Officer Finnigan

THE CHICAGO POLICE DEPARTMENT HAILED HIM AS ONE OF THEIR FINEST. THEN THEY DECIDED HE WAS MJCnCTUCin llffl

ONE OF THEIR WORST

December 2004, Philip Cline, superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, held a press

conference to tout the decline in gang violence in the city. Cline introduced Jerry Finnigan as a prime example of the hard-nosed officers who had turned the tide. Then 41, Finnigan had the look of a military man, with close-cropped hair and the intense stare of a drill sergeant. Although still a patrolman, he was among the most decorated cops in Chicago's history, but Finnigan was best known as a nine-year veteran of the department's Special Operations Section, a unit that sent eight-man squads into the city's most dangerous neighborhoods. Beyond the busts and drug sei­zures, the SOS took most pride in snagging illegal guns. That day Finnigan told reporters how a random street stop led to the capture of a Spanish Cobra gang leader who helped him recover more than 20 unregistered firearms.

This was not an operation that could have been handled by a beat cop or even a tactical officer with wiretaps and informants. Instead, Finnigan implied, it

took a team of SOS war who engaged the enemy on its turf. "Our guys," he said "•* on the front line evei

Cline held another press conference nearly two years later to spotlight Finnigan—but this time he announced Finnigan's ind by the state's attorney on an astounding array of charges, inclu_ lence, home invasion, residential burglary and aggravated kidnapping. Most o. Finnigan's alleged victims were suspected drug dealers and gangbangers, but some were supposedly law-abiding citizens with no criminal history. Besides Finnigan, Cline told reporters, three other SOS officers were also indicted. Then, trying to put the best possible spin on this development, he added, "When we remove bad cops from the street, we build a better department."

But how had Finnigan and the other SOS officers been transformed so quickly from heroic warriors into bad cops? No reporter asked Cline that question at the 2006 press conference or afterward, as the fallout from the SOS investigation

continued to grow. A few weeks after Finnigan's indictment, city prosecutors announced they were dropping charges against 110 suspects arrested by SOS officers. Many of those suspects would bring their own cases against both the cops and the city in lawsuits that have cost Chicago more than $15 million to date in settlements and legal fees.

Even after he announced Finnigan's indictment, Cline said he saw "no reason to disband the SOS" because only ' "four officers out of over 300 officers are accused of a crime. The SOS unit has done a wonderful job in helping reduce violent crime in the city."

But a year later, the SOS would be disbanded—just two weeks after Chicago's U.S. attorney announced an even more serious charge against Finnigan: the hiring of a hit man to knock off a fellow SOS officer.

In April 2011, Finnigan took a plea on the murder-for-hire charge and one count of tax evasion for the cash he'd stolen from drug dealers—allegedly more than $150,000. Last September, he received a sentence of 12 years. Once the face of SOS success, Finnigan became the face of its disgrace, portrayed by prosecutors and the press as the ringleader of a small band of low-level coppers bent on robbing drug dealers. In keeping with that scenario, only one other SOS officer faces as much federal time as Finnigan. A handful of others were sentenced to probation or a few months in prison. No superior officers have been charged.

With Finnigan's sentence, it seemed the SOS story had come to an end. But neither Jerry Finnigan nor the scandal is about to go away. In two interviews with playboy and nearly 100 pages of letters sent from federal lockup—where he was held in solitary confinement—Finnigan has revealed much more SOS illegal activity than was previously reported. He names 19 SOS officers whom he saw steal cash and personal possessions during searches, and he alleges that many more members of the unit routinely committed civil rights violations.

He further charges that commanding officers knew about the stealing and that the civil rights violations were condoned at the highest levels of the Chicago Police Department.

His charges are bolstered by nearly 80 civil lawsuits that have been filed against nearly 90 officers involved in SOS forays since 2001. The lawsuits describe SOS officers kicking down doors without search warrants and holding families at gunpoint while their homes were ransacked and possessions stolen. Those manhandled during raids included young teens, a paraplegic and a grandmother celebrating her 70th birthday.

"We were like the flying monkeys in The Wizard ofOz," Finnigan says. "If crime was spiking in some district any­where in the city, we were told to 'fly, fly' to shut it down. No matter the means. The bosses knew what we were doing all the way up the chain of command. And they loved it."

There once was a time when the image of the SOS was anything but threatening. Back then, Special Operations referred to the CPD equivalent of kiddie rides: horses for mounted cops, bicycles to patrol running paths or boats to monitor the waterfront. Because these were cushy assign­ments, they tended to attract children of the brass—hence the nickname Sons of Supervisors.

But in the 1990s, Mayor Richard M. Daley decided he needed a quick response to a homicide rate that was among the nation's highest. A new unit, with a complement of nearly 180 officers, was added to the SOS with a mission to quell crime hot spots. A mobile strike force was at odds with the "community policing" concept then in vogue, whereby police officers were neighborhood fixtures and not interlopers. But like an invading army, SOS officers were not supposed to worry about community relations. When the CPD's high­est commanders addressed the troops, they reinforced the ,

military nature ot their job. rinnigan remembers one super­intendent who visited an SOS unit during roll call. "He said, 'You're our marines. You're the hard chargers who will be the first over the hill.'"

Jerry Finnigan had been on the force for only five years when he joined the SOS in 1994. He had already made a name for himself—for both his work ethic and his willing­ness to stick his nose into hairy situations. "He had that knack," one former partner says, "for calming things down with his abrasiveness."

The SOS teams on the morning watch would meet for roll call at eight. They were then broken into squads of eight to 10 and given assignments for the day—usually an area of several square miles. Each squad was unsupervised , and permitted to wander wherever it thought crime was festering—often in the city's housing projects or street-corner drug markets.

Although Finnigan was never made a commanding offi­cer, the other SOS officers would let him take the lead. First, he would always lead them to a big breakfast—usually steak and eggs. With that fuel in their bellies, Finnigan says, "we could go and terrorize gangbangers."

For Finnigan, a big part of the job was showing the SOS flag. "The gangbangers knew we weren't from there and knew we weren't fucking around. If a guy smarted off to you, he got his ass kicked and locked up to prevent (continued on page 116)

OFFICER FINNIGAN

(continued from page 96) it from happening to any other cop again." And if a few corner dealers stood too close to a puddle after a rainstorm, they would get splashed ("sharked"), just to let them know who was in charge.

Over the years, Finnigan developed techniques to help him. He admits they all violated the Fourth Amendment, which pro­hibits searches and seizures without warrants or probable cause—an antiquated nicety that Finnigan says is ignored "99 percent" of the time anyway. "Probable cause was the story you came up with after the arrest," he says, laughing. "The bad guys don't play by the rules, so why should we?"

For Finnigan, this meant pulling over any car that looked suspicious. "We'd stop 10 cars minimum on a slow day—20 to 30 if the weather was good. We hardly ever had probable cause, but we still found guns or dope in every third or fourth car."

Sometimes he did no more than ride around and spot people he thought looked suspicious or out of place: These could be Mexicans with new clothes or cars, young black men standing around in groups or what he thought were "hypes"—white drug users wandering through minority neigh­borhoods in search of a fix.

"If we caught a guy dirty—with drugs or guns—we'd squeeze him to give up a house with more drugs and guns." If he wasn't cooperative, Finnigan would go to the dirty guy's address. If someone was home, he'd ask that person to sign a form consenting to a search—often under the pretense that he was searching for a murderer. If no one was home, SOS members would break in and later claim they had entered in "hot pursuit" of a suspect.

"We found gold no matter where they sent us," Finnigan says. He recovered more than 100 illegal guns a year—once as many as 123—and made some of the CPD's big­gest drug busts. "The local tactical teams and their bosses hated us," says Finnigan.

The squad's day together did not end with the last arrest—even if it came after midnight. Usually, they would go to an ex-cop's bar in Greektown. His partner remembers, 'Jerry would be the center of attention. He loved telling the cop stories that made us all laugh. We'd hang out until they closed the bar and then go across the street to the parking lot, watch the sun come up and have another beer."

In a hotel ballroom on May 4, 1999, the Chicago police superintendent presented Jerry Finnigan with one of the depart­ment's highest honors, the Award of Valor. Finnigan had been visiting a friend's con­venience store late at night, off duty, when three masked robbers burst in. They made everyone lie facedown on the floor, but when the moment was right, Finnigan sprang up on one knee, pulled out his Smith & Wesson and shouted, "Police!" One of the robbers fired at him and he shot back, hitting the robber in the leg. The trail of blood helped officers track down two of the attackers.

The award would add to Finnigan's legend. For a few brief hours he was on top of the world. The next day, his father died. Bill Sr. had been a stolid, hardworking man who, with Finnigan's mother, Sylvia, had raised eight sons and four daughters. His death at the age of 74 was not totally unex­pected. But the same could not be said for Finnigan's youngest brother, Johnny, who died three weeks later, at the age of 31.

Johnny was the second of Finnigan's broth­ers to die, and oddly enough, the deaths of both were wrapped up in the murky poli­tics of the CPD. His oldest brother, Billy, was 43 when he was stabbed to death in a pool hall in 1990 by a policeman's son, who was charged only with carrying an illegal switchblade. The circumstances behind his youngest brother's death would torment Finnigan even more. He was convinced Johnny had been shot by his girlfriend—a policewoman who had been introduced to him by one of Jerry's former partners. She claimed he used her service revolver to com­mit suicide after a fight with her.

"It broke my heart when Johnny died," Finnigan says. "He wasn't just my kid brother. He was my best friend. Every time I thought about him, I would get bombed out of my mind to cope. I just couldn't let go of it."

Adding to Finnigan's turmoil was ajar-ring leadership change at the SOS. Jim Darling, an old hand at fighting gang crime, had been brought in to command the unit. Finnigan remembers, "His words at one roll call were, 'Get the guns no matter what. Let me worry about the beefs.' After that, I noticed a major change in the way guys policed. They thought they were untouch­able." To reward the SOS sergeants whose teams recovered the most guns each week, Darling let them save a little money by tak­ing their squad cars home.

But despite the enhanced freedom die new commander gave him on the street, Finnigan says he "never saw eye to eye with Jim Darling. He could be a tyrant and a screamer."

Now Finnigan really wanted out of the SOS. "I was just tired of the street and needed a break," he says. In the spring of 2001, a friend got him a transfer to Mid­way International Airport, one of the CPD's sleepiest outposts. True to form, after just weeks on the job, Finnigan stopped a robber who nearly stabbed his victim to death with a screwdriver. But also true to form, it wasn't long before he tangled with superiors over the security perks given to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. 'Jerry's problem is that he has no filter," says the friend who rec­ommended him for the job. "He says what he thinks is right, no matter what."

After barely a year on his airport lily pad, Finnigan hopped back to the SOS. Now pushing 40, he was resigned to the fact that he had neither the test scores nor the connec­tions to be promoted. But at least Darling was no longer at the unit's helm. His successor was an affable old-timer who wanted results but wasn't going to micromanage a veteran like Finnigan to get them.

As Finnigan started his second stint at the SOS, his cop friends were not so much con­cerned about the supervisors above him as they were about die cops alongside him. "Suddenly he became the old guy," one says. "Everyone

around him looked half his age. He didn't have a peer to calm him down. And some­times Jerry needed to be calmed down."

By 2002, Jerry Finnigan was working with the sons of SOS officers he had known 10 years earlier. One was Keith Herrera, a brash 25-year-old with a boyish face. Finnigan met him when he was a teenager and thought he was a nice kid, but he'd acquired a hard edge on the force.

"Keith was all of five feet seven inches and 120 pounds soaking wet," Finnigan says, "which probably gave him a Napoleon complex. Once we had prisoners cuffed, he started beating on them. Men, women—it didn't matter." Herrera's best friend and partner, John Hurley, was equally violent. Finnigan wondered whether their hair-trigger tempers came from the steroids they took to bulk up.

A few of the lawsuits charge that Finnigan could also get physical with suspects, but he denies it. "I always believed the pen was mightier than the sword," he says, explain­ing that the threat to write up an arrest was all he needed to squeeze a suspect. He is supported on this point by Amanda Antholt, a lawyer who has filed many of the suits and reviewed the others. She says, "I don't see violence as a pattern in Finni­gan. I see a pattern of violence when he wasn't there."

For Herrera and Hurley, there was also a pattern of theft. Finnigan himself was no virgin on that account. In 1993, while he was serving on a plainclothes tactical team, he found $10,000, which he split with his partner. He claims such thefts are rife throughout the CPD. "That was the day I crossed the line," Finnigan recalls, "and I liked it. I wasn't stealing from some kid's piggy bank or an old woman's savings. It was dope money. And the guy never beefed. They seldom did."

Finnigan says he never stole again until Hurley and Herrera arrived at the SOS. In 2002 they stopped a pickup carrying 200 pounds of marijuana. When they searched one of the passengers' homes, they found $50,000, which they split with another SOS cop and two local tactical police officers who had helped with the bust.

Over the next three years, Finnigan's stealing would increase, but so too would the big busts and gun recoveries. In February 2004, from a flophouse perch overlooking a strip mall, Finnigan watched two Mexi­cans get inside a car and exchange cash. As they drove off, he called his partners to stop them down the street. When they found two kilos of cocaine in the car, they had the driver lead them to a nearby garage, where they discovered another 33 kilos—a haul with a street value of $4 million. They then searched the driver's home, without a warrant, and found $35,000, which the SOS cops split among themselves—less the $10,000 they inventoried with the drugs in the station house.

The stealing became an open secret among the SOS teams, but Finni­gan says many officers didn't take any money—though they looked away when others did and signed off on their false

reports. Meanwhile, some SOS cops were not content with snatching just money. At one house, Finnigan watched as Herrera and Hurley grabbed industrial-size con­tainers of liquid Tide detergent and 30-roll packages of paper towels. "Each had just took $2,500 from the cash we found there, so I asked them what they were doing. They just shrugged and said they needed it back home."

The stealing escalated to another level in September 2004 when Finnigan and two other officers, Brian Pratscher and Bart Maka, struck what they would call "the Mexican lottery." The bonanza unfolded innocently enough, with Finnigan pull­ing over a Hispanic driver of a new Ford Explorer with California plates. After he was cuffed and frisked, the cops found a wad of cash and a cell phone but nothing more. Despite the out-of-state plates, he claimed to live just a block away. "When I asked if I could search his house," Finnigan says, "he clammed right up."

He took the driver's keys and left him with Pratscher, who, Finnigan thought, was always too scared to be of much use. He and Maka removed their vests and holsters—so they wouldn't attract too much attention—tucked their revolvers inside their shirts and walked around the cor­ner to a tidy little brick ranch. Finnigan used the keys to open the front door. As they swept through the house with guns drawn, they surprised a young mother and a grandmother pushing a baby on a swing in the kitchen. But all in the house was not sweetness and light. Elsewhere, a semiau­tomatic Beretta pistol lay on the top of a dresser. As Finnigan stood guard over the women, he heard Maka exclaim, "Holy fuck!" He lurched back into the kitchen with wide eyes and told Finnigan, "Go look in the kid's bedroom." On the floor was a black leather bag filled with bricks of plastic-wrapped cash.

Finnigan called Pratscher and told him to dump his passenger and pick them up immediately. They then drove directly to Maka's house, where no one else was home. Maka emptied the bag onto his base­ment floor. The bricks were conveniently marked—"10" for $10,000 and "50" for $50,000—and added up to $450,000.

But such outrageous good luck did not stop Maka from wanting more. He told Finnigan that Pratscher should get only $20,000 because he sat in the car while they risked their lives to find the loot. Finnigan says, "I told him, 'That's ask­ing for problems. It should be an equal share for all.'"

Finnigan admonished the others not to go crazy with their newfound wealth, but that night he took Jane, his wife of 18 years, their 12-year-old son and two in-laws to a feast at Benihana. The following summer, the dinner party would all go to Aruba— along with a nephew to keep Finnigan's son company. There would be other vaca­tions with friends and family—"with all the extras," Finnigan says, "and all on me."

Bart Maka took his own vacations as well, but before he left on one, he asked Finnigan if he could leave a locked satchel in his house for safekeeping. Finnigan

made the mistake of showing him his stor­age room. After Maka retrieved his bag, Finnigan says, $30,000 was missing from his own stash of cash.

Outraged, he thought about "kicking his ass" but then decided to take his dispute to their sergeant, Jim Eldridge. Maka denied stealing the money, but he still coughed up $10,000. Eldridge later shook down the nervous Pratscher for a $3,000 trip to Las Vegas.

Tales of the lottery leaked out and touched off a frenzy among other SOS cops. Now if they caught someone "dirty," there was even more incentive for Her-rera and Hurley to race back to his house and search it before other officers arrived on the scene. "In the beginning, SOS was about getting guns and making big arrests," Finnigan says. "But in the end, it was all about the money."

While some of those who lost money to the cops did not complain, others were not so reticent—especially if they were roughed up or their homes and cars were torn up in the process. From 2001 to 2004, 13 lawsuits were filed against SOS officers. Over the same period, they racked up a much more astounding number of citi­zen complaints. Although the unit of 180 SOS officers made up only 1.5 percent of the entire Chicago Police Department, over a four-year period it accounted for 12 percent of all officers with 10 or more complaints, and 20 percent of those with 20 or more complaints. While the typical officer may have had just one or two com­plaints in that time, Finnigan, Herrera and Hurley had more than 50 each—the three highest totals in the department.

The complaints never appeared to be a concern for Finnigan's commanding officers. Instead, as each came in, he explains, they would work together on a response, making sure Finnigan, his sergeant and their com­mander were on the same page.

Some complaints could not be so easily dismissed, especially when they generated heat in the media. In November 2004, a His­panic family named Melesio charged that Finnigan and Herrera had stolen about $14,000 while searching their residence without a warrant. The family worked for a celebrity landscaper who put them in touch with Carol Marin, an investigative reporter for Chicago's NBC Channel 5.

Soon after Marin's inquiries, the CPD's Internal Affairs Division opened an inves­tigation into the unit. Before it could gain much traction, Finnigan, his sergeant and his lieutenant went to meet with Matthew Tobias, a fast-rising star in the CPD's brass firmament. He had been the SOS com­mander for a year before he was promoted to assistant deputy superintendent and assigned to run the police academy.

Tobias went way back with Finnigan. They were the same age and had worked gangs together in the same district. When their paths crossed again in Special Opera­tions, Tobias was his boss. Still, he assumed no airs with Finnigan. They would chat easily if they bumped into each other in the parking lot, and Tobias would jokingly clap his hands over his ears when Finni­gan told him how he'd really achieved

his latest exploit. "Matt signed off on the command review section for all the com­plaints," Finnigan says, "so it would be hard to believe he didn't know what was going on. He worked the street. He knew we had to be going into the houses and making the stops illegally."

Now Finnigan asked for his help to squelch the investigation touched off by the Melesio family. "We laid it out and said the theft charges were all bullshit, even though we knew they weren't." Finni­gan was present when Tobias called Debra Kirby, then assistant deputy superintendent for Internal Affairs. Tobias and Kirby had been in officers' training school together and remained friends. Finnigan says, "He asked her to take care of it as a favor to him and, after some small talk, said thanks."

In fact, the Melesio case was not the only one that brought SOS officers to the IAD's attention. In 2005, as later revealed by the Chicago Tribune, two of Kirby's agents wrote memos regarding the SOS and the hundreds of complaints generated from their searches without warrants. One agent recommended "a more thorough investiga­tion that would require surveillance." Both memos were seemingly ignored.

As far as Finnigan was concerned, the Melesio case proved that his unit remained untouchable—no matter how brazen the SOS officers' misconduct—as long as they continued to seize illegal guns and drugs.

No week in Finnigan's career was more tumultuous and productive than the first one in November 2005. It started off on the wrong foot when he got into a brawl with a much larger truck driver who rear-ended him on the freeway. They ended up rolling around on the shoulder of the road, and Finnigan injured his own shoulder in the process. But Finnigan kept working and over the next few days helped recover four guns and 14 kilos of cocaine. Then, on Fri­day, he spotted four Mexicans who looked suspicious to him—decked out in expensive cowboy boots and standing next to a new Ford pickup. Within a few hours, he had recovered four more guns and, in a garage, found more than 100 kilos of cocaine, with a street value of $15 million. As the Chicago Sun-Times reported the next day, a bust of such magnitude usually required an elabo­rate sting or extensive surveillance, which could be weeks in the making. For Finni­gan, it took an afternoon.

But what should have been the highlight of his career proved to be its eclipse. He never again spent a day on active duty. The following week he had shoulder surgery and did not return from medical leave until March 2006—when, to his surprise, he was directed to a desk. At first he was told not to worry. They just had to clear up some of the complaints against him. But then, through the CPD grapevine, Finnigan heard he and a former partner would be indicted by the state's attorney. Soon after, TV reporter Marin ran a follow-up story about an internal investigation triggered by the Melesio case. "Then I knew we could have a problem," says Finnigan.

Exactly what touched off the local

investigation is a matter of dispute. The state's prosecutors claimed they became sus­picious when SOS officers routinely failed to show up to testify in drug cases. Finni­gan scoffs at that explanation. Although younger officers like Herrera may have blown off their court dates, he says, they would have received "court deviation" citations if it had been seen as a problem. Finnigan himself received one such citation in his entire career.

Finnigan instead blames a member of his team named John Burzinski. Accord­ing to Finnigan, Burzinski was the most shameless of the SOS thieves, caught sev­eral times stuffing cash into his vest or socks to hide it from his partners. Once,

he walked out of an apartment carrying a suspect's new White Sox jacket.

But in 2006 Burzinski got into trouble over something that had no connection to the SOS. He told Finnigan he had tried to collect $3,000 in insurance on an old Chevy by reporting it stolen, but a police inspector found the car parked in a police lot. It was an offense that could have gotten Burzinski fired, and he hoped his uncle, who was polit­ically connected inside the department, could cut a deal to save his job.

In the summer of 2006, Finnigan met Burzinski at a diner to discuss how his negotiations were going. But, Finnigan says, "John was acting weird." Before they got too deep into their conversation, he

noticed a state's attorney investigator at a nearby table. Finnigan put two and two together. "Now I knew that John was coop­erating," he remembers. On the chance Burzinski was wearing a wire, Finnigan said nothing further about investigations. "I thought, Here's the biggest thief of us all, and he's jumping ship like a rat to save his own ass."

In September 2006, the state's attor­ney and Superintendent Cline announced Finnigan's indictment—along with that of Keith Herrera and two other SOS offi­cers. Another three SOS officers would be indicted three months later. Maka and Pratscher, who shared in the Mexican lot­tery, were charged along with two more SOS officers three years later. Although Burzinski was named in at least 12 SOS-related civil suits, no criminal indictment against him has yet been made public.

While the state's charges linked Herrera to Finnigan, the two were never the Batman and Robin portrayed in the press—even though they lived a few blocks apart. Herrera's long-time part­ner had actually been John Hurley, who died in a motorcycle accident a few weeks before Finnigan left active duty. Of the 29 SOS-related lawsuits filed against Herrera, 15 did not name Finnigan as an associated party.

But the state's indictment, more than any­thing else, drew them closer. "For a while," Finnigan says, "he seemed to be the only one who wasn't informing on me." Finni­gan picked up extra work in construction to help pay the bills, but Herrera spent his days obsessing about the case. He started to drink heavily, and Finnigan often had to collect him when he was too drunk to drive. During those late-night sessions, he says, Herrera would sob about their plight and Finni­gan would assure him they could beat the state's charges. There was no physical evi­dence, no video or audiotapes, only flawed

witness testimony—either from victims with criminal records or from cops trying to save their skins. But during the summer of 2007, as they prepared for the state trial, Her­rera started to rage about killing the SOS informants—especially Burzinski.

To humor Herrera—and prevent him from acting on his threats—Finnigan says, he pretended to contact a professional hit man to do the "paint job," a term he picked up from reading / Heard You Paint Houses, Charles Brandt's book about the mobster who claimed to have killed Jimmy Hoffa. Finnigan then told Herrera he got a quote of $40,000 for the job from the professional—a price he knew Herrera couldn't afford.

But Herrera wouldn't let the scheme die. He claimed to have found his own contrac­tor at a much more reasonable price, and he asked Finnigan for a picture he had of Burzinski that Herrera could show his hit man. They met at their local Walgreens and Finnigan handed it over, but then Her­rera followed him home for Burzinski's address. Before he could get it, Finnigan's wife, Jane, pointed outside to a car down the street with three men inside. They had been watching the house all afternoon.

Finnigan had no doubt who it was: the FBI, or, as he used to joke, "Famous But Incompetent." Herrera beat a hasty retreat—without the address he had come for—but Finnigan paid no attention to that. Instead, he stormed out of the house. When the vehicle took off, he got into his own car to follow it. As they came to a light, he pulled up alongside them, but just like all the suspected drug dealers he had stalked his whole career, none of the three agents would turn their heads to look at him.

Two days later, on September 26, 2007, as Finnigan headed out to an early-morning construction job, a van with tinted windows screeched to a halt in front of his house. The panel door slid open and three men in bulletproof vests came barreling at him.

Finnigan remembers thinking, I'm either getting killed or arrested.

One of the men was an FBI agent he knew by name. When he told Finnigan he was under arrest, he added, "And it's not for what you think." After he was cuffed and driven off, 25 agents descended on the house, along with a drug-sniffing dog. According to Jane, they searched for five hours while a helicopter circled overhead. They removed 40 boxes. "It was mostly police stuff: hats, shirts, pants," he says. "But not one piece of incriminating evidence."

As it turned out, all the feds needed was Herrera's taped conversations with him about the paint job. They were enough to bludgeon him into a guilty plea (the state case was subsequently dropped). A con­spiracy to kill other cops—even disgraced former cops—seemed so depraved that it minimized the other aspects of his case. Even the rampant civil rights violations paled in comparison, which no doubt was a welcome development for the CPD brass and Cook County prosecutors who had ignored SOS complaints for so long.

But the tapes also gave Herrera a chance to redeem himself. They became the basis of a 60 Minutes segment that portrayed him as a hero who put his life on the line to expose Finnigan. In fact, there is no evi­dence anyone's life was ever on the line. As Finnigan's lawyer wrote in the sentencing memorandum, 'Jerome Finnigan was not the individual to broach the homicidal idea." Still, Finnigan feels bad that he had been so cooperative with Herrera—even if he didn't expect him to kill anyone. He explains, "I just didn't want him to rat on me."

For four years after his arrest, Finnigan was held in Chicago's grim federal lockup under the harshest of conditions—supposedly for his own protection. He got one I5-minute phone call and three showers per week, no outdoor recreation or TV and a handful of visits each month. When he was outside his cell, his hands were cuffed behind his back and his legs shackled. The same facil­ity put fewer restrictions on drug lords and gangbangers. Only in the past few months has Finnigan been transferred to a lower-security facility, where he is likely to serve the rest of his sentence.

Although the feds interviewed Finnigan extensively about his bosses, he was sur­prised they were never charged. He expects more embarrassing details about their supervision to emerge when civil suits come to trial later this year. (The Chicago Police Department declined to comment on Finni­gan's allegations that civil rights complaints against SOS cops were covered up, as well as on Burzinski's involvement in the investiga­tion.) As he looks back on his own career, it remains a point of honor for Finnigan that he never sold the guns or drugs he seized— unlike the rogue cops in Los Angeles's Rampart area or other notorious Chicago police scandals. He is also proud of the job he did reducing crime in areas that had been abandoned by traditional law enforce­ment. "I was a good cop," he says. "I really was. I didn't intend to go bad. But once I started, I just couldn't stop."

JERRY FINNIGAN LEAVES COOK COUNTY CRIMINAL COURT IN 2006, CHARGED WITH USING HIS RADGE TO SHAKE DOWN CITIZENS.