Area Two

POLICE COMMANDER JON BURGE TORTURED DOZENS OF CHICAGOANS AND GOT AWAY WITH IT. UNTIL NOW

LIEUTENANT JDN BURGE was every bit the Chicago Police Department's

fair-haired boy by 1982. An Army vet who had left Vietnam with a Purple Heart, Burge quickly rose through the ranks of the Second City's fin­est. At the age of 34 he was commanding detectives for violent crimes in Area Two—60 square miles on the city's South Side. His officers solved, or "cleared," more than 90 percent of their homicide cases, a rate far higher than in most other areas. Big and beefy with a head of thick reddish hair, Burge had the charisma and credibility to go all the way to chief of detec­tives or maybe even superintendent (as Chicago calls its chief of police).

In February 1982 Burge commanded an investigation into the mur­ders of William Fahey and Richard O'Brien, two gang-crime officers who had been gunned down on an Area Two street. Going sleep­less for five nights, Burge had his men turn the South Side upside down in search of the shooters. After tips led them to a pair of ex-con brothers—Andrew and Jackie Wilson—his detectives were just as per­sistent in finding them. When they learned where Andrew was hiding, Burge personally led the arrest squad. He picked the lock and was the

first man through the door. Within a year both Wilson brothers were con­victed of murdering the two cops.

By all rights the capture of Andrew Wilson should have been the highlight of Burge's police career. But Wilson would haunt it. Seven years after his arrest he sued then-commander Burge in federal court, making what seemed to be preposterous claims. He charged he had been not only beaten after his arrest but also tortured with a bizarre array of implements to force his confes­sion. The trial over his suit was hardly covered in the mainstream press. The cop killer's charges were indignantly denied by any police or city ofncial who deigned to comment on them.

Over the course of the next two de­cades Andrew Wilson's lawsuit would grow into one of the worst police scan­dals in American history. More than 100 prisoners, including 10 men on death row, four of whom have since been pardoned, were identified as pos­sible victims of torture committed by Burge or his subordinates. A total of 13 Burge victims have won early release, all having spent decades behind bars as the result of coerced confessions. Chi­cago and its insurers have spent more than $30 million on settlements and legal costs. The indelible stain of the Burge cases extends tojudges and assis­tant state's attorneys. It also extends to state's attorneys—in particular to Rich­ard M. Daley, soon to become Chicago's longest-serving mayor.

Although Wilson's charges would ul­timately lead to Burge's firing, Burge has enjoyed a comfortable retirement. But this summer, for the first time, he will be called to account in criminal court for his torture regime. Chicago's U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has

brought federal charges against him, and a conviction could put Burge in prison for the rest of his life.

Rarely has so much depended on the description of a small room, just eight by 10 feet—practically a cubicle in the eyes of one police investigator who ob­served it eight years after Andrew Wil­son claimed he had been tortured on the second floor of what was then Area Two headquarters. The door faced a tall window with a metal grille. It over­looked a tree-lined street and a brick apartment building. Beneath the win­dow was an accordion-style cast-iron radiator to which detectives could cuff a suspect during an interrogation (or

what police officials prefer to call an "interview").

Wilson claimed that during one of his sessions with Burge he was forced to kneel in front of this radiator with a hand cuffed to either side of the win­dow. As his body pressed against the radiator, its ridges seared stripes onto his chest and thigh.

If not for these marks, Wilson's charges would probably have gone nowhere. No matter how much police had battered him, he was not a victim to evoke sympathy. A career criminal, Andrew Wilson had spent six years in prison for armed robbery. Soon after his release he and his younger brother Jackie resumed robbing, in one case

not only taking money from clerks and customers at a camera store but taking the cameras, too. In another robbery Jackie pretended to be a victim to throw police off their tracks. Andrew later disguised himself as a mailman to force his way into a woman's home, which he and his brother then ransacked before leaving with $700 and a .38 Colt pis­tol. On February 9 officers Fahey and O'Brien stopped them on a residential street, and for reasons that remain un­clear a struggle ensued. At some point Andrew wrestled Fahey's service re­volver away, fired it into Fahey's head and then shot O'Brien five times be­fore fleeing with his brother.

When Burge and his crew burst in on Andrew just before dawn five days lat­er, they found him resting on a friend's couch. He was still shirtless when cops dragged him into that small room in Area Two and severely beat him. At one point Wilson was slammed so hard into the window grating that the glass behind it broke. His most lingering in­jury would come from a kick to his eye, but he was also burned on the shoulder with a cigarette and, Wilson said, suffo­cated with a plastic bag, which he had to bite through to breathe.

The beating stopped when Burge appeared and, according to Wilson, ad­monished the men for having "messed up" Wilson's face. The lieutenant told the suspect his "reputation was at stake" in the investigation, and he wanted Wilson to make a statement acknowl­edging his guilt in killing the officers. Wilson replied that he didn't "do noth­ing" and would "say nothing." Burge left the room, and another detective returned with a brown paper bag from which he pulled a black box with a hand crank and two (continued on page 114)

AREA TWO

(continued from page 78) wires attached to alligator clips. The detec­tive attached one clip to Wilson's nose and the other to an earlobe. Once cranked, the box jolted Wilson with a shock that made him scream in pain.

A short time later officers took Wilson— now dressed in pants, shirt and jacket—into another office, where Assistant State's Attor­ney Lawrence Flyman was waiting. Wilson still refused to make a statement. "You want me to make a statement after they been tor­turing me?" he asked Hyman. According to Wilson, the prosecutor replied, "Get thejag-offout of here."

Wilson's next session with the black box would be administered by Burge, who announced "fun time" when he entered the room. The lieutenant first put clips on each of the prisoner's earlobes. But after Wilson was able to shrug up a shoulder to knock off a clip, the detectives cuffed his hands to each side of the radiator and dispensed the shocks that sent him into the scalding metal ridges. The lieutenant later took out another electric device that looked like the shaft of a plastic flashlight. Wilson would call it a "curling iron with a wire." After making menacing motions with the shaft between the prisoner's legs, Burge jabbed it into his back. This jolt slammed Wilson into the win­dow grille again. "Then I fell back down," Wilson remembered, "and I think that's when I started spitting up the blood and stuff. Then he stopped."

By 6:05 p.m. Wilson was ready to make his statement. Hyman was still around to take it. Although Hyman later denied he had seen Wilson in the morning, he admitted he had arrived at Area Two headquarters nine hours earlier—ostensibly for a session with Wilson. Over the years this time lag has prompted many lawyers to wonder what the assistant state's attorney really knew about the Burge squad's persuasive powers.

Whether or not anyone took Wilson's word about why he confessed to Hyman, the evidence of his abuse was all over his body. When he was taken to the CPD's central lockup for the night, the keeper refused to accept the battered prisoner. Perhaps afraid he would be blamed for Wilson's injuries, he threatened to call his superiors. To prevent that from happening, the CPD transport officers reluctantly took their charge to a hospital. The emergency room doctor did more than apply bandages to Wilson's wounds; he also documented 15 injuries—including the radiator burns— before, he said, an "infuriated" transport officer brandished his revolver. The doc­tor left the area, refusing to work until the policeman put away his gun. When he returned the officer told him Wilson did not want further treatment.

But the next day, when Wilson—with head wounds still bleeding—saw a law­yer for the first time, she insisted he see another doctor and sent along a photog­rapher to make a visual record. A picture was taken of each burn and abrasion, down to the tiny punctures the alligator clips left on Wilson's earlobes. The scab inside the

clip marks on one earlobe would later be identified as a spark burn.

Despite the photographs and medical examinations a judge refused to throw out Wilson's confession when he was tried for killing officers O'Brien and Fahey. Wilson was convicted and sentenced to death. His lawyers appealed, citing the evidence of Wilson's abuse at the hands of Burge and his detectives. The Illinois Supreme Court ordered a new trial and prevented prosecu­tors from using the coerced confession as evidence. Wilson was still convicted in the retrial, but this time he was given a life sen­tence instead of the death penalty.

If torture was a sideshow during Wilson's 1982 murder trial, it moved front and cen­ter in 1989. Wilson sued Burge, three of his detectives, the police superintendent and the city of Chicago for $10 million in dam­ages for the denial of his civil rights. Beyond the claims about his own pain and suffer­ing, Wilson charged that CPD officials knew about his torture and did nothing. In fact, the chief doctor for the jail wrote a letter about Wilson's injuries to the police super­intendent, urging him to investigate the matter further. The superintendent passed it on to then-state's attorney Daley, who never replied.

In the words of the Chicago Tribune, Wilson's charges were "ridiculed" by the attorney for the detectives, a former assis­tant state's attorney. Beyond establishing the plaintiff's extensive criminal background, the lawyer also used his cross-examination to humiliate Wilson, having him admit he was illiterate and had almost never held a paying job. The defense also disputed how seri­ously the prisoner could have been injured in Area Two headquarters. Burge claimed that after his interview Wilson's only visible injury was a "scratch" on his eye. But what about the radiator burns? The defense first tried to deny them. During their testimony, the detectives acted uncertain as to whether Wilson was in interview room number two or whether its radiator even worked. The defense also had an expert witness argue that what appeared to be second-degree burns were actually scrapes ("friction abra­sions") that Wilson supposedly suffered before his arrest.

But when the jury deadlocked after the first trial—and the defense got another chance to respond to the burn charges in the retrial—the expert witness and the scrape theory were scrapped. This time the defense didn't deny the radiator was work­ing or that the stripes on Wilson were burns. They claimed the burns were self-inflicted and used the testimony of a notorious jail-house snitch to corroborate the claim.

It was a startling turnabout for the few reporters who had followed both trials. The only extensive coverage appeared in an arti­cle written for the alternative weekly Chicago Reader. The Reader story revealed that the most striking evidence in the Wilson trials had not been presented to the juries. This included claims from four other prisoners— who had no connection to Wilson—that they too had been shocked by Burge or suffocated by his detectives. One also remembered the

lieutenant introducing a torture session with the words fun time.

The tip that uncovered these potential witnesses came in an anonymous letter to Wilson's lawyers. Because it arrived so late in the course of the first trial, Judge Brian Duff barred any mention of other torture victims. But he restricted testimony in the second trial as well, claiming it would be relevant only if those other victims had also been accused of killing cops.

Duff already had a testy relationship with Wilson's liberal counsel. The lawyers claimed that during a sidebar the judge summed up their case as "whether the Constitution will protect the scum of the earth against gov­ernmental misconduct." The judge denied making the statement. Nevertheless he upbraided the defense lawyers for shuffling their feet and making faces. He ultimately held them in contempt five times. Still, he claimed to be unbiased and refused to step down for the second trial.

Despite his reputation for violence, Wilson didn't seem so loathsome when he testified in court. A small man with a shaved head and thick glasses, he looked more gnome-like than thuglike. When asked to describe the shock, he broke down in tears and said, "It stays in your head, and it grinds your teeth. It constantly grinds."

The detectives' counsel mocked the cop killer's tears. But Wilson's sudden emotion was consistent with other victims of shock torture, according to an expert witness for the plaintiff, Dr. Robert Kirschner, deputy chief medical examiner for Cook County. He was also struck by Wilson's description of how the shock affected him, since it was similar to what other victims of that torture reported. "These are not the kinds of things that are faked," he said in a deposition. "This is not general knowledge or things you pick up through your general reading." Wilson's lawyers had originally asked Kirschner to testify about Wilson's burns; it turned out he had experience treating torture victims for human rights groups. After protests from the defense, however, Duff refused to accept Kirschner's standing as an expert on torture and required him to confine his remarks to Wilson's physical injuries.

The jurors seated for the second trial in Wilson's lawsuit seemed not to know what to make of the testimony. Although jurors acknowledged Wilson must have sustained abuse, they refused to penalize either the city or the detectives for his mistreatment. In the jurors' eyes Wilson was hurt as the result of an "emotional outburst" by arresting offi­cers who were understandably angered by the death of their comrades. The jury did not see such conduct as a standard practice by detectives or the CPD. Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko summed up these sentiments in a column titled "Facts Don't Add Up to Police Brutality." Wilson may indeed have "suffered abuse," he wrote, but added, "It wasn't as permanent as the abuse he inflicted on Officers [Fahey and O'Brien]." As for Lieutenant Burge and his co-defendants, Royko asserted, "They have excellent records."

Throughout Wilson's criminal trial and civil suit, Burge consistently denied he'd tor­tured the cop killer, or indeed anyone else, a

position he has since maintained. (Requests for Burge's comments, made through his attorney, were not returned by press time.)

Jon Burge has never been an easy man to categorize. Although some photographs make him look like a bully, he can be affable in person. In an interview with the Reader after the second Wilson lawsuit trial, he denied the charges, but he wasn't combative. He was humble about his accomplishments and willing to poke fun at his bulky, "hog-headed" appearance.

Movies typically portray torturers as freaks with a sadistic fetish or twisted childhood. But Burge appears to have had an ordinary Chicago upbringing, which began with his birth in 1947 to a stable middle-class family on the southeast side. His father had a steady blue-collar job with the phone company, and his mother contributed an occasional fashion column to the local newspaper. Although his grades were modest, he excelled at extra­curricular activities, collecting donations of canned goods as a member of the Key Club and winning high marks in the school's Reserve Officer Training Corps program.

He won admission to the University of Missouri, but because of poor grades he lasted only one semester. In 1966, after a few months as a stock clerk, he enlisted in the Army. His goal was to get training that would qualify him for a job in the Chicago Police Department upon his return. He asked to join the military police. By 1967 he was made a sergeant, and while serving in Korea the following year he requested reassignment to Vietnam. He received a Purple Heart there—for what he described as a minor shrapnel wound—and the Army Commendation Medal for Heroism after rescuing wounded troops during a raid by the Viet Cong.

During his Vietnam service, Burge may have been exposed to more than hostile

fire. The MP's command post at company headquarters was steps away from where intelligence officers interrogated suspected Viet Cong and their sympathizers. In what troops called "the Bell telephone hour," prisoners were shocked by a hand-cranked Army field phone—with wires and alligator clips—that resembles the black box Andrew Wilson described.

During the Wilson lawsuit trials Burge said he had never heard of field phone interrogations and bristled at the sugges­tion that Americans would have conducted them. But other members of Burge's Ninth MP Company have recalled being present for the "telephone hour." One recalled field phone interrogations as common, explain­ing, "We would pretty much do anything as long as we didn't leave scars on the peo­ple." Philip Wolever, an Army Ranger who served in 1969 as executive officer of the Ninth MPs, saw one prisoner go into con­vulsions after a field phone shock. However, Wolever understood why interrogators came to rely on the device in battlefield conditions. "If somebody was just shooting at you, you'd want information."

That soldiers abused prisoners under battlefield conditions would not surprise psychologists who study torture. Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist and an expert on social aspects of obedience, wrote that "ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process."

Burge was honorably discharged from the Army in August 1969. By March 1970 he was in the Chicago Police Department. He achieved some fame in 1972 when he jammed his thumb into the trigger of a pistol to prevent a young African Ameri­can woman from committing suicide. Four months later, at the age of 24, Burge was among the youngest CPD officers ever promoted to detective. He was assigned

to the robbery unit at Area Two.

In 1973 Burge made his bones with the arrest of Anthony "Satan" Holmes, leader of the Royal Family, a gang that specialized in armed robbery. Holmes confessed to mur­der, among other crimes, and went to prison with a 75-year sentence. His 40-page state­ment implicated other members of the gang in equally serious offenses. The CPD super­intendent commended Burge for the Royal Family probe and praised his "skillful ques­tioning" of Holmes.

Burge's skill may have come from the tools he used while asking his questions. Holmes claimed Burge and other detec­tives first suffocated him with a plastic bag and then wired him to the black box. "It felt like a thousand needles going through my body," he said in a 2004 deposition. "It felt like something burning me from the inside, and I shook, I gritted, I hollered, then I passed out. When they got through with me I didn't care what it was—if they said I killed Bob or the president or any­body, I would say, 'Yeah, how do you want me to say this?'"

Over the next 18 years Burge added a vari­ety of techniques: from the more mundane suffocation with typewriter covers—which became known as "bagging"—to the use of other electrical devices. Besides the black box, a handheld cattle prod was applied to the genitals and other extremities. The plas­tic shaft that Wilson called a curling iron was actually a violet-ray machine. An instru­ment originally developed as a cure for a range of physical ailments, it has since been repurposed as a toy—usually used at lower voltages—for kinky sex play.

Virtually all Burge's torture victims were African American. Although a few black detectives may have participated in the torture, they were usually on the fringes. Even those who had no involvement, how­ever, were not completely in the dark. As one retired black officer explained in a deposition, he took the "ostrich approach," making sure to leave the building if he thought someone was about to get the "Vietnam special."

The radiator stripes on Andrew Wilson's skin weren't the only indelible marks in the Burge saga. There was another, scratched with a paper clip on the surface of a metal bench. In 1986, 21-year-old Aaron Patterson, leader of a small local gang, was "interviewed" about the murders of Vincent and Rafaela Sanchez, an elderly couple in his neighbor­hood who were known for fencing stolen goods. They had each been stabbed more times than was necessary to kill them.

Once inside an Area Two interview room, Patterson denied any involvement. He claimed detectives turned off the lights, bagged him with a typewriter cover so he couldn't breathe and then beat him. The process was repeated until he agreed to con­fess. According to Patterson, Burge put his gun on the table and told him it could get even worse if Patterson didn't cooperate. "Who are they going to believe?" Burge allegedly asked. "You or us?"

"I really thought they were going to kill me in there," Patterson later told a reporter.

"They seemed like they would do anything to get me to say what they wanted."

Patterson confessed to the Sanchez killings, but after detectives left the room he used his uncuffed hand to pick up a paper clip. With the tip he etched on the bench where he was cuffed: "Aaron 4/30 I lie about murders. Police threaten me with violence. Slapped and suffocated me with plastic. No lawyer or dad. No phone." (He had not been allowed to call his father, a Chicago police officer.)

Patterson went public with torture charges at his bond hearing despite the advice of a lawyer, who told him to keep his mouth shut. Four weeks later his story gained cre­dence when an investigator in the public defender's office had Patterson's etchings photographed.

But in those days tales of police torture sounded outlandish, and Patterson's law­yer decided he shouldn't take the stand to make them. Patterson was no paragon of vir­tue. He had already been convicted of one attempted murder and had pleaded guilty to two others. But he had never been caught committing a home invasion or stabbing anyone multiple times, as was the charge in the Sanchez murders.

In fact, Patterson wasn't the only suspect. The police also had tips about the older brother of the boy who'd found the mur­dered couple. Years later this individual was convicted of stabbing a woman multi­ple times during a robbery. She survived to identify him, and he later admitted to two other home invasions.

Whatever the reason, Patterson soon became the prime suspect in the Sanchez case. In addition to the coerced confession (which Patterson never signed), the Burge squad coerced testimony from another gang member, who became a co-defendant, and from a 16-year-old girl (who years later recanted). In 1989 Patterson was convicted of first-degree murder and received the death penalty.

Over the next few years, as Patterson's appeal dragged through the courts, other abusive Area Two interrogations came to light. Wilson's lawsuit initiated two internal investigations by the CPD's Office of Pro­fessional Standards. One report, written by investigator Michael Goldston, identified 50 suspected cases of torture associated with Burge from 1973 to 1986. Goldston concluded that "physical abuse" in Area Two was both "systematic" and "method­ical." Meanwhile, investigator Francine Sanders looked specifically at Andrew Wil­son's charges, reviewing all testimony and evidence in both the murder trials and law­suits. Like Goldston, she came to a damning conclusion: "The overwhelming evidence, bolstered by striking medical testimony and strengthened by the lack of any other sub­stantial theory, indicated that most if not all of Wilson's injuries were sustained during Wilson's detention in an interview room on the second floor of Area Two headquarters and that they occurred at the hands of the police and under the sanction of the officer in charge, Lieutenant Jon Burge."

After CPD superintendent LeRoy Martin received the two OPS reports in October 1990, he reluctantly began the hearing process to determine whether Burge and

two other detectives implicated in Sand-ers's report should be punished. Martin's move was ironic on several levels. Despite his shared racial heritage with the victims, he had for a while been Burge's superior at Area Two and had long defended him.

It would take two more years to boot Burge out the door. A 1992 hearing before the police board replayed many of the same charges as the Wilson lawsuit, and the same attorney represented the detectives. This time the city's attorney argued Wilson's side and was allowed to enter evidence barred from the civil suits.

The case split the department along racial lines. White officers banded together to lion­ize Burge. Off-duty officers collected 10,000 signatures on a petition in support of Area Two detectives, and at one point the police union hosted a float in a St. Patrick's Day parade to honor them. (Parade marshals ultimately nixed the idea.)

When the board ruled in 1993 to dismiss Burge and gave the detectives 15-month sus­pensions, it cited the burn marks on Wilson as the most convincing evidence, but it never described his abusive treatment as torture. Although Burge lost his job, he retained his pension. He retired to Florida, where he lives today.

For Aaron Patterson and other Burge victims, their torture story should not have ended with Burge's firing. They expected authorities to reopen any case with a poten­tially coerced confession and to pursue the cops for criminal prosecution. But the city was happy to turn the page. Like Lawrence Hyman, other assistant state's attorneys had waited around the station house while Burge conducted his "skillful questioning." Some had become judges, and a few were even ruling on the cases involving coerced confessions. It would be revealed that the eventual Cook County state's attorney, Rich­ard Devine, had known about the complaint filed by the county jail's chief doctor about Wilson's injuries. He had discussed the let­ter with his predecessor, the eventual mayor, Richard M. Daley.

The victims had to pursue redress on their own. But their appeals moved slowly, usu­ally rebuffed by judges who wanted medical evidence, which Burge's shock and suffoca­tion torture did not produce. (After Andrew Wilson, nobody claimed they'd had alligator clips attached to their ears and nose.)

It would take extraordinary action out­side the legal system to bring the prisoners justice, and it would come from a disgraced politician who faced the possibility of his own imprisonment.

In 1990, when Madison Hobley took the stand to defend his life, he couldn't help but address the jury directly. Three years earlier his wife and infant son had died in a fire. It would have been any man's worst nightmare, but the detectives of Area Two made it even worse. They accused him of setting the fire.

Hobley told police he had left his apart­ment on the top floor of a three-story building to see why an alarm had gone off. Smelling smoke, he said, he warned his wife and then proceeded to investigate further.

Suddenly he heard a pop and saw flames shoot up the stairwell and engulf the cor­ridor behind him. When he got outside, he watched as other residents jumped from the windows. His wife and son didn't even get that far. Seven died in all, making it Chica­go's worst residential fire in six years.

Other apartment houses in the area had also been torched months prior. But rather than look for a serial arsonist, Area Two detectives focused on Hobley, won­dering how he could have gotten out while leaving his wife and son behind. Their sus­picions heightened when they learned Hobley had cheated on his wife and had only recently returned to her. Later, when Hobley allegedly failed a lie detector test, Area Two violent-crimes officers had yet another convenient suspect. Burge had recently been promoted to commander of the bomb and arson unit, and the squad he left behind at Area Two spearheaded the investigation. By the end of the day they announced to the press they had caught the culprit, adding, "The motive is a love triangle."

But the suspect had no violent crimi­nal record. Hobley, then 26, was a short athletic man who had been an avid base­ball player. He worked at a medical supply company and was a respected member of his community. According to Hobley, the pummeling began as soon as he reached an interview room. He later testified that detectives yelled racial epithets when he was kicked in the shins and groin. His Adam's apple was pushed into his throat until he gagged, and he was finally bagged until he blacked out. Still, Hobley insisted he had never broken under torture and never con­fessed. The detectives insisted he had, but their notes with his remarks were ruined by spilled coffee.

It was a dog-ate-my-homework excuse, but by this time the Burge crew was fixing other evidence. They would have Hobley's case revolve around a gas can supposedly used to start the fire. They had a witness testify he watched Hobley fill the can with gas. But Hobley's fingerprints weren't on the can, and other testimony revealed the can had been kept behind a locked door to which Hobley had no key. As for the wit­ness, he described a can different from the one behind the door. It was later revealed that this witness was an arson suspect, and when he was arrested in another case Burge intervened to get him released.

By all rights the trumped-up evidence and "lost" confession notes should have fatally compromised the prosecution's case. But Hobley still had to overcome the suspicion brought on by his adul­tery and his survival. Hobley's case was further weakened by the presence of a suburban cop on his jury. His lawyer had blundered by not keeping him off in voir dire. To make matters worse, the cop was elected foreman. Other jurors later said they were intimidated when the foreman put his service revolver on the table dur­ing deliberations and insisted Area Two investigative techniques were standard operating procedure.

The jury convicted Hobley and sentenced him to death. If there was any consolation

for him in the months after his trial, it would come with the stream of revelations about Area Two that led to Burge's firing. They bolstered Hobley's own charges about tor­ture, charges his lawyers had been prevented from making during his trial. But even after the Illinois Supreme Court sent Hobley's case down for another hearing on evidence, the judge refused to grant a new trial.

Hobley was lucky to be sentenced to death. He became the centerpiece of a series on capital punishment that appeared in the Chicago Tribune. In a 1999 article titled "Death Row Justice Derailed," report­ers wrote, "The case of Madison Hobley exemplifies how a man can be condemned to die in a flawed trial with questionable evidence of guilt." The story further stated that 14 men sentenced to death in Illinois had claimed their confessions were coerced in Area Two.

The Tribune series had its greatest impact on Illinois governor George Ryan. Until that time, Ryan was one of the last politi­cians in Illinois expected to help inmates on death row. During his long career as a GOP heavyweight, Ryan was an ardent sup­porter of capital punishment. He allowed the execution of one prisoner to proceed

in 1999, but his views began to change on both the death penalty and issues of racial inequity in the state's courts. Some cynics believed the new perspective pro­ceeded from Ryan's own troubles with the law. The FBI had started investigat­ing him for corruption, going back to his days as Illinois secretary of state. Political insiders correctly predicted Ryan would himself face trial and saw him playing to a jury pool that would likely include Afri­can Americans who also questioned the death penalty.

Ryan says his opinions about the death penalty changed because of the Tribune series and the fact that 13 men sentenced to die had walked out of the state's prisons as free men. One of those had come within 48 hours of being executed. He owed his freedom to an investigation conducted by students at Northwestern University. On January 30, 2000 the conservative gover­nor declared a moratorium on executions in Illinois. Even more surprising, Ryan suggested he might permanently com­mute the death sentence for all 134 men on death row.

The reprieve was good news for Mob-ley, but his lawyer, Andrea Lyon, wanted nothing less than a total pardon for her

client. Lyon had represented Hobley in the appeals courts after his conviction. When it was announced that Ryan would address a community forum about the death pen­alty, Lyon managed to corner the governor before he reached the podium. She handed him a capsule of Hobley's case and quickly highlighted the irregularities that had led to his conviction.

In January 2003, during the final days of his administration, Governor George Ryan commuted every death sentence to life in prison and fully pardoned Hobley, Patterson and two others on death row for crimes investigated by Burge and his detectives. "I can see how rogue cops, 20 years ago, could run wild," Ryan explained in the press conference announcing the pardons. "What I can't understand is why the courts can't find a way to act in the interest of justice."

Justice for the rest of the Burge vic­tims was still in short supply. A coalition of attorneys petitioned the chief judge for Cook County's Criminal Court for a spe­cial prosecutor. Surprisingly, the judge, who comes from a long line of police offi­cers, granted the request. He appointed a retired judge named Edward Egan to investigate the charges against Burge. With a staffof eight full-time lawyers, Egan spent four years and $6.2 million on the inquiry. But the 290-page report, released in July 2006, was quickly dismissed as whitewash. At the least, Egan's inquest established that Burge and his detectives had used electric shock, suffocation and beatings during interrogations. But the report did not determine how often tor­ture was used—only that 148 incidents had been investigated. It did not pro­vide a list of the torturers, and it assigned blame only to a former police superin­tendent for "dereliction of duty." The report failed to muster the same outrage against others who bore guilt for the tor­ture and the resulting convictions, namely the Cook County state's attorneys. Dur­ing their reign, scores of prisoners had been abused and detectives had committed perjury hundreds of times, but not a sin­gle officer had been prosecuted. Nothing in Egan's report provoked more outrage than assertions that Burge and his detec­tives could not be prosecuted because the statute of limitations had expired on the felonies they committed.

If any prosecutor were to pursue Burge, it would have to be Chicago's U.S. Attor­ney Patrick Fitzgerald. Known for his conviction of Scooter Libby, who divulged Valerie Plame's role in the CIA, Fitzger­ald has developed a local reputation for shaking up Chicago's inbred system of political corruption.

After several prominent African Ameri­can politicians petitioned Fitzgerald to act, his spokesman said he was already studying Egan's report. Fitzgerald saw crime where Egan hadn't. In particular, he looked at answers Burge had given under oath in 2003. At that point, Hobley, not long off death row, had filed a civil suit. It was now his turn to submit questions to the former detective. Burge was asked whether he had "ever used methods, procedures or

techniques involving any form of verbal or physical coercion of suspects while in deten­tion or during interrogation."

Burge could have claimed his right against self-incrimination and refused to answer. Instead, he chose to reply: "I have never used any techniques set forth above as a means of improper coercion of suspects while in detention or during interroga­tion." Burge made similar denials to one other question about torture. But in law­suits thereafter, Burge always took the Fifth Amendment when asked about torture. His answers in the two Hobley interrogatories were all Fitzgerald needed.

In October 2008, weeks before the federal statute of limitations would expire, Fitzgerald used those answers to indict Burge on two counts of obstruction ofjustice and one count of perjury. If convicted Burge could receive 20 years in prison for each count of obstruc­tion and five years for perjury. But beyond his potential punishment, the trial proceed­ings could finally shine a light on a dark era of American criminal justice that some still deny ever happened.

At the press conference announcing Burge's indictment one reporter asked if the charges could have been harsher given the alleged brutality. Fitzgerald had a made-in-Chicago comeback for that question. "If Al Capone went down for taxes," he replied, "that was still better than him going down for nothing."

Nearly four decades after Jon Burge first tortured a suspect, the ex-cop is anything but a distant memory for Chicago's citizens. His victims continue to win release from prison, each offering a new twist about the "skillful questioning" visited on them. Aaron Patterson was caught dealing drugs and guns and was convicted and sentenced to 30 more years. He was in jail in 2008 when the city agreed to settle the suits of four men Ryan had pardoned; the deal made Patter­son a millionaire. The settlements totaled $19.8 million.

Arrested at his waterfront house just south of Tampa, Burge was brought back to Chi­cago for arraignment. In the courtroom Burge no longer cut such a threatening fig­ure. His full head of carefully brushed-back hair was now white, and although still burly, the former police commander hobbled to his seat with a cane. Dressed in a dark suit and tie, he politely entered a plea of not guilty. The judge released him on a $250,000 bond. To avoid a scene with protesters gathered around the building, marshals escorted him out through an underground tunnel.

His lawyers have since revealed that Burge is battling prostate cancer. His treat­ments delayed the scheduled start of the proceedings from winter to spring, and he is likely to be more infirm when he next appears in court. Andrew Wilson died of natural causes in 2007 while still serving his life sentence, but Fitzgerald has peti­tioned the court to enter Wilson's prior testimony as evidence against Burge. The reviled alleged cop killer may haunt Burge more in death than he did alive.

MORE THAN 1DD PRISONERS WERE POSSIBLE VICTIMS OF TORTURE COMMITTED BYBURGE OR HIS SUBORDINATES.

Hobley insisted he had

never broken under torture

and never confessed. The

detectives insisted he had, but their notes with his remarks

were ruined by spilled coffee.