Before his death, authorities thought they finally had pinned a murder on him: Three men said Stokes and other dealers ordered the killing of Robert Ciralski, a liquor store owner shot in front of his Hyde Park home. They allegedly ordered the hit because Ciralski stopped providing supplies they needed for their drug business.
But the witnesses, who allegedly were involved in the contract murder, changed their testimony. In the end, only one man was convicted in the scheme: Allen, the getaway driver.
Allen recalled that he first met Stokes in the late 1960s, when Stokes was a young drug dealer and Allen was working for the Black Panther Party.
Allen said he helped extort money from dealers-for whom he had great contempt-to use for community programs run by the Panthers. Stokes met their demands, Allen said, because they threatened to ”shoot the streets up” to attract police and hamper his narcotics trade.
Later Allen and his companions tried to rob an armored truck to raise money, he said. But they were surrounded by police, who sprayed their car with hundreds of gunshots. Allen was the only robber left alive; outside the car, a policeman also was dying.
Allen went to prison for the policeman`s murder. Stokes` heroin business grew and flourished.
After Allen`s release in 1983, the pair met again. Allen became involved in the drug trade himself. He said he also saw another side of Stokes. ”It`s a known fact that Flukey left a lot of bodies scattered around Chicago,”
Allen said.
But Allen, bitter about his conviction in the murder conspiracy case, contended that Ciralski`s wasn`t one of them.
Attorney Ettinger says that police, obsessed with getting a man who eluded them and flaunted his criminal wealth, fabricated the case against Stokes. The defense argued that Detective Pocordo and Darryl Moore, a police informant, deliberately built a false case, a charge police vehemently deny.
The case, though, crumbled when the witnesses, including Moore, all said they had lied.
Once again, Stokes was a free man. With diamonds on his fingers and a smile on his face, he waited obligingly for a Tribune photographer to take his picture outside the Criminal Courts building. Then he waved goodbye from his customized Cadillac and drove away.
It was another frustrating day for police.
Eventually Allen was convicted; soon Moore was back in jail with him.
In another trial that brought the name Flukey into the courts, Moore was charged with raping an 11-year-old girl.
Moore claimed prosecutors invented the crime because they were furious that Stokes went free. Previously Moore had bragged to a reporter, ”I was a suspect in over 15 killings.” He boasted that he wasn`t convicted because ”I used the system” by being an informant.
He said prosecutors were so eager to get Stokes that Moore even got away with running a drug operation while prosecutors paid his rent.
The manager of the North Side building where Moore lived said he complained to the state`s attorney`s office about Moore because ”there was a steady stream of traffic coming and going 24 hours a day.” When asked whether Moore was selling drugs there, he said, ”You can draw your own conclusions.” After Stokes went free, Moore found himself without police protection. He was convicted and got 60 years. Despite Moore`s allegations, Beuke later said prosecutors never were ”obsessed” with getting Stokes. ”I had no vendetta,” he said.
In December, during the trial of Stokes` bodyguard, Earl Wilson, for Stokes` murder, prosecutors said Wilson dreamed of choosing the next ”king of drugs” on the South Side.
Wilson denied the set-up at his trial, which again carried Stokes` name back to Criminal Court.
On the night of his death, Stokes rode to the home of a girlfriend, Diane Miller, at 79th Street and Ellis Avenue. He was met by gunmen who stepped from the shadows. Stokes and his driver, Ronald Johnson, were dead.
Miller, in a green velvet dress, pearls and a white fur coat at Wilson`s trial, said she was in the car`s back seat when the firing began.
”I was bending down picking up the (grocery) bags,” she testified. She heard the shots and stayed down. ”Flukey!” she cried when the gunfire ended. There was no response.
Miller said she didn`t see the gunmen; they never have been identified. But the jury concluded that Wilson set up the execution-style murders with a man named Elliott Taylor.
Taylor, a boyhood friend of Wilson, is allegedly a motorcycle gang leader suspected of acting as a liaison between Wilson and the drug dealers who wanted Stokes dead, said police Lt. Philip Cline.
According to police, Wilson was caught with the help of an anonymous caller who told police about an intriguing conversation he overheard on his radio scanner.
Police said the caller heard Wilson give locations as he drove behind Stokes in a back-up car. ”You`re going to need two bodyguards when this is all over with,” the caller heard Wilson tell his co-conspirator just before the shooting started.
Prosecutors say the caller was a random radio buff; Wilson`s lawyer suspects it was a law enforcement agent. The lawyer, Robert Edwards, argued that the information came through illegal eavesdropping.
But car phones use airwaves, not phone lines. In a legal ruling with a modern twist, Judge Ronald Himel found that air waves are public. Those who use them, he said, can`t expect the privacy of normal phones.
Himel denied the eavesdropping motion and commented, ”Who would ever think that Flukey Stokes` case would be involved in modern technology?”
The case also publicly revealed that Wilson wasn`t just a bodyguard; he was also a police informant. He already had been doing undercover work when Stokes offered him the bodyguard job.
He mentioned the job offer to police, and ”they asked me why don`t I go and work for him, because the FBI had been trying to penetrate his
organization and hadn`t been able to,” Wilson said.
Attorney Ettinger said he suspects that Stokes knew Wilson was an informant and only let Wilson see what he wanted him to see. In hand-written notes he gave to police, Wilson didn`t report seeing any drugs. But he did describe bundles of cash that Stokes received almost daily.
When he took the witness stand in his own defense, Wilson testified:
”One time I counted six-hundred-some thousand dollars. . . . I wrote it down in my report (to police).”
In a Nov. 1 entry to police, Wilson wrote that Stokes` desk ”was covered entirely with stacks of money.”
Later that day he wrote that he drove Stokes to a motel and that after they left, ”Flukey realized he had left $40,000 at the motel.” They returned and found that a maid had found the cash. Stokes gave her a $1,000 tip, Wilson wrote.
Under police questioning, Wilson finally admitted that he set Stokes up to be robbed; authorities said it was really an outright assassination but that Wilson wouldn`t admit it.
During his trial, Wilson contended that the whole confession was false and that he made the statement only because police intimidated him.
Wilson signed the statement and promptly was charged with murder. No one else, including Taylor, has been charged.
Despite police theories and the jury`s verdict, Wilson and his lawyers maintained throughout the trial that it was police, determined to end the years of frustration, who fired from the shadows that rainy night.
Thousands lined up at Stokes` wake, and there are many who loved him. Yet many others say that justice was done the night Stokes died.
Several jurors who helped convict Wilson said they felt no sympathy for his victim. ”Flukey got killed because he deserved it,” said one.
Said another: ”Flukey lived by guns, and he died by guns.”
Rueckert and others involved in law enforcement said police were in no way involved in the execution. The killing, said Rueckert, was just ”business as usual” for someone in Stokes` business.
”You might say,” the federal agent said, ”that Flukey Stokes died of natural causes.”
