by Jeff Coen
Jim Sherlock did join the Cook County state’s attorney’s office in 2020. His work included assisting with cold cases.
In fact, in the fall of 2020, Sherlock drove back to Sandwich to tell Costello that he was not fully retired, and that the case would stay on his mind and on his new desk. If Costello would speak to him, there was still a path to doing the right thing. There had been some thought about whistling Costello to the FBI building in Chicago for potential questioning, as some agents thought there was enough probable cause to at least bring him in. Ultimately that plan was abandoned, as Sherlock and those he worked with believed it would only cause Costello to bring in his lawyer and perhaps seal off that route for good.
Instead, Sherlock decided again on a soft sell. He didn’t announce he was coming, and arrived to find that Costello wasn’t at home. He spoke to the man’s wife, delivering his message and leaving hopeful that maybe the woman could convince her husband to share the truth about what happened and move on with his life. But it was not to be. A few days later, Sherlock was faxed a letter from Costello’s lawyer again declining to make him available and requesting that any future requests go through the lawyer’s office.
As Sherlock dug into his new job, he had a conversation with a CPD detective who worked cold cases, and brought him up to speed on the Hughes investigation. The two discussed locking in the accounts of Larry Raddatz and Mary Mestrovic Murrihy before a Cook County grand jury, and perhaps eventually granting Costello full immunity, compelling his testimony and overriding any Fifth Amendment claim. But obstacles remained, including grand jury activity being slowed by the coronavirus pandemic and the need for Sherlock to get the full commitment of the state’s attorney’s office.
Sherlock’s old team, CE-6 at the FBI, made headlines in late 2018 with a sweeping racketeering case against the Goonie Boss street gang, a faction of Chicago’s powerful Gangster Disciples. The gang had run roughshod through Englewood, racking up some eleven murders.
The investigation was such a success, it led local FBI leaders to think the unit needed its own space, somewhere away from the main FBI Chicago headquarters on Roosevelt Road near Western Avenue. One of the considerations was having closer access to the South Side areas like the ones they had worked in the Goonie Boss investigation. Something really local.
Among the spaces they looked at using was the old Ninth District police station at Thirty-Fifth and Lowe, the building so heavily linked to the Hughes case, where police leaders took over interviews and took Mary Mestrovic’s statement out of the hands of detectives in 1976. The FBI looked at the space, shuffling through dust and peeling paint. Paperwork was left on tables and desks, remaining in the places it sat when the last Chicago cops walked out and the building was abandoned.
It had taken a star turn once before.
The old police district was featured in a brief scene in the 1948 classic black-and-white movie Call Northside 777, a film noir that starred Jimmy Stewart as a snappy Chicago newspaper reporter chasing the truth about a 1932 murder of a cop in a speakeasy in the waning months of Prohibition. The film mirrored an actual case of a wrongful conviction based on a bad identification by a witness.
Just before Stewart’s character P. J. McNeal heads to the Ninth District building, which is playing the part of the New City police district in the movie, he calls into the station, acting as if he’s a ranking officer at CPD headquarters.
He asks the cop who answers the phone whether an arrest report is there on the man who was charged and convicted, a poor sap named Frank Wiecek.
The fake-out works. Yes, the cop answers, the report is there. And Stewart is just in time. An unnamed someone had already directed officers in the station to do something with it.
That direction, the cop says to McNeal, was to remove the paperwork from their files.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project simply does not happen without Jim Sherlock, whose work on the Hughes case is the central thread of this story. Thank you, Jim, for trusting me to tell the tale of your effort, and thank you for the help you provided in so many ways. I will always remember getting to know you as part of this project. I owe you more than one trip to Cafe Bionda.
Thank you very much to the Hughes family, in particular Ellen Hughes Morrissey, for welcoming me into your home. A special thanks as well to Mary Mestrovic Murrihy, for taking the step of talking to yet another unknown person about your experiences.
Thank you as well to Terry Strong, John Raddatz, and Brian O’Malley for taking the time to relate your memories.
Special thanks to Nuccio DiNuzzo, a former Chicago Tribune photographer who did work on this project and took the author photo.
I’d also of course like to thank my family and friends for their support of this project. In particular I would like to thank my wife Tracy. Work like this usually places stress on other parts of an author’s life, both at home and at work, and this was no different. That situation was not helped by the fact that as the writing was coming together, Tracy was preparing to give birth to our daughter, Sloane. Thank you, Trace, for tolerating me and the nights and weekends in front of a laptop and for everything else. And thanks, Sloanie Macaroni, for the hard work of occasionally taking a nap.
Thanks also to my mother-in-law Lisa, for all of the support and help with our new family and for being there for us always. Also thank you to Meredith and Liam for your love always and to my parents, Doug and Kathy Coen. Thanks to Chris and Mike, Jeremy and Denise, and Vince Cook for their support as well.
Thank you to my colleagues at the Chicago Tribune, where I have now spent more than twenty years of my professional life. Thanks especially to Peter Kendall, a former editor, and other management there for the allowance to produce this book. Thanks to my often partner Stacy St. Clair for your friendship. Thank you to my friends on “the String.”
Thank you also to those who assisted me in getting certain public documents needed for the project, in particular Joseph Fitzpatrick of the US attorney’s office in Chicago, for help with federal court records.
And thanks, finally, to my friends at Chicago Review Press. Cynthia Sherry, the publisher there, can now be counted as a longtime supporter. Thanks for taking my calls on this and for having faith in it. And thank you to my editor, Kara Rota. Your thoughts and guidance were essential to making this work.
ADDITIONAL REFERENCES
Most references, including books, newspaper stories, official reports, and other materials, are cited by name at the appropriate point in the text, but not all. Here is a list of other helpful books, articles, and publications that influenced and informed this work. The author is thankful for the efforts of so many great writers and reporters who have informed Chicagoans about their city for so long.
Belluck, Pam. “Top Chicago Police Official Will Retire over Disclosure.” New York Times, November 15, 1997.
Cole, Patrick. “Key Cop with Longtime Clout to Retire from Chicago Force.” Chicago Tribune, February 1, 2000.
Dyja, Thomas. The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream. New York: Penguin Books, 2013.
Farr, Finis. Chicago: A Personal History of America’s Most American City. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House Publishers, 1973.
Garmes, Kyle. “Haberkorn, 94, Tough, Loyal Cop, Loving Family Man.” Beverly Review, May 22, 2018.
Gorman, John. “Court Told of Mob-Negotiated Gambling ‘Tax.’” Chicago Tribune, April 12, 1991.
Gorner, Jeremy, and Annie Sweeney. “William Hanhardt: 1928– 2016; Ex-Cop Convicted of Running Jewel Theft Operation.” Chicago Tribune, December 31, 2016.
Hinkel, Dan. “CPD Misses Deadlines on Reforms.” Chicago Tribune, November 16, 2019.
Lombardo, Robert. Organized Crime in Chicago: Beyond the Mafia. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013.
Pacyga, Dominic. Chicago: A Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Pascente, Fred, and Sam Reaves. Mob Cop: My Life of Crime in the Chicago Pol
ice Department. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2015.
Police Accountability Task Force. “Recommendations for Reform: Restoring Trust Between the Chicago Police and the Communities They Serve.” April 2016.
Sobol, Rosemary, Jeremy Gorner, and David Heinzmann. “Jon Burge: 1947–2018; Disgraced Officer Long Tied to Torture.” Chicago Tribune, September 20, 2018.
Stein, Sharman. “Canaryville Beatings Prompt 2 Cop Firings.” Chicago Tribune, March 21, 1992.
United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and United States Attorney’s Office Northern District of Illinois. “Investigation of the Chicago Police Department.” January 13, 2017.
JEFF COEN is the Chicago Tribune crime and justice editor. He is the author of Family Secrets: The Case That Crippled the Chicago Mob and the coauthor of Golden: How Rod Blagojevich Talked Himself Out of the Governor’s Office and into Prison.
Jacket design: Jonathan Hahn
Author photo: Nuccio DiNuzzo
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