by Jeff Coen
If he had viewed the lineup in the photo it would have been ridiculous, he said, because he knew every guy in it. Even so, he said he wouldn’t have identified any of them as being in the car, simply because he hadn’t gotten a good enough look to be sure.
Sherlock noticed that as he was interviewing Russell, the man’s prevailing emotion was anger. Beyond any high-minded sense of injustice, and beyond any shock and sadness that the intervening years might have blunted, Russell was mad. What happened to Hughes had in some ways happened to him too.
Russell told Sherlock it was only a few days after the shooting when it was pretty clear who the main people involved were, including Costello. It seemed like “half the town” knew, Russell said.
“The police can’t clear a case where two or three kids drive by in a car, shoot and kill my friend?” he said to Sherlock, “No one ever paid for it.”
13
HABERKORN
Commander John Haberkorn wasn’t exactly shy or keeping a low profile while he was commander of the area that included Bridgeport. In fact, it was quite the opposite.
He notably took up a bit of a personal crusade against violence on television, speaking to community groups and churches and collecting signatures in an attempt to urge advertisers away from shows he thought pushed the envelope and had a negative impact on kids who might be watching. Cop shows reportedly drew special attention from the commander. Haberkorn’s effort made the Chicago Tribune in a story by Patricia Leeds headlined POLICE COMMANDER RIPS TV VIOLENCE, UNREAL CRIME PLOTS. “The violence on television is worse than anything we encounter,” Haberkorn told the paper. “If [the police] acted the way Kojak operates, we’d go to the penitentiary.
“The TV portrayals of police work are so exaggerated they paint a picture of violence most police don’t encounter in an entire career, let alone in one case.”
It was a public face that would run counter to allegations called in to the FBI at the end of 1976, just months after the Hughes shooting and Haberkorn’s apparent insertion of himself into that investigation.
An anonymous tipster called the Bureau in Chicago and told an agent that Haberkorn was essentially on the take. Haberkorn had a “club” of sorts, the caller said, which consisted of officers close to him who collected money from certain businesses in the Ninth District and from illicit gambling operations there. Several local taverns and restaurants were allegedly involved, with a sergeant acting as a bagman. The information was specific enough and considered reliable enough for agents to start a RICO investigation.
The probe did not end in any charges against Haberkorn, but it drew Sherlock’s interest for obvious reasons when he found it in FBI records. It suggested a pathway that the Outfit could have used to influence the way police handled the Hughes case. With attention being paid to Rocky LaMantia from the early stages of the investigation, had the mob taken steps to protect him? Shorty LaMantia handled gambling for the Outfit right in that geographic area, and LaMantia allegedly had gone on to prove he was not beyond bribing his son out of criminal trouble, as in the Martha DiCaro shooting. To Sherlock, it was at least worth consideration.
At the time, the FBI also had possession of an anonymous 1973 letter from a nosy landlord who had a Chicago police officer in her building. The landlord had taken some interest in the man—and taken to spying on him, apparently—because he left for work mid-morning but got home in the early afternoon, sometimes loaded with packages. The writer’s interest only grew when she learned through another officer that the man was a cop and a “captain’s man” from Thirty-Fifth Street who collected money for his superior. She had seen him drive home drunk, carting cases of whiskey as well. She had made inquiries, she wrote, and learned the cop had friends at the station on Mayor Richard J. Daley’s block in Bridgeport.
The letter might have been written off as the ramblings of a busybody, except for the anonymous caller a few years later. The caller had said a police staffer close to Haberkorn was the accountant for the secret club that was collecting money, and called him by a name similar to that of the nosy landlord’s tenant.
FBI agents were soon poking around in the world of Bridgeport-area taverns with names like the Wagon Wheel, looking for signs of cops wetting their beaks. It was an effort that would carry into 1977 and include agents catching up to work CPD already had done. The anonymous letter from the neighbor had been enough to get light surveillance up on the cop in her building in the spring of 1974. Investigators followed him to a few bars but saw no evidence of wrongdoing and closed their case.
Agents pieced together a history of Haberkorn, noting he had been named Ninth District commander two times, the first being in 1973. It was a plum job, they knew, in part because the station was so close to the mayor’s home. Haberkorn had political contacts, they learned, and owned a security agency that provided guards for places including the International Amphitheatre and Comiskey Park. At least one internal affairs officer reported believing Haberkorn used “unorthodox measures” to eliminate his competition in this business. CPD also had at least one file on Haberkorn from 1971, when another officer alleged that Haberkorn would sometimes shake down tavern owners busted for serving underaged patrons. Supposedly a quick payoff would mean nothing would go on anyone’s record.
The FBI investigation wound down to agents speaking to several tavern owners in 1977. The responses were hardly shocking; no owner volunteered that they had ever been approached by any police officer for payoffs, nor admitted to being aware of any other tavern owner being approached by anyone. One owner said he would sometimes take small bets on horses over the phone in his place for a few bucks a pop. Some officers stopped in for lunch. Nothing to see here.
But the investigation wasn’t without its odd claims during interviews. One Chicago cop and one former one had a few things to say to FBI agents. The one who was still with the department in 1977 said he knew that Haberkorn had a reputation of being very close to Daley and that he gave preferential treatment to other officers who had political clout.
One of the tavern owners the FBI had spoken to also had a reputation as a friend of Daley’s, as well as of being a bookie. It was generally known not to give him any trouble. The officer also said he had heard that a bar owner in West Beverly wanted to open a place in the middle of Bridgeport, and Haberkorn had been the one to put a brick on that.
The former officer had even more to say. That year he told agents that he knew Haberkorn from another district and that Haberkorn was in a small group of officers who would drive around waiting for bars to stay open after their licensed closing hours. They would wait to arrest the owner and then let them go for a little cash. Another time, the officer recalled, he was on a gambling raid that resulted in a number of people being brought to the station. The main operator of the card game was taken home, and the officer shared in a windfall.
But his most spectacular allegation involved a character by the cartoonish nickname of Milkwagon Joe. There was a bit of a tiff between Mr. Joe and a local bookie, and the bookie had wound up with a cut on his neck from a broken bottle.
As the story went, Haberkorn supposedly learned what had happened and made a phone call to someone to find out where Milkwagon Joe was and to arrange to get a suitable amount of money to get rid of the case. That amount wound up being a few thousand dollars, the officer told the FBI, but he didn’t get a cut of the cash.
The harrowing tale of Milkwagon Joe apparently impressed no one, and the FBI made no case. The file sat open for a couple of years before being stamped CLOSED. The investigation and its conclusion happened quietly, doing no damage to the commander’s career. Haberkorn left the department two years after the Hughes killing, and became the chief of police in suburban Oak Lawn, to the city’s southwest.
He continued his turn through the Chicago media, though, and was even profiled in the Tribune in 1985. “When you cover the City of Chicago, you cover a lot of vicious people,” he told the paper, explaining how he follow
ed stickup gangs around town. A reader could almost picture him talking to the latest beat reporter with his shiny shoes up on the desk. “There’s times when I miss that action, the excitement,” Haberkorn said. “It got the adrenaline going.”
Sherlock would have loved to ask Haberkorn about the odd handling of Nick Costello’s questioning and the breaking of police protocols during the early days of the Hughes investigation. He would have asked about the allegations in the old FBI files and perhaps whether Haberkorn had ever met Shorty LaMantia.
But Haberkorn was another person who Sherlock wasn’t going to be able to interview as he worked to uncover what exactly had happened in 1976. John Haberkorn died in May 2018, at age ninety-four, just weeks before Sherlock made his fateful trip to the police evidence center looking for the Hughes file.
14
THE COP
The Dunkin’ Donuts sat on a wide commercial street just outside Chicago, lined on both sides with a bramble of gas stations, brake shops, and local bars. The kind of strip common in the city’s denser, older suburbs, before the flat landscape widens out into newer sprawl and cul-de-sacs.
Terry Strong sat at a table with a cup of coffee. He was older but sharp and affable. He did not give off the impression of a retired Chicago police detective, until he opened his mouth and spoke. There was no nervousness about him. He settled into his chair as Journey’s “Oh Sherrie” played softly in the background and customers waited in line behind him.
He joined the department as a cadet in 1967. There wasn’t any real feel-good, heroic reason. He needed work and heard they were looking for policemen. It sounded interesting. “I really wasn’t burning college up,” Strong said.
He started out in the identification section with fingerprints before getting on the street in 1968. “The first day I ever worked alone on a squad car, I was at Forty-Eighth and Wabash, which is now the Fifty-First Street station. It was April the fourth, 1968,” Strong said.
It was the date the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at a hotel in Memphis, touching off rioting in dozens of cities, including Chicago.
Strong said he was working in a one-man car, meaning he had no partner with him. He had been patrolling a grid on the South Side from Forty-Third to Forty-Fifth, and from Michigan Avenue to a street that was then South Park Way—and was later named for King himself. Supervisors called the rookie back to the station as things were starting to come unglued. “Kid, don’t go out again,” they told him.
A few months later it was the opposite. Mayor Daley that August ordered a crackdown on mostly student protesters at the Democratic National Convention, creating a frightening spectacle on television as light-blue-helmeted cops pounded on the young demonstrators with billy clubs. For a time, a curfew was implemented for anyone under age twenty-one. Strong was still twenty and working afternoons. He liked to joke to his sergeant as it was getting dark that he better go home.
“Get in the fuckin’ car” was the reply.
As his career progressed, he went to detective school, after which his first assignment was in the gambling section of the vice control division. It was fun, and the work landed in the papers.
“Gaming raiders nab 12 in N.W. Side club,” the Tribune reported in 1974. “Arrest son of mobster in raid,” the Chicago Daily News added. The mobster whose son was caught was Joseph “Joe Shine” Amabile, a noted Chicago Outfit lieutenant. And the game in question usually was known in Chicago by its Cuban name, “bolita,” or “little ball.” It was basically a racket that was also called the “Italian lottery” or “policy” in Black neighborhoods, where bettors would put money down on certain number combos before a daily drawing. Amabile ran a club in suburban Northlake that was an alleged mob hangout, and he was once reportedly linked to the killing of a bolita operator by mob flipper Ken Eto. Amabile is listed in the 1967 Congressional Record as a syndicate figure, identified with members, “fellow travelers,” and “pawns that do the bidding of the mob, who break the laws and take the risks, all to insulate ‘Mr. Big’ and his lieutenants from the courts.”
But that was a long time ago.
By the time Strong was telling his stories at Dunkin’ Donuts. Amabile’s grandson, “Grocery Store Joe” Amabile—who, as the nickname suggests, actually did run a food market—had been a contestant on The Bachelorette and Dancing with the Stars, where he once robotically pushed around a glittering shopping cart during a “dance” for America’s amusement while wearing a bright white suit.
“My father was a police officer. My brother’s a police officer, and I was raised not like that,” Joe said of his family’s Outfit history when interviewed by the Tribune’s Tracy Swartz in 2018.
Fair enough. Strong was more familiar with the older relative.
The Sun-Times trumpeted about another raid Strong was part of: 16 ARRESTED IN 31-SITE BOLITA SWEEP HERE. Pulitzer winner and legendary crime reporter Art Petacque wrote that one in 1973, a little more than two years before Strong made detective and caught the Hughes case in the Ninth District. Some 140 cops took part in taking down a game that made $50,000 a week, according to Petacque’s piece, which carried a picture of a deputy superintendent posing with a seized pistol and cash.
After gambling, Strong was sent to Area Three homicide, a tough section for any newer detective. Strong had actually put it down as his preference. He was young and was finding that he craved the action his job brought. He wanted to work the most active areas, even if they were the most dangerous. “We had the Robert Taylor Homes and all of that stuff along State Street,” he said. “We went up in those places. Usually two of us. Sometimes without handheld radios.”
Many of the nearly thirty buildings in the Chicago Housing Authority complex had gone up on ninety-five acres along the Dan Ryan Expressway in the late ’50s and ’60s. For decades they marked a sad entryway for people coming into the city on the busy corridor, until they eventually were demolished. Richard J. Daley built them, and Strong remembers his impression of the place when the complex slipped from being a newly constructed community into fostering social disorder and crime.
In his time there between 1968 and 1972, Strong realized the development, in many ways, had been built “to contain” African Americans. Black Chicagoans had been moving out of South Side ghettos and toward neighborhoods like Bridgeport, the Daley fiefdom. The development literally took on the look of a dam meant to bottle up African Americans east of the Ryan.
There had been promises of a new public housing utopia in the largest development of its kind in America, but Strong dealt with the reality. Some of the sixteen-story buildings had only two elevators, if they worked at all. Some of the cramped apartments had eight or ten people living in them. “The kids want to go out and play and there’s no facilities for them,” Strong said. “They were not a good idea from the beginning.”
It was a dangerous time to be an officer in general. Strong recalled that one officer he went to high school with and had helped to train was killed in a shootout at Sixty-First and Calumet. Others he knew would lose their lives a few years later. Another officer he had gone to high school with was William Fahey, who, along with a partner, would be shot and killed after a traffic stop at Eighty-First and Morgan. That was just two blocks from where they had attended classes at Calumet High School.
Strong’s parents didn’t own a home, so the family had moved around some in the area. He actually graduated from Gresham, he said, which was just across from the Gresham police station. If he had known exactly what his future track was going to be, he might have been more careful choosing the company he kept. “I had friends who used to throw rocks at the squad cars just to get the police to chase them,” he said, “when things got boring.”
In fact, there was one kid whose father was a policeman, Strong remembered. “He would steal cars and then walk over to the station because he knew some of the policemen. And he’d pick up a daily bulletin and see if the car he stole was on the bulletin and if it was he�
��d leave it,” Strong remembered.
Strong eventually separated himself from the local hoods and knuckleheads, of course. One thing he noticed right away was how political CPD was. Everyone was constantly jostling for promotions through internal intrigue, and there were commonly injections of actual politics into the police world. His lieutenant in homicide was none other than Joe Curtin, who eventually would touch the Hughes case. It was Curtin, Haberkorn, and Townsend who had met by themselves shortly before a call allegedly came in from Daley and Costello was released, according to the version of events former officer John Furmanek gave the FBI in 2005.
For many years Curtin was known as “Burke’s guy,” with Burke being Alderman Ed Burke, himself a former cop. Before Burke had a regular CPD detail, Strong said, Curtin was known to do Burke’s bidding and shuttle him around the city.
Burke would go on to become one of the most powerful aldermen in Chicago history; his influence would remain well into the new century. Known for his sharp pinstripe suits and old Chicago ways, he was a throwback to the heyday of machine politics. His seat of power was his leadership of the city’s finance committee, which he kept even through the administration of Mayor Rahm Emanuel. He was long rumored to be under the eye of federal authorities, but they wouldn’t catch up to him until 2019, when they charged him with racketeering. Among the allegations was that a firm redeveloping Chicago’s old main post office near the river needed to go through his committee in the pursuit of $100 million in assistance for their plan.
Burke was recorded by fellow alderman Danny Solis as being upset that the firm hadn’t given Burke’s private law firm any business. “As far as I’m concerned, they can go fuck themselves,” Burke allegedly was captured saying on tape.