Crusade that brought down Burge

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The anonymous letters to attorney G. Flint Taylor arrived in police department envelopes, and so the mysterious author was dubbed “Deep Badge.”

It was 1989 and Taylor was representing a notorious killer — Andrew Wilson, who had shot two police officers and was behind bars for life. He’d originally been sentenced to death but won a new trial after the Illinois Supreme Court ruled his confession had been coerced.

Wilson was now in federal court, claiming that during questioning in the police killings he’d been beaten, tortured with electric shocks, forced onto a hot radiator and smothered with a plastic bag. Among those he was suing: Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge, a decorated Vietnam veteran.

Taylor was no stranger to unpopular causes. Through the years, his firm — the People’s Law Office — has represented the Black Panthers, anti-war activists and members of the FALN, the militant Puerto Rican independence group. So taking on the police wasn’t a stretch.

But if Deep Badge was to be believed, this case was different. A ring of cops, the unsigned letter said, was torturing criminal suspects.

The letters launched Taylor on a 22-year odyssey from the streets to the courts to Death Row and into the heart of a scandal that would stain Chicago for decades.

Abuse claims like Andrew Wilson’s would multiply. Eventually, more than 100 black men would claim Burge or his colleagues beat or tortured them to extract confessions or information on everything from robbery to murder.

Like Wilson, many of the accusers were known to the police: They included gang members, robbers, drug abusers — and convicted killers.

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The first letter was postmarked Feb. 2, 1989.

The author appeared be an insider at Area 2, the South Side headquarters where Burge headed the violent crimes unit for several years. The letter contained tantalizing tidbits, including a claim that officers had used “torture machines” and one such device had been tossed off Burge’s boat. (The boat’s name? The Vigilante.)

Talk with other officers, the letter said, because, “some of them were disgusted and will tell all. The torture was not necessary.”

If Taylor wanted to know more, he was told to place a personal ad in a local newspaper.

He did, then waited more than a month.

“I have learned something that will blow the lid off of your case,” the second letter said.

It urged Taylor to look for other cases where the machine was used. It also listed officers’ names, dividing them between Burge allies and those who had strained relations with him.

More than a week later, while Taylor was cross-examining Burge as part of Wilson’s civil case, he received a third letter and a phone message with the same tip: Talk with Melvin Jones in Cook County Jail.

That visit turned out to be a revelation. The case was much bigger than one man.

Jones, an admitted gang member, told a story later corroborated in city legal documents: After refusing to confess to murder, Jones was shocked in the genitals, foot and thigh by Burge with a hand-cranked electric device. Burge, he said, also pointed a gun to his head.

The methods Jones described became part of a pattern of abuse claims. The electric box was the most sensational. Others included beatings with phone books (to avoid leaving bruises), mock Russian roulette, smothering suspects with plastic or typewriter covers (it was called bagging) and using a cattle prod-like device.

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Francine Sanders had embarked on her own search for truth.

In 1990, she was a civilian investigator for what was then the police department’s Office of Professional Standards, assigned to the Wilson case. Because eight years had passed since his arrest and some key people were dead, Sanders focused mostly on documents.

Her 66-page report substantiated Wilson’s claims. “I looked at all the evidence,” she recalls, “and there was no other possible explanation for someone in police custody coming in looking one way, leaving looking another way.”

As Sanders reviewed records, another investigator for the same agency was trying to determine if this was an isolated episode.

His report, released in 1992, was damning: It said “the preponderance of the evidence” showed abuse in Area 2 was “systematic” over more than a decade. It also concluded some in the police command “perpetuated it either by actively participating in same or failing to take any action to bring it to an end.”

The next year, Burge was fired because of the Wilson case.

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In the 1990s, a group of prisoners called the Death Row 10 emerged.

They claimed they’d been abused by Burge or his associates, mostly resulting in false confessions. But proving was part of a larger hurdle in this case — getting authorities to believe the accusers and see them as victims.

“I think it’s likely that Burge and his men rationalize the misconduct by saying . . . these guys are lowlifes, they’re heinous criminals, it doesn’t matter, they deserve what they get,” says Locke Bowman, legal director of the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University and lawyer for some alleged Burge victims.

Taylor began representing Aaron Patterson, one of the Death Row 10 who’d been convicted of a double murder but had used a paper clip to crudely scratch a message on a police station bench recanting: “Aaron I lie about murders, police threaten me with violence . . . ”

As Patterson’s case was being appealed, then-Gov. George Ryan commuted the sentences of everyone on Death Row; he’d already halted executions when 13 inmates were found to have been wrongly convicted.

Ryan also pardoned four of the Death Row 10 and said a “manifest injustice” had occurred because police tortured them into false confessions.

By this time, a special prosecutor was digging into allegations against Burge and others.

Taylor took statements from a handful of retired black detectives. One recalled barging into an interrogation room after hearing a terrible cry, finding a man with his pants down chained to a steaming radiator and seeing a surprised Burge turn “red as a beet.”

If the case against Burge seemed to be gaining momentum, it stalled in 2006.

After reviewing 148 allegations, the special prosecution team concluded Burge and others, including some of the detective’s “midnight crew,” had abused suspects but there would be no action either because the evidence was too weak, or because the statute of limitations had expired

In 2008, the feds had found a way to deal with the statute-of-limitations roadblock.

Burge was not charged with abuse; he was charged with lying about it. The allegations of perjury and obstruction of justice were based on answers he provided in a civil lawsuit filed by a freed Death Row inmate when Burge denied he and other detectives had tortured anyone.

That day, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald announced the indictment.

“If Al Capone went down for taxes,” he said, “it’s better than him going down for nothing.”

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Last summer, Burge stood trial.

Prosecution witnesses told now familiar stories of abuse and torture. The defense called the accusers thugs and liars who were maligning an honorable man who’d served in Korea and Vietnam and returned with a Bronze Star.

The trial had been delayed so Burge could be treated for prostate cancer. Now he took the stand and broke his long silence, repeatedly denying he had tortured anyone.

A jury disagreed. It found Burge guilty of perjury.

Flint Taylor never discovered the identity of Deep Badge.

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Less than a week after Burge was sentenced to prison, the police pension board considered whether he should continue to receive his benefits. It narrowly ruled that the former commander’s conviction — for lying about the torture of dozens of men — was not related to his job as a police officer.

Burge will receive about $3,000 each month for the rest of his life.

AP