Back in the mid 1980’s, I got assigned to a case against a
drug smuggling ring headquartered in Chicago. The interesting thing about this
ring was that approximately half of the members of the ring were either current
or former Chicago police officers. The charges included Racketeering,
Conspiracy to Murder, Kidnapping, and Murder. Two of the men we indicted were
reputed to be organized crime hit men. You can read a more in-depth account of
the case in my blog post titled THE WRONG MAN MURDER.
The nice thing about working on the case was that I wasn’t
the lead prosecutor. I had been called in to help out on the case when the
defense team filed somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 pretrial motions.
Although I didn’t like pretrial motion practice, I was pretty good at it, so I
got assigned.
After the dust had settled and the smoke had cleared from
hearing all the pretrial motions, I stayed on to assist in the trial of the case.
This was probably the most complex case I ever tried, which was probably
another reason I was kept on after the motion hearings. I was also pretty good
at organizing vast quantities of evidence. The office was just entering the
computer age, and our system came with a very primitive database program. I used
the database program to work out a system for organizing and keeping track of
all our witnesses and evidentiary exhibits. It was fun, and I got totally hooked
on computerizing trial preparation.
The trial team was a reunion of the Ted Bundy trial team. Len
Register was the lead prosecutor, Jerry Blair assumed the role of “player-coach,”
and I was the water boy. We tried the case on change of venue to Tallahassee
Florida, and I rented a room in a fleabag motel hoping to economize on travel
expenses. When we had tried Ted Bundy a few years before, I had run up a
whopping credit card bill which took a good long while to pay off, and I wasn’t
planning on doing that again.
Jerry and Len seemed awfully nervous about personal safety.
They both carried concealed weapons which they had to turn in to courthouse
security every morning and retrieve every afternoon. FDLE had formed a witness
protection team which acted as bodyguards for our important witnesses, some of
whom actually testified while wearing bullet proof vests. Initially I thought this was a silly display
of paranoia, and I took great pleasure in kidding Jerry and Len about their
timidity.
Then some relatives of one of the reputed hit men came to
town in a black Cadillac and started attending the trial. The Sheriff’s Office
tactical unit kept tabs on them while they were in town. They did some strange
things, but nothing you could really call criminal. They got blamed for one
thing that happened, but there was really no proof they were responsible. Somebody
booby trapped the bomb squad which swept our courtroom for explosive devices every
morning. One morning while they were in the
courtroom sweeping for bombs, somebody was taking the lugnuts off of two of the
tires to their van. After they got through sweeping the courtroom, they went
back to the van, got in, and drove off. They hadn’t gone very far before the
wheels fell off. I thought it was funny.
I started losing my sense of humor one night about two in
the morning when I got a call on my hotel phone. I answered the phone, but my
caller did not speak. I said “Hello” several times but got no response. It wasn’t
a hang up call, my caller stayed on the line unspeaking. I hung up the phone
and went to the manager’s office. The motel was so primitive that there was a
little switchboard in the manager’s office. Callers would call the main number
and ask for a room, and the manager would connect the caller to the requested room.
I wanted to know who the blazes had called, and the night manager ought to
know.
He didn’t. Somebody had just called and asked to be put
through to my room, and the manager had obliged. I told the manager I needed to
change rooms, and I needed to change rooms immediately. He put me up in a room
at the other end of the motel from the room I had rented. I slept there that night, and moved my luggage into the room the next day. I continued to park my car in front of my original room.
Then somebody scrawled a death threat on the window of one
of the juror’s hotel room. Then one night somebody got to the judge’s
car, lifted the hood, and unhooked one pole of the battery. He was seen and
fled on foot before he could do anything else. Of course, the theory law
enforcement liked was that he was trying to hook a bomb to the judge’s car. The next weekend I drove back to Lake City and retrieved a handgun.
As I said, the Sheriff’s Office tactical unit was keeping
track of the black Cadillac as it tooled about town, but sometimes they lost
it. One of those nights when they lost the Cadillac I was suffering from
insomnia. I decided what I needed was a nice Diet Coke, so I stepped out of my
room to walk to the one drink machine in the motel. It was then that I saw a
black Cadillac pulling into the motel parking lot. I faded into the shrubbery
and watched. The Cadillac turned to drive in the direction of my car, which was
still parked in front of my old motel room. When it turned, I could see the
license plate—an Illinois tag. The Cadillac slowed down in front of my car,
made a U-turn, and drove back out of the parking lot. I got out of the bushes,
went to a phone, and called the tactical unit. They posted a highly visible guard
on my room for the rest of the night, and I moved out the next morning.
I moved to the motel that was being used by the witness
protection team and got the room next door to theirs. It was much more
expensive, but I slept much better in my new room. Finally the trial ended, and
I can’t say that I was unhappy to be through with it. I believe that two of the
defendants were among the most dangerous men I ever prosecuted, and I have
prosecuted many dangerous men.
