Murder in Canaryville Read online

  The grandson and great-grandson of Chicago police officers, Chicago police detective James Sherlock was CPD through and through.

  His career had seen its share of twists and turns, but on this day, he was at the records center to see the case file for the murder of John Hughes, who was seventeen years old when he was gunned down in a park on Chicago’s Southwest Side on May 15, 1976. The case had haunted many in the department for years, and its threads led everywhere. More than forty years after the Hughes killing, Sherlock was hopeful he could finally put the case to rest.

  Then the records clerk handed him a thin manila folder. A brazen murder in a public park, which had supposedly been investigated by teams of detectives for years, had been reduced to a few meager reports and photographs. What should have been a massive file with notes and transcripts from dozens of interviews was nowhere to be found.

  Sherlock could have left the records center without the folder and cruised into retirement, and no one would have noticed. Instead, he tucked the envelope under his arm and carried it outside.

  PRAISE FOR JEFF COEN’S

  Family Secrets: The Case That Crippled the Chicago Mob

  “Revealing, shocking…. Superbly crafted, this is a tragic, clear-sighted account of how Chicago’s mighty mob was brought to heel.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[An] authoritative account of one of the most amazing Chicago Outfit cases in history … indispensable.”

  —John Kass, columnist, Chicago Tribune

  “A telling look inside the twisted world of organized crime.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Moves with the urgency of a can’t-put-it-down novel.”

  —Rick Kogan, author, journalist, and radio host

  “A stellar recounting of the … systematic dismantling of the Chicago Outfit.”

  —Men’s Book

  “Reads like a fast-paced crime thriller … fascinating reading.”

  —Times (Northwest Indiana)

  “Like a true-life Sopranos, complete with life-and-death drama, Family Secrets is a story of crime, corruption and the subterranean streams of money that built fortunes and sucked life from entire sectors of society.”

  —Shepherd Express (Milwaukee)

  PRAISE FOR JEFF COEN AND JOHN CHASE’S

  Golden: How Rod Blagojevich Talked Himself Out of the Governor’s Office and into Prison

  “All those interested in the Blago drama or political intrigue in general can dive into this book with relish.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Through indefatigable reporting and deft writing, [Coen and Chase] take us into a fascinating, Byzantine world of Chicago politics and power that largely goes unseen.”

  —David Mendell, author of Obama: From Promise to Power

  “[Coen and Chase] offer a nuanced context of political corruption overlaid with Blagojevich’s extraordinarily flamboyant personality, from the profanity to the hair obsession and outsized ego.”

  —Booklist

  “Golden presents complicated political machinations in plain-facts terms, accessible to readers of all backgrounds. Highly recommended … to anyone interested in learning what really drove the Blagojevich scandal.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “The most ambitious book yet on the former governor’s spectacular rise and fall.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  Copyright © 2021 by Jeff Coen

  All rights reserved

  Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, Illinois 60610

  ISBN 978-1-64160-281-5

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020946265

  Interior design: Jonathan Hahn

  Photo of John R. Hughes courtesy of the Hughes family

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  For Tracy and Sloane

  And in memory of John R. Hughes

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  1 Boyce Field

  2 The Friend

  3 A Visit with the FBI

  4 A Case to Look Into

  5 The Gorman File

  6 The Eyewitness

  7 Digging In

  8 Martha

  9 The South Side Group

  10 The Last Greylord Judge

  11 A Green Chevrolet

  12 A Sick Feeling

  13 Haberkorn

  14 The Cop

  15 A Troubling Legacy

  16 A Final Push

  17 “I Really Want to Go Now”

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Additional References

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Source material for this book comes primarily from interviews with the family and friends of John Hughes; interviews with retired police officers; police records and reports; author research and conversations with confidential sources; federal court records and transcripts; and materials written and gathered primarily by retired Chicago police detective Jim Sherlock, while he was working for the FBI.

  Attempts have been made to stay as close to the official record as possible, though the official record is at times limited, and perhaps intentionally so.

  Those limits are especially apparent in the official Chicago Police Department file, which was used by the author. Items that were gathered in a separate collection of material recovered by Sherlock, which became known as “the Gorman file,” are noted as such; they include police records not found in the official file. That paperwork originally was gathered by James Gorman and attorney Brian Gilmartin. Eventually it was entered into the official CPD record by Sherlock, as described in the following pages.

  Direct quotes from reference materials, including published news accounts and books, are noted in the text where they are made. Other reference items that were helpful to the project are listed later in the “Additional References” section at the end of the book.

  Quotes from interviews and police reports are cited as such.

  Quotes taken from police reports are also described according to which report is being used in the text and which file it was kept in. Those quotes are as close to the original material as possible. However, since such police reports are notorious for their misspellings, abbreviations, and accepted shorthand, some efforts have been made to smooth out those quotes for the reader without changing the original meaning of what was written. That is to say that obvious spelling errors have been corrected in the text without a “[sic]” note so as not to constantly distract from the narrative. Major changes for clarity include paraphrasing in a few instances, but again, not to a level that would change the meaning of the quotation.

  Additionally, in two cases, names of individuals in this book have been fictionalized. Both fictional names are indicated by the use of SMALL CAPS on first mention. This decision was made in fairness to those people, as they found themselves under some scrutiny in a criminal investigation but have not been formally charged with any crimes. Any similarity between the fictionalized names and the names of other real people is strictly coincidental. In other instances, the proper names of some who were interviewed by investigators have simply been excluded or replaced with general descriptions. This was done for similar reasons, and in an effort not to unfairly lead to the identification of the two people whose names were fictionalized.

  PROLOGUE

  Jim Sherlock sat in a black Jeep Cherokee on a residential street in a town more than fifty miles from Chicago.

  The SUV was unmarked, but he had made sure to use a vehicle that you could see had bars of emergency lights lined inside its windows, if you had a reason to look a little clo
ser.

  Months of peeling open aging records, jogging the memories of crusty old cops, and finding people who still remembered what happened, and here Sherlock was. There was little more to do than slip the Cherokee into park and watch. The house and the street were still. A typical street in a typical town just beyond the outer reaches of suburbia. The concrete had given way to subdivisions, which had given way to corn, which had given way to this.

  He was a Chicago police detective. And yes, people always stopped on his name when he identified himself on the street or at the start of interviews. “Detective Sherlock?” they would say. “Right. You’ll have to do better than that, pal. Where’s Watson?”

  He didn’t blame them. He had made the jokes himself on occasion.

  For years he had been on loan to the FBI, including a stint working cold cases, and for months he had been obsessed with this one. It would be his very last before retirement. It involved a murder four decades earlier, in a neighborhood that he knew well. It had ripped a teenager from his Irish American family and broken them. It was a family not unlike the one Sherlock himself had grown up in.

  In many ways, Sherlock knew he was pulling on his final thread. He needed the man in the house to talk to him and tell him about a night more than forty years earlier. The car. The park. The gun. Sherlock believed the man held the key to the case that had proven to be among the most challenging and the most remarkable of his career. He believed dark forces at the intersection of Chicago government, police, and organized crime had worked to keep justice from being done, and he was out to change that.

  But Sherlock’s time with a badge was running out. He would need to work quickly to see this file stamped SOLVED before going on vacation, or moving on to the next stage of his life.

  In any event, there was a very good chance the man in the house would already know what this was about and why an undercover police vehicle was sitting on his street. He had probably heard that the case that had dogged him for so many years had been reopened—again.

  That was the way the neighborhoods worked.

  Start asking questions, especially about a case like this one, and word traveled like an electric pulse across the grid of streets and alleys of Canaryville and Bridgeport. Through the family networks. Through the churches. Through the brick taverns and corner stores. Sherlock had been amazed how quickly he had gotten to the point at which he would call someone about the case and the person on the line would say someone already had told them Sherlock was poking around. Within days. Probably hours. So by now the information relay had almost certainly made it even here, to the town where the man Sherlock was watching now lived. This man had picked up and left Canaryville and Bridgeport for good long ago.

  That was not the way the neighborhoods worked.

  Clans there spread across generations, and roots ran deep. Irish, Italian, and Croatian families had ridden out good times and bad in Canaryville and Bridgeport and had stayed through the ’60s and ’70s, when African Americans began to move in great numbers into areas around them. The White youths had met that perceived threat with curses and rocks. It was a sad history that carried back to the city’s 1919 race riots, which saw many hundreds of people killed in the area in clashes sparked by the drowning of a Black teen whose raft had drifted too close to a South Side beach claimed by Whites. To many, the neighborhoods were a fortress against a changing city, and they have long been key geography in Chicago’s ongoing struggles with racism.

  To most Chicagoans, Bridgeport was an ancestral stronghold of sorts, and a political enclave that was synonymous with the Daleys. But mention many other family surnames in these neighborhoods and their longtime residents could also tell you the street each of those families lived on, whom their kids hung out with in grade school, and probably which mass they attended. That was the real fabric. Politics, yes. But family first.

  Even in the new century, these neighborhoods are old Chicago. That old city fades but never completely weathers away. It’s there in the bricks peeking from a newly opened pothole. There in a painted sign for a long-closed business that slowly disappears on a building. And there in the phantom rail tracks that appear on a side street, forever headed to nowhere.

  And of course it is there in the faces and voices of those who lived in Chicago long before meatpackers gave way to tech lofts, the world’s largest Starbucks moved to Michigan Avenue, and international tourists appeared in droves to take selfies in front of a polished metal bean.

  The Canaryville and Bridgeport of 1976 were not so glossy. They sat on the near Southwest Side, where Chicago’s work got done. Canaryville was believed to be so named for the swarms of small birds that once flocked to the old Union Stock Yards, where untold millions of hogs and cattle were gathered in a sea of pens and butchered for shipment across America. The neighborhood was home to tidy blocks of bungalows and two-flats owned by laborers, many of them Irish, and functioned more like its own town. Many residents knew as youngsters where they would go to church their whole lives and where they would be buried. The city’s foundation grew here. They were proud of it.

  Bridgeport, too, gave its sweat to the yards. Its history is filled with tales of Chicago laborers, many of them immigrants, who toughed out challenging conditions in their new city to make a path for their families. Some historians note that one of the area’s first place names was telling enough: “Hardscrabble,” which could have described Bridgeport for decades. It grew up along the Illinois and Michigan Canal before becoming a political seat of power for the Daleys.

  Those, of course, are some of the better things that can be said about it. It was also insular to a fault. “It’s a suspicious neighborhood,” legendary Chicago columnist Mike Royko wrote of it in 1971 in his seminal book Boss: “a blend of Irish, Lithuanian, Italian, Polish, German, and all White. In the bars, heads turn when a stranger comes in. Blacks pass through in cars, but are unwise to travel by on foot.”

  Celebrations in 1976 marked the United States bicentennial. The Sears Tower already spiked above the Loop in the distance as a sign of things to come, but lifelong residents of Canaryville and Bridgeport who were senior citizens that year had lived as children in the Chicago of Al Capone.

  No, the secrets would not come easily. Jim Sherlock knew it, and that was fine. Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for, Clarence Darrow supposedly once said. Maybe that’s what this was. Whatever truth was buried here, whatever the streets of Bridgeport and Canaryville would dish out, he would take. He was as Chicago as they were—in some ways the perfect person to take this up and not look back.

  The town where Sherlock found himself that day in 2019 was called Sandwich, and the name was fitting. He wanted the man in the house across the street from where the undercover car was parked to feel like he was in one.

  Sherlock had already spoken to the town’s police chief to let him know what he would be doing there. He had told the chief the man was no real danger to anyone, and Sherlock needed no help or backup. The idea was to be seen and to shake up his target, make him think the investigation was much larger and more active than it was. The man inside the house might start to wonder why this unfamiliar SUV was sitting across from his home, and when the man took a moment to look more closely, he would realize it was a police vehicle.

  In fact, this wasn’t the only car Sherlock had used to sit in roughly this spot, hoping it would seem like multiple officers were on a rotating surveillance detail. It had been a silver Dodge on a prior visit. He was hopeful but not sure it was working, or if it would make any difference at all.

  But cases like this one—the stubborn ones that lodge themselves in Chicago lore and stay there—those were the ones that were worth the work. Worth the months sifting through dusty files. Worth sitting in a car for hours and doing nothing.

  Well, not always nothing. Sometimes Sherlock made it look like he was taking notes or jotting down something important, just in case his target was watching. He glanced out the Cherokee’s
window to check the house again.

  Sherlock wanted the man inside to look.

  The drapes moved.

  1

  BOYCE FIELD

  Music spilled from the house party on Throop Street, common for a Friday night in the Bridgeport neighborhood. It was May, and Chicago high schools were wrapping up their academic years. Prom had been the prior weekend for many. It was still cool enough for jackets, but summer was starting to beckon.

  Word had spread quickly that someone’s parents were out of town and there was beer. Soon cars were pulling up filled with teens from the neighborhood and other blocks nearby. Their families were mostly Catholic, so they went to all-boys parochial schools with names like De La Salle and Leo, or to Maria, a nearby all-girls counterpart. De La Salle in particular reflected the political power of the area, as it eventually would be the alma mater of no less than five Chicago mayors, including both Mayor Daleys and Michael Bilandic.

  A house party like the one that night would often mix teens from the neighborhoods, including some who were anything but friends. Groups of mostly Irish kids from Canaryville sometimes found themselves feuding with groups of mostly Italian kids from Bridgeport. It had been this way for most of their lives, though many of them did not know why. Had their parents or grandparents competed for the same blue-collar jobs as immigrants? Had the insular nature of their blocks naturally led to strife with other ethnic groups?

  The foundations of the rift had long been buried by time, but it was real.

  To those living with it that night in 1976, the division of the groups at times defied logic. Many of the teens went to school together and played together on the same sports teams. But out on the street, tensions were constant. Fistfights occurred regularly along Irish-Italian lines. Most teens from one side or the other had a story about the time their rivals had jumped them or their brother or friend. Many had tales of walking through neighborhood parks and narrowly escaping an ambush.