by Jeff Coen
It was the case against Rocky LaMantia for the murder of Martha DiCaro.
In their sealed motion, prosecutors alleged that a relative of police sergeant Sam “David” Cuomo—who had been involved in the Hughes investigation—had learned something from LaMantia about the case and trial. It wasn’t clear whether the information was gathered in some kind of recording operation at, say, Garibaldi’s, or whether the relative had come forward with it. But there it was, in black and white. “Shortly after Maloney became involved in the case, [the relative] saw LaMantia in a bar. LaMantia told [him] that he was not worried about his case because LaMantia’s father, Shorty, was paying Maloney $20,000 for an acquittal,” the motion said.
“Maloney had represented Shorty LaMantia in a number of matters before Maloney was appointed to the bench,” the document continued. “Later, in a separate conversation, LaMantia told [the relative] that two weeks after the case was assigned to Maloney his [LaMantia’s] father met with Maloney in Maloney’s chambers at approximately 7:00 in the evening and paid him $20,000 in cash.”
The motion wasn’t supposed to be for public consumption, but some of what it contained wound up in the news media. It’s not known whether that revelation might have been some consolation to DiCaro’s family—to know that some of those who had denied them fair process in court, Maloney especially, had been snared for corrupting the system that was supposed to bring justice.
To Sherlock, it was a big piece of the circumstantial puzzle he was putting together. Shorty LaMantia had seemingly been adept at bribing law enforcement—even a judge—to keep his son out of trouble. The federal government had memorialized it in a court filing. It was certainly possible that in an era when the Chicago Outfit was meddling in law enforcement left and right, be it working with cops on the take to look the other way or something more sinister, Shorty LaMantia knew how to protect his boy.
The Maloney jury never heard about the DiCaro case. The judge had limited what the government could present in an attempt to keep the trial fair and focused on the matter at hand. But not getting information about other bribes ultimately meant little in the case against the crooked judge. He was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in prison, despite a long speech at his sentencing hearing in which he declared Cooley to be a “corrupt, inept slob” and rambled against others who had been part of the case against him.
The pugnacious Maloney, a boxer in his youth, was obstinate to the end. At age seventy-four he testified in Chicago at a hearing for two men whose triple-murder cases he had heard as a judge and sentenced to death. The defendants, William Bracy and Roger Collins, were looking to cast doubt on their convictions and get a new punishment by showing Maloney’s various problems. In an appeal of their case, lawyers pointed out that Bracy and Collins’s trial came just after the infamous Chinatown trial and before another Maloney was convicted of fixing, and argued that he made an example of them to cover his tracks and preserve his reputation as a law-and-order judge. Lawyers for the pair also made much of all the information that showed Maloney was corrupt, including in his handling of Rocky LaMantia. They noted that, in files they received during their appeal, there was an allegation that a prosecutor of LaMantia had been told by a cousin of Martha DiCaro’s that Maloney had been paid off, yet another indication the trial of Rocky LaMantia for the murder of the teen was fixed.
At the hearing Maloney denied ever having taken bribes, period, despite all the evidence against him. That included the government having shown jurors how Maloney repeatedly purchased money orders with cash during the years he was a judge. It didn’t faze him. “Every case I ever heard was decided on the facts and law,” Maloney was quoted as saying by the Tribune at the hearing.
Maloney died in 2008 of kidney failure at age eighty-three, not long after finishing his prison term. He remained the only judge in the history of Cook County to be convicted of fixing murder cases.
It was becoming clear to Sherlock that Rocky LaMantia had very likely shot Martha DiCaro, with a gun that was similar—if not identical—to the one that had been used to shoot John Hughes just a few years before. That gun had been made to disappear in the minutes before police arrived at the LaMantia home, where they found Shorty LaMantia promising that his son was innocent. The claim had not held up, but it didn’t matter. Federal prosecutors had gathered evidence that showed the trial that followed probably was a sham, presided over by a crooked judge. Rocky LaMantia, who was so central to the Hughes case in Sherlock’s mind, had skated through and been acquitted. He had never been retried based on any allegation the case was fixed.
But if LaMantia was guilty of the DiCaro murder, it certainly made him capable of killing Hughes. If you could pull the trigger on a pistol and fire a shot into the head of the girl you supposedly loved in the kitchen of your own home, Sherlock reasoned, you could certainly fire a shot out of a car in the dark at a guy you wanted to beat up.
It was sad to think that if justice had been served in the Hughes case, DiCaro might have been a grandmother by the time Sherlock picked up the investigation, he thought. More determined than ever to do something about it, he turned his attention again to the best clue he had.
11
A GREEN CHEVROLET
Rocky LaMantia and Judge Maloney weren’t the first things on Sherlock’s mind when he knocked on the door near Midway Airport in November 2018. He was concentrating hard on what he had to do in that moment. In fact, he was so tied up in his thoughts that he would forget the day of the visit happened to be his wedding anniversary. The case was occupying every corner of his mind.
He had decided to move forward, in part because of how credible Mary Mestrovic Murrihy had been. Very, very credible, he thought, and he had told his FBI bosses the same. Mary was an excellent witness, bolstered by the fact she didn’t really want to talk about it at all. He had sensed no lies or embellishment in her account.
Sherlock believed his best route to cracking the Hughes murder was still the car, even though so many years had passed. He had names of people who had access to a car that matched the description of the shooting vehicle and was in the area the night of the crime, a car that had been driven out of state the night of the murder. He had found them in the few police records he managed to recover and had been able to locate them.
The family name of Paul Ferraro’s girlfriend was in the reports, and after some detective work Sherlock found himself knocking on a door. It swung open, and an eighty-one-year-old woman greeted him warmly. Though the woman was a senior, she had her wits about her. She invited Sherlock inside, and for a moment he was encouraged. But it wouldn’t last.
When he began by introducing himself as a CPD investigator, the woman thought Sherlock was there about her neighbor. Someone who lived near her was trying to get hired by the police department, and she had assumed Sherlock was part of a background check or something. So when Sherlock began to explain that he was there about the Hughes murder and her daughter, whose boyfriend had the green Chevy, she grew cold rather quickly. She didn’t remember the killing, she told him.
But Sherlock needed to press ahead. Paul Ferraro had given his alibi as being with his girlfriend, babysitting in her neighborhood. It would have been a home almost directly across the street from this woman’s home in 1976, Sherlock knew. He figured Ferraro and the woman’s daughter would have broken up long ago. Surely their relationship was the stuff of high school and was ancient history. Maybe this woman would now be willing to say something about the car and why the group of them had driven it away while Hughes was still at the hospital, Sherlock thought. Maybe she would put him in touch with her daughter.
“Was that your daughter who dated Paulie Ferraro in 1976?” Sherlock asked, using a softer voice than he usually spoke with. He wanted to seem nonthreatening.
Yes, the woman told him, that was her daughter. “They went to a prom together,” she said. “I’ve got nothing else to talk to you about.”
It was best to break it off
at that point, Sherlock thought. There was no need to be confrontational, and he had other routes to pursue.
It was a few weeks later that Sherlock was talking to a fellow officer from Bridgeport, the kind of guy it could be helpful to run things by when it came to the neighborhood and the history of the families there. Sherlock gave the cop a fill, describing what he had been up to, and how he had landed on the woman’s front steps. He described their brief conversation.
The cop looked at him. The woman’s daughter had married Paulie Ferraro, the cop said flatly.
The news took a second to sink in. Then Sherlock looked at him with wide eyes. “They’re married?” Sherlock said, not trying to hide his disbelief. Another surprise in a case that was full of them. He shook his head, feeling a bit like a dad who was going to have to go scold a child for being caught in a fib.
Soon Sherlock was walking back up the steps at the house near Midway. The older woman’s evasiveness was, of course, not making him any less interested in this angle. Quite the opposite.
His strategy was to confront her and come across as perturbed, but not to overdo it and badger the woman or frighten her into silence. Sherlock went over and over it. While he was angry and wanted to communicate there was some trouble, he wanted to be let into the home again. She once again opened the door.
Sherlock greeted her in a bit of a sing-song but stern tone, like you might use to get a toddler to pick up their toys. “You told me a lie the last time I was here,” his voice trailing higher at the end.
“I know,” she replied, somewhat sheepishly. “Come on in.” She was smiling, as if she knew the jig was up. Sherlock’s approach had worked. He was just disarming enough that it was clear they would have a conversation.
“You wanna tell me something about your daughter?” Sherlock said.
“Yes. They’re married, they’re married,” the woman answered. And another thing: she remembered John Hughes being shot like it had happened yesterday. It was horrible, and it wasn’t the kind of thing the neighborhood just let fade away.
Sherlock began to walk her through the scenario that had been painted in the old interviews in police reports. What did she remember about that night? Did she recall the babysitting going on across the street? Paul Ferraro had told police in 1976 that he had been there all night with her daughter, leaving only to get a sandwich.
The woman answered that she wasn’t sure about it, or at least didn’t remember that the two were babysitting specifically. She said she did remember driving in the car in question to Indiana, and that it was the night of the Hughes murder, but she said she didn’t know what time it was.
In his mind, the moving of the car made sense, especially if someone had borrowed it and word had gotten to the the woman’s family that it had been used in a crime. There was a possible connection between her family and the LaMantias, he knew, and it was very possible Rocky LaMantia had been driving the car and had shot Hughes. Warning could have come through those channels, or could have come from Nick Costello if he had been in the car and returned it. He had been picked up near the babysitting site on Emerald by other teens cruising the area. Hughes had been shot at around 1:15 AM, and Ferraro told police the car was taken to Indiana at 2 AM. It was possible everyone realized the car had to get out of Chicago. In those days many families didn’t have a car, and many that did only had one. People tended to know who drove what.
Sherlock began to press. “Why? Why leave to go to the summer home at 2 AM?” Sherlock asked. Had they ever done that before?
In her memory, no, the woman answered.
“Then why that night?” Sherlock asked.
There was a pause, and she said she didn’t know. If she had an answer to give beyond that, she didn’t offer one. There was no excuse, no story about a sick family member or some other reason for heading out of state, seemingly suddenly. But while she provided no reason for going to Indiana at 2 AM, she said she remembered the trip had been the night of the Hughes murder.
Sherlock wanted to know, had she heard police could be looking for a car like Ferraro’s? That might provide at least a more innocent explanation. Maybe she just didn’t want there to be any confusion about it.
“I know it wasn’t Paulie’s,” the woman told him, not quite answering the question Sherlock had asked. A police officer had shown up in Indiana early that day, she volunteered, meaning later on the morning of the shooting. This police officer had interviewed Paul, she went on as Sherlock asked for the details. The officer went over to the car himself, she said. One officer. He inspected the car and asked a few questions about whether anyone had borrowed it.
The scenario was a head-scratcher for Sherlock on a few levels, but he didn’t interrupt.
Paul said no, no one had borrowed the car. After looking at the vehicle, the officer had announced that there didn’t appear to be any damage on it, she said, and people had been saying bats were thrown at it.
Despite not remembering some key details, including the reason for leaving for Indiana at such an odd hour, the woman’s memory was good on this. She said that’s why she knew her son-in-law wasn’t involved and that the car had been cleared. In her mind it was over, Sherlock thought.
Odd thing, though: Sherlock knew he had no report of any car being examined in Indiana. What he did have was the single-sheet report of a green Chevrolet being looked at soon after Hughes’s death. The time didn’t match what the woman had told him, but it apparently was the car. The criminalistics sheet, signed by detectives, said the car was photographed. Under the line for “location found,” someone had written “NONE.” Sherlock had placed a yellow Post-it note on the report, he remembered, and written “Where did this occur?” Maybe now he had an answer. One line of the sheet noted activity at Area Three, as if the photos had been taken there, but the woman he was speaking to said she was certain. She may have volunteered something important.
If some officers were in fact trying to help scrub this car, keep the teens involved out of trouble, and hide what happened, had they known it would have looked weird for an evidence technician to appear a state away to process the car with no accompanying notes? There were no reports showing how the car had come to anyone’s attention, who had found it, and who sent someone to Indiana. The sheet simply said five photos had been taken of it, as if that was supposed to remove the car from suspicion forever. At least now, that’s not the case, Sherlock thought to himself. Who knew whether any part of the police sheet on the 1972 Chevrolet could be trusted.
Sherlock later jotted down his thoughts in his own notes. “It would have been highly unlikely for an Evidence Technician to drive out of state without being accompanied by a detective or supervisor or both,” he wrote. “In a CPD supplementary report dated 5/17/76, detectives … document no damage found on the vehicle and no sign the license plates were removed or replaced. No mention in the CPD reports where the inspection took place but [this woman] was adamant that the event took place in Warsaw, INDIANA.”
He was an experienced Chicago police detective, to say the least. Sherlock knew no evidence technician would drive five hours outside Chicago by himself to inspect a car that was possibly involved in a homicide. Protocol would dictate that a detective and a supervisor, if they had good probable cause, would have gone, and with plenty of paperwork in tow. Or it would have been two detectives and a supervisor, more likely, and if they determined there was something to be looked at, then they would call for an evidence technician. None of this made sense.
And the single page filed by the tech had seemed to hinge on there being no damage to the car. The witness accounts collected at that point—and even those received decades later by Sherlock—did not agree that any bat flung toward the car had come in contact with it as it sped away from Root and Lowe. Put yourself in the shoes of an eighteen-year-old who just watched his good friend get shot in the chest and probably tried to get away himself. That teen probably isn’t keeping his head long enough even to throw a bat,
Sherlock thought.
Even if there was no damage, there were five photos of the car cataloged, according to the piece of paper. Where were they? The only photo of any car in the official record was the blue Nova, which had nothing to do with anything.
And the woman he was speaking to wasn’t done surprising Sherlock. She said she knew Ferraro had been brought to the police station a few days after the killing, once they all returned from Indiana, and had been questioned. She told Sherlock that when she heard Paul was there, she called her “cousin” Jackie—Jack Townsend—who went to the Ninth District and brought Ferraro home. Townsend was the high-ranking police supervisor who served as Mayor Daley’s security chief, and who had already been identified in the case as possibly being Nick Costello’s uncle. Sherlock knew Bridgeport was insular and its families were often interwoven, and its residents typically had just a few degrees of separation from nearly everyone else there, but this was getting ridiculous. Thanks to Townsend, it seems, Ferraro had only been at the station for a few hours, given a handwritten statement, and left.
What the woman actually believed or knew about the crime itself was difficult for Sherlock to discern, but there were only a few possibilities. The first was that it was all an innocent coincidence, and no one she knew had anything to do with the murder. It was random that her daughter’s boyfriend had the same car as the shooter, random that the family had an Indiana getaway planned for the middle of that night, and random that they happened to leave shortly after the fatal shot was fired.
The second was that most of the first scenario was right, but that the car was moved for a reason related to the murder. Either news had spread that police were looking for a green Chevrolet like the one Ferraro drove, and he and the woman’s family had decided to take it out of the neighborhood to avoid being hassled, or they knew that Ferraro had lent the car to some troublemakers and wanted to just get the car out of the spotlight to avoid being tangled up in it. If that were true, they still should have felt obligated to report the car being loaned, Sherlock thought, but clearly that didn’t happen.