In the U.S. Attorney’s Chicago office, good lawyers, not good administrators, have commanded the most prestige, respect and trust. Prosecutors go forward with little second-guessing. The common sense and personal integrity that got them hired is expected to be their guide.
Hogan fit right in.
“They were people who believed strongly in public service, in doing justice,” Hogan says of his mentors. “You could do this job and not worry about who you were prosecuting, what political power they had, whose political nose would be out of joint.”
Hired by then-U.S. Atty. Anton Valukas in 1985, Hogan cut his teeth on a “regular criminal diet,” working primarily in the Rockford office. Eighteen months and 150 cases later, he came to Chicago full-time.
“I was bored with bank fraud and routine narcotics cases,” Hogan recalls. “You had to be deaf, dumb and blind in 1986 not to see what was going on. Public corruption was a problem, but it paled in comparison to the mayhem that was going on in the streets.”
Convinced that he could virtually eliminate El Rukn with a sweeping racketeering indictment, Hogan gathered thousands of hours of taped conversations left over from the Fort case, the building blocks of an intricate prosecution once he had witnesses to decode them.
The plan was unconventional for a federal prosecution because so many allegations involved murder and other violent crimes going back as far as a quarter of a century. But as Hogan says of his investigators, a group of Chicago police officers who had been trying to pick off Rukn gang members for years in the state courts: “This wasn’t the government. It was five Irish cops and a prosecutor.”
The oldest of five sisters and two brothers, Hogan, 43, spent his teenage years in Winnetka in a nondescript stucco house and shuttled around the North Shore in a beatup station wagon, according to a longtime friend, Thomas McGarry.
Like his father, an executive with U.S. Gypsum who once played high school football under Vince Lombardi, Hogan was a football star for Loyola Academy as its center and middle linebacker. As testament to his strong will, friends recall the 1968 game against Hales Franciscan High School in which Hogan tore the ligaments and cartilage in his right knee covering a punt return but returned for the final quarter. Although the injury imperiled his college scholarship, he recovered to follow his father, playing at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.
After his freshman year, Hogan married his high school sweetheart and earned money by painting houses.
It was a time of political instability and excitement. The violence outside the 1968 Democratic convention. The Chicago 7 Trial. The raid on Black Panther headquarters on the West Side. Justice was a daily issue, debated at dinner and fought over in the street. In 1970, in New Haven, Conn., Hogan was arrested after scuffling with police he believed were hassling a group of black teenagers. When charges were dropped the following week, he headed straight for an anti-war rally in Washington, D.C. (He was arrested again 12 years later, he recalls, for arguing with police about the handling of an arrest in an Uptown CTA station. Those charges, too, were dropped.)
He was disenchanted with the government but didn’t consider himself a radical, choosing instead to “change it from within.” Like many of his high school classmates, he headed for a career in law.
After graduating from Loyola law school in 1970, he clerked for U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras for two years, then was hired as an assistant in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Seattle.
“Prosecuting just suited him,” says Stephen Schroeder, a fellow prosecutor in Seattle who worked with Hogan to convict a corrupt lawyer. “He didn’t like dissembling, cheating, lying. Those things just ticked him off. Bending the rules was not part of his makeup.”
In Seattle, Hogan also got his first experience working with cooperating witnesses.
“You never trust them,” Hogan says, describing the rules he followed in using informants to prosecute the Bandido motorcycle gang there. “You never get too close. You never get personal or emotionally involved. You always deal with them at arm’s length. You are using them for one purpose only-they have information that is valuable to your prosecution of other people. End of story.”
“Those rules are standard,” he adds. “I never made a mistake with an informant. . . . I’d say I’m pretty good at it.”
As Hogan assembled a powerful drug case against the Rukns, the intelligence yielded by Harris and the other informants also shed light on dozens of murders and shootings. Noah Robinson, Jesse Jackson’s half brother, was implicated in the South Carolina murder for which Harris had been arrested. And there was talk of bribing a corrupt judge.
Still, there wasn’t much interest in the investigation among Hogan’s colleagues, many of whom were involved with complex, long-term investigations of commodities fraud and organized gambling.
“Nobody wanted any part of the case,” Hogan recalls. “It was too big, too violent, too unclean, too unfederal.”
Tackling the rukn organization required a strategy similar to that used against traditional organized crime, including the use of “flippers.”
“Flippers” can carry numerous risks. They come with extensive criminal histories and credibility problems. They might tailor their testimony to the needs of prosecutors who could help reduce their prison time. And sometimes, after being sequestered with prosecutors for days or even months, friendships develop.
“It’s just a natural thing that happens,” says a former U.S. Attorney in Chicago, who, like many interviewed for this article, did not want his name published because the case is still under review. “If they’re not obnoxious, you’re going to get to like them.”
It was true for the Rukns, even though they were a vicious and street-toughened crew.
“I don’t know that the office had previously dealt with these kinds of witnesses,” says Alex Vesselinovitch, a former assistant U.S. Attorney who worked on the Rukn case. But, he added in what is a classic refrain among federal prosecutors, “When you go after a street gang, you don’t get the neighborhood priest to testify against them.”
For months, Hogan worked with the turncoats, following with fascination as they pieced together the sordid jigsaw puzzle that was the hierarchy of the Rukn organization. In late 1988, he recruited another assistant, Ted Poulos, to help.
As the investigation neared its conclusion, a draft indictment the size of a big-city phone book was prepared, naming 75 defendants, including Jeff Fort, and outlining hundreds of crimes. Hogan’s boss, Thomas Scorza, chief of a drug task force, praised Hogan’s work but warned of serious problems because of its immense size.
“I told Bill Hogan that in my judgment, there is simply no way that the indictment, as presently conceived, can be properly handled within our office or in the court system,” Scorza wrote in a 1989 memorandum. “I cannot imagine what pretrial discovery would be like in the proposed case, whether there are 25, 50 or 75 defendants. . . . We are talking about a trial that will take from nine months to a year; that will obliterate the assigned judge’s calendar and the lives of the assigned assistants; and this will pose insurmountable security problems to boot.”
The proposed indictment was debated by senior prosecutors in informal indictment-committee meetings. In its final form, the number of defendants was reduced to 65 and split into two separate indictments according to the severity of the offense and the rank of the defendant.
Scorza’s concerns remained, but his involvement with the case diminished. “The problem was that an 800-pound gorilla wound up being cut into two 400-pound gorillas,” he says.
Even though he was Hogan’s immediate supervisor throughout the trials, Scorza rarely intervened or objected and often lauded Hogan’s performance. Occasionally he helped draft motions or signed off on expense vouchers for investigators. But like other top attorneys in the office, Scorza had to tend to his own cases. It was standard procedure to leave matters in Hogan’s hands, and there seemed no compelling reason not to.
“The supervision was exactly the same as with every other case in that world,” Scorza says. “There’s a huge amount of personal responsibility given to an assistant. This was a senior division. He was a senior prosecutor. It’s not like having a secretary and saying, ‘Show me what you typed today.’ You can’t say that to a prosecutor.”
In the frenzied weeks before the indictments, crucial decisions were made.
In the fall of 1989, First Assistant U.S. Atty. Ira Raphaelson finished plea agreements with the flippers. Harris’agreement, for example, called for a sentence of 20 years to life, with the understanding that his testimony could reduce his time served.
Raphaelson handled the negotiations because he had no earlier relationship with the witnesses, a common practice in federal prosecutions. As Hogan explained to investigators: “It was just not a good idea for me to be the person bringing the hammer down on their heads after having brought them along the line to cooperate and having then to subsequently put them on the stand.”
Because most of the crimes fell under state jurisdiction, state prosecutors had to sign off on the agreements. The state pushed for maximum sentences, a position federal prosecutors considered impractical and one that Hogan feared might backfire when it came time for the witnesses to testify.
Valukas had castigated Hogan for encouraging the witnesses to hold out for better deals-a position that undercut his own office, according to sources who heard the exchange. Hogan says he and Valukas resolved their differences in a private meeting, and the matter was dropped.
Valukas has refused to comment on anything relating to the Rukn prosecution.
With the plea agreements in hand, the informants continued their recollections of a quarter century of crime.
The information offered by Harris and the other former gang members illustrated in graphic terms El Rukn’s brutal methods, ranging from the profitable arithmetic of dealing drugs known as “T’s and blues” and heroin to the bloody trail of drug-related vendettas.
The gang’s narcotics enterprise, which at its peak sold multiple kilograms of cocaine monthly in ubiquitous $10 bags, generated between $3 million and $4 million in profits that were hidden in the pipes and holes beneath the basement of the fort and stashed in several safe deposit boxes in Chicago and Milwaukee, according to government documents.
The number of murders linked to the Rukns in their 20-year history ranges from the two dozen outlined in the indictments to many times that number suspected by police. They were on the one hand vicious executioners of rivals for their South Side turf, and on the other hand, sloppy in their ways, sometimes targeting and killing innocent victims.
A key player in the drug operation was Harris, the son of hard-working middle class parents who ran a Milwaukee tavern. By his own admission, Harris was the outcast in an otherwise stable family. He was sent to a boys home by age 15 and drifted into Chicago where he began his association with Jeff Fort and his gang.
Harris worked his way up the Rukn hierarchy, carting cash to drug transactions as Fort’s bagman before achieving the rank of “general,” primarily through his own success as a dealer.
By the mid-’80s, he was purchasing approximately one kilogram of cocaine a month and large quantities of potent white heroin from East Coast suppliers for distribution by the gang and its associates.
Harris and the turncoat generals delivered Robinson to the prosecution, describing not only Robinson’s role in the drug business but also in a murder-for-hire plot he ordered against a former employee and a botched hit he contracted on a former business partner.
Occasionally, the witnesses’ recollections trailed off into intriguing but uncorroborated territory. In one such instance Harris says Jeff Fort had warned the head of the Milwaukee mob, Frank Balistrieri, about the perils he would face if he attempted to sell heroin on Chicago’s South Side. Balistrieri’s bones would be rattling so loudly that his ancestors in Sicily would hear them, Harris quoted Fort as shouting.
