial. He claimed that Maloney had handed it back to him at the door to his chambers after he sensed the trial was getting too much publicity and learned the El Rukns were under federal scrutiny. Cooley testified as well, of course, walking the jury through the mechanics of the payoffs. Maloney was found guilty in April 1993.

  The former judge would be sentenced the following year, with Cooley again stepping up to detail accusations against him, including that while Maloney was still a lawyer, he had gone to Pat Marcy to solicit the high-profile Aleman acquittal. Aleman would go on to be convicted at a unique second trial on the very same charges, being reindicted on the theory that double jeopardy wasn’t a factor because the case was fixed. After making legal history, Aleman was given essentially a life sentence of more than one hundred years and died in prison in 2010 at age seventy-one.

  Cooley went on at length in his testimony against Maloney, adding more allegations against the crooked judge. This time he alleged that a 1983 double-murder trial of mobster Anthony “the Ant” Spilotro, which Maloney had presided over, was fixed as well.

  Maloney had found Spilotro not guilty of what had come to be known in mob lore as the “M&M Murders.” Two very unfortunate thieves had been targeted for death by the Chicago Outfit: Billy McCarthy and Jimmy Miraglia. McCarthy and Miraglia—“M&M”—had apparently been involved in three unsanctioned murders, big Outfit no-nos, and Spilotro was the enforcer tapped to get rid of them. The mob caught up to McCarthy first. His head was placed in a vise and tightened until he gave up the location of the other “M.” Both eventually turned up in the trunk of a car, and the use of the vise contributed to Spilotro’s later reputation as a maniacal crazy person even among his mob cohorts.

  Strangely enough, the Maloney acquittal didn’t turn out as a net positive for Spilotro. If he had been convicted for M&M and imprisoned, he probably wouldn’t have been in harm’s way a few years later in 1986. That year Spilotro was summoned home from Las Vegas, where he had been spearheading the O
utfit’s operations. Spilotro’s criminal activity out west had made too much noise, as it turned out, so he was marked for elimination with extreme prejudice by bosses at home base who were tired of his antics making the news and bringing heat to their lucrative Vegas outpost. He was lured to a suburban Chicago basement on the pretext of being made a capo in the organization and was there beaten to death along with his brother Michael, who was falsely promised he was going to become a made guy. It was possible neither brother was completely surprised. Michael seemed to have sensed something was up, leaving his jewelry behind at his Oak Park home in the suburbs in case things went south. The bodies of the pair would be found in an Indiana cornfield by a farmer checking his plantings.

  The government originally had sought to bring in evidence of the Spilotro fix before Maloney’s trial, but a federal judge kept it out of the proceedings. Prosecutors had detailed the allegation in a sealed motion, saying Cooley had discussed it in a meeting about the case in another Counsellors Row rendezvous. “At some point in 1983 during the pendency of Spilotro’s case, Robert Cooley, at that time a Chicago-based practicing attorney, was in the Counsellors Row Restaurant in Chicago and saw” Spilotro there as well, prosecutors wrote. Spilotro went into the back with Pasquale Marcy. “Spilotro and Marcy were gone between approximately five to ten minutes. When they returned, Cooley observed that Spilotro appeared to be upset. Spilotro then began a conversation with other persons in the restaurant besides Marcy. At some point, Cooley walked over to where Marcy was seated in the restaurant and stated to Marcy that Spilotro appeared nervous. Marcy told Cooley that Spilotro had a case up with the same guy that Cooley had had a problem with but that Spilotro had nothing to worry about because he [Marcy] had taken care of it.”

  But it was something else in the sealed motion that caught Sherlock’s attention, something many who knew about Hughes had heard about over the years. Another case, and another alleged bribe.