Families of the Victims Tortured by Chicago Detectives Rejoice at First Arrest

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted October 27, 2008.

It began as a dirty open secret and is now Chicago lore: From the 1970s into the 1990s, African American men in the city of Chicago were routinely arrested, taken into police custody, and tortured, during interrogations lasting hours on end. An estimated 150 black men endured abuse that included savage beatings, suffocation with bags and typewriter covers, and in many instances, electrical shocks applied to their genitals. The goal was to secure confessions, and more often than not, it worked, whether the suspect was guilty or not.

At the head of Chicago's police torture ring was Jon Burge, a decorated Vietnam veteran who once made his name for himself as a young cop on the beat on the South Side of Chicago. As Police Commander, first at Area Three on Chicago's North side and then at Area Two on the South, Burge is said to have instituted some of the same techniques he saw deployed in Vietnam, to brutal effect. Forced into early retirement over the torture of a man named Andrew Wilson in 1993, Jon Burge has long been virtually synonymous with racism and police brutality in Chicago. Yet his name remains mostly unfamiliar to the rest of the country, in no small part because neither he nor his subordinates have ever been held accountable for their alleged crimes. Until now.

On Tuesday, October 21, Federal agents arrested Burge, now 60 years old, at his home in Tampa, Florida, where he has been living off a taxpayers' paid pension. This Monday, he will be arraigned at a Chicago courtroom, where he will not only face charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, he will come face to face with activists, family members and loved ones of men who, decades ago, were tortured under his command.

"They should apologize for what they did to him."

Carolyn Johnson was at her home in Chicago the morning Jon Burge was arrested. "I was doing my hair and a news flash came on -- and when the news flash came on, it showed Burge being arrested outside his house in Tampa, Florida!" Excitement creeps into her voice as she tells the story over the phone two days later -- "I called a million people," she says. After all, it was news she's been waiting to hear for more than 15 years.

Carolyn Johnson's son, Marcus Wiggins, was only 13 years old when he was arrested following a gang-related shooting and taken to an Area Three police station on the city's North side. The year was 1991. Jon Burge was the presiding detective commander at the station. According to Carolyn, Marcus was brought into the interrogation room without a lawyer or other adult present. "They told him to put his 'black ass' in the corner." There, he was beaten with a 15-inch rod and then, and then, the police officers brought out a black box. The box had electrical wires with alligator clips on the ends and some sort of switch that unleashed an electrical current.

In 1993, Marcus filed a lawsuit against the City of Chicago. In his deposition, he described what happened next:

Examination: What happened after he turned the switch?

Wiggins: He told me to put my hands on the table.

Q: And did you do that?

A: Yes.

Q: And then what happened?

A: And then he put the things on my hand.

Q: Was the box making a humming noise before he put the things on your hand?

A: Yes.

…

Q: What happened when he put the things on your hands?

A: They started -- my hands started burning, feeling like it was being burned. I was -- I was shaking and my -- and my jaws got tight and my eyes felt they went blank … It felt like I was spinning … It felt like my jaws was like -- they was -- I can't say the word. It felt like my jaws was sucking in … I felt like I was going to die.

According to Carolyn, it was Jon Burge himself who provided the officers with the box. "He let them do it," she says. "He was there."

Marcus's conviction was thrown out by a juvenile court when it was determined that he had been coerced into confessing, and in August of 1996, his lawsuit was settled for $95,000, paid for by the City of Chicago. But a few years later, he was arrested again, by the same officers, for another gang-related crime. He is still behind bars.

For years, Carolyn Johnson has kept a record of each of the officers involved in her son's case: Jon Burge, John Byrne Anthony Maslanka, John Paladino, and James O'Brien. "I have the names," she says. "I have the names in my sleep. I dream about them." As far as she's concerned, even with Burge now in custody, "It's not over yet. Not while those [other] detectives are out there on the streets and my son is in jail … They should apologize for what they did to him."

The case of Andrew Wilson

Jon Burge might have gotten away with torture altogether if it weren't for the case of Andrew Wilson. Wilson was arrested on Valentines Day, 1982, for the killing of two police officers, William Fahey and Richard O'Brien. That night, after spending hours being interrogated at Area Two, where he ultimately confessed to the crime, he was admitted to Chicago's Mercy Hospital with multiple injuries, including lacerations to his face, bruises to his chest, and second degree burns to one thigh. The next year, Wilson was convicted for the murders and sentenced to death, but the Illinois Supreme Court overturned the conviction, based on the fact that he had been apparently abused by police. The court's opinion cited Wilson's testimony at a pretrial hearing, where he described being "punched, kicked, smothered with a plastic bag, electrically shocked and forced against a hot radiator throughout the day until he confessed." Wilson was convicted a second time for the same crime, in 1988, and given a life sentence. In 1989 he filed a civil suit against Jon Burge and four other police officers.

See more stories tagged with: torture, chicago, jon burge, madison hobley, stanley howard, george ryan, patrick fitzgerald, andrew wilson, anthony porter

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