Blago sentenced unfairly

Judge Zagel’s decision was a popular or unpopular one? Popular: Zagel risked nothing politically. Blago had become expendable by being so stupid and arrogant. He deserves what he got, because he was stupid and arrogant. You get 14 years for that.

He was stupid and arrogant doing what comes naturally in Cook County. Most of us know people who went to jail. We know them personally, grew up with them if we grew up in Cook. Usually that calls for lesser punishment. The culture, your honor, etc.

His stupidity and arrogance indeed threatened the structure. He brought dishonor to it in too high a degree. Many were angry at him because of that excess of dishonor. 14 years.

You can’t plead everybody does it in Cook, however. That would get you at least 14 years, bringing excessive dishonor to an army of people who know how it works and take extreme umbrage at being reminded of it publicly.

Zagel knows, for sure. He headed the state police in 1984, when two Oak Park detectives, Kelly and Surmin, told Oak Park’s police chief, Keith Bergstrom, about thievery among their fellow detectives.

Bergstrom took their allegations to the Cook County state’s attorney and to the Illinois State Police. Both agencies began to investigate, but the investigation went awry and sprang a leak. In February of this year [1987], the entire Oak Park Police Department learned that Kelly and Surmin were whistle-blowers. The two [became] outcasts, unable to work because they [could not] count on their fellow police officers to protect them.

Some details:

Bergstrom took Kelly and Surmin seriously. He went to Frank De Boni, assistant state’s attorney in charge of special prosecutions; De Boni in turn sent Bergstrom to the Illinois State Police, headed by James B. Zagel (who has since become a federal judge). De Boni went to Zagel because he felt he didn’t have the manpower for a full investigation; federal investigators could not be called in because the case did not fall under federal jurisdiction. Zagel assigned the investigation to the state police Division of Criminal Investigation under Lieutenant Daniel McDivitt, who is based in Elmhurst.

………………..

For a long time after the investigation got under way, Kelly and Surmin did not fully inform each other of what they knew, and Bergstrom had to guard his every contact with the two whistle-blowers, planning excuses for two-minute meetings and not even trusting the telephone. He didn’t let anyone else in on it, not even a succession of village managers and village presidents.

“The state’s attorney and State Police strongly requested I tell nobody,” said Bergstrom. “This is standard procedure. Confidentiality is the key to a successful corruption investigation. At least in the beginning, the village manager and president didn’t have to know about it. It’s hard for some to understand that the chief is derelict in his duty if he doesn’t follow through on something like this. I had to cooperate with the other agencies [the state’s attorney’s office and State Police], who had sole legal responsibility to do something about it. Oak Park authorities had no legal responsibilities in the matter.

“The fewer who know, the greater the security for the informing officers. This knowledge was no burden to put on others.”

In the State Police investigation (which has apparently ended without visible results, except for the ostracism of Kelly and Surmin), six state detectives questioned Kelly for an hour and a half in a hotel room.

“I was made to feel as if I were guilty,” recalled Kelly. “I came expecting a spirit of cooperation but instead felt like I was getting the third degree. I was close to being badgered. I lost my temper at one point. I wasn’t offering them more than I had. They could take it or leave it.” They didn’t seem to want it. Kelly couldn’t get out of the room fast enough. “I left feeling I should never have opened my mouth. It took years to get up the courage to talk, and they didn’t want to hear it.”

Surmin met separately twice with two state policemen who made him feel as if he were the problem. “I thought they would be enthusiastic about it, but they weren’t. Instead, they were caught in the middle and felt obligated to do something with what I told them. If they didn’t follow my leads, they would look bad. It had never occurred to me that I was putting others in the middle, telling them what they didn’t want to hear. I was putting them in a tight situation.”

Eventually the state investigators planned an elaborate sting to test two of the detectives on the Oak Park force. Without informing Kelly or Surmin (Bergstrom was told only a day or two before the sting occurred), they devised an Abscam-style operation that would give the allegedly crooked detectives a chance to incriminate themselves. (Neither of these detectives, whom I will call simply A. and B., would comment for this article.) According to the plan, a phony informant would lead these two detectives to a phony fencing operation, where they could do whatever they wished with the “stolen” goods. This was in October 1985, more than a year after Surmin and Kelly were first interrogated by the State Police. Why it took so long for the state to act isn’t clear. Lieutenant McDivitt will not comment.

The sting was bungled from the start. The “snitch” used by the State Police showed up one day at the Oak Park station and told his fabricated story to A. and B. Obviously nervous, he told the detectives that he and another man had a load of stolen goods stashed in Oak Park’s Carleton Hotel. But he had been burned once by his partner, the snitch said, and wanted to burn him in return; so he was offering to lead the detectives to the cache.

While the snitch was in their office, the detectives did some checking on him. They learned his address through the license plate of his car, which was parked in the police station lot, and they called the Carleton to see what other rooms the man might have taken there. They learned that the snitch had rented a second room next to the one where he said the loot was stashed. What or who might be lurking there was anybody’s guess. A. and B. took the man immediately to the hotel. There they found the stolen goods he’d promised, but no accomplice. In a transparent move, the snitch told the two detectives to help themselves to the loot, and he began to leave.

But the two detectives didn’t let him leave. Instead they went next door and tried to force their way into the second room. The door opened, and out came four or five men with guns and badges, among them McDivitt of the State Police. The two Oak Park detectives had called for help, and the hallway was quickly filled with two kinds of detectives, milling around and flashing guns and badges in a sort of Keystone Kops ballet.

……………

Bergstrom sees the whole business as a Greek tragedy moving inexorably to the destruction of all. Including the villains, one may add, if special counsel Turow nails the allegedly crooked cops. Turow presumably knows at least as much as the State Police knew after their long investigation, since he has been given the State Police report that James Zagel had for months refused to give to village authorities. Turning over the report was one of the last things Zagel did before he left the Department of State Police to don his federal judge’s robes.

The whole story, which I wrote, leads me not to take Zagel seriously. Am I wrong?