Courtroom 302 (13 page)

Lenard emerged from his coma six days after the beating. Two days later, at a crowded Easter weekend meeting of the PUSH/Rainbow Coalition on the south side, Reverend Jackson likened the attack on Lenard and his recovery to
Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection.

After a month in a rehabilitation center, Lenard was sent home. He’d had to relearn how to feed and dress himself. He still had difficulties with memory, abstract learning, and impulsivity—problems typical for a young person who’d suffered severe head trauma, his doctor said. He reportedly had no memory of the beating. He’d need daily physical, occupational, and speech therapy, and it likely would be years before he recovered fully, if he ever did. A host of cameras were trained on him as he left the center and as he climbed into a van loaded with donated toys, clothes, and flowers. Then he went home—but not to his Stateway Gardens housing project. City officials had found a place for Lenard, his mother, and his three siblings in a middle-class south-side neighborhood, in a four-bedroom home furnished with new appliances and furniture contributed by merchants. Back at Stateway, some of Lenard’s neighbors admitted they were jealous; they said Lenard might be better off than they were, even with his brain injury, since he was able to leave the project.
“Many kids are saying … ‘I wish it was me that got hurt,’ ” one Stateway resident told a
Chicago Tribune
reporter.

The grand jury indictments of the three defendants were announced in a 26th Street courtroom on an April morning. Afterward deputies hustled Caruso, Jasas, Kwidzinski, and their families down the courthouse steps through a media crowd and African American protesters. “
Hang those white boys!” some of the protesters shouted.

Once the defendants and their families were whisked away, the protesters joined hands on the courthouse plaza, and led by Reverend Paul Jakes, president of the west-side NAACP, they prayed: “
We ask that this court system will be just and will be fair.”

BLACKS IN CHICAGO
might pray for justice, but they wouldn’t bet on it. Years of experience with Chicago police and the Cook County courts have taught them to be wary.

There was the race riot of 1919, touched off by the drowning of a black
youth in Lake Michigan after he’d been stoned. The youth had drifted into waters that whites considered their own; the riot began after police refused to arrest the white man seen stoning him.
Whites committed the vast majority of the violence in the riot, but most of those jailed and prosecuted were blacks. There were the
decades of beatings and stonings of blacks who tried moving into white neighborhoods, and the torching and bombing of their homes—and the cops who rarely caught anyone, and the prosecutors who found the evidence insufficient when they did. There were the innumerable
beatings and shootings of blacks by white cops—beatings and shootings almost invariably deemed justified by police officials and prosecutors.

There was the raid on a west-side apartment in 1969 by fourteen police officers assigned to the state’s attorney’s office, in which Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were shot to death and four other occupants wounded. The seven surviving occupants, including the four who’d been wounded, were charged with attempted murder. State’s attorney Edward Hanrahan assured reporters the police officers had been defending themselves from a Panther barrage and lauded the officers’ “
considerable restraint.”
A federal grand jury later determined that the Panther barrage had consisted of a single shot, while the officers’ considerable restraint consisted of eighty-two to ninety-nine shots, half of them from a submachine gun. (Under intense media pressure,
county prosecutors dropped the charges against the seven survivors.
None of the police officers was found criminally accountable for the shootings of the Panthers.)

In the 1980s, there was
a profusion of allegations of detectives torturing suspects—white detectives torturing black suspects in almost every instance. Detectives in one south-side station were accused of electrically shocking suspects, suffocating them with typewriter covers and plastic bags, putting guns in their mouths, and hanging them by their handcuffs. When the allegations were made in hearings and trials at 26th Street during that decade, prosecutors and judges belittled them, and they continued to belittle them during hearings and retrials in the 1990s, even after an internal Chicago police investigation concluded that abuse of suspects at the station had been “
systematic.”

In the courts, there has been the Cook County prosecutors’ tradition of cleansing juries of blacks. The criminal court
judges commented on this custom in 1920, when they were interviewed by a commission investigating the previous year’s riot. The judges said the standard all-white juries tended to disbelieve black witnesses testifying against white defendants, were apt to convict blacks and acquit whites on similar evidence, and
would convict whites on lesser charges when they convicted them at all. “
Where a white man will be found guilty of manslaughter, a colored man will be found guilty of murder,” Judge Hugo Pam said. Pam added: “In the more serious crimes, where a holdup is committed or guns are used, I think there is great prejudice.… I see colored men … very often feeling that most people are not interested in them. They come and take their medicine, and go away.”

As late as the 1950s, a black defendant in Illinois could ask the judge to remind the jurors that they were to consider his case “as if he were a white man.” In 1953 and 1955 the Illinois Supreme Court
reversed two Cook County cases in which judges had declined to give that instruction,
first used in Illinois in 1854. The state supreme court observed in the 1955 case,
People v. Crump
, that while Negroes no longer should have to ask for equal consideration, “we must recognize that our American system of justice and equality before the law is still administered by human beings.”

In 1955—while Chicago officials were clucking their tongues about the all-white Mississippi jury that had acquitted Emmett Till’s accused killers—juries here were still typically snow white as well,
thanks mainly to prosecutors’ continued use of peremptory challenges to routinely dismiss blacks. That practice continued into the 1980s; an Illinois Supreme Court justice noted in 1983 that in Cook County, blacks were still being stricken from juries because of their race in “
case after case.” And the practice has endured, in spite of a U.S. Supreme Court
decision in 1986 forbidding it. Illinois reviewing courts have found that Cook County prosecutors have tried
to skirt that decision.

Cases at 26th Street today still are often handled by an
all-white cast. Eighty-four percent of the lawyers in the state’s attorney’s office, 69 percent of the public defenders, and 74 percent of the trial court judges are white.

AND MANY BLACKS
here believe that white defendants have the ultimate advantage: if worse comes to worst, they can always buy their way out of trouble.

From before the days of Al Capone, Cook County residents have suspected that justice was for sale here. Such suspicions remained unproven for decades, as
county prosecutors were unwilling to investigate the judges with whom they needed to work. After changes in federal law led to probes by federal agents in the early 1980s, it became apparent that judges here were in fact
fixing everything from parking tickets to murder cases. Since 1984 U.S. prosecutors have convicted eighteen Cook County judges and fifty-two lawyers on corruption-related charges. The federal investigations
showed that the defendants who got cases fixed—syndicate gangsters, defendants with political connections, defendants who could afford the judges’ rate—usually were white. The typical
poor and cloutless defendant, meanwhile, may have been punished for his inability to pay. Federal prosecutors have contended that some crooked judges sentenced nonbribing defendants harshly as part of their corruption scheme—to divert doubts about their propriety, and to warn other defendants what they risked if they didn’t ante up.

So when reporters disclosed that the alleged ringleader in the Bridgeport attack, Frank Caruso Jr., came from a family with
roots in organized crime, it didn’t raise the confidence of blacks that justice was forthcoming for Lenard Clark.

It was all the more reason for blacks to scrutinize the Bridgeport case as it proceeded, some African Americans maintained. As one letter writer put it in the
Chicago Defender:
“
This case will be closely monitored. The eyes of the nation will be on the Chicago judicial system.… If the system works, let it be demonstrated here.”

LOCALLO DOESN
’
T THINK
racism is really a problem at 26th Street. “When I worked in the system as a prosecutor, we didn’t look at the defendant and say, ‘Well, because he’s black, we’re gonna push harder,’ or ‘Because the victim’s white, we’re gonna work the case up more.’ I didn’t care what color they were. And as a judge, I don’t care whether the person is white or black or Latino.”

But he’s well aware that there’s a perception of racism in the courthouse, and he’s anxious to dispel it. Whatever the outcome of the Bridgeport case, he wants blacks to feel that the judge handled it without bias.

How suitable is Locallo for that task?

Like most white Chicago natives, Locallo is the product of a white neighborhood and a white grammar school. His suburban Catholic high school had a few imported blacks, most of them athletes. In his formative years, what he heard about blacks from his father—and from his uncle Joe, also a police officer—wasn’t always flattering. “They had their certain, you know, feelings,” Locallo says. What kind of feelings? “I would say that they probably had a low opinion of blacks. But as police officers, they were dealing with the lowest elements of that race.” As his father and uncle encountered blacks of a higher “element”—fellow officers, the occasional black lawyer or judge—their views modified, he says. “So when you start out, you have some baggage from your environment. And hopefully you expand.”

As a prosecutor, Locallo’s experience with blacks was skewed, as his
father’s had been. Day in and day out he dealt with accused criminals, the vast majority of them black. The colleagues with whom he was laboring to convict these blacks were, with rare exception, white.

The state’s attorney’s office, moreover, has not been known through the years as a citadel of racial enlightenment. Consider the contest prosecutors once competed in when they reached the felony trial courts. The goal was to be the first prosecutor in one’s class to convict four thousand pounds of defendants. When a defendant pled guilty or was found guilty after a trial, the prosecutor would tally the defendant’s weight from the arrest report. This was known as the “Two-Ton Contest.” But since most defendants were black, some prosecutors called the competition “Niggers by the Pound.” Locallo says he learned of the contest from veteran prosecutors, but that it had ceased before he reached the trial courts. He found it amusing, however. From what he’d heard, “a lot of fat guys [defendants] were getting great deals,” he says with a laugh. “Let’s say a prosecutor’s got a guy who’s 350 pounds. Where the guy normally would have gotten ten years, the prosecutor might offer him a year”—to get a quick and certain conviction. “Skinny guys wouldn’t get offered anything,” Locallo says. Did it sound like a racist contest to him? “Not necessarily,” he says. He considered the Niggers by the Pound title “very offensive.” But the contest itself was harmless “gallows humor.”

Ethnic jesting was common in the state’s attorney’s office when he was there, Locallo says. Because he was Italian American, one prosecutor called him a trunk-stuffer. And because that prosecutor was a Greek American, when an arson case would come into the office, Locallo would ask him, “Is there a Greek involved here?” (Foundering Greek-owned apartment buildings and businesses used to burn down with suspicious frequency here, according to Locallo. He says the Greek American prosecutor he used to joke with defined spontaneous combustion as a Greek landlord rubbing two leases together.) On the office softball team, Locallo showed such speed that prosecutors dubbed him “
the fastest white man alive.” It was all in good fun, Locallo says.

Locallo expected that some African Americans would have an ethnic bias against
him
regarding his ability to preside fairly in the Bridgeport case. They’d realize from his last name that he was not just white but Italian American; and they’d assume he’d therefore be partial to Caruso. (While the judge’s mother was Irish American, his father’s ancestors were from Sicily, as were Caruso’s ancestors.)

Something in Locallo’s background likely would have caused blacks even more concern, had it been publicized after Locallo got the Bridgeport case.

On December 16, 1967, the
Chicago Tribune
reported the FBI arrests of
eight mob bookies after a four-year investigation. Federal authorities had charged the bookies with running a racetrack communications network, the only one of its kind in the country and “the lifeblood of syndicate controlled gambling” in five midwestern states. One of the accused was Victor Locallo—August Locallo’s oldest brother. Victor Locallo was described as a “close associate of Ross Prio, north-side gambling overseer.” (Victor Locallo
pled guilty in 1969 and was sentenced to five years’ probation.)

Dan Locallo’s late uncle Victor was indeed, he says, a close associate of Prio. And Victor wasn’t the only relative to work as a bookie. So had his uncle Joe, Dan says, before he became a police officer. And so had his father.

Bookmaking used to be a misdemeanor. When it became a felony about 1950, the judge says, his father and his uncle Joe decided to quit the gambling business. Not long after that they joined the police force. His uncle Victor didn’t quit.

Locallo was aware of the Caruso family’s mob roots, and he presumed the Carusos were aware of his family tree as well. “I would imagine that when they first heard that I had the case, they assumed, ‘Okay, we’re in,’ ” he was to tell me after the trial.