She looked so matronly. Nicely dressed, gray hair in a bun, like a grandmother just home from church.
Her words, though, didn’t match the picture.
“Why are you [bleeping] doing this? What are you [bleeping] doing here?” She was directing her venom at officers from the Chicago Police Department’s new Fugitive Apprehension Section.
“I’ll turn my back and they’ll blow my child’s head off!” she shouted to the world at large.
The officers had come to the woman’s North Side house looking for her 22-year-old son, a suspect in the shooting of two people. He had escaped from a police interrogation room the night before and now the fugitive unit was trying to help find him. Suddenly, as quickly as she had exploded at the officers, the woman changed her tune, saying that she had no idea where her son was, and that if she heard from him, she’d turn him right in. A couple of the officers apparently found her sudden change of heart amusing. Observing their smiles, she was off and ranting again. Only louder.
“You think this is a [bleeping] joke? What is so [bleeping] funny?”
Lt. Mike Walsh, who heads the fugitive unit, had seen — and heard — enough.
“This here, this is just a lot of wasted breath,” he said, nodding toward the half-dozen officers who were talking — or trying to talk — to the woman, as well as her daughter and a third relative. Walsh conferred with Sgt. Joan Biebel, and she directed her team of officers to return to their cars.
“She’s yelling, ‘What are you doing at my house!?’ ” Biebel said, as she drove to the next stop in the search. “Well, this is the address he gives whenever he’s arrested.”
The hunt for the 22-year-old — pretty much a typical day in the life of the Fugitive Apprehension Section — had begun earlier that afternoon with a stop at his sister’s house in Bellwood. Then it was on to the West Side, where a girlfriend lives. Then over to his mom’s house. Then to a convenience store where he sometimes hangs out.
And that’s how the squad, which is divided into three teams, each with a sergeant and eight officers, operates. Get a piece of information, chase it down. Find another, and chase it down.
More often than not, they hit pay dirt. Since last August, the unit has made 252 arrests, including 188 for homicide, has located another 66 wanted individuals who were already in custody in the Illinois prison system on other charges, and did the same for 23 more who were in other jurisdictions. In the past, before there was a unit charged specifically with pursuing them, individuals such as these likely would have remained at large unless they were arrested on other charges. And only after their names were run on the computer would police realize that the person was wanted.
But even with that success rate, there are days, like this one, when they go home empty-handed.
“And if we miss ’em, we go back and dig,” Biebel said.
Starting from scratch
The Fugitive Apprehension Section was the idea of Deputy Supt. Harvey Radney, who took a cue from other cities and early last year asked Chief of Detectives Phil Cline to put the unit together.
“We’re aware that violent offenders tend to be repeat offenders,” Cline said, “so the quicker we can get them in custody, the better chance we have of them not committing additional crimes. And that’s where the fugitive squad comes in.”
He picked Walsh, a 20-year department veteran, to run it, and gave him three sergeants, Biebel, Jerry Mahon and John Manos. With an August 2001 starting date as their target, Walsh and his sergeants had a month and a half to put everything together. They interviewed 200 candidates — twice what Walsh expected — and selected 24 department veterans, half detectives, half patrolmen, for the unit. The members of the unit took a high-risk entry training course (a weeklong class run by the CPD’s Hostage Barricade Team, in which officers learned the safest methods of gaining access to buildings where a fugitive might be hiding) and qualified in the use of shotguns, all preparation for what they might find on the street.
“We were all pretty much flying by the seat of our pants when we started,” Walsh said. “We all knew how to do police work [the average length of service is just over 12 years], and they said to us, just go ahead and do it.”
The unit has had some memorable successes. One man wanted for murder — listed as one of Chicago’s five most wanted individuals — was tracked to Laredo, Texas, after members of the unit found an associate of his and talked him into giving them the suspect’s pager number. Another murder suspect was tracked to an Indiana jail, where he was being held on an unrelated charge, under a different name. The prisoner had burned off the skin on his fingertips, figuring he couldn’t be tied to his fingerprint file in Chicago. But members of the unit believed he was their guy, so they had Indiana authorities re-fingerprint him, giving the fingers an extra roll to get images from the sides of the fingers. It worked; they were able to match the prints with his old records and the man was brought back to face charges.
Doing the job
Much of what the squad does is pretty basic police work — staking out an address, going door to door, asking questions, working the phones, pursuing leads. But they couldn’t do that if not for what goes on in a fifth-floor office at a converted Sears warehouse at Fillmore and Homan every morning.
The office resembles almost any other business quarters that have been carved out of a renovated building — lots of open space, high ceilings, about 20 desks with computers, a small snack-and-coffee area off to one corner and bulletin boards with various announcements. But some things are out of the ordinary: A Chicago Police Department poster hangs on one wall, showing the faces of Chicago’s five most wanted criminals; there’s a big sign-out board for the unit’s unmarked cars; and instead of insurance reports or press releases, the paperwork sitting on a desk is more likely to be someone’s rap sheet, complete with mug shots and fingerprints. And the attire is extremely casual — jeans and T-shirts are about as formal as it gets. But by and large, there’s not much difference between this and other workplaces, even down to the office banter (there’s a discussion of brake repairs on a Jeep, and cracks are made about one officer’s fashion sense). It’s what goes on each morning on those computers that is unusual. It’s where the officers begin the chase.
“Days vary,” Walsh said. “Sometimes they’ll hit on something and run out. Other days they’ll spend almost entirely on the computers.”
The officers start with investigative alerts, which are issued by a detective working a particular case. The alerts are issued for “anyone needed to tie up a case,” Walsh said, be it a suspect, witness or even the last person seen with a victim. Mostly, though, the alerts are for offenders.
“The area detectives [the city is divided into five police areas] always make a first stab at trying to apprehend the offender,” Cline explained. “But when they’re not successful, they turn it over to the fugitive squad, and [the detective] can start working on another case where they need to identify who the offender is in that case. This frees them up to do that.”
“The detectives call from time to time, looking for a person,” Biebel said. “But absent that, I go over the list and look for people to put on the front burner.”
Her team members do the same, looking at the individuals who are wanted and running a variety of computer checks. Old arrest records are called up, information is obtained from the state’s attorney’s office, federal law enforcement officials and the secretary of state’s office. Phone records are scrutinized.
A wealth of information
Dave Feltman, a 16-year department veteran, gave a quick demonstration as he tracked information on a man who had witnessed a shooting and whom detectives wanted to re-interview. Feltman started by looking at old arrest records.
“You call up his name, and his fingerprint number is listed,” he said. “You run that. And all his arrests come up, along with his birthday, [physical] description, a narrative of his arrests, the people he was arrested with.”
They can call up mug shots, a person’s last known address, his driver’s license number, his car registration, whether he owns property, possible relatives, the names of people who now live at his former residences, names, addresses and phone numbers of his neighbors. All pieces of information to be followed.
The data come from insurance reports, real estate transactions, the Secretary of State’s office, phone company records and myriad other bureaucratic sources.
“You try to cross reference,” Feltman said. “If you see someone has used the same address [as the person named in the report] two, three, four times, you’re pretty sure she’s got some connection. Probably a relative or wife or girlfriend.”
A lot of the information is no good — running a reporter’s name resulted in the reporter’s sister’s dog being listed as a possible “associate” — but, Feltman said, “You’ve still got to look at it, still have to double-check.”
“If you find an address that hasn’t been checked or something like that, or if you find a person who hasn’t been looked into and it looks like it’s very possible, that’s when the juices start going,” said Brian McKendry, another member of the unit. “It’s almost like finding the needle in the haystack.”
Next, they hit the streets.
Safety in numbers
When looking for someone, the unit travels as a group — on the day seven of them were looking for the 22-year-old escapee, they were in four unmarked cars. At each stop, one car would park in the alley, the rest would pull up, slowly, in front, park, and the officers would go to the door.
“I want everybody there,” Walsh said. “When people see all of us arrive, it sort of sets the tone. And people do acknowledge it. Their eyes widen. They go, `This must be something really bad.'”
In many cases, it is something really bad.
“Homicide offenders are probably the ones you really want to get off the street, along with a criminal sexual assault,” or something like that,” McKendry said. “They’re the top two offenders you go for.”
Tracking fugitives, often in some rough neighborhoods, isn’t the safest job in the world.
But the unit has been fortunate.
“Safety is huge with me,” Walsh said. “We’ve had to knock doors down, wrestle a few people. And a guy pulled a gun last week; luckily, then he dropped it. But no one’s gotten hurt.”
While most of their work involves pursuing suspects, in other cases they’re looking for someone who might be needed only as a witness, such as the individual Feltman had been tracking on his computer.
“I think a lot of times it comes down to not knowing they’re wanted,” Walsh said. “Chances are [the police] talked to him when the crime occurred. Now something has come up and he needs to be talked to again.”The search for this individual started with a six-car caravan of officers going to a West Side address where the subject’s brother lived. He had been there the two previous nights, the brother said, but had left early that morning for work. He said he wasn’t sure where his brother worked, so the officers regrouped, grabbing lunch at a restaurant on Taylor Street and discussing the next move.
It was decided to try another neighborhood, one where the witness had once been arrested. And the move panned out. They saw the subject walking down the street, told him what was up, and he came along compliantly.
Creating a rapport
Most cases aren’t as simple. Repeated visits to a subject’s home — or the home of a family member — are one way the unit succeeds.
“Maybe we get the name of a relative,” Walsh said. “You talk to them, and they don’t talk; they don’t know anything. But sometimes people change their opinions of other people [he laughs]. And you go back a couple of weeks later, and they’ll tell you where he is.
“Family members who aren’t involved in this nonsense, they don’t want us knocking on their doors twice a week. Even once a week. They don’t want us around.”
Sometimes it doesn’t even take a couple of weeks for results.
Remember the 22-year-old man who had escaped police custody? The evening of the day that the unit spent looking for him, he walked into the station at Grand and Central — with his attorney — and surrendered.
Did the unit’s door-knocking have anything to do with his decision to surrender?
“We like to think so,” Walsh said.
