The prosecution didn’t know for sure that Harris was telling the truth, but Hogan’s system of scrutinizing Harris and the other witnesses was simple: If they told him 100 stories and 85 could be independently corroborated, he could accept the other 15. Most prosecutors believed that to be an acceptable risk.
It was during the last-minute rush to indictment, in October 1989, that Hogan was visited by another assistant prosecutor in the office, Lawrence Rosenthal.
Like Hogan, Rosenthal was buried in his own work, preparing for the trial of mob boss Albert Tocco. But one afternoon, Rosenthal recalled for investigators, he received a distressing memo.
Now widely known as the Rosenthal Memo, it was an internal document of the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the downtown federal prison, that listed positive drug-test results of incarcerated Rukn witnesses, specifically Harris and another cooperator, Harry Evans.
Hogan has maintained that he never received a copy of the memo, and Rosenthal has said he doesn’t know why it came to him. He recognized the names of the Rukns because he had once been assigned to a spinoff investigation, and when the significance of the memo became clear, Rosenthal told investigators, he went to find Hogan.
Hogan says he can’t recall the meeting. Rosenthal gave investigators a detailed description of their exchange.
Rosenthal says he immediately asked Hogan whether he planned to turn over the positive test results to defense attorneys in accordance with standard government policy. According to Rosenthal’s statements to investigators, Hogan showed little interest, muttered that “it wasn’t a problem” and added that although he could request his witnesses refrain from using drugs, he couldn’t force them to.
Hogan flatly denies having such a conversation with Rosenthal, testifying that such information, surfacing in the crucial days before the indictment, would have been like holding a “red flag in front of a bull.”
Rosenthal didn’t report his conversation with Hogan to his supervisors, and the memo wound up in Albert Tocco’s file, a bomb with a slow fuse.
The indictments were announced on Oct. 27, 1989. The following spring, a wrecking ball tore into the fort. It was a celebration of sorts for Hogan, who posed for pictures, flanked by the agents and Chicago police officers, who considered the day’s events among the most satisfying of their careers.
Walking through the corridors of the U.S. Attorney’s office, often with little more than a few hours of sleep, Hogan carried within an encyclopedic knowledge of the Rukn hierarchy, its coded language and its alleged crimes.
Only tragedy could slow him down, as it did in March 1990, when his daughter Sheila, an athletic teenager in her freshman year at the University of Illinois, checked with a doctor about a seemingly innocuous bruise on her leg. Tests revealed that she was suffering from acute leukemia.
Her body degenerated with frightening speed. Three weeks later, after being removed from life support, she died.
“How did I handle it?” Hogan recalls. “She knew how much I loved her. I didn’t have any regrets that she didn’t know.”
For Hogan, it was another convulsion in a difficult personal life. His first marriage lasted 12 years before ending in divorce in 1982, and a second marriage met the same fate seven years later.
A month after his daughter’s death, Hogan was back at work.
Hogan’s mega-trial strategy faced a new opponent, U.S. District Judge Marvin Aspen, who also objected to the size of the indictment, ordering the government to break up the Rukn case into smaller trials. Hogan and his supervisors resisted, arguing that even though there were 38 defendants, barely half would actually face trial. More important, Hogan argued that it was more efficient to try the case once, instead of presenting the same witnesses and overlapping evidence in numerous courtrooms.
Aspen was not moved. He divided the indictment into five trials. The prosecution reconfigured its case and prepared for the first trial, before U.S. District Judge James Holderman.
The office was in transition.
Fred Foreman, an outsider who had never tried a federal criminal case, was named U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. The end of a hiring freeze brought a wave of new assistants, nearly 30 of them that year, bringing the total to about 135. Oversight was stretched.
Hogan concentrated on the cases before him with an intense focus that seldom wavered, whether he was pounding away at a witness or challenging a judge. With Aspen, Hogan engaged in heated exchanges over the severance question and the starting dates of the trials. One of Hogan’s supervisors worried that Hogan was occasionally too strident in his battles with the bench and brought it up in an otherwise glowing performance review. Hogan denied there was a problem, and at the time, the observation seemed to be of minor significance.
“Standing up to a judge is something that is admired,” says a former prosecutor referring to the line attorneys walk before the bench. “But being antagonistic is just dumb. You’ll never beat them.”
Then, in early 1991, came a decision that would have lasting impact. Hogan assigned the job of organizing the evidence against the Rukns to an attorney named Corinda Luchetta who was working as a paralegal. At first the job was menial, requiring her to retype and catalog interviews and notes. Over time, she would take on much more responsibility, dealing directly with the cooperating witnesses and recording their versions of government tapes.
Luchetta didn’t have much of a social life, craved Hogan’s direction and gladly devoted all her energies to work. Later, she would tell investigators of having to choose between wanting an affair with Hogan or trying to be like him. She said she decided to emulate him.
Hogan worked with the witnesses most closely, winning their respect and, at times, it seemed, their affection. Days were passed documenting their lurid tales and butting heads with bureaucracies in arranging for their families’ housing and security needs.
Over the course of the trials, he traveled to Henry Harris’ family in Milwaukee to ask if they wanted government protection. He found public housing for witnesses’ family members. He intervened with the Department of Children and Family Services to help protect another witness’ children when their mother appeared to be on drugs.
“It was true that a relationship developed that was more unique than the normal, cool relationship you have with cooperating witnesses,” says one former prosecutor involved with the case. “It was unavoidable under the circumstances. We were with these guys 12 hours a day.”
There were some other gestures. Luchetta told investigators that Hogan bought one of the flippers a watch battery that required him to visit four jewelers before finding the right one. In an interview, Hogan insisted that he obtained the battery from a drug store one afternoon during his lunch break.
In unusual visits, Evans’ mother spent afternoons with him in Hogan’s office on the 14th floor of the Dirksen building instead of visiting him in the more secure environment of the MCC.
Routinely, Luchetta told investigators, there were certain items the prosecution team supplied to the witnesses: cigarettes, pens, legal pads, accordion folders, hard candy, chocolate and sometimes aspirin. Poulos told investigators that he knew Harris was taking his cigarettes back to the MCC, though it was a violation of rules.
The prisoners found ways to show Hogan they held him in high regard. After the trials, Rukn general Jackie Clay sent Hogan a ceramic pot. Harris gave Hogan a copy of the Koran and a prayer rug. Harris told Luchetta that Hogan had served as his father and his priest, she told investigators.
Luchetta admired Hogan’s stamina, how he seemingly lived on coffee, Marlboro Lights and aspirin, how he downed beers at Ranalli’s, a Dearborn Street bar, after work, then went home to review transcripts.
When they talked after hours, Hogan warned Luchetta not to share anything about her personal life with the witnesses. He remembers instructing her: “I don’t ask about their feelings. I ask them: ‘How did it happen? How many times did you shoot? How did you get away?’ “
Over drinks one night, a Chicago cop on the case reminded Luchetta not to let her guard down, but Luchetta didn’t listen.
Over time, she grew attracted to one of the witnesses, Earl Hawkins. She considered herself Henry Harris’ big sister. Once, Luchetta told investigators, she gave him a sip of beer in the Dirksen building. And Rukn general Eugene Hunter, who called Luchetta “Rindy,” called her on the telephone to talk.
