Such a vote to make killers like Arturo Reyes and Gabriel Solache rich takes place regularly in Chicago, but this time enough truth about the case has emerged in Chicago’s underground media and in a few novel legal tactics that the usual one-party corruption keeping the story out of the public imagination has failed.

More and more people in Chicago and beyond are seeing that what Crooked City has been claiming for nearly two decades is true: The exoneration of killers like Solache and Reyes, then making them rich through lawsuits, is the lifeblood of the modern radical Democratic Party, having originated in Chicago but now spreading across American cities like a cancer.

That the city is even considering a settlement for Solache and Reyes, both illegal aliens, is itself a stunning glimpse into the failure of large Democratic cities to govern or conduct a legitimate justice system. But the debate over this settlement—and the mainstream media coverage of it—promises to be a compelling event to witness, much like a horror movie, except that this one is real.

Let us consider many of the threads comprising this evil tapestry before contemplating the grand event in the city council about to take shape.

Solache, Reyes, and a third offender, Adriana Mejia, were convicted for their role in the 1998 double murders of Mariano and Jacinta Soto. They were accused of going to the Sotos’ apartment and stabbing the couple, then kidnapping the Sotos’ newborn and another child. Mariano was stabbed 39 times, Jacinta 20 times. Mejia reportedly was the one who hatched the plot against the couple. Court records claim Mejia was engaged in a bizarre plot to deceive her husband that she was pregnant, so she was searching for a newborn to claim as her own. The Sotos couple had a newborn. That’s why the three went there.

The Solache/Reyes “exonerations” are also part of a larger body of cases in which Latino gangbangers claimed they were abused by now-retired Chicago detective Reynaldo Guevara. This chorus of gangbangers claiming abuses never got any traction until Kim Foxx was elected as the city’s top prosecutor. Her predecessor, Anita Alvarez, rejected all the Guevara coerced-confession claims and refused to toss their convictions. That is until Foxx, a radical’s radical, breathed life into what was a hopeless exoneration mythology, which will ultimately cost taxpayers as much as a billion dollars.

This pivotal transformation in Chicago’s criminal justice system in the “Guevara” cases is itself worthy of scrutiny by the media, federal investigators, and anyone concerned about the demise of America through the radicalization of the Democratic Party, for it was an incredible act of leftist hubris by Foxx to toss the convictions, a brazen sign suggesting that these radicals could do whatever they wanted in Chicago.

One reason it was so brazen is that throughout the years the third offender, Mejia, was in prison, she repeatedly stated that Solache and Reyes were her accomplices. And even as the men walked free from prison, Foxx’s own top prosecutors stated in the media that they were guilty.

“There is no doubt in my mind, or the mind of anyone who has worked on this case, that Mr. Solache and Mr. Reyes are guilty of these crimes,” said Foxx’s top prosecutor at the time.

Hang in their dear reader. We got a long way to go.

A crucial statute in Illinois often determines whether “exonerated” killers get a massive payday. It’s called a certificate of innocence. Offenders petition for such a certificate from a judge. If they get the certificate, it makes it much harder for city attorneys to defend cops like Guevara in the federal lawsuit the offenders file in their crusade to not only become free for murder, but rich from taxpayers.

Who says socialism doesn’t work?

Prosecutors have to contest the petition by forcing a judge to admit the exoneration was shady. If the prosecutors don’t contest it, a judge has no option but to issue the certificate. In perhaps the most scandalous, corrupt move under the Foxx nightmare, her administration suddenly and inexplicably ceased contesting the Solache/Reyes certificate of innocence, almost as if Foxx was working on behalf of the exoneration attorneys guiding the case rather than working on behalf of the public she swore to protect.

In a sign of life for justice in Chicago, Foxx was recently questioned about the Solache and Reyes case in a deposition. She admitted she believed the men were guilty. The bombshell was covered by CWB Chicago, not the mainstream media in Chicago. Even after the CWB story broke, no mainstream outlet posed this question to Foxx: If you thought they were guilty, why did you let them out and not contest the certificates of innocence?

Are you getting depressed, dear reader, by that chilling sense that you do not live in a republic anymore, but rather a fast-evolving socialist hellhole? Did you think those chronically empty storefronts all over the city and those roving bands of gangbangers shooting, robbing, and stealing was just a “trend” and not an inevitable consequence of living in a one-party political machine that is, in truth, a sign that socialism and Marxism are taking shape before your very eyes?

Consider this, then. In the era of the Foxx nightmare, two police killers walked free; two men convicted of raping and murdering a young woman in one of the offenders’ basements walked free, then got rich; and a total of four prosecutors were fired or about to be fired before they left Foxx’s administration. Two of these prosecutors were criminally charged and endured the long nightmare of the leftist “process is the punishment” tactics chronically employed by Foxx and her allies. Thankfully, those former prosecutors had their case overseen by a suburban judge who ripped the charges against the prosecutors to shreds in a bench verdict. But the lesson was nevertheless sent to naive prosecutors and other public servants in Chicago still operating from a sense of duty or principle: Cross the mandates of the ruling party, and you are toast.

Take a break, dear reader. Get some more coffee. Put a bagel in the toaster and slather some extra butter on it, maybe even fry an egg. Your doctor may understand if you just explain to him or her what you now know about the Solache/Reyes case.

One of the early champions of getting the two men out of prison was an attorney named Karen Daniel, who worked at the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University. When the two killers were released from prison, Daniel waited outside the prison gates. But the men never showed up. Instead, they were taken into federal custody because they were illegal immigrants.

While Daniel was a fervent exoneration attorney championing one ludicrous case after another, Northwestern became embroiled in a vast scandal, which had rocked Northwestern in the years before Daniel vainly waited outside the Pontiac prison for Solache and Reyes to emerge. The scandal centered on the university’s Medill School of Journalism, involving a controversial professor, David Protess, and various private investigators and students working under Protess as part of the school’s Innocence Project. Intense doubt was cast upon the journalism school’s claims about cases, in particular the means by which Protess, his private investigators, and his students obtained retracted witness statements that paved the way for “exonerations.”

After the scandal broke, the university initiated an investigation and issued the following statement:

In sum, Protess knowingly misrepresented the facts and his actions to the University, its attorneys and the dean of Medill on many documented occasions. He also misrepresented facts about these matters to students, alumni, the media and the public. He caused the University to take on what turned out to be an unsupportable case and unwittingly misrepresent the situation both to the Court and to the State.

All the while Protess was engaged in the conduct the university assailed, Daniel, who was killed in a 2020 traffic accident, was an attorney at the university. Did she truly not know what was going on at the Innocence Project under Protess? Whatever Daniel’s state of mind was, the Innocence Project scandal was so ominous that any exoneration claim issued from the university’s attorneys or journalists should have met with intense skepticism, especially a case like that of Solache and Reyes which held so much overwhelming evidence.

As it is now, dear reader, the public is paying more and more taxes to a political machine that sees them as little more than chumps who must witness the spectacle of the Chicago City Council debating whether to make Solache and Reyes rich through a settlement, a debate that perhaps will take shape within a few weeks.

You will certainly not see the only fair response the city council will make to this case coming before the council: a formal request for the Department of Justice to look into the Foxx administration on this and all the Guevara exonerations. Such a request would never, ever actually work for the ruling one-party banana republic of Chicago to a Justice Department under Donald Trump. The city council also would never take the necessary steps to truly reveal the corruption in the exoneration movement. If the city council did, the three decades of settlements they have made to this movement would reveal what almost anyone paying attention to Chicago already knows: the Chicago City Council is perhaps the most pathetic, corrupt political body in the country.

Keep an eye out for these dark dynamics. The most radical city council members—the ones chronically bloviating about social justice, racism most certainly will be the ones to make Solache and Reyes rich. The basic human rights of men, women, and children, like the victims in the Solache/Reyes murders, will recede, as they always do, in the machinations of the more radical aldermen’s crusade to maintain the lucrative exoneration industry, an industry whose revenue almost certainly finds its way back to the campaigns of these unapologetic radicals in the city council. The rights of these victims will also recede in order for the radical city council members to maintain their war on the system that the exoneration industry provides.

The other dynamic is to watch the huffing and puffing of the supposedly middle-of-the-road and police-supporting aldermen. Certainly many of them will oppose the settlement and make righteous speeches against it. But will they band together to take the necessary steps to undermine this movement?

Like demanding that the feds take a long, long look at the exoneration movement in Chicago?

Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House. For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.

Let us flush out some of these most compelling questions to understand how a big city justice system could be commandeered by the radical left and transformed into an actual weapon against the system itself, for Foxx’s decisions to release criminals more and more encapsulates a phrase the left reserves for their media attacks on the right: systemic corruption.

According to the lone voice of still-legitimate journalism in Chicago, CWB Chicago, Foxx’s former top prosecutor Risa Lanier will be questioned about the exoneration of two women, Marilyn Mulero and Madeline Mendoza, for a 1992 double murder.

The deposition will likely include one key event. After convicted killers like Mulero and Mendoza get released from prison in Chicago, they often petition for a certificate of innocence. Obtaining such a certificate from a judge makes it all that much harder for city attorneys to contest the inevitable lawsuit filed against police and prosecutors. In one of the most glaring signs of prosecutorial abuse under Foxx, the social-justice-bloviating public servant Foxx refused to contest some of these certificates despite the overwhelming evidence of the guilt in the cases.

So it wasn’t just a decision to release the convicted killers in the first place and then refuse to contest the certificate of innocence. No, not at all. The doubt surrounding Foxx’s exonerations was compounded a few months ago, when Foxx herself was deposed about her administration’s decision to release two men for the stabbing death of a couple and kidnapping their children, another case in which Foxx’s prosecutors suddenly dropped out of contesting a certificate of innocence. In the deposition, Foxx reportedly admitted the men were guilty of the horrific crime.

Hang on, dear reader. It’s a dismal, depressing saga.

Many of the cases the Foxx administration dropped were tied to a retired detective, Reynaldo Guevara, accused of coercing confessions from gang members. The allegations against Guevara, championed by the most corrupt media in the country, were rejected by Foxx’s predecessor, Anita Alvarez, but within weeks of taking office, Foxx started letting out the criminals Alvarez claimed were still culpable.

So you see the vast disparity between the old school Democratic politicians and the new radicalized ones? It’s a powerful lesson for the entire country: These maniacs are dangerous.

CWB broke the story of Foxx’s deposition, in which she admitted the two men were guilty of the stabbing:

But during her deposition, Foxx often said she did not know the details of exoneration cases or how her office investigated and determined whether to challenge certificates of innocence, legal documents that mean an exonerated person is actually innocent of a crime. Those matters, Foxx said, were under the purview of the office’s number-two executive, then-First Assistant Cook County State’s Attorney Risa Lanier.

Sure, Kim. Sure.

Now CWB reports Lanier is being called to a deposition:

Lanier is now expected to be questioned under oath about topics including the administration’s decisions not to contest the vacating of the Mulero and Mendoza convictions, discussions with the Exoneration Project about cases involving Chicago Police Detective Guevara, and the State’s Attorney’s Office’s decisions to stop investigating the validity of convictions Guevara played a role in.

Grab the popcorn. Put some extra butter and salt on it. This is gonna be good.

At this point, though, compelling questions emerge.

Some are obvious, like: Why did CWB Chicago break this story, but no one in the mainstream media? Why after the story broke has it not been picked up by the mainstream media to pose the myriad questions that emerge from it? Oh, the Pulitizers that could be won. The book tours. The media interviews.

Forget about it. The answer is simple. The mainstream media in Chicago is one of the most corrupt institutions in the country. Its zombies have been pushing bogus exoneration stories for so many decades, they are trapped in their own web of lies. If the reporters and editors truly believed these men were innocent, those media dogs would be scribbling line after line pointing it out in front-page stories. But their silence tells it all.

The sad story is that many in the Chicago media have less integrity than the worst street thugs in the city. They have not exercised the First Amendment; they have abused it, violated it. Their willingness to support the most vicious, violent offenders as a war on the system should be kept in one’s mind as they publish virtually daily attacks on police officers.

Here’s another question. According to CWB, plaintiff attorneys have fought the city attorneys’ question to depose Foxx and Lanier.

Why? If these attorneys believe the offenders are innocent, wouldn’t such depositions be welcome? Wouldn’t they help bolster their innocence claims, perhaps even increase their settlements or verdicts in the civil lawsuits, the lawsuits that are one of the only thriving industries in Chicago’s endlessly vacant storefronts and closed restaurants? Wouldn’t it be yet another opportunity to humiliate the big bad cops and prosecutors who set up their poor clients?

Another troubling question, very troubling, emerges.

Why are these questions holding Foxx and her subordinates accountable being posed by city attorneys and not the woman who billed herself as a reformer, the current top prosecutor Eileen O’Neill Burke? The question becomes even more compelling when one observes that the Burke administration is no longer folding on remaining and new exoneration fantasies nauseatingly turned into legal arguments, but contesting them, a vital sign that her administration recognizes fraud was endemic in the exoneration movement during the Foxx dark ages.

Why, then, wouldn’t Burke be the one grilling Foxx and Lanier, not city attorneys? Why wouldn’t she be gung ho to get to the bottom of the “Guevara” exonerations to find out which ones were substantial and which ones were bogus.

Here is why, dear reader.

While Burke is refusing to hold Foxx accountable, she is nevertheless willing to extend the energy and resources of her administration to pursue criminal charges against ICE agents. “Cook County’s Top Prosecutor Outlines Plan to Charge ICE Agents with Crimes” ran the headline of a Sun-Times article back in February.

So while Burke refuses to address the evidence of corruption against her predecessor, who seemed to think nothing of destroying the career and reputation of a Chicago detective or a prosecutor—detectives and prosecutors who faithfully served the public for decades—she dutifully bows to the radical faction of her party to undermine a policy aimed at addressing rampant illegal immigration that the majority of Americans support and voted for.

Burke is a goddamn Democrat and, at this point in America, no Democrat is willing to let it be known just how crooked their ruling radical faction truly is. It is impossible in America to find even a few Democrat politicians anywhere in the country worthy of a republic. If Burke digs into one Guevara case, just one, she could reveal a fraud so grand, so malevolent, that the corruption unfolding in Democratic strongholds like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia would be jaywalking in comparison.

Imagine, then, the trouble brewing among current and former prosecutors who worked under Foxx and obeyed her mandates despite private misgivings, despite perhaps everything they learned in the first year of law school, about that one document . . . what’s it called again? Oh yeah, the Constitution. Imagine the phone calls being made, the gossiping taking place. At some point, somebody may lie in a deposition or legal proceeding, as the exonerations appear more and more unjustifiable.

At this point, it will take a dozen “news” stories from the radical sycophants in the media to explain how it’s not really a lie, how white is actually black and up is actually down, in the same manner they argue a human predator is really a great guy and the courageous cops and prosecutors who put him in prison are, in fact, the criminals.

Well, let them, because there’s an even bigger fly in the ointment of the exoneration movement. One of the people Foxx sold down the river was Nancy Adduci, who led the prosecution of three Spanish Cobras for the 2011 murder of police officer Clifton Lewis. Foxx dropped all charges against the men, even after one had been convicted. She also fired Adduci. Not one to go gentle into that good night, Adduci filed a lawsuit over her termination. Foxx also fired other prosecutors under equally dubious circumstances, firings that thrilled the wrongful conviction crowd, none more so than their media lapdogs.

Many prosecutors shocked at Foxx’s tactics fled her administration, some writing letters expressing their disgust on the way out. Will all these outcasts from the Foxx revolution sit idly by should statements be made that these outcasts know are false?

Hardly. Each and every one of them has a story to tell.

Let the Chicago media try to spin those stories.

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Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House. For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.

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Right now, the most pro–law enforcement president in the modern history of the nation is in office, proving time and again his willingness to back the police. At the same time, Chicago is ground zero for the radical Democrats seeking to expand their power throughout the country. The key strategy of this Democratic faction is a war on the criminal justice system.

One would think that an alliance of the Trump administration, particularly the Department of Justice, and the Chicago FOP would be a match made in heaven. Imagine the things they could get done. One would think that public appearances between Trump and the leader of the FOP, John Catanzara, would be frequent and friendly.

Consider. In his first administration, Trump already signaled his willingness to rescue Chicago from the grip of the radical lunatics now governing almost every institution in the city and state. For example, Trump and his DOJ quickly nixed the imposition of a consent decree on the Chicago police, one generated in the politicalization of the DOJ that took shape under Obama and Biden.

Never to be distracted from the war on law and order that now drives the depraved, radicalized Democratic Party, Chicago/Illinois political hacks former attorney general Lisa Madigan and former mayor Rahm Emanuel stepped in to resurrect the consent decree through legalistic trickery. In the wake of this dirty Chicago political move, the FOP folded like a cheap suit and the Democrats got their consent decree. But it was through no fault of the Trump administration.

When Trump came to Chicago in his first administration, he was met by former FOP president Kevin Graham at the airport, a meeting broadcast throughout the world.

But search the media and you will find no such photo-op, let alone the slightest indication of any communication or cooperation between Trump’s administration and the Chicago FOP under its current president, John Catanzara. In fact, you will find just the opposite.

In what many regard as a sign Trump wants nothing to do with Catanzara, the FOP president was reportedly turned away at the capital for a conference of big city police union leaders. Rather than work with Trump’s DOJ to root out the endemic corruption within Chicago by harnessing the power of the DOJ, it appears that either Catanzara, the FOP board, or both are being targeted in an investigation by the DOJ.

The FBI investigation seems tied to at least some allegations made against Catanzara by his first vice president, Mike Mette, allegations in which Mette claimed a host of financial abuses by Catanzara with FOP money. Mette’s allegations were dismissed by the FOP board and then by the state lodge, both entities that Catanzara holds great influence over. The allegations now head to the National FOP, where Catanzara’s influence is close to nil.

In the long list of claims and counterclaims surrounding the DOJ investigation of the FOP/Catanzara and the charges by Mette, two issues may illuminate just what is at stake.

In 2011, Officer Clifton Lewis was murdered while working a side job. Three Spanish Cobra gang members were ultimately charged with the murder. In the all-too-common corruption of Chicago’s depraved criminal justice system, the charges were ultimately dropped by Kim Foxx, the poster child for the radical Democrats’ war on cops.

Many of the scandals surrounding Foxx took place while Catanzara and the current board were in office, yet Foxx and her political allies never showed any signs they were concerned about the FOP.

Nevertheless, any police union that had the slightest moxie, the barest ability to navigate the political and legal channels of their city, would rally to right this depravity, including communication with the DOJ to assert the DOJ’s right to intervene on the Lewis murder case by bringing their own charges against the gang thugs, a move that would humiliate the Chicago radicals who have destroyed the criminal justice system in Chicago and their media lapdogs. In doing so, a sense of moral outrage would guide the actions of the FOP.

But the FOP has done little to nothing about this case, and there are no signs they are about to. Has the FOP in Chicago become so pathetic, so weak, so caught up in its internal bickering that it cannot even undertake an action to recharge the gangbanging scumbags for the execution-style murder of one of their own?

The second issue surrounds the allegation by Mette that Catanzara took money from both the Lodge and the state FOP to run for national president, totaling some $20,000. Despite taking the money, Catanzara ended up not running for national president, likely realizing he lacked the political support to do so. When asked about the money, sources say Catanzara claimed he used it to buy T-shirts with the image of slain police officer Ella French on it. Yet sources say Catanzara has not provided any receipt for this purchase, only an invoice.

Has the receipt been turned in? Is the absence of this receipt an issue that the feds are looking at in connection with Catanzara and the board, as well?

It’s a disturbing question, to say the least.

Consider all these issues in the face of the fact that an FOP election is approaching this winter. Rumors abound that Mette will run against Catanzara in that election. Just recently, FOP board members initiated their own charges against Mette, allegedly based on the fact that Mette approved paying for legal defense for an officer in a DUI case.

The approval was made more than a year ago, but charges are emerging only now. There is no accusation that Mette pocketed any money or benefited in any way from the approval. He made a judgment call, as many FOP board members have made in legal defense issues, none of whom have faced similar charges.

And so a question lingers in the dusty, putrid air of Chicago politics. Are the charges against Mette, in fact, politically motivated? Are they aimed not at misconduct but rather at the next election?

How would bringing charges against Mette affect the election? Simple. If Mette is found culpable by the FOP board—the same FOP board that rejected far more ominous charges against Catanzara, charges that seem to have interested federal investigators—Mette could be suspended and therefore become ineligible to run in the next election against Catanzara. With his main opposition sidelined, Catanzara could then glide into his third term as president of the FOP.

FOP members can now stand back and watch with one question lingering: Would the FOP board sustain charges against Mette that would prevent him from running for office and deprive many members the right to a candidate they strongly support simply to commandeer an election victory?

But no. It can’t be.

Not in Chicago.

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Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House. For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.

Former prosecutor Nancy Adduci—whose assignments over two decades prosecuting the worst of the worst in the trenches of Chicago’s criminal courts included overseeing the Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU)—is perhaps the poster child for the corruption wrought upon Chicago by former Cook County State’s Attorney Kimberly Foxx.

Caught in a hailstorm of biased and fake news reports claiming that Adduci’s prosecution of three lowlife Spanish Cobra gang members for their role in the murder of police officer Clifton Lewis was dirty, Foxx fired Adduci from her long-serving post as prosecutor in the wake of the bogus media reports surrounding Adduci’s prosecution of the Spanish Cobras.

How ludicrous were the trumped-up media attacks on Adduci? Reporters echoed claims that one of the Spanish Cobras couldn’t have committed the murders because phone records obtained by the FBI indicate one of the offenders wasn’t in the vicinity of the crime. What the reporters didn’t bother to notice—and haven’t cleared up yet—is the fact that the FBI reports were cited in Pacific Standard Time, a two-hour difference from Chicago time. Taking into account the time difference, the FBI reports actually bolster Adduci’s conviction narrative.

Nevertheless, Foxx’s firing of Adduci served another crucial purpose: It put wind in the sails of the lawsuit by the Spanish Cobras against police and prosecutors, a lawsuit that can turn the gangbangers into millionaires. By getting the police killers out of prison, the case marked a climactic moment for the collection of prosecutors supported by radical philanthropist George Soros in big cities throughout the country, all of whom used their prosecutor’s office to wage war on the system, not strengthen it. The fact that one of these Soros-backed prosecutors, Kim Foxx, would engage in tactics that would assist police killers in escaping prison marks a radical shift in the tactics the new, radicalized Democratic Party will engage in.

Foxx’s firing of Adduci also sent a powerful message to public servants not only in her administration but throughout Chicagoland; the more committed and seriously you take your job, the more of a target you become. Go along and get along and you will be okay. Fight crime, as Adduci and so many other prosecutors did, and you are a target.

Doubt it? Look at the exodus of committed, long-serving prosecutors who were either fired or became so fed up with Foxx’s tactics they left. This trend is taking hold throughout Chicago and Illinois, not just in the prosecutor’s office. Virtually every institution in Chicago, including the police department, is ridding itself of committed, duty-minded public servants, turning departments into useless bands of bureaucrats willing to tow the party line even they don’t believe in.

This goes for people at the top positions in Chicago’s institutions. Many people, for example, were hoping for a restoration of sanity in Chicago’s criminal justice system with the election of supposed reformer Eileen O’Neill Burke, who narrowly defeated Foxx’s acolyte in the last election for prosecutor. Proving she is a Democrat first and public servant a distant second, Burke refused to recharge the three Spanish Cobras for the murder and stood silent as they marched into federal court to get rich. She also refused to send a powerful message to Foxx and her ilk by not rehiring Adduci to the position she had so faithfully served throughout her career.

Go along and get along.

Adduci did not go gentle into Foxx and Burke’s good night. She courageously filed a lawsuit against Foxx. That lawsuit has been winding its way through the courts at the same time the Spanish Cobra civil lawsuit winds its way through the federal courts, two entirely different narratives moving through local and federal courts.

In the meantime, there is other smoke emerging in the cockpit of the George Soros movement to radicalize big-city prosecutors.

Foxx, for example, was recently under fire for her deposition testimony in which she admitted she believed Arturo Reyes and Gabriel Solache were guilty of a horrific double murder and kidnapping of two children in 1993. What made Foxx’s admission so shocking was the fact that she vacated their conviction and then suddenly ceased contesting a certificate of innocence for the men, paving the way for the two men to become rich in a civil lawsuit à la the Chicago “justice” system, just as the three Spanish Cobras are attempting to do.

Another compelling development in the era of Soros-supported prosecutors is taking shape in Pennsylvania. The Supreme Court has investigated Philadelphia prosecutor Larry Krasner, another Soros soulmate, for his opening up of prison doors.

Ralph Cipriano, a former L.A. Times and Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, covered this story on Substack:

The state Supreme Court also found that the work of Krasner’s prosecutors, in granting “highly problematic” concessions to 110 convicted killers, to be lacking in integrity. In past concessions granted by Krasner to convicted killers, the state Supreme Court found that Krasner’s “prosecutors” had routinely lied to and misled judges, submitted false evidence, withheld “relevant” evidence, conducted faulty investigations, and dodged required evidentiary hearings.

Sound familiar?

Adduci appears well-prepared in her lawsuit to refute the attacks against her by Foxx, including any allegations of misconduct in a police murder case. Her deposition of Foxx, therefore, could be revelatory. In fact, Foxx’s deposition could drag down a host of players in the Chicago criminal justice debacle, not just Foxx.

Consider: Adduci’s lawsuit against Foxx could undermine the integrity of Burke’s current administration, providing so much evidence that Foxx had no right to drop charges against gang members in a police murder case that Burke’s refusal to recharge the men approaches legal cowardice and amounts to a betrayal of Chicago police officers on a magnitude rarely seen in an American city.

The significance of Burke’s betrayal has been obfuscated by a Chicago police union president and board mired in its own scandals, including reports of a federal investigation concerning union funds.

In any case, it is not clear that the tactics employed by the current decision-makers at the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office regarding the lawsuit by the Cobras against the county comprehend the potential fallout from Adduci’s lawsuit. If the county does settle with the gang thugs, Adduci’s lawsuit, in particular her deposition of Foxx, could uncover so much egregious misconduct by Foxx that the decision to settle amounts to little more than a prosecutor’s office working on behalf of gang members.

Various voices in Chicago, including former mayoral candidate Paul Vallas, are calling for a federal investigation of the Foxx era. What if that federal investigation unfolds? How would the prosecutors who recommend settling the case rather than recharging the Cobras look then?

And what if, as has happened in other “exoneration” cases, the city follows suit by the Spanish Cobras and settles the case against the detectives? How would that settlement look in the wake of a Foxx deposition by Adduci’s attorneys ripping the decision-making by Foxx to shreds? How would the other cases the city has settled as a result of Foxx’s alliance with the exoneration movement look?

And perhaps most importantly, what shadow would be cast upon the Chicago media in the wake of Adduci’s lawsuit? The exoneration movement, particularly under Foxx, is media-driven, not judicially driven. The movement hinges on the fact that Chicago has purged itself of legitimate journalists and replaced them with drooling anti-police radicals who cut and paste the same drivel from one article to another, all clearly aimed at pressuring prosecutors, judges, and politicians to embrace exoneration fantasies, as well as drowning out any journalism posing legitimate questions.

Wouldn’t it be nice for Adduci, who has been scapegoated by the media in the media’s efforts to embrace Foxx’s bogus exonerations, to have the last laugh and expose the Chicago media for what it is, one of the most corrupt institutions in America?

Pay attention to the Adduci lawsuit, dear reader. Pay close attention.

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Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House. For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.

The state’s supreme court has assailed Philadelphia prosecutor Larry Krasner for his willingness to release offenders, often murderers, with dubious “investigations.”

Ralph Cipriano, a former L.A. Times and Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, described how on Substack:

The state Supreme Court also found that the work of Krasner’s prosecutors, in granting “highly problematic” concessions to 110 convicted killers, to be lacking in integrity. In past concessions granted by Krasner to convicted killers, the state Supreme Court found that Krasner’s “prosecutors” had routinely lied to and misled judges, submitted false evidence, withheld “relevant” evidence, conducted faulty investigations, and dodged required evidentiary hearings.

In response to the findings of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, the state attorney general has been imposed as a watchdog over Krasner’s decisions to release convicted killers with the authority to nix these decisions should the AG conclude they are baseless. One compelling subplot in the handcuffing of Krasner is the fact that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is majority Democrat, a sign that even members within Krasner’s own party have turned on him.

Let us take a moment and consider the implications of the Krasner scandal and the supreme court response to it for a city like Chicago.

In the coming weeks or days, the Chicago City Council will consider paying out a massive settlement to two illegal aliens convicted of a double murder in 1993. Gabriel Solache and Arturo Reyes would not have gotten out of prison were it not for Kimberly Foxx, another big-city prosecutor supported by George Soros in the mold of Krasner, except that Foxx’s exoneration mania far surpasses that of Krasner.

The Solache/Reyes debacle is part of a larger group of exonerations tied to retired detective Reynaldo Guevara. Foxx’s predecessor, Anita Alvarez, rejected the claims of misconduct against Guevara and refused to overturn convictions tied to him. But soon after taking office, Foxx embraced these claims, which led to vast riches to Foxx’s far left ideological soulmates in the exoneration industry through federal civil lawsuits.

Foxx’s 2017 decision to vacate charges against Solache and Reyes was one of her most appalling actions during her two-term nightmare. Foxx took the extraordinary step of suddenly ceasing to contest a certificate of innocence for the two men, a move that made contesting their federal civil lawsuit even more difficult for attorneys representing former detective Guevara. Foxx then admitted under oath she believed they were guilty.

“So why did you let them out?” few, if any, journalists have asked Foxx.

Foxx’s conduct in the Solache/Reyes case alone cries out for an investigation like the one carried out against Krasner in Philadelphia. But Chicago, Cook County, and Illinois are run by one-party political machines devoid of principles, guided only by power politics.

It is difficult to imagine, then, that the kind of reform that is taking place in Philly will happen in Chicago, even as the vote for a payout to Solache and Reyes approaches. Nevertheless, it will be interesting, if nauseating, to observe the Chicago City Council debate making Solache and Reyes millionaires through a legal settlement. One reason is that Solache and Reyes were illegals when they committed their crimes. The far-left faction of the Democratic Party ruling Chicago would prefer not to let the two men stand as poster children for the need to protect borders as a necessary measure against letting such monsters enter the country. Instead, Chicago’s depraved uniparty has turned the men into victims worthy of a massive payout.

Here’s another reason why the city council will pay out for the men. If the aldermen reject a Guevara settlement in the Solache/Reyes case, don’t they open up the possibility that all their settlements in previous Guevara cases are suspect?

If only the Solache/Reyes case were an isolated incident that should draw scrutiny on the Foxx nightmare. Foxx’s transformation of her office into a way station for killers went much deeper than perhaps that of any other Soros prosecutor, including Krasner.

Let us consider what Foxx did to her Conviction Review Unit, tasked with reviewing convictions and possibly letting guys like Solache and Reyes out. At one point, Foxx appointed Michelle Mbekeani to run the CRU, even as Mbekeani held a top position in an organization that helped convicted offenders find defense attorneys in an effort to have their convictions tossed.

Go figure.

Where is the Pennsylvania Supreme Court when you need them?

Cook County Judge Michael McHale had some questions for Mbekeani about her apparent dual role as prosecutor and someone helping offenders obtain exonerations:

“I find the answers that you have been giving to this Court duplicitous. I do find there is a per se conflict of interest with this specific Assistant State’s Attorney, and you’ve conflicted yourself off this case, so to speak, in addition to any other cases in my courtroom.”

Foxx didn’t just free a host of offenders other prosecutors wouldn’t dream of letting out. She didn’t just put an exoneration advocate in the top spot reviewing innocence claims. Heavens no. Foxx also went after tried-and-true prosecutors who took seriously the job of putting dangerous predators in jail.

Foxx, for example, fired one of the best prosecutors in her administration who had skillfully led the prosecution of three Spanish Cobra gang members for killing Chicago police officer Clifton Lewis. She replaced this prosecutor with exoneration advocate Mbekeani. Foxx also showed the door to three other prosecutors, one tied to the Lewis case and two tied to another infamous police murder case.

Again, where is the Pennsylvania Supreme Court when you need them?

Forget about it.

The kind of courageous public servant that would reveal the corruption of the Foxx administration and attempt to remedy it, in particular a case of cold-blooded police murder, is almost impossible to find in Chicago. Many citizens placed their hopes on the candidate Eileen O’Neill Burke, who professed bringing reform and legitimacy to the prosecutor’s office on the heels of the Foxx scandals.

But Burke has refused to take up real reform in the manner the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has done in the case of Krasner. Like virtually every public servant in Chicago, Burke is a go-along/get-along party hack far more loyal to her party overseers than to the people she swore to represent.

But Burke should watch Philadelphia closely. It isn’t just Pennsylvania’s supreme court that is scrutinizing Krasner’s office. US District Judge Paul Steven Diamond for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania has apparently cast a suspicious eye on Krasner and his staff, according to Substack author Cipriano:

Judge Diamond is nobody to trifle with. He was one of a three-judge panel that recommended the disbarment of former ADA Paul George, and the suspension of the law license of ADA Nancy Winkelman for three years.

How interesting. For how long have attorneys in Chicago brought forth one bombshell argument and evidence that exoneration cases in Chicago are a sham and federal judges have shrugged their legal shoulders? Indeed, one wonders if Burke is paying attention to the lawsuit by the Spanish Cobras clearly hoping to cash in on a big payday the same as Solache and Reyes. Attorneys for the city and county defending the detectives and prosecutors seem to be mounting an aggressive defense. What will come out in the course of gathering evidence? Could the case for the detectives and prosecutors be so strong as to cast a dark shadow on Burke? Would it be so bad as to constitute a betrayal on her part against her own prosecutors?

And so as the reform of a Soros prosecutor takes shape in Philadelphia through a Democratic Supreme Court and a federal judge, so many questions emerge for Chicago.

Will the gaggle of gasbags called the Chicago City Council make Gabriel Solache and Arturo Reyes rich men? Will Burke ever take one step to rectify the depraved exonerations that took place under Foxx? Will she take any action to hold her fellow Democrat Kim Foxx accountable, let alone the prosecutors who did Foxx’s bidding? Will Burke skate through her administration leaving a police murder unsolved, even though there is overwhelming evidence against three gangbangers originally indicted for the crime?

No question is more compelling than this: Will the feds see the opportunity in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling and initiate an investigation into exonerations by Soros prosecutors throughout the nation?

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has already laid a foundation for the feds in Philly.

The feds reindicting the Spanish Cobras for the murder of Officer Clifton Lewis would be a good starting point in Chicago.

It promises to be a virtual tour of the most Crooked City.

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Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House. For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.

Philadelphia Prosecutor Larry Krasner was one of several big city prosecutors heavily supported by philanthropist George Soros who embraced the tactics of destroying the system from within by transforming their administrations into an agency working on behalf of criminals, not prosecuting them. Krasner, like Kimberly Foxx in Chicago, began releasing murder offenders on the most laughable claims with, critics allege, no serious investigation to support the releases.

It was family members of murder victims who initiated the legal proceeding that ultimately compelled the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to hold Krasner’s renegade office accountable. In a 5–4 vote, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court acknowledged that not only was Krasner’s ruling on the murder case of Lavar Brown “not reliable,” but also that Krasner “withheld material evidence from the court, submitted a false stipulation of fact, misstated facts in its pleadings, failed to conduct a reasonable investigation and opposed a required evidentiary hearing.”

Wow. “Withheld material evidence”? “Submitted a false stipulation of fact”? “Misstated facts”? “Opposed a required evidentiary hearing”?

Imagine what would happen if a court made such allegations against a cop.

Nevertheless, shouldn’t such allegations merit an investigation by the Department of Justice? Indeed, the failure of the DOJ to hold Soros prosecutors accountable across the country has helped big cities become base camps for the radical left.

In any case, it is a step in the right direction that now anytime Krasner wants to let out a killer at the behest of his political and media comrades, the attorney general must be notified and can intervene.

Krasner, like all Soros prosecutors across the nation, was helped out by a press that dutifully didn’t report or under-reported what was clearly a bombshell ruling. In response to the supreme court ruling, the media should generate questions about Soros prosecutors throughout the country, but they won’t. Admitting the vast corruption in the exoneration movement going back decades would simultaneously reveal a corrupt press in the back pocket of the movement.

But the larger national burden of the movement still remains, in particular the connection between Soros prosecutors, exonerations, and the faction of the Democratic Party now engaged in what many are finally recognizing as a political party filled with revolutionary zealots, for no strategy has fulfilled the mandates of American radicals more than the movement to turn cold-blooded killers into victims and the criminal justice system that convicted them into villains. More importantly, some cities, like Chicago, are much farther down the road of exoneration madness than Philly, so much so that it is a serious question whether Chicago or Illinois can ever return to the fold of a functioning republic.

Krasner’s allegiance to exoneration mania cannot compare to Kim Foxx’s in Chicago. Not only did Foxx release scores of offenders, but she also fired a host of career prosecutors, many of them doing so with public attacks on her tactics and decisions. In perhaps the most despicable chapter in the decline and fall of the American republic, Foxx also fired prosecutors who had attempted to hold accountable offenders charged with murdering police officers.

One reason Foxx got away with such outrages is that the entire institutional landscape of Chicago and Illinois is far more radicalized than that of Pennsylvania, a state not tangled in a one-party web in the fashion of the Soviet Union or Cuba.

To understand the vast disparity and the hopelessness of Chicago, let us compare what the family members of victims in Philly accomplished with a similar attempt by family members of murder victims in Chicago.

In 2009, the Democratic legislature of Illinois bowed to the emerging radical faction of their party and created one of the most blatantly unconstitutional bodies ever conceived of by a political entity, the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission (TIRC). A wet dream of the washout radicals in Chicago who once threw rocks and bags of urine at police in the 1960s, then moved on to bombing public buildings, TIRC granted the authority of unelected commissioners to send long-settled criminal cases back into the criminal courts, thereby breathing new life into them. The justification for the creation of TIRC were the claims that a former police commander, Jon Burge, and his men engaged in torture to extract confessions. This was the justification, but a cynical observer might describe the creation of TIRC as, in truth, a plot to direct tens of millions of dollars from taxpayers into the coffers of the radicals, especially since the exoneration movement has been rocked by scandals since TIRC was first conceived.

It’s as if the left in Chicago believes: So what if TIRC violates the separation of powers built into the fabric of the republic by allowing a legislatively created entity to completely undermine the judicial process?

And what a boon TIRC has been to the exoneration movement, resurrecting once-doomed murder exoneration claims that ultimately paved the way for massive settlements in federal civil court. Once released, previously convicted killers, with the help of the most corrupt media in the nation, peddled their fraudulent claims of innocence in laughable civil complaints after TIRC helped get them out of prison.

And so, dear reader, whereas the state attorney general of Philadelphia now has a role in overseeing the outrageous exoneration decisions by Philly prosecutor Krasner, a similar reform of TIRC or any renegade Soros prosecutor like Foxx is unlikely in Illinois. After all, one of the key architects of TIRC is none other than the current state attorney general, Kwame Raul.

Talk about a fox in the henhouse.

It’s not just the attorney general. The governor’s office also plays a key role in implementing unconstitutional ploys like TIRC. Former governor Pat Quinn not only embraced the creation of TIRC during his scandal-plagued administration, but in the waning moments of his administration, he freed a man convicted of trying to murder four police officers, another man convicted of murder despite no new evidence of innocence, and a man convicted of perjury in a case in which the man’s perjured testimony could have sprung two convicted murderers.

No state has had such broad collusion with a powerful, utterly unconstitutional, radical commission like TIRC than Illinois.

Let’s get back to the family members of victims in Illinois, who have already tried to reform the corrupt exoneration movement in the same way family members succeeded in Philly.

In 1983, two notorious criminals, Jerry and Reginald Mahaffey, traveled from the South Side to the Far North Side of Chicago in a friend’s beat-up van, planning the burglary of a store. When they arrived early in the morning, there was a police car parked in the lot, so they abandoned their plan.

They did, however, find an open window facing an alley. Once inside, they killed a couple and attempted to murder the couple’s son in the course of a home invasion. The mother was also raped by the men. They loaded up the couple’s sports car with loot and returned to the South Side. The crime shocked the entire city.

In 1984, while awaiting trial, the Mahaffey brothers staged one of the most daring escapes in the history of the Cook County Jail. They convinced a paramedic to smuggle a gun into the facility, taking a corrections officer hostage. They opened up the cells of other inmates, many of whom joined them. They were all eventually recaptured.

Ultimately, the brothers were convicted and sentenced to death, but the death penalty would be abolished in Illinois before they could receive their sentence. Nevertheless, it would be almost impossible to find a murder case with more overwhelming evidence, including police recovering the loot from the home invasion from the apartments of the two brothers and the fact that the brothers repeatedly admitted they had committed the murders. They confessed to a state’s attorney and admitted no police personnel had treated them badly.

With the creation of TIRC, it didn’t matter. TIRC is comprised of some of the most radical voices in the nation. And so the commission, incredibly, took up the claims of Jerry Mahaffey.

And here is where one can understand clearly the difference between Philly and Chicago when it comes to hearing the voices of family members who have been left to deal with the murder of their loved ones. According to the TIRC statute, the commission was obligated to notify family members that the commission was taking up a case. This never happened. Instead, the family members of the Mahaffey murder victims learned TIRC was taking up the Mahaffey case when they received a phone call from a reporter.

The family then discovered the commission had not notified several other families in other cases. In fact, the commission never bothered to notify most of the family members in TIRC cases. Family members lashed out at the commission, ultimately leading to Executive Director Dave Thomas’s resignation amid the chorus of outrage. But even then, several commissioners stood by Thomas.

Public officials took the opportunity to weigh in on their skepticism about the legitimacy of TIRC. Then-top prosecutor Anita Alvarez wrote a letter to then-governor Pat Quinn, asserting the commission acted illegally.

“There’s no oversight to this commission. I don’t know who they report to, if anybody. I don’t think anybody’s watching or vetting what they’re doing,” she said.

Even with the scandal of TIRC violating its own mandate by ignoring victims’ family members, the vote on whether to toss Jerry Mahaffey’s case back into the courts and potentially allow Mahaffey a chance to secure his freedom, as so many others have done through TIRC, was close.

If there is a chapter in the history of the exoneration movement that revealed the cold, calculating, devious inhumanity of the radical left in Chicago, it is the creation of TIRC and the decision by its commissioners to take up the Mahaffey case.

Philly and Chicago reveal that the exoneration movement is a national phenomenon, essential to the modern Democratic Party. But Chicago shows its true mendacity in that it has placed so many institutions under the control of this movement. Philly and other cities have not sunk to the level of Chicago’s depravity.

Not yet, anyway.

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Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House. For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.

Apart from the false promise of a workers’ paradise, Marxism served the criminal left with vital rhetoric and philosophy to justify the most heinous, brutal acts and corruption under the guise of revolutionary pursuits.

No two figures of the radical left in Chicago exemplified this abhorrent narcissism disguised in radical Marxist philosophy more than Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, founding members of the terrorist group the Weather Underground.

A new book, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, attempts to shed light on the appalling story of two middle-class kids who joined forces with a host of other criminals to destroy what they claimed was one of the most violent, unjust countries in the country. This would be the United States, that terribly evil country millions of people attempt to run to every year as they flee the hellhole countries like Cuba that Dohrn and Ayers once celebrated. The book is authored by the eldest child of the couple, Zayd Ayers Dohrn, named after one of the militant black terrorists so dear to the Weather Underground.

Every cop learns early on that narcissism is a root force in the criminal mind. Narcissists see themselves as the center of drama, willing to ignore their own crimes and indifferent to the cruelty they have imposed upon others. Instead, they see themselves as victims. The narcissist not only lies, but also believes their own lies. Zayd as a writer is trapped in his parents’ narcissistic web, too often embracing the revolutionary jargon used to justify his parents’ crimes rather than questioning them with a journalistic eye. It’s understandable in one sense. Who wants to see their parents as criminals? But in deciding to recount his parents’ violent, fugitive lives through the lens of militant radicalism, Zayd becomes almost an agent, if not an apologist, of his parents’ duplicity, rather than a writer illuminating a key chapter of American history.

It’s too bad. Zayd had a front-row seat. He was born and lived much of his early life on the run as his parents moved from one place to another in the years Dohrn and Ayers were being hunted by the FBI.

Those years in which the FBI were searching for Zayd’s parents make up one of the biggest radical lies permeating the book. The left wants to condemn the measures adopted by the FBI in trying to stop the likes of the Weather Underground, with the support of Nixon, by engaging in “black bag” tactics. These tactics ignored the constitutional rights of Dohrn and Ayers and their ilk in 1970s in the FBI’s desperate attempt to stop the militants before they could kill hundreds, if not the thousands. Despite their chronic protestations against the FBI, these radicals posed such a grave threat to public safety and the republic itself that Nixon and former FBI top dog Mark Felt were justified in engaging such unconstitutional tactics.

In law enforcement, such actions are sanctioned in what is called exigent circumstances. It is why federal agents were so outraged when criminal charges were brought against Felt and other top FBI officials for the black bag jobs that the agents demonstrated on the Capitol steps. It is why President Nixon volunteered to testify on behalf of Felt at Felt’s criminal trial, with Nixon saying he approved of the tactics and would employ them again. And it is why President Reagan fulfilled his campaign promise shortly after he was elected by pardoning Felt after he was convicted and sentenced to probation.

Indeed, knowing the background of Ayers and Dohrn and their allies, one cannot wonder at the nightmare political state these zealots would create had they been more successful in their revolutionary aims. North Korea might look enlightened compared to what these maniacs would have created in the name of revolutionary justice. But doesn’t the last century of Marxism provide evidence?

Zayd’s memoir, then, serves not in justifying or even providing meaning to the lives of his parents, but rather for the insights it reveals about “the movement,” insights that help explain the current state of the republic and certainly Chicago.

One compelling glimpse into the book is the profound shift in strategy of the American left in the ascendance of militant radicals like the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. The WU were at the core of this shift from the traditional Marxist strategy of organizing workers to focusing on American youth. This transition came as Weather Underground members broke away from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the old-guard Marxists who comprised the SDS and turned their attention to radicalizing the youth:

On one side was Progressive Labor (PL), the largest faction within SDS at the time. PL was made up of Marxist intellectuals who believed the revolution would inevitably come from the working class, so student activists should commit themselves to becoming blue-collar workers—taking jobs in factories and hotels and union shops, where they could help organize and build a broader class consciousness. PL was ideologically disciplined and culturally conservative; members tended to avoid drugs, long hair, cursing, and public promiscuity, all of which they felt might isolate them from their natural proletariat allies. Bernardine once called them “cultural aliens.”

On the other side of the split was Bernardine and her group, the Revolutionary Youth Movement, known within SDS as the Action Faction. The Action Faction, in contrast to the economic Marxists of PL, wanted to focus less on class and more on race.

This was perhaps the most influential change in the radical left, shifting its focus to college campuses rather than factory floors. From the earliest days of the WU terrorist movement, Dohrn and Ayers focused on corrupting youth. After they were set free and came aboveground, they both ended up at prestigious universities. So too did many of their radical brethren. They burrowed their radical agenda into journalism schools, law schools, and education departments. It was hugely successful. This is one reason American journalism, particularly in Chicago, has been transformed from an institution protecting the republic into an agent of its demise.

Embracing the claim that the American republic is one of most corrupt and evil countries is one of the most enduring fabrications of Zayd’s book. The history of racism in the country, the Vietnam War, and the other central issues that lit the fire under Dohrn and Ayers in no way justify the acts of terror the couple engaged in and covered up, nor does any remotely rational person compare the corruption of America with the horror shows of Germany and the Soviet Union of the last century, to name just a few.

But some of Dohrn’s lies are so blatant that even the couple’s son cannot justify them. One of Dohrn’s most appalling lies was her attempts at justifying her praise of the Manson murders, statements Dohrn delivered during the crucial Flint meeting when the WU began its transformation into a terrorist organization.

“Dig it,” she told her War Council. “First, they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach? Wild!”

Here is what Zayd has to say about it:

“My mom would later claim this was meant to be a dark joke—an extreme metaphor for the way the American media celebrated war and fetishized sex and violence,” Zayd waxes on about his mother.

Dark joke? What is an extreme metaphor?

He goes on:

But it’s clear to me now, after talking to her and other people who were there and looking more closely at the context, that it was less a joke than a provocation—that Bernardine invoked the Manson cult’s end-times barbarism not as a cautionary tale but as a battle cry…”

What? Context? The context was a war council. Provocation? Battle cry for what? Such meaningless blather attempting to explain away the clearly “violence fetishizing” of the WU permeates Zayd’s book.

It was the Weather Underground, not the American media in the late ’60s and ’70s, who “celebrated war and fetishized sex and violence,” a fact that brings us to the central lie that permeates the Weather Underground’s legacy and the failure of Zyad to capture the true narrative of his parents’ pathetic lives: the claim that the group renounced harming people through their radical overtures after members of the group accidentally blew themselves up while making bombs in a New York townhouse. Three members died. Several others escaped.

Before and after this explosion, regardless of the claims by the members about renouncing harm to people through their actions, a “fetishized violence” permeated the WU.

Shortly after the Flint war council meeting in which Dohrn gave her famous speech calling for violent attacks and extolling the tactics of Charles Manson, WU tried to burn down the house of a judge overseeing a case against several Black Panthers.

[Justice John Murtagh Sr.] was the state judge then presiding over the Panther 21 trial in New York. And he and his family had just become the first civilian targets of an increasingly radicalized East Coast Weatherman cell.

Here’s what his son John Murtagh Jr. had to say about the bombing:

For the next 18 months, I went to school in an unmarked police car. My mother, a schoolteacher, had plainclothes detectives waiting in the faculty lounge all day. My brother saved a few bucks because he didn’t have to rent a limo for the senior prom: the NYPD did the driving. We all made the best of the odd new life that had been thrust upon us, but for years, the sound of a fire truck’s siren made my stomach knot and my heart race. In many ways, the enormity of the attempt to kill my entire family didn’t fully hit me until years later, when, a father myself, I was tucking my own nine-year-old John Murtagh into bed.

Zayd’s accounts of his father’s role in helping to spring Assata Shakur from prison—allowing her to flee to Cuba and live freely for the rest of her life, despite the fact that she gunned down two police officers during a traffic stop, killing one—don’t hold much water. Breaking cop killers out of prison is not fetishizing violence? Another passenger in the car Shakur was riding in just before she gunned down the cops was Black Liberation Army member Zayd Shakur, who was killed in the shootout. Zayd Dohrn was named after Zayd Shakur.

A few miles away, Bill waited in the parking lot, listening to the radio and watching the clock. He didn’t know exactly what was happening—or even what his role would be—but he knew something was in process, and whatever it was had to be illegal and dangerous. “It was a dramatic time,” he told me. “You knew that an action was underway, you knew that all these gears were in motion, and you were one of the gears.”

Ayers didn’t know what he was doing, didn’t know he was involved in breaking out a woman who murdered a cop?

Breaking Assata out of prison was a sign that while the WU members might not have harmed people through their own violent actions, they certainly aided other militants who continued to support and engage in such violence. Indeed, Ayers and Dohrn would adopt the child, Chesa Boudin, of fellow WU members Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert after the couple was imprisoned for her role in a 1981 armored car robbery in New York.

In that “nonviolent” action, the robbers killed one security guard, wounded two others, and then murdered two police officers, one of whom was the first African American officer ever hired in the city.

Chesa Boudin would eventually get elected top prosecutor in San Francisco, echoing the philosophy of his parents by letting out offenders rather than prosecuting them, until voters in San Francisco woke up and drove Boudin out of office.

Nevertheless, throughout the book, I found it interesting that Zayd made no mention of the 1970 Park Place bombing in San Francisco that killed Sergeant Brian McDonnell and severely wounded several other officers. I traveled to the police station about a decade ago to see what I could find out about the bombing for my book Crooked City. Sure enough, I made contact with people who put me in touch with family members of Sgt. McDonnell. In investigating the book, I also spoke to several retired FBI agents who stated they believed Dohrn was responsible for the bombing. Another source pointing to Dohrn as the bomber was a Vietnam veteran from Ohio, Larry Grathwohl, who infiltrated the Weather Underground and reported his findings to the FBI. Grathwohl testified that Ayers told Grathwohl that Dohrn was the San Francisco bomber who killed Sgt. McDonnell.

Members of the San Francisco Police Department asked federal authorities to re-investigate the case.

“There are irrefutable and compelling reasons to believe that Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn are largely responsible for the bombing of Park Police Station,” the officers stated in the letter.

This incident is not mentioned in Zayd’s memoir, but shouldn’t it be, even if to deny the accusations? Did Zayd’s mother commit this bombing? If she didn’t, does she know who did?

There are incidents in the sordid lives of Dohrn and Ayers that are not covered in Zayd’s book. Throughout the memoir, Zayd mentions lawyers who worked with his parents, particularly when they were on the run. Zayd barely mentions the law firms for whom at least some of these attorneys are no doubt tied. But he does once: The People’s Law Office (PLO), a collection of radical attorneys who represented the Black Panthers in the group’s early days and who were closely tied to Dohrn and Ayers in their years on the run. One attorney from the PLO was named Dennis Cunningham. Dohrn formed an extremely close relationship with Cunningham’s wife, Mona Cunningham, according to Zayd. How close was it? Dohrn ultimately borrowed the Cunninghams’ children as part of a disguise to scout out bombing locations.

Zayd:

“So, if, for example, Bernardine…needed to scope out a potential target for a bombing, they could bring Sunflower along and they would seem more like a respectable all-American family, out for a stroll.”

The ties of the PLO to violent radicals is a largely untold story in Chicago. It’s a strange silence. The reason is that perhaps no law firm in the city has played such an influential role in transforming the city’s criminal justice system as the PLO. The ties between Dohrn, Ayers, and the PLO suggest that the revolutionary fervor guiding Dohrn and Ayers, even after evidence against them was tossed, never abated. In fact, it may have become more sophisticated and successful.

The crowning achievement of Dohrn’s PLO buddies was their pivotal role in creating what is now known as the wrongful conviction movement, the claim that former Chicago cops like Jon Burge tortured confessions out of suspects, usually minorities, out of racial animus.

One of the achievements of the PLO was obtaining the release of Jackie Wilson, who, like Assata Shakur, had been convicted for his role in gunning down two Chicago police officers during a traffic stop in 1982. For decades the PLO fought to get Wilson out, a case that polarized the radical left and cops throughout the city, who claimed the accusations against Burge and his men were bogus.

An ominous body of evidence has emerged pointing to corruption in the wrongful conviction movement, which has siphoned off well over a billion dollars from taxpayers in legal fees, settlements, and jury verdicts. One place where a series of scandals has arisen over wrongful conviction claims is Northwestern University, the very same university that gave Dohrn a job teaching American youth about “justice.” These ties of Dohrn to the PLO beg questions, like how truthful are the police misconduct claims arising from a movement whose prolific leader was celebrating the murderous cruelty of Manson followers as a legitimate expression of revolution?

To say that Zayd’s book is unsatisfying and suspiciously incomplete about the real conduct and aims of the radicals from an earlier era is an understatement. One does not get to choose their parents, but in dressing up his parents’ sordid lives in revolutionary rhetoric, Zayd does a disservice to the truth.

There are some insights into the evolution of the radical left in his book, now the most powerful faction of the Democratic Party.

But the writing does not rise above the ideological, suggesting that, despite Zayd’s book, the truth is still on the run.

Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House. For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.

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“A divided Pennsylvania Supreme Court, including two Democrat justices, ordered Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office to face new outside scrutiny over its post-conviction concessions after the state’s high court found the office’s handling of one convicted murderer’s case was unreliable and said similar problems extended beyond just that single case…

The case was brought to the high court by family members of murder victims Michael Richardson and Robert Crawford. Brown was convicted by a Philadelphia jury in the 2004 murder of Richardson and convicted by another Philadelphia jury in the 2005 murder of Crawford, according to the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office.”

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Getting Gabriel Solache and Arturo Reyes released from prison in 2017 for their conviction of stabbing a couple to death then kidnapping their children was a major accomplishment for the lawyers at Northwestern’s Center on Wrongful Convictions. With the release of Solache and Reyes, a whole new revenue stream of federal lawsuits opened up for exoneration lawyers. The Solache/Reyes exoneration was a key case in the police misconduct mythology manufactured largely through the media against a retired detective, Reynaldo Guevara, whose transformation into a bogeyman of police corruption has netted tens of millions to exoneration attorneys and their clients.

But from the outset, the road to freeing the two men for the heinous crime was rocky at best for Northwestern attorneys like Karen Daniel, who worked at the CWC. Learning that the men would be released from Pontiac Correctional Center, Daniel waited outside the prison gates. But the men never showed up. Instead, they were taken into federal custody because they were illegal immigrants.

But even before Daniel planted herself outside the prison, the signs that Solache/Reyes represented yet another dubious exoneration were reverberating throughout the city, even with the media virtually in Daniel’s back pocket. For one, a third offender in the case, Adriana Mejia, who hatched the plan to murder the couple and kidnap their newborn child, remained in prison, continuing to finger Solache and Reyes as her accomplices.

For another, Kimberly Foxx’s predecessor, Anita Alvarez, refused to release offenders whose convictions were tied to Guevara. The contrast between the determinations of the two state’s attorneys, Alvarez and Foxx, in Guevara cases was in many ways the more compelling and legitimate media story, providing a chilling glimpse into the lengths that prosecutors supported by radical philanthropist George Soros would go to undermine big city criminal justice systems.

Another stumbling block was the fact that Foxx’s top prosecutor at the time, Eric Sussman, stated the men were guilty of the murders.

“There is no doubt in my mind, or the mind of anyone who has worked on this case, that Mr. Solache and Mr. Reyes are guilty of these crimes,” he said.

Sussman’s statements about the case—coupled with the fact that Alvarez wouldn’t overturn Guevara convictions—are enough to compel the DOJ to investigate Foxx and question why she chose to release these men and so many others.

But what truly threw everything into chaos that even the Chicago media is having a tough time covering up is the fact that Foxx was recently called into a deposition about the case, a deposition in which she admitted the men were guilty of the crime. Foxx also suggested, incredibly, that the decision to release the men was made by her staff members.

In the wake of Foxx’s bombshell statements about the Solache/Reyes case, former mayoral candidate Paul Vallas recently penned an article for the Chicago Contrarian demanding a federal investigation into Foxx’s exonerations.

“Federal investigators should determine whether these decisions were the product of legitimate individualized prosecutorial review or predetermined outcomes negotiated outside public view. The question isn’t whether wrongful convictions should be corrected. Of course, they should be. The question is whether the public was misled about how so many of these convictions were undone. Whether political actors, government lawyers, and private civil rights attorneys collaborated in ways that denied taxpayers, courts, victims’ families, and the public the transparency they were entitled to.”

Of the myriad questions that emerge from Foxx’s depositions—questions the corrupt Chicago media will certainly never pose—several go back to Karen Daniel and the Center on Wrongful Convictions.

Here is one compelling question: If the guilt of the men is so clear to Foxx, her underling at the time Eric Sussman, and so many others familiar with the case, why was it not clear to the likes of Daniel? Why was there no doubt whatsoever in Daniel’s claims or in her actions? Why didn’t the media grill her about all the evidence that the men were guilty and hold her accountable?

Such questions become even more compelling when one considers the scandal that had rocked Northwestern in the years before Daniel vainly waited outside the Pontiac prison. This previous scandal suggested that staff and students at Northwestern had crossed the boundaries of fairness and honesty in their claims. They took shape in the university’s Medill School of Journalism involving a controversial professor, David Protess, and various private investigators and students working under Protess as part of the school’s Innocence Project. The original scandal emerged after prosecutors under Anita Alvarez became suspicious about witness recantations in cases that Protess, his private investigators, and his students had investigated. In the end, the university conducted its own investigation and barred Protess from teaching his class.

The university issued this statement:

In sum, Protess knowingly misrepresented the facts and his actions to the University, its attorneys and the dean of Medill on many documented occasions. He also misrepresented facts about these matters to students, alumni, the media and the public. He caused the University to take on what turned out to be an unsupportable case and unwittingly misrepresent the situation both to the Court and to the State.

(Lying to the court and the state? Care to expound Northwestern?)

Nevertheless, the Northwestern scandal under Protess was contained to the Medill School of Journalism, even though an ominous question emerges: Why were the suspicious tactics of Protess and his minions apparent to prosecutors but not to the attorneys like Daniel working at the very same university as Protess?

The answer to this compelling question might be revealed in observing cases in which Protess and his students’ investigations were embraced by the CWC and Daniel.

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One case in particular comes to mind: the exonerations of Armando Serrano, a member of the Imperial Gangsters who received a $20 million settlement from the city in 2021 in a federal civil lawsuit alleging he was wrongfully convicted for a 1994 murder. Fellow gang member Jose Montanez was also “exonerated” along with Serrano.

The Serrano/Montanez saga included ominous allegations involving Protess’s Innocence Project, including the by-now familiar questions about witness retractions obtained in the case, with the exonerations hinging on the retraction of a witness statement by a fellow gang member named Francisco Vicente.

Here’s what attorneys for the city stated in court proceedings:

In 2004, Medill succeeded in extracting Vicente’s recantation. But discovery has
revealed that prior to recanting, Plaintiffs’ gang, the Imperial Gangsters, threatened Vicente’s life because of his testimony against Plaintiffs. Thereafter, and in consideration for his recantation, both Plaintiffs offered Vicente protection from assassination, and along with Medill, offered him other hidden incentives, including a prison transfer and a fortune (described by Plaintiff Montanez as “ching-ching”) from the proceeds of Plaintiffs’ anticipated civil lawsuits.

Ching-ching?

Check out this passage from a Chicago Tribune article about this case:

Prosecutors on Tuesday unveiled documents that suggested students and staff with Northwestern University’s Medill Innocence Project arranged a visit from a female student as a “treat” for a prisoner, in addition to making unspecified promises, before he recanted his testimony in a 1993 murder and armed robbery case.

“[The woman], a previous student of David’s [Protess] who worked on the case and formed a good relationship with [Vicente], will accompany us as a ‘treat’ for him, since he has requested to see her again,” the student wrote in an April 2004 e-mail to Serrano’s lawyer, Jeffrey Urdangen, a Northwestern law professor.

It wasn’t just questions about obtaining witness statements that arose in the Serrano case. City attorneys also made this allegation:

Plaintiff Serrano’s agents deliberately destroyed and/or intentionally lost inculpatory audiotapes, memos, and notes relating to key witness interviews.

But there is another chapter in the Serrano case that adds to the urgency of Vallas’s call for a federal investigation. It wasn’t just cops who were accused of misconduct in the Serrano/Montanez investigation. Prosecutors who worked the case back in 1993 were also accused of misconduct in convicting Serrano. Matthew Coghlan, a former prosecutor who worked the Serrano case, went on to become a respected judge. Another judge, Maura Slattery Boyle, had the Serrano “exoneration” claims in her courtroom. She rejected a post-conviction petition by Serrano, forcing Serrano’s lawyers to take his case up with the Appeals Court.

Both judges were targeted by the Chicago media in subsequent elections in their efforts to remain on the bench. As the lawsuit against Coghlan proceeded, his attorneys expressed doubt about the motives of the media. Here’s what they said in court motions:

“. . . To the contrary, prior to his deposition, Plaintiffs already started to try this case in the media, engaging in repeated media attacks against Coghlan specifically, and in some instances, misrepresenting the evidence in these cases. In addition, a number of the questions posed to Coghlan during his deposition had no relevance to the merits of the case and were designed solely to embarrass or harass him.

Coghlan was ultimately voted off the bench. Boyle just survived, but a cynical person might wonder if every judge in Cook County observed firsthand what happens to judges and prosecutors who contradict exoneration cases.

Any federal investigation of exonerations under Foxx starting with the Solaches/Reyes debacle would have to ask some elemental questions about Karen Daniel and the Northwestern Center on Wrongful Convictions.

Who knows where those questions would lead?

Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House. For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.

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Yet lost amid the public reaction was another remarkable aspect of Foxx’s testimony — one that had never been publicly disclosed. Foxx was deposed about the case of Marilyn Mulero, one of eight defendants whose murder convictions were vacated at Foxx’s behest in August 2022, in cases connected to former Chicago Police detective Reynaldo Guevara. At the time, Foxx announced that a “comprehensive case-by-case review” had uncovered police misconduct by Guevara that called all of the convictions into question.

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The press and public were now screaming for justice—not for the victim, but for those convicted of the crime. Quickly forgotten were the confessions and ample evidence in the case. In the end, the only blemish for the lawyers was being lambasted by a federal judge for bickering over the $4 million in fees in the $40 million settlement case.

This grooming of the public with the help of a press eager to reaffirm its leftist credentials has since played out thousands of times. The cash settlements by cities and counties desperate to move on from messy headlines about purportedly innocent men (nearly always men of color) languishing in jail are piling up—and straining budgets…

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“If Democrats took control of the Congress, I think that—and let’s say, took control of the country—I think that this country’s finished.…If they get in power, I think this country would be maybe finished.”

Last week, newly appointed U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros provided crucial wind in the sails of Chicago’s deep campaign state toward the coveted goal of radical Dem complete autonomy when his prosecutors dropped charges against six people once charged for interfering with federal immigration agents in Chicago, a group now known as the Broadview Six.

Charges were dropped after prosecutorial errors or even misconduct surfaced in the case presided over by Judge April Perry, who lambasted the conduct of federal prosecutors.

“I think there is also a potential here, separate and apart from the merits of this case and how this case ends up proceeding, on sanctions for prosecutorial misconduct and for potential ethical violations, including lack of candor to the Court,” Perry thundered.

There is no issue more dear to the Democratic Party than illegal immigration. Allowing millions of illegals into the country, then providing resources and defending their right to stay is nothing less than an attempted coup by the Democrats, who can all but taste the one-party rule in the manner of Chicago and Illinois that they have coveted for the rest of the nation since the election of Barack Obama, by using illegal immigrants to secure their political power. Illegals will be used to pad the census, thereby creating more Democratic representatives in the House. They will also likely be used in presidential elections, as big-city voter rolls like those in Chicago are notoriously and intentionally unreliable.

Chicago is in many ways ground zero for the war on Trump’s attempts to remedy the chaos imposed on big cities through the invasion of illegals. But Trump’s Operation Midway Blitz operation has been unsuccessful in convicting those accused of interfering with federal agents. Now with the stumbling, mumbling collapse of the case against the Broadview Six, U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros has provided valuable ammunition for the militant pro-illegal faction in Chicago.

Boutros better wake up. It is likely he doesn’t understand who he is up against either in the Chicago media, the city’s radical law firms, or even Judge April Perry. For if there was ever a clear indication of the city’s deep state and its massive power, Perry is it.

While the local media is hyperventilating about federal prosecutorial misconduct in the Broadview Six case, the entire media establishment is remaining silent about a larger, more ominous scandal surrounding illegals and Perry.

In their crusade to preserve the political power illegals will garner for the radical Dems, reporters in Chicago rarely, if ever, notify the public about Judge Perry’s résumé. They never mention that Perry was once a key figure in the administration of former Cook County State’s Attorney Kimberly Foxx, currently embroiled in her own scandal surrounding illegal immigrants. Perry was once ethics chief for Foxx, one of the most scandal-plagued prosecutors in the nation, a fact you will not see in the manic articles about the Broadview Six pouring forth from the radical sycophants in Chicago called the media as Perry thunders her moral and legal outrage at the conduct of prosecutors in the case.

Let us consider a scandal involving illegals from the Foxx administration far worse than the Broadview Six that did not elicit such outrage from either Perry or her media sycophants. In 2017, Foxx vacated the conviction of two illegal aliens for their role in the double murder of a couple and the kidnapping of their children. Despite the fact that the third offender in the double murder continued to finger the two men as her accomplices, Foxx released them.

Recently Foxx was compelled to testify in a deposition surrounding her decision not to contest a certificate of innocence against the offenders in the case, a refusal that paved the way for the men to obtain the certificate from a judge as well as likely a massive settlement from the city. In her deposition, Foxx admitted that she believed the men were guilty of the murders, compounding the shocking conduct of her administration in the case.

Why did Foxx release the two murderers? What did her chief of ethics, April Perry, have to think about it, ethically speaking, that is?

In contrast to the near-hysterical reporting on the Broadview Six case, which involved no murders or injuries whatsoever, a media blackout on Foxx’s decision-making in the double-murder case in a crime involving illegal aliens, as well as Foxx’s decision to vacate convictions in a host of others, has ensued—a sure sign that Chicago’s media will promote some scandals and ignore others in what appears to be a blatant campaign to fight Trump’s immigration policy, despite the fact that it was a key policy embraced by the American public in the last election.

It suggests, yet again, that the Chicago media are activists, not journalists.

For if the media were functioning in Chicago, wouldn’t some intrepid reporter pose an obvious question to Perry: While you were serving as chief ethics officer for the scandal-plagued administration of Foxx, what did you think about her vacating the conviction of two illegals in a vicious double-murder case? What did you think about Foxx’s other dubious exonerations? Where was your moral outrage then, Judge Perry?

Don’t expect reporters like Jason Meisner at the Tribune or Jon Seidel at the Sun-Times drooling at the leverage of the Broadview Six case to pose such questions about the Foxx scandal, nor the fact that Judge Perry was chief ethics officer for the likes of Foxx.

A cynical person might wonder if Perry’s ascendance to the federal throne was an example of Chicago’s deep state flexing its muscle by moving its obedient activists into key public servant roles, especially when one considers that before becoming a judge, Perry was actually nominated to be the U.S. attorney in Illinois under Biden. If that had taken place, one wonders what kind of lawfare Perry might be initiating against Trump and all the voters terrified at the consequences of the illegal invasion.

Such elemental questions are forbidden in Chicago, which long ago lost its independent press.

Let’s dig deeper into the deep state tactics, especially their public relations outpost called the Chicago media. Just what was it about April Perry that compelled Kim Foxx to make Perry a key member in Foxx’s administration? What made her so attractive to Chicago’s deep state?

Such a question takes us back to perhaps the most despicable and chilling chapter in the growing power of the Chicago/Illinois deep state. For before Perry was chief of ethics for Foxx, she herself was a federal prosecutor in Illinois and was tied to one of the most obscene legal cases ever to take shape in a federal courtroom.

For decades, the radical left had sought the criminal conviction of former police commander Jon Burge based on allegations that he and his men coerced confessions from African American men. Those hopes were in vain until one of the most corrupt governors in the state’s history, George Ryan, freed four men from death row shortly before Ryan himself would be sent to prison on corruption charges. Ryan’s release of these men was one of the greatest accomplishments of the Chicago/Illinois deep state, for whatever a person believes about the culpability of Burge and his men, no new evidence pointed to the innocence of these four death-row inmates Ryan set free. No judicial proceeding pointed to their innocence, just a slimy, corrupt governor kowtowing to the radical left in an effort to save his reputation and perhaps keep himself out of jail.

How terrible were the offenders Ryan released from death row? One was Madison Hobley, who had been convicted in 1990 for setting a fire that killed seven people. Hobley had set a fire outside the apartment door of his wife and child after he initiated an affair with another woman, and Hobley could not bear the thought of his wife marrying another man who would raise his child. The stairwell of the building where Hobley set the fire created a chimney effect, immediately raging upward out of control. In addition to the seven people who perished, including Hobley’s wife and child, dozens of others were injured jumping from the third floor of the building.

In an early sign of the Chicago media’s capitulation as a deep state outlet, no media ever dug into the overwhelming evidence that offenders like Hobley should never have been released by Ryan, that such a release was a sign that the judicial system had been transformed into an early manifestation of lawfare all the way back in 2003.

Nor did the media investigate the lunacy of Hobley’s innocence claims when he filed a civil lawsuit against Burge. Rather, when Burge denied coercing confessions from suspects in the lawsuit brought by Hobley, the media celebrated the fact that federal prosecutors used this denial as a basis for perjury and obstruction of justice charges against Burge.

So daunting was the evidence that Hobley was guilty that shortly before Burge’s criminal trial was about to begin, prosecutors released a document to Burge’s attorneys revealing that a fellow inmate with Hobley on death row told federal investigators that Hobley often admitted he not only set the deadly fire, but that he had not been abused by detectives.

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One of the prosecutors in the criminal trial against Burge was none other than April Perry, now a U.S. judge expressing outrage over the conduct of the federal prosecutors in the Broadview Six case. She was also a former prosecutor who used a man convicted on overwhelming evidence that he incinerated his own family and five others to prosecute Jon Burge.

Talk about an impressive résumé to become Kimberly Foxx’s ethics chief, for Foxx continued the madness of exonerations in her administration on the same manic level that Ryan initiated in 2003, virtually opening the prison doors to a host of vicious killers jumping on the exoneration bandwagon.

No matter what one concludes about the corruption of Jon Burge and his men—and there is widespread disagreement about this era in Chicago—it is difficult, if not perverse, to say that releasing a monster like Hobley justifies the end goal of convicting Burge and his men. All one has to do is observe the photos of victims in the arson, photos of the burned children that should not be viewed on a full stomach.

None of this ominous background surrounding Perry, the Hobley arson, or the obvious sick irony of Perry being the chief of ethics under Foxx will ever be explored in the Chicago media, particularly in their coverage of the Broadview Six case.

Federal prosecutors under U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros have provided the deep state with ominous ammunition in their quest to undermine federal immigration policy, regardless if this is what the voting public overwhelmingly supported in the last election.

Boutros better wake up and embrace the warnings of President Trump:

“If they get in power, I think this country would be maybe finished.”

Ya think?

Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House. For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.

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A major investigation into Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism during the tenure of Professor David Protess is currently underway by reporters who attended Medill and worked with Protess on the Ford Heights Four exoneration, my sources are telling me. The former students, now reporters, may provide an inside glimpse into the strategies and methods employed by Protess in a host of wrongful conviction cases, as well as the university’s oversight of Protess and the Innocence Project.

Protess was banned from his teaching position at the school after allegations emerged casting doubt on witness recantations he and his students obtained in various Innocence Project investigations, culminating in the university issuing the following statement in 2011:

In sum, Protess knowingly misrepresented the facts and his actions to the University, its attorneys and the dean of Medill on many documented occasions. He also misrepresented facts about these matters to students, alumni, the media and the public. He caused the University to take on what turned out to be an unsupportable case and unwittingly misrepresent the situation both to the Court and to the State.

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Hadden, like so many of her city council brethren, is a vocal progressive, and among progressives in Chicago there is no more compelling issue than fighting the Trump administration on removing illegal immigrants.

That progressive battle took a huge hit recently when Loyola University student Sheridan Gorman was murdered on a Lake Michigan pier not far from the university. The offender, Jose Medina, is an illegal immigrant who had been, according to news reports, shot in the head in 2018 and had tested positive for tuberculosis. Gang ties were also suggested, with former governor Rod Blagojevich arguing Gorman’s murder might have been part of Medina’s gang initiation.

So let’s do the math. Entered the country illegally, has tuberculosis, buys a pistol illegally, may have been trying to join a gang, senselessly shoots a young student with her whole life ahead of her.

So what could go wrong with open borders?

In the aftermath of the shooting, progressives like Hadden stumbled and mumbled their response, drawing even more anger from more conservative-minded people and the remaining Democrats not guided by political philosophy that can be boiled down to one mantra: Get Trump. In her witless, cruel response to the murder, Hadden went so far as to suggest that Gorman may have been in the “wrong place at the wrong time” and that perhaps Gorman “startled” Medina at the pier as a factor in the shooting.

But now the aldermen like Madden on the city council are faced with an even more ominous challenge to their pro-illegal-immigrant policies, as well as their support for chronic anti-police measures, including voting to pay out massive settlements to offenders who claim they were coerced into confessing.

These aldermen must decide in the coming weeks if they will pay out likely millions of dollars to Gabriel Solache and Arturo Reyes, whose conviction for a 1998 double murder was vacated in what is becoming yet another scandal emerging from the administration of former Cook County State’s Attorney Kimberly Foxx.

Solache, Reyes, and Adriana Mejia were all illegals when they were convicted of stabbing a couple to death and kidnapping their two children. The murders were part of a bizarre plot by the female offender, Mejia, who had been faking a pregnancy, to take the newborn child of the victims as her own.

Despite the fact that for years Mejia continued to finger Solache and Reyes as her accomplices in the double murder, Solache and Reyes jumped on the bandwagon claiming their confessions were coerced by retired Detective Reynaldo Guevara, a detective accused in a host of cases in which offenders have been released. Many have been paid vast sums of money from taxpayers.

The problem with the Guevara corruption mythology is that it was only embraced by one top prosecutor in Chicago, Kimberly Foxx. Foxx’s predecessor, Anita Alvarez, rejected the notion of overturning convictions tied to Guevara, a clear sign she wasn’t buying the narratives against the former detective. Nevertheless, within days taking office, Foxx began tossing “Guevara” convictions.

It is often said that stupidity in humans is measured by the degree of their bias. City council members are among the most biased elected body in the nation. It is therefore agonizing to observe them discuss settlements in cases like those for Solache and Reyes, for such a settlement offends human decency just on the merits of the crime itself and the manner by which the men obtained their freedom, but also by the fact that the case puts the insanity of the Democrats’ open-border policy on full display, coming as it does so soon after the murder of Loyola student Sheridan Gorman.

The debate over the settlement, then, will be a window into the real Chicago, not the fake one propped up by the ministry of propaganda misnamed the media. Likely the city council will drum up some justifications claiming that the settlement is a better course of action than going to trial, a chronic lie posed by city attorneys lacking the ferocity for justice and the passion for supporting cops on the street required to make a city like Chicago safe. Despite the blatant fraudulence of such claims, they will be repeated throughout the media with hardly one dissenting, coherent voice.

Nevertheless, every single Chicagoan with a modicum of common sense is currently asking of the Foxx administration, “If you thought they were guilty, why then did you release them?”

The response of aldermen claiming to truly support the police as well as law and order therefore requires more than speeches on the city council floor, something like a short walk from the city council chambers should the council vote to pay out to the men. That walk should be directed a little east and then south to the federal buildings along Dearborn. There, these aldermen should approach the US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. In that meeting, they should request an investigation of Foxx for her and her staff’s decision-making on all the “Guevara” cases.

It would be interesting indeed to see the finger-pointing that would no doubt emerge among prosecutors during the Foxx reign should the feds step in.

It could make the corruption unfolding in Minneapolis and California look like jaywalking in comparison. Such an investigation might lead all the way back to the beginning, when CCSA Anita Alvarez refused to overturn “Guevara” cases before Foxx opened the floodgates, asking a chilling question to a city that has already paid out tens of millions:

Was Alvarez right all along about the “Guevara” cases?

What a devastating blow that would be to the Chicago aldermen like Marie Hadden should the Solache/Reyes case be the impetus of such a grand federal inquiry, the entire mythology that has guided the tenure of these progressives, from their immigration policy to their settlements in police misconduct lawsuits, put under a legal microscope immune from the machinations of Chicago’s corruption, including its media.

Is there an alderman with the guts to take that lonely walk to the federal building down the streets of the most Crooked City?

Just one?

Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House. For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.

It was winter, and Daniel was awaiting the release of Gabriel Solache and Arturo Reyes, two men once convicted in the 1998 stabbing death of a couple and kidnapping their children. The imagery of a prisoner released to the awaiting arms of exoneration advocates was a media cliché replayed time and again in Chicago, and now Daniel was employing it once again.

But on this particular winter night, Daniel’s potential media circus was in vain. In one of the few instances in which it seemed federal authorities--now working under President Trump, not Obama or Biden--the feds immediately took the two men into federal custody, leaving Daniel to stand outside the prison looking much like a dejected fool.

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

But there was no triumphant walk to the prison gates for either Solache or Reyes on Thursday. Both men, Mexican nationals who were undocumented immigrants at the time of their arrest, were transferred from state prisons to Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, defense attorneys said.

“They were not free for one split second,” said attorney Karen Daniel, who had waited at the state prison in Pontiac for hours Thursday afternoon before learning Solache had been taken by ICE agents.

The fact that federal authorities whisked Solache and Reyes away into federal custody was an early sign that these authorities did not believe the men were innocent of the double murders. There was good reason for the feds not to believe they were innocent.

The evidence was overwhelming that Solache and Reyes were two of the offenders who, along with Adriana Mejia, conspired to murder a couple and kidnap their newborn child in 1998. The motive behind the plot was that Mejia had told her husband she was pregnant, but it was a lie. All the while, Mejia was plotting to obtain a newborn as her own. When she learned the Sotos had a newborn, she conspired with Solache and Reyes to go to their apartment and stab the couple to death. A gruesome crime scene, but the plot was not well thought out. The Sotos had another child, who was kidnapped by the three offenders along with the newborn.

As news broadcasts flashed the older child’s image across television screens, it wasn’t long before people confronted the offenders about the fact that the child in their custody resembled the one kidnapped from a double murder scene. The offenders tried to sell a story to cops, but it unraveled, and before long, they were fingering each other for the crime.

All three were convicted.

Despite the humiliation Daniel endured the night Solache and Reyes were taken into federal custody, not into the awaiting arms of Daniel, there was reason for the exoneration advocates and media lapdogs to remain optimistic.

Within a year of being elected to Kim Foxx elected as Cook County State’s Attorney in 2016, the year before the men were released, the exoneration mania that had been fueling the radical left in Chicago had recovered from a series of scandals that would have generated thousands of media articles and broadcasts from a host of media investigations in any other American city. Those attacks, if they had taken shape, could have stopped the exoneration movement in its tracks. But one of the movement’s assumptions, clearly revealed in Daniel’s attempted media dog-and-pony show outside the Pontiac state prison, is the belief that the media will promote exoneration narratives rather than undermine them.

The scandals that should have generated more media coverage centered on Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, the same school where Daniel worked. The epiphanies of potential corruption at Northwestern were the result of investigations by prosecutors under Foxx’s predecessor, Anita Alvarez.

Aside from the evidence of misconduct Alvarez uncovered at Northwestern, Alvarez also presented a threat to the growing exoneration industry when she refused to budge on growing claims that a retired Chicago detective, Reynaldo Guevara, was culpable of coercing confessions from a host of offenders, mostly Latinos. The “exoneration” of Solache and Reyes was part of the Guevara misconduct mythology. Despite a media tsunami that Guevara was a dirty cop, Alvarez, a veteran of the trenches in the criminal courts building at 26th and California, refused to overturn “Guevara” convictions.

For all these reasons, Alvarez posed a grave threat to the exoneration industry, and it was no doubt with a sigh of relief that the movement saw Alvarez defeated and Kim Foxx, who could barely prosecute a parking ticket, replaced as top prosecutor. The reason was that Foxx was part of a larger movement by the radical left to install activist prosecutors more in sympathy with criminals than with public safety, many of whom, like Foxx, were heavily supported by George Soros in their campaigns.

And so within a year, the exoneration advocates, even those at Northwestern University, seemed back in the swing of things, though the road to riches from lawsuits against Guevara remained rocky.

One lingering fly in the ointment for exoneration advocates in the Solache/Reyes case, for example, was that the third offender, Adriana Mejia, continued to finger Solache and Reyes as her accomplices on several occasions over the years in various venues. It certainly must have been bittersweet for Mejia to witness her two accomplices walk out of prison while she remained there for the rest of her life.

The release of the two men was an early sign of just how radical the transformation from Alvarez to Foxx would be. But even her own prosecutors made statements about the culpability of the men:

“There is no doubt in my mind, or the mind of anyone who has worked on this case, that Mr. Solache and Mr. Reyes are guilty of these crimes,” said Foxx’s top prosecutor about the murders.

It wasn’t just the Solache/Reyes case in which Foxx folded. Despite her predecessor standing by the “Guevara” convictions, Foxx tossed the convictions of several other offenders tied to Guevara, many of them as suspicious as her decision in the Solache/Reyes case.

And what a field day for the Chicago media, the media that long ago that sold its soul to the exoneration mythology, each “Guevera” case covered in a media frenzy while the growing evidence that the exonerations were bogus, including the growing evidence that Foxx had sacrificed her office as top prosecutor into a weight station for a host of convicted killers to find their freedom and march into federal court in the hopes of becoming wealthy.

But now, dear reader, we cannot get too bogged down in the shocking subplots between the release of the men a la Kim Foxx to the point at which the city has mind-bogglingly agreed to a tentative settlement with Solache and Reyes. Those subplots could make a host of thriller movies chronicling the attempts by city attorneys to cultivate the evidence that the men should not have been released, that Guevera may be innocent of misconduct, and a host of other shocking revelations in other Guevera cases.

Suffice it to go right to the bombshell articles by CWB Chicago, first announcing several weeks ago that city attorneys won the right to depose Foxx about her decision-making in these crucial cases, then obtaining the transcript of that deposition earlier this week for the public to see. Remember, in reviewing the stunning revelations in CWB’s articles, that were it not for this one media outpost and a few other alternate media outlets, it is quite feasible that the public would never have known the city’s former top prosecutors were being deposed about several murder cases and would never have known the revelations that have arisen from that deposition.

That’s how bad the Chicago media truly is.

The background of Foxx’s deposition.

After being released from prison, the men filed their mandatory federal lawsuits. One key factor in “exonerated” men obtaining a settlement from the city is petitioning for a certificate of innocence (COI) “to formally declare their innocence, allow them to clear their names, and make them eligible for compensation,” according to CWB Chicago.

In her deposition, Foxx admitted she believed that the men were guilty of “heinous acts of murder.” Nevertheless, her administration initially fought a COI in the case. Then, suddenly, her administration withdrew from contesting them, allowing the men to receive the COI despite Foxx’s admission that she believed they were guilty.

A host of chilling questions arise in the wake of Foxx’s sworn statements. Why did she not contest the COIs? The question is crucial because Foxx has been under fire for her refusal to contest COIs in exoneration cases, not just the Solache and Reyes cases. Here’s what one former prosecutor had to say about Foxx:

“Many prosecutors were shocked that Foxx refused to contest the COIs. They believed the offenders were often guilty and that Foxx’s justifications for refusing to contest them, like the claim that contesting them was a drain on resources, were laughable. But it wasn’t funny because these prosecutors knew the facts of these cases and that such actions not only made a mockery of their work, but also the system itself,” said a former prosecutor familiar with the cases.

In the wake of Foxx’s deposition, why is the city considering settling? This is a vicious double murder by three illegal immigrants, a virtual poster for the danger of allowing undocumented, illegal immigrants into a city with no vetting whatsoever. Will Foxx be called to testify in the federal trial if it takes place?

Will the city council members, now having been informed about Foxx’s deposition, still vote for a settlement to the men, men who even prosecutor Kim Foxx said are guilty of “heinous” murders? Will Foxx be called to testify in other exoneration cases in which her decision-making appears to be, at best, dubious?

Will federal authorities, who have turned a blind eye to the evidence of rampant corruption in the exoneration movement in Chicago, finally initiate their own inquiry into it?

The questions are posed, but do not expect to see them posed by the mainstream media, at least not until they are backed into a corner and forced to do so.

Rather, they come from another place, a lonely, desperate place where an exoneration attorney is waiting outside the prison walls for the release of killers that never comes because federal authorities stepped in.

In a series of stunning revelations made under oath, former Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx said last month that she personally believed two exonerated men whose certificates of innocence were not opposed by her administration were, in fact, guilty of “a heinous act of murder.”

One of those two men recently reached a wrongful conviction settlement with the city of Chicago so large that it is awaiting City Council approval. The man accused of being his accomplice is preparing to take his lawsuit to a federal jury next week.

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“These findings come after a Tribune investigation detailed how Chicago’s longtime strategy for handling reversed-conviction cases — hiring expensive private attorneys to wage long legal battles — has run up costs for taxpayers. In fact, the Tribune found, Chicagoans have paid more to resolve these claims, on average, than in New York or Los Angeles.”

Stop the presses.

While such an investigative article might be welcome in another time and another political context, alarm bells should go off for anyone remotely aware of the war being waged in the city’s criminal justice system.

The reason is that the federal courts are where, on a daily basis, cases unfold in which ominous evidence emerges pointing to rampant corruption in the attack on police and prosecutors called the exoneration movement. The city is virtually under siege by lawsuits claiming misconduct against cops and prosecutors by offenders who were released from prison on the most dubious claims imaginable, claims that nevertheless are embraced by the city’s media.

A collection of law firms is tasked by the city to fight many of these cases, something they have been doing for decades. In their representation of detectives, they have amassed the knowledge and tactics of the exoneration movement in a manner no other law firms could match. It would take new attorneys decades to catch up just on the simple history of the cases, let alone an understanding of the underlying strategy employed in the cases.

An encyclopedia can and should be assembled to collect the myriad instances in which evidence and argument in Meisner’s federal courts beat have been posited by these city attorneys refuting the claim that some killer or rapist was the victim of renegade prosecutors and cops. One could assemble this evidence and argument in an encyclopedia because one certainly won’t find much of it in Meisner’s “coverage” of the federal courts beat, a potentially chilling sign of the influence exoneration advocates have upon the Chicago media.

When prosecutors under former Cook County State’s Attorney Kimberly Foxx asserted that the Tribune’s articles claiming Nevest Coleman was innocent of raping and killing a young woman in Coleman’s basement, no deep investigation piece by Meisner unfolded. Despite the chronic condemnation of Coleman’s release by city attorneys in their defense of the detectives who worked the cases, the city ended up settling.

When city attorneys alleged it was media pressure that compelled scandal-plagued Governor Pat Quinn to commute the sentence of Tyrone Hood for murder, it garnered no deep dive by Meisner or the Tribune, even though the city attorneys alleged it was media pressure from outlets like the Tribune that drove Hood’s innocence narrative, not hard evidence. Hood, too, became rich a la the citizens of Chicago.

In this context of a blinding failure by Meisner and the Tribune to fairly cover exoneration cases, a cynical possibility emerges in Meisner’s investigative piece on billing by outside attorneys in city cases. The larger narrative looming over Chicago, the one that stands out far more than some discrepancies in billing by city attorneys, is that most of the money paid out to law firms in exoneration cases is not justified. The narrative that is not finding its way into Meisner’s reporting is that the tax money from citizens is being squandered in the exoneration movement, not by the attorneys attempting to fight that movement in court.

Not only are massive amounts of money being squandered, so too are the careers of competent, sometimes brilliant public servants who are the targets of misconduct allegations.

So what is really behind Meisner’s attacks on the billing practice of outside law firms defending cops?

Here’s a possibility.

Things have gotten somewhat difficult for exoneration attorneys in their quest to seek millions from the taxpayers in the federal courts. Despite the media wall that resists telling the other side of the exoneration narratives, many people in the public, including prosecutors, judges, the more conservative right and the still sane left are recognizing corruption within the movement. Current top prosecutor Eileen O’Neil Burke, for example, is enforcing a modicum of resistance to these narratives, evidenced by her willingness to fight petitions that would grant a certificate of innocence (COI) to “exonerated” offenders. Burke’s predecessor, Kimberly Foxx, a virtual exoneration advocate occupying the top prosecutor’s spot, didn’t even contest many of these COIs, making it all but impossible for city attorneys to fight the cases in the federal courts despite the fact that their motions and arguments pointed to a strong conviction that the claims were bogus.

On top of that, city attorneys have scored some powerful victories in exoneration cases.

In February, these city attorneys took a wrongful case to trial in which exoneration lawyers were demanding almost $30, but were only awarded $750,000, a sign that exoneration cases can be beaten or drastically diminished in trials, while at the same time keeping open the possibility that these cases, by going to trial, could steadily erode the media-driven mythology of exoneration advocates by revealing the movement’s dubious tactics and claims.

Some discrepancies in billing would be a poor reason to diminish the representation by these law firms, for it would take more than a decade for any new law firms to take up and comprehend the history and tactics of the exoneration movement. Full-time lawyers at the city’s corporation counsel have been a revolving door, particularly the top position.

So if the veteran law firms were removed, how could the city continue to fight the exoneration industry? The answer: it couldn’t. The city would have to settle and the glory days would be back for the exoneration movement, better even than when Kim Foxx was top prosecutor.

All of this poses a question: What’s truly driving the attacks on some possible overbilling by law firms working on behalf of the city, firms that are defending against attorneys who have raked in over a billion dollars on the claim that the entire judicial system, from the cops on the street, to the detectives, to the prosecutors, judges, juries, appeals courts, post-conviction petitions all got it wrong?

What, indeed, Chicago Tribune?

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Some of those who disliked Jackson condemned him as a race hustler whose tactics foisted those in power to grant his movement compromises that gave Jackson vast influence. Others, even among his opponents, described his charm and energy and were won over by his personal magnetism.

Though I only met Jackson once, Jackson and his movement had a powerful impact on me and my understanding of how Chicago worked. Our sole meeting took place at the criminal court building at 26th and California in Chicago. It was early in the morning, shortly before Judge Vincent Gaughan was supposed to begin the day’s pleadings on the high-profile case of former Chicago cop Jason Van Dyke for the murder of Laquan McDonald.

I was the second vice president of the police union at the time, elected in the midst of the case against Van Dyke. Much of our time at the FOP was spent on the case, because the police union provides legal defense to its members. One duty was transporting Van Dyke to and from the trial, making sure no protestors or assailants got to him as we entered and left the criminal court building at 26th and California.

Cops throughout the city had strong opinions about the Laquan McDonald shooting, and I had my own. Because no case involving the police is ever truly settled in Chicago, I’ll refrain from giving my take of the shooting. I will add some background about it as a means of discussing Jackson.

The trial of Van Dyke came at a critical moment for the ruling faction of the Democratic Party in Chicago. The deep state tactics of the party had been revealed in several key criminal cases, culminating when Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez made several bold decisions that caused a black eye on the industry of releasing criminals from prison on the claims of wrongful conviction.

One theme emerging in Alvarez’s investigation of these cases was the evidence that media pressure was becoming more dominant in the decision-making of the courts. In this era, the Chicago media demonstrated it could take any case and drive it in the courts with a concerted, militant unity across the entire spectrum of broadcast and print media. This media pressure was in full swing for the trial of Van Dyke, a 24-hour news cycle playing the recording of the shooting across Chicago’s media. Documentary-format coverage exploded. It wasn’t just Van Dyke the media went after. It was every cop on scene or in any way tied to the case.

The coverage was, unsurprisingly, one-sided, the machinations of the press to drive a narrative making Van Dyke and the other cops as villainous as possible. The Chicago media was not just covering this one case: they were reclaiming a narrative that had been slipping away from them in the years before the trial took shape, particularly as signs of massive corruption in the exoneration movement were taking shape in the years before the shooting. That corruption in the exoneration movement suggested the Chicago media had knowingly driven bogus exoneration claims as part of a larger war against the police and the “system.”

The trials against the officers tied to Laquan McDonald’s shooting became media events. Powerful figures in the community often gathered for the media circus. One such circus in the trial against Jason Van Dyke became a who’s who of Chicago radicals, all cramped in the courtroom of Judge Vincent Gaughan. The members of the FOP, including me, escorted Van Dyke to and from the courtroom and kept an eye on the proceedings, milling about with the likes of Chicago’s most fervent police haters.

In the courtroom that day, two people caught my eye. One was an older women I didn’t recognize at first. I knew she was somebody important in Chicago by the way reporters went up to her, shook her hand, and chatted obsequiously to her. Then it dawned on me. It was Bernardine Dohrn, founding member of the terrorist group the Weather Underground.

What a surprise. I had been researching Bernardine Dohrn for several years before I was elected to the FOP. I had learned about her years living underground while she was on the FBI’s most wanted list for her role in bombings throughout the country, including bombing police stations. One bombing in particular drew my attention, the 1970 attack on a San Francisco police station that killed a sergeant and wounded several others. In the course of my research for my book Crooked City, I interviewed several retired FBI agents who believed strongly that Dohrn was the person who set the bomb on the windowsill at the police station.

Founding member of the Weather Underground, Bernardine Dohrn, (left) and an unknown associate leaving a hearing in the trial of police officer Jason Van Dyke…

After Dohrn emerged from hiding, she got a job at Northwestern University, a powerful player in the exoneration movement. Why, I wondered, was a prestigious university hiring a woman accused of setting off bombs throughout the country in an effort to overthrow the system?

I became so curious about the bombing of the San Francisco police station I traveled there. With the San Francisco FOP president, I toured the station and saw where the bombing had occurred. As luck would have it, officers in the district had recently met family members of the murdered police officer, Sergeant Brian McDonnell. I got the contact information of these family members and met them later in my trip in Seattle. They described how badly McDonnell had suffered from the bombing, lingering in the hospital for several days before succumbing to his wounds. Other officers were also badly injured and could not return to work.

And now, in the courtroom of the trial, there was Dohrn in the flesh, reporters chatting with her like she was an old friend. I was tempted to walk up to her and ask her about the bombing, but the trial was no place for such a scene. But watching the reporters suck up to her added ten degrees to the antipathy already I felt toward Chicago’s media.

When I turned around from watching Dohrn, I spotted Jesse Jackson in the center of the courtroom. A tall man garnering even more attention than Dohrn, Jackson greeted everyone with a handshake, including all the FOP reps. He caught my eye and extended his hand. It would be a public relations disaster not to shake his hand in such a public setting, and Jackson certainly knew it. But I didn’t want to shake Jackson’s hand. I didn’t even want to be polite to him.

In 2005, a few years into my career as a cop, my best friend on the job, John Wrigley, whom I had met in the academy, had been shot twice during a traffic stop. Two other officers were also wounded. Despite the fact that the offender, Howard Morgan, was struck eighteen times by officers returning fire, he survived. The subsequent criminal case against Morgan, who was an off-duty railroad police officer at the time of the shooting, became my introduction to Chicago’s deep state.

Wrigley and his partner were drawn to an area where they heard what they believed was a gunshot. When they arrived in their squad car, they observed a van being driven by Morgan the wrong way on a one-way street with no headlights on, a sign that maybe he was fleeing from wherever a gun had been fired. They ran Morgan’s plates as they followed him. Morgan kept making right-hand turns, going in a circle, another suspicious sign. They put their lights on. As they did, another squad car with two officers pulled up behind them.

At first, Morgan complied, though he was yelling at the cops, accusing them of racism. All the officers were white. Morgan was black. Morgan told the officers he too was a policeman. They told him to calm down. If he was a cop, they said, he should know how to act. Morgan began to struggle. He broke free, pulled out his pistol from his waistband, and fired all his rounds at the three cops, who were miraculously not wounded badly. Wrigley was saved from a fatal shot to his heart by his Kevlar vest.

Nine years of hell followed for Wrigley and the officers. While Morgan’s side of the criminal courtroom was filled with supporters, many of them from Muslim and Christian organizations, the officers’ side was almost empty. As a friend showing support, I drove down to 26th and California day after day, watching the case take shape. Despite the overwhelming evidence against Morgan, it was the cops, the ones who had almost been murdered, who endured daily attacks in the form of legal accusations and biased media coverage, with some reporters only showing up when Morgan presented his case.

Bizarre and ludicrous accusations surfaced that the officers had been robbing Morgan, that they wanted to execute him because he was black. These accusations were peddled to a colluding media, perhaps the most corrupt and anti-police media in the nation. All the theories ignored one central fact. When Morgan stopped firing because he ran out of ammo, all three officers (one did not fire) ceased firing as well, even though Morgan was still holding his pistol in his hand. If the officers were engaged in any of the nefarious conduct they were accused of, why would they not have finished off Morgan? They didn’t. On the contrary, in a stunning display of discipline under the most extreme circumstances, they ceased firing.

It wasn’t just legal theories and media attacks the officers had to endure. If someone entered the courtroom and sat in the gallery on the side of the officers, they received glares of simmering hatred from the packed crowd gathered in support behind Morgan, on his side of the gallery. This daily outpouring of support for Morgan hinted that many forces were working behind the scenes to support him, including the outrageous decision by a judge to grant Morgan bail despite being charged with four counts of attempted murder of police officers.

Throughout the first trial, one question would reverberate through my mind as the officers endured one legal and media attack after another: Why would anyone do active policing ever again?

Well, the tactics by Morgan’s supporters worked. Despite the overwhelming evidence that Morgan tried to murder four police officers, the first trial ended in a hung jury. If the trial verdict took shape in another era of Chicago politics, say when Kimberly Foxx became top prosecutor, prosecutors would have likely elected not to retry the case, and the officers would have been left hanging. But the verdict came down during the administration of Anita Alvarez, and prosecutors geared up for another trial.

Under the guidance of extremely competent prosecutors, Morgan was finally convicted on all four counts of attempted murder. He was sentenced to forty years.

Everyone thought it was over. But in the nine years of the trials, I had come to see a dark deep state operating in Chicago, none more so than in its criminal justice system. I had misgivings. There was a routine hearing for Morgan right before he was sent to prison. I didn’t go. But Wrigley called me afterward. He told me that Jesse Jackson had attended and had asked the judge to release Morgan pending his appeal. The judge said no.

Morgan went to prison. Less than three years later, I was at home when I started receiving phone calls about rumors that Governor Pat Quinn was going to commute the sentence of Morgan right before he left office.

Sure enough, Quinn did so—the nine years of trials for the officers after getting shot just trying to do their job, all for nothing. The entire justice system transformed into a malevolent joke.

And so when Jesse Jackson extended his hand to me at the trial of Jason Van Dyke, I grabbed it and leaned into Jackson so that nobody could hear me save Jackson.

“I’m good friends with John Wrigley, one of the officers shot by Howard Morgan. How is your buddy Morgan doing these days?” I said.

I kept my hand wrapped around Jackson’s and squeezed even harder, glaring at him as it dawned on him what I was talking about. He pulled his arm back and walked away.

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