Camouflage Bias: Part 1

It involved a guy named Ronnie Karskio who was imprisoned for murder. I've been following the facts of his case pretty closely. We actually sent someone to record the proceedings that day. You're right, could you say your full name, Ronnie Cowski. I was interested in this hearing because it was, in a strange way connected to the story of Bob Cooley. Back in the nineteen nineties, when Bob exposed the corruption that was going on in Chicago, there were ripple effects.

These ripple effects they played out for decades. Ronnie's hearing in Chicago, it was one of these ripples. It all started back in the nineteen seventies with the trial of Harry Laman a mob hitman, remember him. This was the big case from season two. Harry had stone gold eyes. He just did. Harry looked pure evil. If you ever watched the movie Scarface, kind of reminds you of the guy walks up behind Scarface with shotgun at the end. Harry went on trial for murder and the mob called

him Bob Cooley to fix the case. Bob claimed he bribed the judge, a guy named Frank Wilson, and the hitman, Well, he got off. The not guilty verdict sparked controversy and outrage. So what does any of this have to do with Ronnie Well? Ronnie's original trial took place seven months after Harry Alaman's. It was another high profile murder trial. Because the guy Ronnie was accused of murdering he was a cop. The case got assigned to the same judge, Frank Wilson.

Now forty five years later, Ronnie is arguing that he was in effect a victim, that the sentence he received was deeply unfair. The judge Wilson was just trying to burnish his credentials to show he was in fact tough on crime, and that because of all of this and other reasons too. Ronnie is arguing that he should have

another shot at justice. So over the next two episodes, I'll be telling you this story about someone whose life has been shaped by the corruption that hung over Chicago for decades, and how even now twenty and twenty two, it's still playing out dramatically as one man's freedom hangs in the balance, because well, Ronnie's been in prison for almost half a century, and now his lawyer is asking all of us to open up the history books, to take a good hard look at what really happened in

the shadows, and then to let his client walk free. I'm Jay Calburn and this is a deep cover mob lend. My name is Ronnie cars Gaio and a C. A R R A s q U ill Oh. Ronnie talks to me on a pay phone from his cell block. I'm currently sixty three years old. He's sixty four years old. In a couple of weeks, I'm currently residing in the Disincorrectional Center in Illinois. We've been communicating for a few

months now. When he calls, a timer starts and we have exactly twenty minutes before were disconnected, which means there's really not a lot of time for chit Chad and Ronnie. He is a lot to tell me about his life and where and when it all started to go wrong. Yeah, I grew up in a gang infest the neighborhoods. I grew up with a single mother, uneducated, a father's divorce when we were young kids back in the nineteen seventies. Ronnie was a poor Puerto Rican kid from the Humboldt

Park neighborhood of Chicago. His dad was a chef who immigrated from Puerto Rico. Ronnie he joined a gang at an early age. He was a tough kid. He got a tattoo on his arm that read mad Dog ron He was eleven at the time. His mom died when he was fifteen, and in the years that followed, he found himself in some pretty dicey situations. And that brings us to the night that changed his entire life. It was October of nineteen seventy six. Ronnie was eighteen years old.

That night. Ronnie says he was in rough shape because he'd been stabbed about a month before, But he says his friends they convinced him to go out early in the evening. We went through a party, and what happened in this party started six seven o'clock at night. Everybody's drinking all that long, so everybody's consuming alcohol, Ronnie says. At some point, someone at the party stepped out and went to a local tavern to get change for the bus, and that's when the trouble started. It was a dark

skin Puerto Rican Latino. The Caucasians in the bar felt like, what are you doing in here? You don't belong here. He chased them out. Now the place where I was seventy five people, maybe a hundred people in a party. They all ran down the street to go get in the middle of this stuff. The situation quickly escalated into a full pitched battle rival gangs, one white the other Puerto Rican, like the Jets and the Sharks, the whole thing right out of West Side Story, only scarier, violent, chaotic.

Ronnie says. At first, he didn't do anything. I didn't go. I was stayed in the house. I was stamped up. I'm just recovering. So I'm the last guy out. When you know, towards the inn. As i'm leaving out also building, there's a kid in the hallway and he's got a gun in his hand. He's telling me the guns jam, so I get the gun in my hand. That's why I acquired a pistol from So then Ronnie leaves the building and then looks around surveys the scene. Now this

is where the story takes an unexpected turn. There's someone mixed up in the melee here who isn't a member of Ronnie's gang or a member of the rival White gang either. His name was Terence Loftis. He was a Chicago police officer, though that wouldn't have been clear because he was dressed in civilian clothing. Officer Loftis was there totally by chance. He just finished a late shift. He was off duty driving down the street when he saw this gang battle, and courageously he tried to break it up.

So there's Officer Loftus. He grabs hold of one of the guys in Ronnie's gang. Reports from the time suggest that Loftus was trying to help this kid to rescue him from the rival gang. Somewhere around this time, a pattiwagon with uniform police officers arrives on the scene, and then there's Ronnie pistol in hand. It's late almost two in the morning, Ronnie's about one hundred and fifty feet away from Officer loftus. I've seen everybody wearing a round, so I said, has fired a gun, and there's a

break off and they're going to run. So Ronnie says he decided to fire the gun at an angle above everyone's head to try and scatter the crowd, break things up with a few warning shots, you know, like a sheriff might do in some old timey Western. Only Ronnie he was eighteen and intoxicated. Ronnie said he had no idea there was a plain closed cop there. He also says he never intended to shoot anyone. After all, many of the people in the crowd they were his own friends,

and shooting into the crowd would have endangered them. And that's why Ronnie claims he aimed up above head level. Now, this detail right here of where exactly Ronnie aimed his gun, it's hugely important. It's everything, really, and there's still disagreement over this to this day. A forensic investigation found that three of the bullets struck an abandoned building several feet

above head level. This would seem to corroborate Ronnie's claim that he was aiming the gun up, not anyone in particular, but there was at least one more bullet, and this one it struck Officer Loftus in the head. His body then crumpled to the ground. Officer Loftus was taken to Saint Elizabeth's Hospital. He died a few days later. Ronnie was charged with murder. Secutors said Ronnie had quote intentionally and knowingly shot Officer Loftis, meaning he aimed the gun

with the intent of killing him. At trial, one of Ronnie's buddy's fellow gang member testified. He said that Ronnie aimed the gun with both hands and held at level like he was aiming for Loftis. Now I should note that this buddy he may have been under real pressure to testify for the prosecution. See the gun belonged to him, so he could have been an accessory to murder. He was never prosecuted, by the way, so there were conflicting accounts of where the gun was pointed. But Ronnie maintains

that he wasn't aiming at anyone. So I just fired four shots and I left. I walked out in run. I didn't know I shot anybody. I went walked up back in the house, I walked out of back door and I left. All right, Before we get any deeper, something I should mention about this trial. Ronnie he opted for a bench trial, no jury, just a judge deciding the outcome of his case. His trial attorney anticipated that there'd be a ton of cops in the courtroom to

show their support for the slain officer. The attorney worried that a jury might be swayed by this, so it went to a judge. The case was assigned to Judge Frank Wilson, yep, the same judge who acquitted the hitman, Harry Alaman. Ronnie's lawyer at the time hoped that Judge Wilson would conclude that technically, legally this wasn't murder, that it was manslaughter. The decision to forego a trial by jury it was a big one. Judge Wilson would now

be the sole arbiter of Ronnie's fate. If he decided Ronnie was guilty of manslaughter, well that's a lesser crime than murder, which would carry a smaller sentence. But if Judge Wilson found that Ronnie had intended to kill Officer loftus to murder him. Under the rules at the time, the judge could throw the book at him. The prosecution depicted Ronnie as a cold blooded murderer who deliberately aimed and shot the victim. Prosecutors brought another witnesses, friends of Ronnie's,

who were there that night. One of them testified that Ronnie said something like I think I shot a pig. In closing arguments, one of the prosecutors said, Ronnie quote could not have hit that officer by accident. He shot because he had hate in his heart. Judge Wilson found Ronnie guilty of murder. Ronnie's current lawyer, Michael Deutsch, still can't believe what happened. Next. The judge gave him two hundred to six hundred years. Wait did you say six

hundred years? Two hundred to six hundred years he gave him. I don't think I've ever heard of anything like that. I mean, in your fifty years of practicing law, have you ever seen a sentencing like this. No, never seen a sentence like that. And Wilson himself, because we went back and looked at all those sentences Wilson is given in the past, and all even for murder, all kinds of murders, all kinds of He never gave a sentence like that, only wants where a guy had a huge

prior record. Michael Deutsch believes that the timing of all of this is suspicious. He notes that the judge had just let the hitman, Harry Alaman, walk free, and he believes that Wilson wanted to make an example out of Ronnie to restore his own reputation as a tough judge. Wilson took ten thousand dollars to quit Harry Aliman, and now he needed what's called compensatory bias. There's a concept

in the law known as compensatory or camouflage bias. The idea is a judge takes a bribe in one case and then, to avoid suspicion, punishes the hell out of another defendant in a separate case, so it looks like that judge can be tough on crime. Then years later the bribe is exposed and the guy who got hit with the big sentence, he complains says, Hey, this wasn't fair. I got hit with this huge sentence because this corrupt judge was covering his tracks. In fact, in the wake

of Operation Gambat. A number of other defendants have made similar claims against other judges in Chicago whose corruption was exposed by the FBI. Those defendants are challenging their sentences, and that's what Ronnie and his lawyer are doing. They believe that Ronnie's enormous sentence was a symptom of Chicago's corruption. I'm the one that brought this case to vacate his conviction and sentence based on this theory of compensatory bias. The judge he needed to cover up what he did.

It was a lot of how cry about what he did, and he was in a situation where he had to rehabilitate his reputation. And here is that ripple effect, an unintended consequence of Bob Cooley's actions, a consequence that forever changed the fate of one man's life. At least that's what Ronnie's lawyer is claiming. We'll be right back. It's kind of hard to imagine how anyone would react to a prison sentence that's two hundred to six hundred years long.

Can you talk to me about what you remember from the day that you were sentenced, when that sentence came down, Just like what your reaction was when we went through your head. I didn't know what it meant. I was that illiterate as a kid. I know that while six hundred years I don't know what it meant. It didn't register. And when I was in flow, I kept hearing like news media will come up to me, or do you think about Harry Altiman. I was so in and I

thought it was a legal term. I didn't know what it meant until years later I said, oh, Alum is a man's name. To wake up and realize man. Ronnie sat in prison for decades. He exhausted his appeals. Then a faint hope emerged in the late nineteen nineties when Ronnie met Michael Deutsch. Michael's a criminal defense lawyer with the People's Law Office in Chicago. He's been doing this work for decades. Michael's represented animal rights activists, black panthers,

and people with wrongful convictions. You've got a social justice issue with long shot odds. Michael, he's your man. Michael began taking a closer look at Ronnie's case and the judge who presided over it. How I got back in court with Michael Deutsch fouled a petition that I was void jurisdiction, that Frank Wilson had an old business sentence to me because he was a crook from the beginning,

and he CAMOUSI himself as a good judge. Just to be clear here, the Harry Alaman case is the only case where it was alleged that Judge Wilson took a bribe. What's more, neither Ronnie nor his lawyer have any definitive proof that Judge Wilson threw his case in any way. Ronnie's argument about camouflage bias really hinges on a series of speculations. Plausible speculations, but speculations. Nonetheless, the core of these speculations come down to this was the judge using

Ronnie's case to salvage his own reputation. Well, let's start by reviewing the facts. After the Harry Alaman trial, there was a big outcry. The state's attorney held a press conference to express his outrage over the verdict. One state legislator called the judge craven. According to Bob Cooley, the judge did get very upset after the trial and told Bob, quote, you destroyed me. And years later, when the FBI was investigating the Alaman and the corruption in Chicago. Wilson killed himself,

But what does any of this really tell us? For certain? Does this explain why the judge handed Ronnie such a long sentence? Do we really know how Judge Wilson would have ruled at a different time in his career, or how another judge would have ruled at the time. We simply don't. That's what's so maddening about Ronnie's case and what's so insidious about the legacy of corruption in Chicago. The ripple effects continue in ways that are so consequential

and yet also sometimes unprovable. It's odd to think about Ronnie Carriscio and Harry Alaman were both gangsters at some point in their lives. They both got in trouble with the law. They were both charged with murder. One could argue that the crucial difference in their fates was that Harry's gang simply had more powerful connections, and so he walked free. The question is what and Ronnie actually do

about any of this? Well, what Michael and Ronnie wanted was a retrial, a new judge, maybe even a jury who could reconsider the facts of the case and determine whether Ronnie really was guilty of murder or some lesser charge like manslaughter. We had a long hearing in front of the judge, and the judge denied us relief, saying the law is very difficult to show this because you have to show a nexus between the case in which

the judge was bribed and your case. The court essentially concluded, we can't know what Judge Wilson was thinking at the time, so we can't know for certain if Ronnie's case was influenced by the Alaman acquittal. Would not give me the granting of the judge Wilson being a group, saying that I did improve a pattern that we didn't know his state of mind, and we could improve his state of mind as far as being a group. So Michael Bois's

contention was one he's got phoned up. He shot himself on the So Michael Deutsch was contending, how do you say, we don't know if the state of mind, you know exactly what he was going to do if he got caught, and he did do it. Since that Appellet ruling, Ronnie and Michael have soldiered on. They remain adamant that the facts of the case don't offer any solid proof that Ronnie knowingly and deliberately intended to kill this plainclothed policeman.

But this alone isn't grounds for a retrial. Appeals are about challenging how a case was decided and whether the law was applied properly. They're not about re examining the same set of facts. Again, kind of frustrating, right, This is not the kind of drama that you typically see on TV, where the story has a clear beginning, middle,

and end. No, Ronnie's case is dragged on through a lengthy process of motions and appeals and petitions, and so far they've gotten well, very little in the way of relief, and in the meantime time Ronnie remains behind bars. I've been incarcerated forty forty five years, like seven months maybe like them. That's more than five hundred months, more than sixteen thousand days. When he was last free, Jimmy Carter

was president, the Soviet Union was still going strong. They are smartphones just phone booths, and all that time since then, Ronnie he's been well, surprisingly busy. He has this unrelenting positivity in a sense, I'm blessed in here He says he's seen what happens when his fellow inmates don't stay busy. When they give up. I see guys, they lose their faith and they lose their going. They don't sit their fans, they they don't bomb the air on brush their teeth.

They just score around and then they get sick. So I'm not going to claim this over myself. So I keep my spirit up. Iron, I train ways, I train sports, I have, you know, and I keep going a ten. One day last year, Ronnie finally caught a break. The court said, in effect, we won't grant you a retrial, but we do have some concerns about how you were sentenced.

They said, we have questions about his sense because we don't we think this sentence might violate the Illinois Constitution, which says you have to give a sentence based on the serious of the offense, with the idea to returning the offender to freedom and citizenship. Next time on deep cover, Ronnie has a shot at freedom. But there's a catch. We don't care. How must rehabilitation? We don't, you know, the constitution says, weblitzaed. We don't care. How must you

gotta We don't care about none of that. You kill the police officer, and they blatantly say, I'm not gonna for a police killer. This episode of deep Cover was produced by Amy Gaines and edited by Karen Schakerji. Our managing producers Jacob Smith. Original music and our theme was composed by Luise Gera, mastering by Jake Gorski. Mia LaBelle is our executive producer. Additional thanks to Jesse de Bartlomeo and Emily Horner, formerly of Injustice Watch and now at

the Chicago Tribune for her reporting on Ronnie's case. I'm Jake Halpern. Deep Cover is a production of Pushkin Industries. For ad free listening and early access to upcoming seasons of deep Cover. Consider becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. You can find Pushkin Plus on the deep Cover show page on Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot Fm.