Courtroom 302

Chicago’s African American community was dissatisfied with the decision in the Bridgeport case, while Frank Caruso Jr.’s lawyers asked Judge Locallo to reconsider Caruso’s case, arguing that his eight-year sentence was unfair, given that his accomplices only got probation. Wanda McMurray, Lenard Clark’s mother, agreed. Locallo set a hearing in the fall to review Caruso’s sentence.

Caruso’s father was present for the new hearing. The author took the opportunity to ask him how he would have felt if someone had beaten up Frank Jr. when he was 13, in the way that Clark had been beaten up. Frank Sr. recounted a story about “something that happened to Frank Junior when he was eleven” (314). Frank Jr. had gone skateboarding in the predominantly Black neighborhood east of Bridgeport. Three Black men drove by “and offered to tow him along” (314). The boy accepted the offer. The men towed Frank to the top of a hill, then sped up. Frank Jr. went flying then hit the pavement, head-first. At the hospital, Frank Sr. saw that his head’s son had swollen to an incredible size. Moreover, “[f]lesh was torn from Frank Junior’s face, neck, and chest” (314). Frank Sr. didn’t think at all about who the culprits were. All that mattered to him were the doctors’ assurances that Frank Jr. would recover. 

In the gallery during the hearing, Caruso supporters berated Locallo and accused him of using the Caruso case to further his political career. Frank Sr. also delivered a statement in which he contended that Locallo’s decision “[had] been clouded” by “pressure […] from politics and the media” (315). Locallo ultimately refused to reconsider Frank Jr.’s case, which resulted in ramped-up efforts within Bridgeport to unseat him. Conversely, the African American community also supported the judge’s replacement due to their outrage over Locallo’s probation sentences for Jasas and Kwidzinski. Meanwhile, Locallo’s campaign raised $21,850—most of it from criminal defense lawyers’ donations. Initially, Reverend Jesse Jackson’s PUSH Coalition planned to encourage voters to reject Locallo. However, after Locallo sought help from his mentors, Appellate Justice William Cousins and former Appellate Justice Eugene Pincham—both African American—Jackson reversed his position and agreed to support Locallo. In exchange, Locallo’s campaign committee sent $1,200 in donations to PUSH.

On Election Day, Locallo “[coasted] to retention with a 78 percent affirmative vote, well above the required 60 percent” (325). However, he lost the vote in Chicago’s 25th Ward, where he and his family lived. As for the Bridgeport case, Judge Locallo regretted that he couldn’t give Frank Jr. 10 years, but he believed that justice had been served.

Evidence in the Bridgeport case strongly suggested Victor Jasas was the second attacker, but it also suggested Kwidzinski wasn’t involved in the attack. The other witnesses hadn’t implicated him, but “anonymous tipsters” had. Worse, “the case against Kwidzinski rested solely on DeSantis,” who was dead (327). When the author reported to Detective Turner that there was a third assailant in the attack who wasn’t Kwidzinski, Turner insisted that Kwidzinski—though not as bad as the others—was still “an asshole” (330).

In April 1997, Detective Turner showed up to a grand jury hearing to indict Caruso, Jasas, and Kwidzinski “for attempted murder, aggravated battery, and hate crime” (332). While there was plenty of evidence showing that Caruso and Jasas beat Lenard and called him the n-word, there was no evidence that Kwidzinski had done any of this (332). However, Turner, who had previously testified before the grand jury, knew that he didn’t have to be so specific. 

Kwidzinski pled guilty to attempted murder and was sentenced to misdemeanor probation, due to evidence against him being rather thin. Jasas, on the other hand, got felony probation. On the morning that Kwidzinski pled guilty, he spoke briefly to the author outside of the courtroom. He said that police and prosecutors would “do anything to cover their asses” (336). When Bogira reviewed with Judge Locallo the facts in Kwidzinski’s case that suggested the young man’s innocence, Locallo expressed interest but reassured himself that Kwidzinski was guilty because he had pled guilty—overlooking the young man’s fear of going to trial and facing “a possible prison term of six to thirty years” (333).

In 1999, Judge Locallo was working in his chambers when two FBI agents visited and warned him that someone might have been trying to murder him. The agents ensured that Locallo got a security detail. Though high-ranking mobsters assured the FBI that they were not going after Locallo, the judge believed the death threats were tied to the sentence he gave Frank Caruso Jr. In 2000, the FBI contacted Locallo with news of more death threats. This time, Locallo only asked for a police patrol around his house. 

Richard DeSantis, the witness who disappeared during the Bridgeport trial, “surfaced in November 1998, two months after the Caruso trial finished” (337). He was charged with obstructing justice, which brought a possible sentence of one to three years. DeSantis pled guilty in exchange for a year-long sentence. Though he tried to broker for probation, the prosecutor Ellen Mandeltort—who handled the other Bridgeport cases—insisted he serve time in prison. In the end, DeSantis didn’t go to prison; instead, he spent six months at the Illinois Department of Corrections.

Mike Cutler’s murder remained unsolved, with detectives having concluded that he was killed during a robbery. The police disregarded the possibility that it was a mob hit—a denial that the Chicago Sun-Times attributed to the persistent influence of organized crime in the city.

Frank Caruso Jr. began serving his sentence at the Sheridan Correctional Center—a medium-security facility. Though Judge Locallo had sentenced Caruso to eight years, Caruso only served three years and three months due to day-for-day credit and for attending school while incarcerated. He only spent a year and a half in the penitentiary. The rest was spent at a facility in Urbana where he attended school; he then went back home. 

A front-page story in the Chicago Sun-Times, taken a day after Martin Luther King Day, featured Caruso Jr. and Lenard Clark together. The story reported that Clark had twice visited Caruso at the Sheridan facility. Locallo believed Dominic Di Frisco, a public relations executive and friend of the Carusos, had arranged the photo. In 1998, Di Frisco tried to convince Locallo to minimize Caruso’s sentence. 

In regard to Leslie McGee’s case, McGee revealed to Bogira during a phone call that she had lied in her confession. She had, in fact, been involved with Jean François for nine months and shot him because he had planned to end the relationship to focus on his wife and children. McGee was 15 when they began seeing each other. McGee had been carrying the gun, she said, to protect herself because she had been working nights as a cocktail waitress. 

The Illinois Supreme Court supported Judge Locallo’s “decision to deny Leroy Orange a hearing regarding his torture claims” (342-43). Orange’s hearing was delayed several times and then became unnecessary after Governor George Ryan “declared a moratorium on executions” in the state due to Illinois’s “shameful record of sending innocent men to death row” (343). Governor Ryan was then “indicted on federal corruption charges for allegedly steering contracts and leases to family and friends during his tenure as secretary of state” (344). Orange, however, was arrested again “near his South Side home and charged with selling crack cocaine” (344). He pled guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison. 

Dan Young Jr., the man who pled guilty to raping and murdering Kathy Morgan in 1990, was released after 13 years when the state dropped its case against him and his supposed accomplice, Harold Hill. DNA evidence exonerated both men.

Larry Bates “waited in jail for three months before a treatment bed opened for him in a south-side rehab center” (346). He worked for a while as a machinist in a factory after he got out, then married Lillie Gross, “the mother of two of his children” (347). The pressures of being unable to get a job earning more than minimum wage and seeing his drug-using friends each day, caused Bates to relapse in mid-1999. Once again, he was selling drugs to fund his habit. In early 2001, he was back at the 26th Street Courthouse, pleading guilty to “two new drug-dealing offenses” (347). He ended up in prison for seven and a half years. He was denied both work release and the chance to serve his last year at home because he was found guilty of selling drugs “within a thousand feet of a park or school” (348). After he was released in November 2004, he resumed work, taking whatever jobs he could get. Otherwise, he spent time with his children and grandchildren.

In 2002, the Cook County jail population rose “above eleven thousand” (349). The overpopulation led the sheriff to propose housing some of the population in tents. 

In March 1999, Judge Locallo was sent to a civil courtroom downtown, where he handled lucrative “personal injury and medical malpractice suits” (350). Most of the defendants were white and white-collar. For making a distasteful public joke about another judge—who he believed took too long to dispose of her cases—he was briefly shipped to a suburban court. Locallo missed his colleagues and the important work that he did on 26th Street, but he enjoyed “doing the big lawsuits in the Daley Center” (351).