When the squad cars arrived that day among the upscale homes on a quiet cul-de-sac in Highland Park, a labyrinth of secrets was unveiled. At 1810 Shelley Ct., more than 20 law enforcement officers swarmed over a boxlike post-modern manse, whose understated pale facade, railed parapet and severe horizontal lines gave it a faint resemblance to a flat-topped concrete bunker–though with $120,000 worth of landscaping. A $10,000 chandelier glittered beyond plate glass above the front door. Statues facing the brick drive gazed out on late-model Mercedes-Benzes, Jaguars and a small fleet of other vehicles.
That was Jan. 31, 1997, when federal officers and local police came to arrest Mohammad Mansoori, owner of the home. This spring Mansoori, 40, was convicted in U.S. District Court of engaging in an extensive conspiracy to distribute large quantities of cocaine and heroin, using top-level street-gang connections in Chicago. Squadrons of “pack workers” and “shift runners,” moving through housing projects on Chicago’s West Side, formed a pyramid whose apex led back to the quiet green lawns and lapping swimming pools of Shelley Court, which, just off Tennyson Lane, had seemed a sylvan refuge from unpoetic urban woe.
Neighbors among the 10 imposing homes on Shelley Court watched the excitement of the arrest but were left to wonder just how deeply their sanctuary had become involved in the poisoning of a distant ghetto.
“I never knew that in a wonderful, beautiful area like this,” marveled Mansoori’s next-door neighbor, Roslyn Lotzof, that “something like this would happen.” The Lotzofs had been puzzled by the ever-changing array of new automobiles that kept appearing in the Mansoori driveway, just beyond a thin screen of evergreens.
“They drove home every single day with a new car,” recalled Lotzof’s son, Daniel, 15. “It just didn’t make sense.” Daniel had noted that Mansoori said he worked as a dealer in used cars, but the cars in the neighbor’s drive did not look used. “He had a new Jaguar every day.”
Mansoori would stroll over and chat amicably, seeming at ease in the neighborhood. He expressed dismay that he had sold a boat he had owned before moving from Texas. He was surprised to find that Highland Park was by Lake Michigan. “He seemed to be hiding out,” mused Roslyn Lotzof.
Still, she hospitably sent the Mansooris and their five children cake and cookies when they moved in in 1995. Far from being stiff or haughty, Shelley Court displays a friendly, unpretentious air, as if secure in its pastoral seclusion. On both sides of Mansoori, who came to the United States in 1985 from Iran, neighbors also are from abroad. One, who asked not to be named, is from Bolivia. The Lotzofs are from South Africa. Their daughter Tanya, 12, would go in-line skating with the Mansooris’ well-liked children on Shelley Court’s gentle slope.
“And then this goes on in your back yard,” Lotzof said with a sigh, absorbing the impact. “Literally in your back yard.”
On April 7 the Mansoori home, valued by its owner prior to his arrest at $2.5 million (investigators have calculated that it cost Mansoori $800,000 to build the home), was included in a forfeiture verdict by a federal jury with three other residences Mansoori owned in Chicago, Bolingbrook and Texas. All four properties were awarded to the government, though actual transfer has yet to occur. The properties were found to have been instrumental in drug dealing and money laundering.
Mansoori is now awaiting sentencing with 13 co-conspirators, who either pleaded guilty or were convicted. Taken together, the conspiracy case against the 14 is described by federal authorities as the second-largest asset-forfeiture case in the history of U.S. District Court in Chicago. The defendants have been ordered to surrender some $6 million in assets.
“High-level drug dealers often try to insulate themselves,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Mark Hersh after prosecuting Mansoori and the others. “This case is an example of how they are not invulnerable . . . that we can get to (gang) leaders and high-level drug dealers and take away the fruits of their crimes.”
Mansoori apparently was not a boss of crime but a supplier of its raw materials, a drug distributor. His West Side automobile dealership, Z&M Used Car Sales, became a front for pumping narcotics to a Chicago gang leader, Terry Young, who is among the 14 convicted.
But the gang leader was not Mansoori’s only high-volume customer, according to prosecutors, who explained that the drugs flowed to lower-income areas of Chicago through multiple outlets, including another dealer who was not a gang member, John Hunt. In 1992, after release from prison on a drug-dealing sentence (also involving drugs supplied by Mansoori, Hunt has testified), the parolee became manager of America’s Car Wash at 2744 Skokie Valley Rd. in Highland Park, a few minutes’ drive from Shelley Court. Hunt has testified that he would drive to Mansoori’s residence and drop off McDonald’s sacks or other bundles. These were filled with as much as $9,000 in rumpled $5, $10 and $20 bills, profits from the inner-city drug sales.
Nor were drugs the only goods involved.
A gang leader testified that Mansoori helped him buy more than 200 handguns so heroin dealers could protect themselves against addicts trying to rob the dealers.
On Shelley Court, Roslyn Lotzof was astonished to learn recently from a neighbor, that Mansoori had been convicted without local publicity, in contrast to the hubbub surrounding his arrest the previous year. To Lotzof it seemed that after the arrest, the case had dropped from the face of the earth, leaving no clear lesson for her or her two children.
“I want the kids to know that this is not in the movies,” she said. “This is real life. This is how things really are.”
