CHICAGO (AP) — The anonymous letters to attorney G. Flint Taylor arrived in police department envelopes, and so the mysterious author was dubbed "Deep Badge."
It was 1989 and Taylor was representing a notorious
killer — Andrew Wilson, who had shot two police officers and was behind bars
for life. He'd originally been sentenced to death but won a new trial after the
Illinois Supreme Court ruled his confession had been coerced.
Wilson was now in federal court, claiming that
during questioning in the police killings he'd been beaten, tortured with
electric shocks, forced onto a hot radiator and smothered with a plastic bag.
Among those he was suing: Chicago police commander Jon Burge, a decorated
Vietnam veteran.
Taylor was no stranger to unpopular causes. Through
the years, his firm — the People's Law Office — has represented the Black
Panthers, anti-war activists and members of the FALN, the militant Puerto Rican
independence group. So taking on the police wasn't a stretch.
But if Deep Badge was to be believed, this case was
different. A ring of cops, the anonymous letter writer said, was torturing
criminal suspects.
The letters launched Taylor on a 22-year odyssey
from the streets to the courts to death row and into the heart of a scandal
that would stain Chicago for decades.
Abuse claims like Andrew Wilson's would multiply.
At first, there were a few. Then dozens. Eventually, more than 100 black men
claimed Burge or his colleagues beat or tortured them to extract confessions or
information on everything from robbery to murder.
Like Wilson, many of the accusers already were on
the police radar: They had mug shots, rap sheets and prison records. They
included gang members, robbers, drug abusers — and convicted killers.
But in this topsy-turvy scandal, they claimed to be
the victims. The police, they said, were the villains.
___
The first letter was postmarked Feb. 2, 1989.
The author appeared be an insider at Area 2, the
South Side headquarters where Burge headed the violent crimes unit for several
years. The letter contained tantalizing tidbits, including a claim that
officers had used "torture machines" and that one such device had
been tossed off Burge's boat. (The boat's name? The Vigilante.)
Talk with other police officers, the letter said,
because, "some of them were disgusted and will tell all. The torture was
not necessary."
If Taylor wanted to know more, he was told to place
a personal ad in a local newspaper.
He did, then waited more than a month.
"I have learned something that will blow the
lid off of your case," the second letter said.
It urged Taylor to look for other cases where the
machine was used. It also listed officers' names, dividing them between Burge
allies and "weak links" who had strained relations with him.
More than a week later, while Taylor was
cross-examining Burge as part of Wilson's civil case, he received a third
letter and a phone message with the same tip: Talk with Melvin Jones in Cook
County Jail.
That visit turned out to be a revelation. The case
was much bigger than one man.
Jones, an admitted gang member with a lengthy
criminal record, told a story later corroborated in city legal documents: After
refusing to confess to murder, Jones was shocked in the genitals, foot and
thigh by Burge with a hand-cranked electric device. Burge, he said, also
pointed a gun to his head.
The methods Jones described became part of a
pattern of abuse claims. The electric box was the most sensational. Others
included kicking, beatings with phone books (to avoid leaving bruises), mock
Russian roulette, smothering suspects with plastic or typewriter covers (it was
called bagging) and using a cattle prod-like device.
In June 1989, Deep Badge (the name was a nod to
"Deep Throat," the informant in the Watergate scandal) wrote again,
claiming Burge was the leader and officers involved "were either weak and
easily led or sadists."
The letter also warned about false allegations.
"Alot of people have to do the rest of their
lives in jail so check and make sure they are telling the truth," the
writer said.
It was the last letter Flint Taylor received.
But his work — along with that of many other
lawyers and investigators — was just beginning.
"All of a sudden, the case was getting
notoriety," he says. "We'd be talking to public defenders and they'd
say, 'I had a case back in the '80s and my client said he was tortured.' We
started getting letters from prison. We were able to put together lists, interview
people and find transcripts."
"It was just like peeling an onion."
___
Francine Sanders had embarked on her own search for
truth.
In 1990, she was a civilian investigator for what
was then the police department's Office of Professional Standards, assigned to
the Wilson case. Since eight years had passed since his arrest and some key
people were dead, Sanders focused mostly on tens of thousands of pages of
police reports, medical records and court transcripts.
Her 66-page report substantiated Wilson's abuse story.
"I looked at all the evidence," she recalls, "and there was no
other possible explanation for someone in police custody coming in looking one
way, leaving looking another way."
The work, she says, was grim duty. First, there
were the details of a cold-blooded murder of two police officers by Wilson and
his brother, Jackie (he also was convicted), a crime that had triggered a
massive manhunt in the city. Then there was the brutality Andrew Wilson
described.
"You're looking at the darkest, ugliest part
of human beings," she says. "While you're satisfied you've gotten to
the truth, the truth is horrific."
As Sanders reviewed records, another investigator
for the same agency was trying to determine if this was an isolated episode.
His report, released in 1992, was damning: It said
"the preponderance of the evidence" showed abuse in Area 2 was
"systematic" over more than a decade and included "planned
torture." It also concluded some in the police command "perpetuated
it either by actively participating in same or failing to take any action to
bring it to an end."
The next year, Burge was fired because of the
Wilson case. Another officer was suspended for 15 months.
Flint Taylor kept chipping away. So did others.
They were all heading into another direction: the death house.
___
In the 1990s, a group of prisoners called the Death
Row 10 emerged.
They claimed they'd been beaten or tortured by
Burge or his associates, mostly resulting in false confessions. But proving
that was something else. It was part of a larger hurdle in this case — getting
authorities to believe the accusers and see them as victims.
"I think it's likely that Burge and his men
rationalize the misconduct by saying ... these guys are lowlifes, they're
heinous criminals, it doesn't matter, they deserve what they get," says
Locke Bowman, legal director of the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern
University and lawyer for some alleged Burge victims.
"The system tacitly or otherwise was prepared
to go along with that rationale," he adds. "What starts to upend that
is when you look at cases ... where the Burge crew got it wrong and the guys
were innocent. The problem with vigilante justice is at the end of the day, you
can't sort the guilty from the innocent."
Taylor agrees.
"What proves the lie to anyone who says it's
OK to torture the cop killer, but it's not OK to torture the innocent people is
how do you know which is which?" he asks.
He points to a 13-year-old questioned in a killing
who claimed detectives under Burge's command shocked him until he felt he was
going to die. (A judge threw out his confession.)
Taylor began representing Aaron Patterson, one of
the Death Row 10 who'd been convicted of a double murder but had used a paper
clip to crudely scratch a message on a police station bench, recanting:
"Aaron I lie about murders, police threaten me with violence ...."
As Patterson's case was being appealed, then-Gov.
George Ryan, days from leaving office, upended the state's criminal justice
system by commuting the sentences of everyone on death row. He'd already halted
executions when 13 inmates were found to have been wrongly convicted.
Ryan also pardoned four of the Death Row 10 —
including Patterson — and said a "manifest injustice" had occurred
because police tortured them into false confessions. He placed blame on
"the brutal police work" of Burge. (Years later, the four would reach
a $20 million settlement with the city.)
By this time, a special prosecutor was digging into
allegations against Burge and others. Investigators soon ran into a wall of
resistance: Thirty former detectives and supervisors in two South Side areas —
Burge was among them — took the Fifth Amendment when asked about allegations of
torture and abuse of dozens of suspects.
But small cracks began to surface.
Taylor took statements from a handful of retired
black detectives who maintained that white officers got better assignments
under Burge. (In depositions, white officers acknowledged they and Burge
sometimes used racial epithets for black suspects.)
There was more.
The retired black officers said there long were
rumors of abuse swirling about Area 2. One also recalled a chilling scene: He'd
barged into an interrogation room after hearing "an inhuman-type
cry," saw a panicked young black man on the floor, his pants down, chained
to a steaming radiator. Burge, surprised to see him, turned "red as a
beet," as another officer tried to hide something.
If the case against Burge seemed to be gaining
momentum, it stalled in 2006.
After reviewing 148 allegations, the special
prosecution team concluded Burge and others, including some of the detective's
"midnight crew," had abused suspects but there would be no action
either because the evidence was too weak, or because it was too late: The statute
of limitations had expired. Some cases dated back to the 1970s and 1980s.
The investigation — which had taken four years and
$7 million — absolved Mayor Richard M. Daley, the county prosecutor when much
of the alleged abuse happened. Daley has never been charged with any wrongdoing
and has repeatedly defended his tenure as state's attorney.
But Taylor notes the police superintendent at the
time of the Wilson case had written Daley alerting him to the abuse claims.
"Daley had every power to investigate and indict Burge," the lawyer
says. "If he had done what he should have done, this never would have
happened."
Many were dissatisfied with the report and the lack
of punishment — especially the black community, where the long-running scandal
had already intensified a mistrust of the police.
Taylor and others wrote a critique of the special
prosecutors' report and presented it to the U.S. attorney's office. Nearly two
decades earlier, he'd tried to pique the interest of federal officials. Nothing
came of it.
This time, he got a polite thank you, and that was
that.
In October 2008, Taylor was surprised when he
received a courtesy call from the U.S. attorney's office with the news that Jon
Burge was being arrested at his home in Florida.
The feds had found a way to deal with the
statute-of-limitations roadblock.
Burge was not charged with abuse; he was charged
with lying about it. The allegations of perjury and obstruction of justice were
based on written answers he provided in a civil lawsuit filed by a freed death
row inmate when Burge denied he and other detectives had tortured anyone.
That day, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald
announced the indictment.
"If Al Capone went down for taxes," he
said, "it's better than him going down for nothing."
Fitzgerald also put former detectives on notice,
saying they'd be wise to tell the truth.
"If their lifeline is to hang onto a perceived
code of silence," he said, "they may be hanging on air."
"This is the beginning of the prosecution of
Jon Burge," he said, "it is not the end of the investigation of
torture and abuse."
___
Last summer, more than 20 years after the first
accusations against Burge became public, he was brought to trial.
Prosecutors presented witnesses who told now
familiar stories of abuse and torture.
The defense called the accusers thugs and liars who
were maligning an honorable man, a war hero, no less, a Bronze Star recipient
who'd served in Korea and Vietnam.
The trial had been delayed so Burge could be
treated for prostate cancer. Now he took the stand and broke his long silence,
confidently and repeatedly denying he had tortured anyone.
The jury disagreed. It found Burge guilty of
perjury.
At sentencing this month, two vastly different
portraits of Jon Burge were presented to the court.
There was the villainous former lieutenant who was
so cruel, one alleged victim claimed, that Burge laughed while he tortured him.
In one letter to the judge, Ronald Kitchen — who claimed he was beaten until he
confessed to murder — said Burge was so feared, he was the "(Osama) bin
Laden in our neighborhood."
On the other hand, there was the valiant police
officer, the loyal brother, the public servant who dedicated his life to
keeping the streets safe.
Then there was Burge himself, now 63, his hair
white, his bloated face ruddy, his burly frame stuffed into a suit, who told
U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow that "while I try keep a proud face, in
reality, I am a broken man."
He said he was not a racist or the person the media
had portrayed him to be and he was "deeply sorry" for the disrepute
his case had brought on the police department. But he offered no apologies for
his actions.
On Jan. 21, Lefkow cited Burge's
"unwillingness to acknowledge the truth in the face of all the
evidence" and sentenced him to 4½ years in prison — double what had been
recommended by the probation department.
Afterward, Richard Beuke continued to defend his
client. "I don't think a day in jail for Jon Burge is just," he said.
Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney who'd filed
the charges, had a different conclusion.
"Justice delayed," he said, "isn't
justice completely denied."
___
In sentencing, the judge addressed an issue that
long dogged this scandal: How did this misconduct go unchecked for decades?
Lefkow said it showed a "dismal failure of leadership" by the police
department and added that if local or federal prosecutors had stepped in much
sooner, it could have saved "so much pain."
John Conroy, who has written extensively about
Burge and police brutality, agrees. "This is not a one-man show," he
says.
"Not only were there other police, but state's
attorneys and judges who looked the other way and ignored these obvious truths
of what people were saying," adds Conroy, now a senior investigator at the
Better Government Association.
"The fact this happened to more than 100 men,
that some were nearly put to death, the fact that some were separated from
families for many years and lost the best years of their lives ... and only one
man has been indicted and charged ... no, justice has not been served by any
means."
One of those men is Kitchen, who says he was
tortured into confessing to the murder of five people. He was exonerated in
2009 and freed after spending 21 years behind bars.
"This is not going to make up for what was taken
from me," he says. "I did 13 years on death row, then eight (more)
years. I missed my kids growing up. My daughter doesn't know me. My (two) sons,
they're hurting. And I'm hurting."
"The things we were fighting for" —
torture charges — "we didn't get," Kitchen adds. But he finds some
solace in Burge going to prison. "Something," he says, "is
better than nothing."
Flint Taylor, who never discovered the identity of
Deep Badge, holds out hope for more prosecutions and sees the Burge sentencing
as a victory — albeit a partial one.
"I would have to characterize it as
incomplete, late and insufficient," he says.
"But it's a start."
___
Less than a week after Burge was sentenced to
prison, the police pension board considered whether he should continue to receive
his benefits. It narrowly ruled that the former commander's conviction — for
lying about the torture of dozens of men — was not related to his job as a
police officer.
Burge will receive about $3,000 each month for the
rest of his life.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.
In this
June 26, 2003 file photo, Aaron Patterson, foreground left, one of four death
row inmates pardoned in January 2003 by former Gov. George Ryan sits behind a
photo as his lawyer G. Flint Taylor, foreground right, addresses a question
during a news conference in Chicago. The photo shows writing which Patterson
scratched with a paper clip on a police station bench that reads "Aaron I
lie about murders, police threaten me with violence..." (AP Photo/Stephen
J. Carrera, File)
