by Jeff Coen
“What effect did it have on you when he put the cover over your face?”
“Felt like I would die,” Mu’min answered.
After Burge did that to him two more times, Mu’min said, he cracked. He would sign anything, he said he told the officers, he just wanted to be allowed to go. OK, Burge said, but he had a final message.
“If you tell somebody, nobody will believe you because there’s no marks on you and you better sign the fucking statement when this attorney gets here tomorrow,” Mu’min said Burge told him. “If you don’t, you’ll get it even worse than what I did to you now.”
And it was not an isolated incident, according to those who later investigated Burge. A long series of defendants described similar circumstances of torture, along with having their feet and testicles beaten. One plaintiff, Andrew Wilson, alleged two Burge detectives used torture techniques on him to get him to confess in a case of the double murder of two police officers. Wilson said he was subjected to mistreatment including the detectives holding his abdomen and chest against a hot radiator.
That treatment did leave marks, and the injuries worried Superintendent Brzeczek enough to write a letter to Daley, who was still the Cook County state’s attorney. But, again, nothing was done.
Daley would be sued a number of times over his role in the torture scandal but apparently testified in a deposition only one time. That testimony, in the case of a man named Alonzo Smith, never was made public. Smith alleged he was kicked and beaten with a rubber club, among other things, before he confessed to a 1993 murder, which he spent about twenty years in prison for. Smith alleged that Burge detectives Peter Dignan and John Byrne tortured him, and that other police officers and lead prosecutors, including Daley, did nothing about it.
As that case progressed in 2016, US District Court judge Amy St. Eve rejected a motion to dismiss the complaint, including against Daley, and issued a unique ruling:
Plaintiff specifically alleges that while Defendant Daley was Mayor: (1) he did not disclose exculpatory information in his possession from the date he resigned as State’s Attorney of Cook County in 1989 until he left the Mayor’s office in 2011; (2) he did not intervene at any time to direct the CPD to disclose exculpatory information in its possession regarding Defendant Burge and detectives under his command; and (3) he did not direct the CPD to conduct a thorough and aggressive investigation of Defendants Burge, Byrne, Dignan, and the other detectives who tortured and abused African-American men while working under Defendant Burge’s command…. Plaintiff also alleges that in furtherance of this conspiracy, Defendant Daley: (1) repeatedly discredited OPS findings of the systemic torture under Defendant Burge at Area 2; (2) refused to direct Defendant Martin (as CPD Superintendent) to initiate criminal investigations or disciplinary proceedings against Defendant Burge and CPD Detectives under his command; (3) rejected advise from senior staff that the City should sue Defendant Burge rather than continue to defend him in civil proceedings despite Defendant Daley’s knowledge of Defendant Burge’s wrongdoing; and (4) made false public statements in July 2006 in response to a Special Prosecutor’s Report…. These allegations sufficiently allege that Defendant Daley, as Chicago’s Mayor, participated in a conspiracy to conceal evidence of police torture.
That special prosecutor determined Burge and his men coerced dozens of confessions but that too much time had passed to file any charges.
By 2016, of course, Daley was no longer mayor. He had turned the reins over to Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who would deal with his own major police scandal in due course. The city would go on to settle the Smith case for more than $5 million.
As for Burge, he was rousted from his home in Florida in late 2008 and charged federally with perjury and obstruction of justice. Prosecutors worked around issues with the statute of limitations by contending that when Burge submitted answers to lawyers for former death row inmate Madison Hobley denying participating in torture, he had perjured himself.
It was a relatively brief answer to torture allegations that Burge gave in a 2003 interrogatory that ultimately sunk him. “I have never used any techniques set forth above as a means of improper coercion of suspects while in detention or during interrogation” was his written response.
Federal prosecutors needed to prove up the torture to prove that Burge had lied about it, setting up a bit of a trial within a trial as Burge’s history was laid out in federal court in 2010. Prosecutors presented evidence that Burge and detectives close to him systematically subjected suspects to physical and psychological abuse. Among the witnesses was Shadeed Mu’min, who repeated his tale of Burge holding a gun to his head and cutting off his air with a typewriter bag, twenty-three years after he had raised the allegation in his own case, in the hearing that the FBI kept a transcript of.
Burge ultimately was convicted and was sentenced to four and a half years in prison, most of which he served at a low-security federal correctional facility in North Carolina. After his release, he returned to Florida, where he settled back into retirement on his $4,000-a-month pension, which the Chicago police pension board had split over stripping from him, leaving it in place.
Burge died in 2018, his legacy as one of Chicago’s most notorious police officers thenceforth memorialized in the history books—quite literally. After Mayor Emanuel issued a public apology for Burge’s conduct, the city, as part of a settlement with many of his torture victims, agreed to add information about Burge and his crew to the high school curriculum in Chicago Public Schools in 2017.
Over recent decades Chicago has endured a number of scandals involving officers who crossed the line from trying to combat the city’s vast drug networks to becoming a part of them. The play-book has ranged from simply taking money to allow narcotics rings to operate to actively becoming part of the game. Plainclothes narcotics officers often work closely with confidential sources to understand where larger quantities of drugs and cash are going to move. That knowledge can lead to certain temptations.
Some officers have found themselves skimming cash they were supposed to be inventorying. Others have stolen the actual narcotics and made their own drug deals on the side. Recent examples have included the crew of Jerome Finnigan, Sherlock’s old friend, who shook down drug dealers and led to the disbanding of the special operations section. The debacle became known as the SOS Scandal and included Finnigan’s eventual attempt to hire a hit man to kill a witness.
Officers Broderick “Big Thirsty” Jones and Corey Flagg led a group of Englewood District officers who were busted in 2005. The ring used informants to track drug movements and then interrupted the shipments. Jones and Flagg were known to wear their police stars and vests and stop vehicles on the street to make their illegal work look legitimate. They would confiscate large quantities of narcotics and then sell the take back into the drug networks.
“You and your merry band essentially raped and plundered entire areas,” US District Judge Ronald Guzman said when he sentenced some of the convicted officers. The cops had sent “lethal poison” back onto the city’s streets instead of protecting the residents of some of Chicago’s poorest areas, and they had destroyed CPD reputation in the process. “People see and hear what goes on in these courtrooms,” Guzman said, “and the next time they look at a police officer, they see you.”
Jones was sentenced to twenty-five years as the ringleader of the group. Interestingly enough, leading the prosecution of that case was John Lausch, who would go on to be named US attorney in Chicago in 2017, leading more than 150 attorneys in that office.
Other examples of corruption have included rings of rogue cops that have been given now-familiar numeric labels after authorities caught on to their activities. The Austin Seven. The Marquette Ten. The Marquette District officers were convicted of taking bribes to allow dealers to operate. It was a scandal that would splash eventual Chicago police superintendent Phil Cline, as Cline was working in the area at the time and discrepancies arose over paperwork used to get approvals for s
earches in cases that would lead to the uncovering of the scandal. Cline was never accused of wrongdoing but invoked his Fifth Amendment rights when asked about it.
In the long list of officers who have gotten in trouble in the illicit drug trade, no one took things as far as Joseph Miedzianowski, considered by many to be the most corrupt officer the city has ever produced. Instead of just cavorting with drug dealers or taking bribes from them or robbing them, Miedzianowski ran his own Miami-to-Chicago drug enterprise with the help of street gangs, complete with drug couriers at O’Hare International Airport, stash houses, and fake identities. He led members of the ring, whom he protected and armed, and fixed their criminal cases if they got in trouble.
Miedzianowski, an Evanston native, became a Chicago police officer in 1976, just a few months after Hughes was killed. And like many rogue cops, he showed an unusual proficiency in dealing with Chicago’s underworld. He worked criminal networks seemingly like no one else, showing a knack for getting guns off the street. He moved from early work in the Foster District to time on an elite anti-gangs unit, earning the nickname “Hammerin’ Joe.”
The 1998 charges against Miedzianowski were fairly epic. An indictment detailed how the cop—with the help of coconspirators, including a woman whom Miedzianowski had struck up a relationship with—moved cocaine from Miami to Chicago and then cash back in the other direction. Members of the conspiracy would transport the drugs to Chicago on commercial airline flights, and Miedzianowski and his girlfriend would meet the couriers at the airport and take them to various stash houses on the North Side. There the drugs would be processed into sellable cocaine.
“It was further a part of the conspiracy that defendant Joseph Jerome Miedzianowski protected the conspiracy from law enforcement activities of the Chicago Police Department by providing conspirators with identities of Chicago Police Officers acting undercover and descriptions of undercover vehicles involved in investigations,” the indictment against Miedzianowski said. He had provided his ring with the names of informants as well. And in exchange for that help, gang members would give Miedzianowski the names of dealers that he could rob.
His story was chronicled in depth by veteran Chicago Tribune reporter Todd Lighty. Lighty laid out how things finally began to come apart for Miedzianowski in a 2003 Tribune story headlined FORMER COP CROSSED LINE, DESTROYED IT.
The unlikely tip-off came when an AT&T security operator called and left a message for Miedzianowski at gang crimes, wanting to talk to him about a wiretap. Miedzianowski knew he hadn’t ordered one, so he called back and slyly asked if the question was about phone monitoring of a suspect ordered by him.
“Well, not necessarily … it has your name on the order,” the operator said, according to Lighty. Miedzianowski hung up and quickly set about burning down his little empire, ordering players to get rid of evidence. He told one gang member to ditch a handgun Miedzianowski had given him for Christmas, investigators said.
FBI agents up on the phone line heard the end of their covert probe, and quickly scrambled to arrest members of the ring. Miedzianowski eventually was convicted in 2001, and after adding a threat to kill the lead federal prosecutor on his case, Brian Netols, to his resume, was sentenced to life in prison.
Miedzianowski maintained that his outrageous criminal career was overblown by prosecutors. “The Chicago Fire? Mrs. O’Leary’s cow didn’t do it, I did,” he told Todd Lighty in a prison interview. “Am I behind anthrax? The Twin Tower attacks? What the hell didn’t I do?”
He stayed out of the news for several years after that, until 2007, when his lawyer tried to get some of his seized property back from authorities. But instead of itemizing it, the attorney simply attached an inventory sheet to the request. It included gas masks, rifles, and bulletproof vests.
“You seem to be seeking a key to a Chicago Police Department vehicle?” the judge who heard the request said sarcastically at a hearing on the matter. Least shockingly, Netols opposed the idea.
The request also included some very unusual items, including two samurai swords taken from Miedzianowski, along with Nazi memorabilia from the WWII era. That included SS cufflinks, a dagger, and “one sterling silver Nazi SS death head ring signed ‘Heinrich Himmler.’” Some of the non-weapon items eventually were made available to Miedzianowski’s family.
In the fallout from the Miedzianowski case, two married ATF agents sued the city, alleging they were retaliated against by CPD’s internal affairs division after they tried to blow the whistle on Miedzianowski’s corruption. The same year Miedzianowski was trying to get his property back, the ATF couple attached to their court filings an expert report by analyst and onetime Los Angeles deputy police chief Lou Reiter. The wanted to bring Reiter into the case as they attempted to show how police leadership had allowed someone like Miedzianowski to thrive under their watch.
Reiter had a twenty-year police career, had consulted with departments across the country, and had been retained as an expert in more than one thousand cases. His findings in Chicago were stinging. The so-called “code of silence” was so entrenched in the city that police officers had no real expectation of being caught and disciplined for wrongdoing. According to Reiter’s report, which was filed as part of the court docket in the case:
The failure of the Chicago Police Department to acknowledge its potential and take affirmative steps to eliminate or minimize the influence of the Code of Silence, in my opinion, is a conscious choice various Chicago Police managers and executive officers have taken and, in my opinion, represents a position of deliberate indifference by the Chicago Police Department to this disruptive issue within the agency. Any reasonable officer in the Chicago Police Department would be aware of the systemic deficiencies in the administrative investigative process and the discipline deliberative system coupled with the entrenched effect of the Code of Silence. Those officers who engage in misconduct and violate citizens’ Constitutional rights would do so with the perception that their misconduct would go undiscovered or investigated in such a deficient manner or subjected to prolonged delay in adjudication that they would not be held accountable or sanctioned.
Reiter noted that the Miedzianowski prosecutor, Netols, had been deposed in the civil case and said he had seen such a situation in each of the eighteen cases he had brought against cops over his career. Phil Cline, by then the superintendent, had been deposed as well, and Reiter noted that Cline once had been Miedzianowski’s supervisor. Cline apparently had seen enough problems with Miedzianowski to ban him from Area Five, but things went no further. Reiter also cited the deposition of former police superintendent Matt Rodriguez, who led the department at that point and said there was a backlog of police disciplinary cases. Rodriguez stepped away from the department in 1997 after the Austin Seven case had damaged its reputation and after the Tribune disclosed that Rodriguez had violated department rules against fraternizing with known felons. The paper reported Rodriguez had been longtime friends with Frank Milito, a man who pleaded guilty to mail fraud and failing to pay $300,000 in taxes on sales at a gas station he owned.
The ATF couple would win their suit against the city. And by late 2019, Miedzianowski was serving out his life term at FCI Pekin in Illinois. The case surely should have sounded a wide warning that there were flaws in the department and its command structure that would continue to allow problems and foster problem officers. But anyone who was expecting wholesale changes in the wake of the Miedzianowski case would be disappointed.
On October 20, 2014, what should have been a minor incident set in motion a series of events that would shake Chicago to its core and once again cast a spotlight on the failings of the city’s police department and its command structure.
Callers rang in to 911 dispatchers at about 9:45 PM, reporting that a teen seemed to be trying to steal radios out of trucks sitting in lots near Forty-First Street and Kildare Avenue, near a collection of warehouses almost abutting the Stevenson Expressway on the city’s Southwest Side. One
caller had tried to confront him, but the teen allegedly swung a small pocketknife in his direction and started away from the area on foot.
The first Chicago police SUVs to arrive swerved into the area of the lots, only to have a witness point them toward Pulaski Road. The teen in dark blue jeans and a black hoodie—a seventeen-year-old named Laquan McDonald—was meandering on side streets and through parking lots away from the responding officers.
At one point one of the SUV’s tried to cut him off, but the teen stabbed one of its tires with the knife, which had a blade of only a few inches, and officers backed off. Finally, Laquan moved through a Burger King parking lot and onto Pulaski. He continued with bounding steps, at times almost in a skip. He was a ward of the state being raised by a great-grandmother, and he had taken PCP that night, according to authorities, though it wouldn’t account for what happened to him. Police radios in the squad cars chirped on and off as officers followed him, reported where they were, and asked that someone armed with a Taser report to the area to help stop the teen.
Officer Jason Van Dyke, a thirteen-year CPD veteran, and his partner for that night, Joseph Walsh, had been getting coffee at a 7-Eleven a few blocks to the south when the calls came in. They rocketed northward in a marked Chevy Tahoe, joining other officers swarming toward the scene. They arrived with Walsh at the wheel, turning left onto Fortieth just as Laquan was cutting through the Burger King lot to their south, onto Pulaski and back in the direction they had come from.
Walsh and Van Dyke jumped a curb and sidewalk in pursuit, aiming their squad back south on Pulaski, hooking around to the left of Laquan as he continued walking, and then left again around another SUV that had stopped in the median turn lane of the four-lane street. Walsh stopped his SUV just beyond that squad car, and Van Dyke quickly opened his door. Laquan continued walking southbound in their general direction but veered away from them, through the left lane of the street in the direction he was walking and then into the right lane, appearing as if he had every intention of continuing past the stopped squad cars on foot.