by Jeff Coen
It’s unknown what kinds of Burke stories Curtin took to the grave with him in 2010. Strong remembered Curtin in leadership as a commander, including times that he butted heads with Haberkorn. “They were enemies. We had a homicide one time at Forty-Fifth and Ashland in a plumbing store. And it turned out to be a former employee, but he killed two guys because he didn’t want any witnesses,” Strong said. “So we’re working on the homicide and the crime lab came in, and they’re doing their thing, and next thing you know the reporters show up. Well, Curtin and Haberkorn are both there because it’s in the Ninth District. And they are practically elbowing each other to get on camera. It was a travesty.”
Both had big egos, according to Strong. And both were politically connected. For Haberkorn to be leading the Ninth District showed a lot, Strong said. Because it was right down the street from Daley’s home, it was a natural clout post; it wasn’t a big secret that Haberkorn and Daley were close.
As for the FBI file on Haberkorn, which suggested some informant thought he was protecting illicit gambling operations or collecting money from taverns, Strong never saw it. He knew a Haberkorn who was aloof and political but not crooked. That didn’t mean any part of it was true or false, he said, just that he wasn’t aware of it.
In any event, Strong’s detective work sometimes led him to the Ninth District, where he eventually worked the murder of John Hughes. Strong had been off that weekend and was working days with his partner Jack Boyle. The two of them appeared at work the Monday after the shooting and were handed the file.
“They said, ‘Here, read this over, and then go over to Nine, because Haberkorn supposedly has some information on it. He wants to talk to you,’” Strong recalled. “So that’s exactly what we did.”
They walked in. Haberkorn met them. “He said, ‘Well, we’re probably gonna be able to clear this before the day is over.’”
Haberkorn told Strong and his partner to go have coffee with two plainclothes guys who had been working the case, one of which was Furmanek. Haberkorn also told him that “this kid, Costello,” who was the passenger in the front seat of the car the shot was fired from, was being brought in later by his father. “And he mentioned that he had been in contact with the alderman and the alderman had arranged it,” Strong said. “Which I didn’t know anything about until afterwards.”
The word was that Costello’s family lived very near the alderman and the alderman actually was his godfather, Strong said. That was what was said, he remembered, though he couldn’t prove the claim as he sat with his coffee more than forty years later.
The alderman Haberkorn mentioned that day was Michael Bilandic, the alderman for the Eleventh Ward, which included Bridgeport and, of course, the Ninth District police station where the conversation was taking place. Bilandic was a native of Bridgeport, a corporate lawyer turned politician who had been alderman there since 1969. He counted Mayor Daley as a mentor, and he had run for office in the first place at Daley’s suggestion. Daley named Bilandic to the city council’s finance committee and counted him as a confidant. He would be named to replace the mayor when Daley died at the end of 1976, just months after the Hughes shooting.
But that part of Bilandic’s career didn’t end up as he might have wanted. His political demise is now the stuff of Chicago legend. In January 1979, as Bilandic was seeking a new term as mayor, the city was crippled by a massive blizzard. Jane Byrne, whom Bilandic had previously fired from a city commissioner post, primaried him while using the bad snow response against him and defeated him that March, ending his mayoralty. Chicago mayors from that point until today have tried to plow the city’s snowflakes practically before they hit the ground, looking to avoid a similar political fate.
Bilandic later became chief justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, and he died in 2002 at age seventy-eight.
But in May 1976, Daley and Bilandic were both still in their powerful positions, and Daley—though some believed the Democratic machine he created was beginning its downward slope—remained the most powerful mayor the city had ever known. Daley had risen from Democratic precinct captain to the Illinois House of Representatives to head of the Central Committee of the Cook County Democratic Party by 1953. It was that organization that controlled the movement of jobs and other spoils of the machine. When Daley was elected Chicago’s forty-eighth mayor in 1955, he did not relinquish his committee job—instead, he united all city political power under himself, further influencing the machine’s ability to raise huge patronage armies of people who could do political work and be rewarded with city jobs and other perks. That ability sustained the machine and made many of the political leaders who protected it all but invincible. Daley was reelected five times, and his consolidation of power raised Bridgeport from a blue-collar working man’s neighborhood to the machine’s power base. In 1976 Daley would have had nearly unlimited influence over anything taking place anywhere in Chicago, but especially in Bridgeport—perhaps even a murder investigation.
Clout would come to pull strings everywhere Strong turned. “But Jack and I didn’t quite understand that because we were brand new on this case,” he said. “We’re thinking, ‘OK, you know, maybe it is his district and Haberkorn wants to do the right thing. He didn’t. It just became obvious after a while, Haberkorn. This kid came in and he just absolutely stonewalled us. And my personal opinion, now, he wanted to know what we knew, and find it out.”
Costello came in, Strong remembered, and denied everything. Haberkorn ran the interview. He was a commander and Strong and Boyle were detectives. He outranked them and there was nothing they could do about it. Haberkorn’s questions were straightforward and very basic, Strong recalled:
“Were you in the car?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? We have proof.”
“It wasn’t me. She’s wrong. She must’ve been drunk.”
The “she” in Costello’s answers was “a girl witness” who was there and knew Costello, Strong said. She had known him her whole life and said, “That’s him.” And she never varied from that. The way Strong described Mary Mestrovic made it clear they had not spoken at any recent point.
Figuring out that Haberkorn was going to be inserting himself into the case and hampering their efforts, Strong said he and Boyle decided on their own to go and get Mary and take a statement from her as soon as possible, in case something worse went down with the case. They planned to take a written statement and get the account locked in. Again, Haberkorn insisted he do the interview. Mestrovic stuck to her story of seeing Costello, and the detectives prepared a statement for her.
Strong said they even decided to use a detective’s trick when they did so. There were no recordings in those days. The witness statement would have to be typed. They planned to make an obvious minor error or two so they could give it to Mary and have her make any corrections. They would make the “mistakes” obvious enough that she would catch and correct them and mark her initials with a pen. Later, if she tried to retract her statement in court if someone got to her, she couldn’t claim she had never read the final statement because her marks and initials would be there fixing the errors. Of course they would never need to use the corrections, because Mary would never change her account of what happened.
At one point, Strong said, Haberkorn requested that the detectives not tell their boss, Curtin, what they were up to. It was another strange request. There was no way Strong and Curtin could just disappear for six or seven hours and not fill someone in on what they were doing. They ignored the directive, Strong said.
He and Boyle pressed forward on the case and finished the Mestrovic written statement. They had it locked in. But things weren’t done being weird.
“When we finished the written statement, Jack Townsend, who at one time had been the head of Daley’s bodyguard detail, he walked through the front door,” Strong said. “I’m not sure what his rank was then, but I was sure it was high above mine. He was at least a chief. And he said, ‘Let
me see the statement.’” Strong remembered it clearly. They had just finished with Mary Mestrovic in one of the Ninth District’s interview rooms, which were located near the front desk. Townsend confronted them near the desk.
Naturally, Strong and Boyle gave him the statement.
“He read the statement. He walked out the front door,” Strong said, which was only about fifteen feet away. The door closed behind Townsend and he turned south. “It’s my belief there was only one place for him to go,” Strong said, admitting that he did not watch Townsend walk the six doors down to Daley’s home. “But he did come back only fifteen or twenty minutes later,” Strong said. “I was not the world’s greatest detective, nor the worst, but I’m pretty sure I knew where he went.”
When Townsend reappeared, he handed the statement back to the detectives.
At that point, the Costello arrest technically belonged to Furmanek and his partner, Strong recalled. And that wasn’t a concern for Strong in that moment, because it didn’t matter who had made which arrest, as long as the case was cleared. According to Strong, when Townsend came back, he told them to take Mary to Area Three and to call for felony review.
When doing that, officers would normally get the person who was the “riding state’s attorney”—essentially, whichever prosecutor from the felony review unit was working a shift to cover charging approvals when detectives were making cases. The floater assigned that day to approve felonies, in other words.
Strong and Boyle didn’t have far to go to get from the Ninth District at Thirty-Fifth and Lowe to the Area at Thirty-Ninth and California—less than two miles. But when they arrived, the key state’s attorney supervisor was already there with his assistant.
Strong had nothing specific to show the prosecutor did anything wrong, but could tell something was going on. “Again. Red flag,” Strong said. Nothing about the case was being worked through normal channels or in the normal ways. “They were waiting for us.”
Strong and Boyle ran everything by them. Strong said the prosecutors asked the detectives what they wanted to do, and his and his partner’s suggestion was to give Costello immunity, put him in the grand jury, and he would say who the shooter was, otherwise he was going to jail. The prosecutors had concerns about that, Strong said, for some reason fearing that Costello might put the shooting on himself. Many accessories to crimes lie, of course, but not many lie in a way that makes things worse for them, taking blame for things they did not do. Strong said he told the attorneys that was unlikely, and if he did it, he would be lying. They had a good witness, Mary, right there in the building with them.
The guys from felony review made a decision. Nothing was going to happen that day. Costello wouldn’t be going to the grand jury. Strong and Boyle were incredulous, but there wasn’t exactly an appeals process.
Over time, witnesses began to dry up. Some got lawyers. Most of the statements that were collected weren’t memorable. The detectives spoke to Paul Ferraro about his car, and he denied the vehicle in the shooting was his, Strong said.
Strong caught rumors at the time about a meeting in which police supervisors had told potential witnesses not to cooperate, but he was unaware whether it might have been the rendezvous at the Coral Key restaurant allegedly orchestrated by Sergeant Cuomo. He said he knew Cuomo at the time, even working with him later in his career in a different section.
“I had heard it was in some police commander’s basement or something,” Strong said. It was only from Sherlock that Strong said he heard about the location of the alleged meeting.
With the benefit of hindsight, the entire thing was silly to Strong, from the neighborhood feud to the killing to the unfinished investigation. He shifted in his chair at the Dunkin’ Donuts as he spoke. It was clear that it was slightly annoying that, after a long police career, the case that he was asked about in retirement was the Hughes case. None of it made sense to him at the time or on the day he was speaking about it, starting with the divisions along the ethnic lines of the Bridgeport and Canaryville teens, who were mostly second-generation Americans.
“Most of them it was their grandparents that came from other countries. And the Italians and Croatians were tight. And the other kids were all Irish,” Strong said. “And their parents were all, or at least a good portion of their parents, were city workers. So they all came from the same backgrounds.” Many of them went to the same high school. But “when they were out of school they butted heads all the time,” he said. “Like a bunch of young billy goats.”
Strong said in the immediate years after the killing he would periodically pick up the file to see whether something had been missed and there was something more to do. Every now and again a tip might surface that would send him briefly back to work on the stalled investigation. The name LaMantia was whispered, he said, but talking to him was cut off by Onesto, the LaMantias’ attorney, known among police officers as a mob lawyer.
Strong also had limited contact with Haberkorn after the initial moments of the case, he said, though he did once work off-duty for him as a security guard at White Sox park. There was a concert, Strong recalled, and Haberkorn was in charge, riding around on a golf cart and barking orders.
As far as Strong knew, Haberkorn made no other attempts to directly derail Strong. “He could have been going well over my head and I wouldn’t have known anything about it,” Strong said. No one ever came back for more of his paperwork either, though copies of everything were sent to the chief of detectives. Cases were worked until there was nothing more to do each day, and then reports were typed and sent through channels. Strong never knew the permanent file he was supposedly feeding paperwork into was lighter than it should have been. He was surprised when Sherlock told him about the missing reports.
Periodically, whenever one cold-case group or another took up the investigation in the years following, Strong said someone he knew would tell him that so-and-so wanted Terry Strong to watch out because the Hughes case was kicking up again, as if his own conduct could be called into question. Strong lost no sleep. “So what do I care? I’m living in the same house I was in when I was on the job, and they send me a check every month,” Strong said. “They know exactly where I am. If they want to come, I have no problem talking to anyone about this case.”
So how long before the case really began to fade? Strong said it stayed on his mind for several years, until he left Area Three homicide in 1980 or 1981. Even before that, he said, he was contacted by special prosecutors at the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, when they were supposedly looking at the possibility of a police cover-up in the Hughes case.
Prosecutors said they were looking again at the police response, and Strong said they asked him and Boyle what they should do about the case. Again, Strong said, the advice he and his partner gave was that Costello should be put before a grand jury. “It’s the only logical thing you can do,” he said. “To not do it is ridiculous.”
The threat of time in Cook County Jail could have been enough to get at the truth, Strong said. It was basic policing that never happened. He had wanted to solve it and was convinced Costello would have pointed a finger at the triggerman eventually. It might have meant Costello would need protection, but Strong said it could have been done. He wasn’t overly afraid of the Outfit, having come across some of the mob’s lower-level operatives from his years in the gambling section.
But as it went, one of the biggest cases Strong touched during his career went unsolved. The shooting of a teenager in a park. When Strong thought about the killing, and his work, and the investigation that never gave a family justice, he said he would think about John Hughes and about fate. “The truth is, if he hadn’t turned away, he probably wouldn’t have gotten killed,” Strong said. “When he saw the gun, he turned to run off, and the bullet went right into his heart.”
Any of a million different things could have happened that night, and the story would have ended differently. “I’m a great believer in destiny,” Strong s
aid.
Sherlock would come to rely heavily on Strong and his account as he formed his opinions on what had happened. Like so many others he spoke to, Sherlock found him to have a straightforward Chicago demeanor. There was a sensibility to him that was only magnified by his years as a street cop. He had seen something that was wrong, and he knew it.
This was a cover-up, Sherlock had thought when he spoke to Strong himself earlier. Bingo. It’s worse than I thought.
15
A TROUBLING LEGACY
The story of the Hughes killing and the possibility that Chicago police at high levels successfully protected suspects from being blamed and prosecuted at the behest of mobsters or politicians—or both—seem outlandish in a vacuum.
Sherlock was as skeptical as anyone. And in many ways, he found himself struggling alongside the proverbial man who attempted to describe an elephant in the dark by feel. Depending on where Sherlock peeled apart the timeline, he found what appeared to be a conspiracy of a slightly different dark shape. It was hard to determine where the outline of one possibility ended and another began.
There are, of course, many good cops in the city today, and they had predecessors who did their jobs with honor and dignity in the 1970s. Sherlock knew them. Many of those Chicago police officers were his mentors, which was part of what made the Hughes case so disturbing. He knew they were good, no-nonsense cops, and he knew what they would have done in the case had they been unfettered by whatever was going on up the food chain. They would have solved it.
But as outrageous as a conspiracy in the Hughes case might sound, if it were proven beyond doubt, where would it rank among Chicago police scandals just in the last fify years? For a Hughes conspiracy to have been successful, it would have required several police leaders to have participated or at least looked the other away, whether each cop knew the others’ reasons for doing so or not. Sherlock certainly thought it possible that Chicago’s political power trust might have weighed in and asked some ranking officers to keep Costello from harm, while the Chicago Outfit may have relied on its influence with others to keep LaMantia from blame. By effect, protecting Costello protected LaMantia, as it turned out. The teens could have had different protectors, even while they had a green Chevrolet in common.