Courtroom 302 (56 page)

The bargaining had started soon after Caruso got his sentence, Lopez says. Locallo was not only aware of the negotiations, he helped them along. Lopez says the parties were stymied at first because the discussions were between himself and Mandeltort, “and she and I are like oil and
water.” Then Locallo “said, ‘Okay, from now on Bob [Berlin] and John [DeLeon] are doing the negotiating.’ ”

In his chambers, Locallo is boiling. Someone has just called to inform him about the Carusos’ campaign to unseat him. They’ve already printed thousands of “Dump Locallo” buttons, the judge learned. “It just shows the father’s a big phony,” he tells me angrily.

He fields a phone call, leaning back in his chair and resting his brown suede shoes on his desk. The green button pinned to the lapel of his sports coat urges “Vote Yes on Retention of Judges.” “They pled,” Locallo informs the caller. “Now Caruso’s father is working on a campaign against my retention. All this ‘racial healing’ shit? Fuck him. It just shows he’s a big phony. He’s interested in racial healing, and then he’s gonna go after somebody who does the right thing? Well, fuck
him
. My message to him is ‘Fuck
you
.’ ”

After he hangs up, he tells me he had no involvement in the plea negotiations, notwithstanding Lopez’s account.

Regarding Caruso’s sentencing, he says, “There were no decisions based on the fact that I was up for retention. Politics had nothing to do with the case. As for any campaign to remove me from office, I would hope it would not be successful. But the chips will fall where they may. I’m not gonna change the way I do things.”

NINETEEN

Politics

“
JUSTICE WAS NOT SERVED
in this case,” Jesse Jackson says two days after the probation deals are consummated.
Robert Shaw, an African American Chicago alderman, tells reporters the deals show once again the racism of the Cook County courts. A front-page story in the city’s African American daily, the
Chicago Defender
, quotes several furious black Chicagoans:
“The justice system always leans toward white people.” “We all know that if the tables were turned and three black men would have jumped on a white kid, the three black men would have gone to jail.” Newspapers across the country and in other nations make note of how two white men, charged with beating a black boy unconscious in Chicago, have been “
let off” with probation, as the
Independent
of London puts it.

An editorial cartoon in the
Chicago Sun-Times
shows a judge telling two smirking defendants, “
I’m gonna throw the book at you!” and tossing a volume labeled “Jokes” at them, and the book bouncing harmlessly off their heads.

Once again Locallo is being thumped from two sides. On the afternoon of the plea deals—October 19—Caruso’s lawyers file a motion asking Locallo to reconsider Caruso’s sentence. An eight-year term for Caruso is clearly unfair when his cohorts are getting probation, according to the motion.

The next day reporters are invited to a press conference at Reverend B. Herbert Martin’s church. The featured speaker is none other than Lenard Clark’s mother, Wanda McMurray.
In tears, McMurray tells reporters she had no idea that Jasas and Kwidzinski were going to get off with probation, and that she feels betrayed. In light of the probation terms, Caruso’s
sentence ought to be reconsidered, she says. Caruso’s parents and a sister are at the press conference, having come to show their support “for continued racial healing,” as Caruso Senior tells reporters.

McMurray had been in the courtroom when Locallo took the pleas from Jasas and Kwidzinski. Prosecutor Mandeltort told Locallo then that the plea agreements had been explained to McMurray, as well as to Jennifer Nicholson, Clevan’s mother, who was also in the courtroom, and that both mothers had given their assent. When Locallo learns of McMurray’s statements at the press conference, he assumes “that she’s being used,” as he says later, and that it’s part of the Carusos’ effort to convert the furor over the plea deals into a lighter sentence for Frank Junior.

On October 21, Locallo gets a mailgram from Reverend Martin, who informs the judge that his community is “appalled” that Caruso got such a stiff sentence while Jasas and Kwidzinski got off so easy. It’s clear now that Caruso was sentenced harshly for political reasons and not in the interests of racial justice, Martin asserts. The sentencing disparities are a “blatant act of injustice against the African American community,” he says.

The judge has no intention of letting this matter linger. He sets a hearing on the motion to reconsider Caruso’s sentence for October 22.

THE SMALL GALLERY
in 302 is jammed the following morning with Caruso friends, neighbors, and relatives, and more Caruso allies are in the hallway hoping to get in. Caruso Senior chats with a friend on one of the gallery benches. During the trial he’d dressed unassumingly—a plain dress shirt and tie and beat-up Nikes; today he’s in a tailored three-piece suit and a Gucci tie. “He’s gonna have something to say,” Mike Jankovich told me earlier this morning outside the courthouse. Jankovich, thirty, a highly regarded
junior-middleweight boxer from Bridgeport, has been chauffeuring the Carusos to court.

The front of the courtroom is packed, too, reporters and sketch artists filling the jury box, and various sheriffs and curious courthouse workers standing along the walls; it’s the most crowded 302 has been this year by far. Rhodes and Guerrero are also in the front of the courtroom, but crowd control is mainly the responsibility of the half-dozen sheriffs specially assigned to 302 today.

When Locallo indicates he’s ready to begin, a pair of SORT guards escort Caruso Junior from the jury room to the defense table. He’s in civilian clothes, white dress shirt open at the collar and dark slacks. For the first time a bit of fuzz is evident on his chin. He takes the seat next to Genson and immediately drops his gaze to his lap.

Locallo’s mood is evident as soon as Genson asks the judge if he and
Adam can split their argument in support of their motion. “Do whatever you want to do,” the judge snaps.

Genson does most of the talking. He refers to Locallo’s statement at sentencing that Caruso gave Lenard a final kick after Jeffrey Gordon screamed at the offenders to stop. Assuming Caruso did do that, he still didn’t deserve eight years more in prison than his codefendants for one extra kick, Genson says.

Mandeltort responds that of course Caruso isn’t getting eight more years for one extra kick. Jasas and Kwidzinski got probation for a simple reason, she says: their cases were far weaker, the evidence against them resting more heavily on the missing witness and the dead one.

Genson also offers Locallo an out, a way to rationalize a sentence reduction for Caruso should the judge be so inclined. He says Mandeltort and Berlin “deceived” the judge by not telling him before Caruso was sentenced that they were going to offer probation to Jasas and Kwidzinski. Had Locallo known that the other two defendants were getting probation, he surely would have given Caruso less than eight years, Genson says. It’s a devious point for Genson to make if he believes, as he’s told me, that Locallo foresaw the probation deals.

Mandeltort calls the charge that she and Berlin deceived the judge “outrageous, offensive, and totally, totally without merit.” There was nothing mysterious about the plea deals, she says. She and Berlin met with Jasas’s and Kwidzinski’s lawyers and came to an agreement. The lawyers presented the agreement to Locallo, and the judge approved it. “It happens every day in every courtroom in this building,” she says.

DURING THE LUNCH BREAK
Caruso Senior steps through the glass doors and into the nearly empty front of the courtroom. His son is in the jury room with his guards. The elder Caruso catches the eye of the clerk, Angela Villa, who’s at her desk. “Thank you for your kind smile throughout this whole ordeal,” he croons to her. Villa, surprised, smiles back bashfully. “Just doing my job,” she says.

Caruso Senior walks up to the lectern and taps the microphone. Then he frisks himself for the speech he hopes to read today. His brow creases. He pulls off his suit jacket and probes its inside pockets. He dips into his pants pockets and pulls out a thick bankroll but no speech. “I lost it,” he mutters.

He takes a seat at the empty defense table, picks up a pen, and bends over a legal pad.

Genson soon returns to the courtroom. When he sees the elder Caruso composing at the defense table, he tells him, “You’re not addressing the judge,” but Caruso ignores him and keeps writing.

“Not if you want me to continue on this case,” Genson says. “It reflects on me.”

“Does the judge have to warn me before he holds me in contempt?” Caruso asks an onlooker. The onlooker shrugs, and Caruso resumes writing.

“It reflects badly on me,” Genson repeats.

“So what? You’re tough,” Caruso says without looking up.

“I have a reputation,” Genson says. Then he tries a different tack. “You start attacking the judiciary, and it might not help in the appellate court.”

Again, Caruso seems not to hear. He frowns, crumples the page he’s been working on, and starts over on a fresh sheet.

A short time later Caruso asks me if I thought one particular witness who testified against his son was a transvestite. I ask him what made him think so. “I don’t know. He just looked funny on the stand,” he says.

I ask him how he’d have reacted if someone had beaten his son, when he was thirteen, the way Clark was beaten.

He purses his lips and stares vacantly at the unlit cigar dangling from one of his hands. Then he tells me about something that happened to Frank Junior when he was eleven. Frank Junior had gone skateboarding one day just east of Bridgeport, he says, in the black neighborhood on the other side of the Dan Ryan Expressway. Three black men came by in a car and offered to tow him along. Frank Junior held on to the rear bumper as the car cruised up a hill. At the top of the hill the driver floored it, sending Frank Junior flying. His head slammed into the pavement, knocking him cold. A friend who happened by piled him into his car and rushed him home. The elder Caruso was horrified when he saw his son. “I didn’t know a head could get that big,” he says, spreading his hands in front of him. Flesh was torn from Frank Junior’s face, neck, and chest. He and his wife rushed him to a hospital. “We thought we were gonna lose him,” he says. Then he looks me in the eye and delivers the moral. “When the doctors said he was gonna be all right, I didn’t care who did it, why they did it, or if they caught them.”

I ask him again how he’d have reacted if Frank Junior had been attacked the way Clark was. “My first reaction then probably would have been violence,” he says softly. “But I have more spirituality in me now.”

LOCALLO BEGINS
his ruling after lunch by distancing himself from the plea deals. “This court was not involved in the negotiations,” he says. At the defense table Genson leans over and whispers to Adam, “I told you he’d say that.” Locallo says that the prosecutors knew their case better than he did, and so it would have been inappropriate for him to reject the plea
deals. It also would have been wrong to make Lenard’s and Clevan’s families suffer through another trial, he says, especially when the outcome likely would have disappointed them. “With the pleas of Jasas and Kwidzinski there was a guarantee of a conviction,” he says. “If there was a trial, there was no guarantee of a conviction and a great possibility of acquittal.”

He says Caruso deserved a harsher sentence than Jasas and Kwidzinski regardless, since he “planned the attack, led the attack, and … finished the attack, upon a defenseless thirteen-year-old boy. All because he was black.” Therefore, he concludes, “the motion to reconsider the sentence is respectfully denied.”

The Caruso supporters in the gallery have been growing louder throughout the hearing, their jeers occasionally audible through the Plexiglas. Now a woman shouts at Locallo, “You did it to further your career.
That’s
why you did it!”

“Mr. Sheriff, remove that woman from the courtroom,” Locallo directs a sheriff’s lieutenant. But the clamor persists:

“Politics!”

“Fucking
puppet
!”

“Call the fucking mayor and ask him what he wants you to do!”

“Piece a
shit
!”

Locallo waits as a handful of sheriffs restore order.

Then Sam Adam tells Locallo that Caruso’s father would like to address the court. This is highly unusual, and Locallo certainly doesn’t have to allow it—the elder Caruso has no legal standing in this hearing. But Locallo says, “If he wishes.”

Caruso Senior steps forward from the gallery, pulling a folded paper from a suit-coat pocket.

“Your honor,” he says at the lectern, “I feel that this has a lot of political attention, feel it’s got a lot of media attention, therefore I think your decision, respectfully, has been clouded. I feel that the pressure that was weighed on you from politics and the media had you boxed in a corner, and you had to do something that was forced upon you. I actually feel that the scales of justice weren’t tipped—I think the robe was actually ripped off the lady.”

Locallo stares at Caruso. “Is that what you wanted to say?”

“I would continue, but I don’t want to burden the court,” Caruso responds tartly. “You have a decision to make. You’ve made it, and we have to live with it.”

“Well, Mr. Caruso, I take what you say and I understand where it’s coming from, because it’s your son. But as for your comment about the scales
of justice, or what she’s wearing—you’re entitled to your opinion. But if there’s nothing else you have to say, then I suggest that you take care of your wife and family.”

“I thank you, and that’s what I’m going to try to do, but with no help from you,” Caruso fires back.

“All right. Mr. Sheriff, take the defendant,” Locallo says.

This ignites the Caruso supporters again. Several of them pound the tinted glass, Frank Junior’s girlfriend with her middle finger. Curses are shouted at Locallo and Mandeltort. The three sheriffs in the gallery are notably ineffective and unusually tolerant. They implore the Caruso allies to settle down, but they make no arrests nor threaten any. Guerrero hustles into the gallery to help. “Step
back
,” he barks at one young man in the aisle. The young man doesn’t budge; instead he glares at Guerrero and says, “Well,
who
are you?” Guerrero is about to pull him into the hallway when a sergeant steps between them. “We’re not here to arrest people,” the sergeant tells Guerrero. (“If that was any other family, we would have made a
bunch
of arrests,” Guerrero says later.)