by Jeff Coen
The scope of police misconduct in Chicago is considered significant by many who have studied the CPD, and in some ways that scope clarifies the possible scenarios in the Hughes matter. While many of the black marks in the department’s past have been miscarriages of justice committed by individual rogue officers, some have involved complicity, oversight breakdowns, or negligent missteps among leadership. Many were allowed to happen with the protection of what is known as the “code of silence,” an unwritten layer of protection officers afford each other when they fail to expose misconduct. It’s a code that has allowed some corrupt cops to live double lives as criminals, and others to mistreat or abuse suspects without punishment. But it has also benefited department leadership and Chicago mayors, for whom bubbling police misconduct cases can mean lost jobs or failure on election day.
In any event, the investigation of the Hughes case didn’t happen in a small town with no history of police issues. The Hughes killing happened in Chicago. And it happened at a time when the department was morphing into its modern self and the seeds of some of its worst scandals may have been taking root.
Some of those scandals involve officers whose very names are now synonymous with police corruption. Others were of a smaller scale, though still devastating to those directly involved and beyond, including some that touched Canaryville and Bridgeport themselves. A few are somewhat lost to history, such as the 1989 case of two White officers who picked up a pair of Black fourteen-year-olds after a White Sox game, ostensibly for violating curfew, before insulting and hitting them. The teens were deliberately dropped off in Canaryville, where a gang of White teens chased and beat the boys. The officers were indicted but eventually found not guilty in a bench trial. The case touched off protests in the city, and the cops eventually were fired.
It would be notable to many in Chicago that the Hughes case involved a White victim, an Irish American teenager who was from the same area of the city as Mayor Richard J. Daley and whose death was investigated at a police station just steps from Daley’s house. The Chicago Police Department’s troubled relationship with the city’s Black citizens is now well documented. If there is truth to allegations that Daley gave his blessing to CPD slowing down an investigation with a victim like Hughes, what does that suggest was possible when it came to the department “serving and protecting” the minority communities that have had so much trouble trusting the police?
Major studies have pointed out the depth of the problems. One was “Crime, Corruption and Cover-Ups in the Chicago Police Department,” published in January 2013 by the University of Illinois at Chicago’s political science department, authored by John Hagedorn, Bart Kmiecik, Dick Simpson, Thomas Gradel, Melissa Mouritsen Zmuda, and David Sterrett. By analyzing decades of news reports, the group found an “embarrassingly long list” of nearly three hundred officers who were “convicted of serious crimes, such as drug dealing, beatings of civilians, destroying evidence, protecting mobsters, theft and murder” since 1960.
The UIC group outlined four major findings: First, corruption has long persisted within the CPD and continues to be a serious problem. There have been 102 convictions of Chicago police since the beginning of 2000.
Second, police officers often resist reporting crimes and misconduct committed by fellow officers. The “blue code of silence,” while difficult to prove, is an integral part of the department’s culture and it exacerbates the corruption problems. However last November, a federal jury found that the City of Chicago and its police culture were partially responsible for Officer Anthony Abbate’s brutal beating of a female bartender. After the civil trial to assess damages, the victim’s attorney declared, “We proved a code of silence at every level in the Chicago Police Department.”
Third, over time a large portion of police corruption has shifted from policemen aiding and abetting mobsters and organized crime to officers involved with drug dealers and street gangs. Since the year 2000, a total of 47 Chicago law enforcement officers were convicted of drug and gang related crimes. The department’s war on drugs puts police officers, especially those working undercover, in dangerous situations where they must cooperate with criminals to catch criminals. These endeavors require that CPD superiors provide a high degree of leadership and oversight to keep officers on the straight and narrow.
Fourth, internal and external sources of authority, including police superintendents and Mayors, have up to now failed to provide adequate anti-corruption oversight and leadership.
William Hanhardt became a Chicago patrolman in 1953, twenty-three years before John Hughes was killed. Over his career he showed great proficiency in solving cases, with many crediting him with thinking like a criminal himself. It turned out there was a very good reason Hanhardt had that kind of ability.
Despite being suspected of links to the Chicago Outfit and other criminal rackets, Hanhardt earned nearly a dozen promotions, rising high into the ranks of the department. By 1975, the year before the Hughes killing, he was commander of CPD’s Shakespeare District.
He was asked that year about his connection to two men linked to a federal investigation of the Outfit, labor racketeer Allen Dorfman and bail bondsman Irv Weiner, who had his own mob ties. The feds were investigating the corrupting of the Teamsters Pension Fund by Outfit figures including Joey “the Clown” Lombardo. Massive amounts of Teamsters money was being used to fund new casinos in Las Vegas, which the mob would quickly figure out how to skim.
The feds were in the process of taping Lombardo that year, and famously captured him threatening an attorney on the phone who Lombardo thought might be stiffing Dorfman and the Outfit on some money he owed. The attorney was older—seventy-two—but still trying to resist Lombardo on the phone. Federal prosecutors played the tape at the Family Secrets trial in 2007.
“I assure you that you will never reach seventy-three,” Lombardo threatened on the call, demanding the money. At the trial Lombardo claimed that he had just been playacting like a gangster to scare the guy. “Like James Cagney,” he told the jury.
But in 1979, as Lombardo was being recorded by the feds, Hanhardt was deputy superintendent in CPD, despite his rumored mob connections. When Mayor Jane Byrne named Joseph DiLeonardi acting police superintendent, DiLeonardi took the early step of demoting Hanhardt and others, saying he was trying to rid the department of leadership with links to the mob-connected First Ward, which would later play such a major role in the Greylord scandal.
Hanhardt’s demotion to head of the traffic division was short-lived. When DiLeonardi’s permanent replacement, Richard Brzeczek, was named, he made Hanhardt head of the criminal investigations division. After all, Hanhardt was still being lauded for his uncanny ability to tap criminal networks for useful intelligence for the department. “Hanhardt, through his use of informants, has cleared more murders than DiLeonardi, even though Hanhardt never worked in homicide,” the Tribune quoted Brzeczek as saying. Hanhardt found himself in charge of some twelve hundred detectives.
Things did not progress as nicely for Hanhardt’s friend Dorfman. In 1983, outside a suburban Lincolnwood hotel where he was meeting a friend for lunch, someone shot him seven times and left him in a pool of blood on the pavement. The feds would link Frank “the German” Schweihs to the hit, presenting evidence he was one of two gunmen involved, though he was never charged.
Interestingly, when investigators went through what Dorfman had on him, they found his small personal phone book. Inside was Hanhardt’s number.
But even with those kinds of connections, authorities could put nothing on Hanhardt. He retired with honors in 1986, even though he had turned up in Las Vegas as a surprise witness for the defense in the trial of Outfit enforcer Anthony Spilotro not long beforehand.
It would take until 2000 for the federal government to catch up to Hanhardt, but when they did, the results were fairly spectacular. His thirty-one-page indictment spelled out the cold fact that Hanhardt was himself a criminal—and a good one—while also making
an accounting of all the supervisory police positions he had held. Chief of detectives, chief of traffic, commander of the burglary section, deputy superintendent for the bureau of inspectional services, and district commander. An exemplary record, which basically made Hanhardt the Colonel Kurtz of police supervisors. He had gone completely off the reservation, the feds alleged, acting as the leader of a sophisticated ring of jewelry thieves that targeted traveling sellers.
The ring included a man named Guy Altobello, who owned a suburban Chicago jewelry store, and Paul “the Indian” Schiro, who was one of the Chicago Outfit’s trusted representatives out west, operating in Las Vegas as well as his home base in Arizona. Though he was eventually replaced by Spilotro as the Outfit’s Las Vegas watchman, Schiro also ran his own burglary operation and was once a friend and partner of Emil Vaci, a restaurant manager and head of a tour company that shuttled gamblers from Phoenix to Las Vegas. Vaci also had been a casino pit boss and became a federal witness as investigators worked to figure out the mob’s skimming operations. His eventual murder by Nick Calabrese was described during the Family Secrets trial, in which Schiro was convicted and sentenced to twenty years in prison in 2009. In the Hanhardt ring, federal authorities alleged that Schiro was involved in surveilling people in the jewelry business out west and participating in heists.
According to his indictment, Hanhardt directed the gathering of information on potential targets as others in the ring followed traveling jewelry salesmen and learned their patterns. He used his police powers as well, authorities said, and personally participated in the thefts.
“He utilized certain CPD officers to do database searches of CPD and other law enforcement computers to obtain information concerning jewelry salespersons,” his indictment stated. “Similarly, he caused a private investigator to conduct credit bureau database searches and other database searches to gather information concerning individuals who were traveling jewelry salespersons.” Cars, homes, and hotels were surveilled as the ring looked for the most opportune moments to take watches and high-end jewelry valued in the millions of dollars.
They went as far as obtaining luggage identical to that routinely used by some salespeople and would switch it in moments when their target wasn’t paying close enough attention. Their tools were numerous, according to the feds, including “locksmith tools, keymaking machines … automobile keys, hotel keys, key blanks, lock picks, ‘slim jims,’ smoke grenades, fake mustaches and fake beard, key cutting dies, wrenches and other hand tools, evasion devices, taser, cam sets, key cutters, bulletproof vests, cameras, listening devices, and key code books.”
The ring would sometimes wait for salesmen to take their cars in for repairs and then stealthily have matching keys for the vehicles made. Once, in advance of a large trade show in Ohio, they managed to repeatedly distract hotel personnel to give themselves time to make copies of keys to safe-deposit boxes, which they then raided once they were stuffed with jewelry. That 1994 theft from a Hyatt netted the group jewelry, gems, and cash to the tune of more than $1.5 million.
Hanhardt eventually pleaded guilty and mentioned his police record at his sentencing hearing at the courthouse in downtown Chicago. “I still have the same amount of pride for this building and our criminal justice system,” the Tribune quoted Hanhardt as saying.
The judge wasn’t impressed and gave him a sentence of sixteen years. It was later reduced to eleven in 2004, but Hanhardt only saw a few years out from behind bars before his death in 2016 at age eighty-eight.
When John Hughes was killed, Jon Burge had been in the Chicago Police Department for six years, including four as a detective in Area Two, in the 9000 block of South Cottage Grove on the Southeast Side of Chicago. He was elevated to sergeant in 1977 and to a lieutenant overseeing detectives in 1981.
He was a US Army veteran who served in Vietnam, earning medals including the Bronze Star. He spent time as military police there and in Korea. In Chicago, he showed a real knack for “solving” crimes and getting subjects to confess, and while many believed he carried some of the interrogation techniques he developed during wartime to the streets of the city, Burge would later deny it. He would also deny systematically torturing suspects with beatings and electric shocks while at Area Two, though that was later alleged by the federal government.
His footprint on the Chicago police department remains considerable. In many ways he came to personify the wrongful conviction era in the city and the state, a woeful state of affairs that led to Governor George Ryan emptying the state’s death row and Illinois abolishing the death penalty. Before Burge, many would have had a difficult time believing there were any circumstances that would lead to anyone falsely admitting to a murder they did not commit. But Burge showed that phenomenon was real, and that inflicting the kind of punishment he did on suspects could make it happen. Authorities said Burge led a close band of detectives known as “the Midnight Crew,” which used the tactics to gain confessions.
But how early should those in power have suspected there was an insidious problem at Area Two?
Probably well before an avalanche of lawsuits over Burge’s conduct easily topped $100 million in payouts to men—most of them Black—who claimed they were tortured into false confessions that led to years behind bars. And probably well before 1993, when Burge finally was fired after credible allegations arose in the 1980s. It took until 2008 for Burge finally to face a criminal indictment. It was at the federal level and for perjury and obstruction of justice based on lies under oath while he was testifying in depositions in the civil cases brought by those who were subjected to his treatment.
In late 2019, the FBI released from its vault files on their investigation of Burge over the years. Among the hundreds of pages made public was a transcript of a hearing in 1987 in the case of a defendant named Shadeed Mu’min, who was trying to suppress a confession he had allegedly made in a murder case. The transcript noted there were two prosecutors there, one of whom was Cook County state’s attorney Richard M. Daley, who was still two years from becoming mayor. Among the witnesses were Burge, then the commander of the CPD bomb and arson unit, and Mu’min himself.
Burge testified he was leading the violent crimes unit of Area Two a couple of years earlier, on a 4 PM to midnight shift, when Mu’min was brought from the Seventh District and turned over to him for questioning about a robbery and attempted murder at a restaurant.
Burge said he only had a conversation of five or so minutes with Mu’min and didn’t really see him after that because his detectives were working the case. He said he certainly didn’t harm him or threaten to kill him. “I told him the reason why he was there, told him the evidence that we had against him, told him that certain statements had been made by a codefendant in the case implicating he was one of the offenders,” Burge said. “Various idle chatter. Nothing to the point. No questions relative to the case.”
But that wasn’t the version of events Mu’min gave when he took the witness stand.
He had been pulled over by an unmarked squad car near Seventy-First and Halsted in October 1985, Mu’min testified, and officers asked him about having guns in his car. He did have a pistol in his car, he said, and he was taken in for questioning.
When he arrived at Area Two, he said, he was placed in a small room, and Burge entered and immediately handcuffed him to a wall. The hook the cuffs were attached to was so high, Mu’min testified, he was unable to sit down. Burge told him he wanted information about a robbery, which Mu’min said he had no knowledge of. So the two men went back and forth, before Mu’min testified that Burge said, “You’ll talk before you leave here,” and left the room. As an apparent message, Burge returned a few minutes later and tightened the cuffs and then left for about thirty minutes, before returning yet again and asking whether Mu’min was ready to talk. The tightening of the cuffs did nothing to spur a memory that Mu’min didn’t have, and he again told Burge he didn’t know what he was talking about.
Burge pushed him
against the wall, Mu’min said, and then led him down a hallway to an office. There, Burge confronted him again, threatening to “bury” him in prison. Mu’min still had nothing to offer, at which point Burge told him police really were interested in his son. Mu’min still resisted and said he had no information, at which time he said Burge took a .44 revolver out of a desk drawer and removed all but one bullet from the cylinder. He held the gun to Mu’min’s head and pulled the trigger three times.
“You’re damned lucky I didn’t kill you,” he quoted Burge as telling him.
“Do you know of your own knowledge whether or not there were any bullets in the gun when he was pulling the trigger?” a lawyer asked Mu’min.
“One,” he answered. “He took them all out except one.”
“You believe there was one?” he was asked.
“I seen it with my own eyes,” Mu’min answered.
“And did he snap the trigger slowly or quickly?”
“Snapped it slowly,” Mu’min said. “He pulled it up, put it to my head and pulled it, snapped it and locked, turned it again and pulled it, and the third time he did it he took it away and said, ‘Oh, you’re not afraid, huh?’ And I just looked at him.”
Burge became enraged, Mu’min said, and jumped up from the desk. Nearby was a typewriter with a brown vinyl cover over it. Burge snatched that off the machine and pulled it over Mu’min’s head.
“You’ll fucking talk or I’ll kill you,” he said Burge told him. Burge and a detective then held the bag there, pinning Mu’min down.
“I tried to move my head but I couldn’t move it,” Mu’min testified. “Every time I moved he would move and push it, and finally I passed out.”