Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, it's Jake. I want to let you know
Speaker 1: we are working right now on season three for you,
Speaker 1: and it's a totally different kind of story than you've
Speaker 1: heard before on this podcast. I've actually been flying all
Speaker 1: over the country reporting it and I can't wait to
Speaker 1: share it with you. But first, Deep Cover is back
Speaker 1: with two special episodes which are kind of a spinoff
Speaker 1: of season two. So let's jump right in. About a
Speaker 1: year ago, there was this pretty unusual hearing in Chicago.
Speaker 1: It involved a guy named Ronnie Karskio who was imprisoned
Speaker 1: for murder. I've been following the facts of his case
Speaker 1: pretty closely. We actually sent someone to record the proceedings
Speaker 1: that day. You're right, could you say your full name,
Speaker 1: Ronnie Cowski. I was interested in this hearing because it was,
Speaker 1: in a strange way connected to the story of Bob Cooley.
Speaker 1: Back in the nineteen nineties, when Bob exposed the corruption
Speaker 1: that was going on in Chicago, there were ripple effects.
Speaker 1: These ripple effects they played out for decades. Ronnie's hearing
Speaker 1: in Chicago, it was one of these ripples. It all
Speaker 1: started back in the nineteen seventies with the trial of
Speaker 1: Harry Laman a mob hitman, remember him. This was the
Speaker 1: big case from season two. Harry had stone gold eyes.
Speaker 1: He just did. Harry looked pure evil. If you ever
Speaker 1: watched the movie Scarface, kind of reminds you of the
Speaker 1: guy walks up behind Scarface with shotgun at the end.
Speaker 1: Harry went on trial for murder and the mob called
Speaker 1: him Bob Cooley to fix the case. Bob claimed he
Speaker 1: bribed the judge, a guy named Frank Wilson, and the hitman, Well,
Speaker 1: he got off. The not guilty verdict sparked controversy and outrage.
Speaker 1: So what does any of this have to do with
Speaker 1: Ronnie Well? Ronnie's original trial took place seven months after
Speaker 1: Harry Alaman's. It was another high profile murder trial. Because
Speaker 1: the guy Ronnie was accused of murdering he was a cop.
Speaker 1: The case got assigned to the same judge, Frank Wilson.
Speaker 1: Now forty five years later, Ronnie is arguing that he
Speaker 1: was in effect a victim, that the sentence he received
Speaker 1: was deeply unfair. The judge Wilson was just trying to
Speaker 1: burnish his credentials to show he was in fact tough
Speaker 1: on crime, and that because of all of this and
Speaker 1: other reasons too. Ronnie is arguing that he should have
Speaker 1: another shot at justice. So over the next two episodes,
Speaker 1: I'll be telling you this story about someone whose life
Speaker 1: has been shaped by the corruption that hung over Chicago
Speaker 1: for decades, and how even now twenty and twenty two,
Speaker 1: it's still playing out dramatically as one man's freedom hangs
Speaker 1: in the balance, because well, Ronnie's been in prison for
Speaker 1: almost half a century, and now his lawyer is asking
Speaker 1: all of us to open up the history books, to
Speaker 1: take a good hard look at what really happened in
Speaker 1: the shadows, and then to let his client walk free.
Speaker 1: I'm Jay Calburn and this is a deep cover mob lend.
Speaker 1: My name is Ronnie cars Gaio and a C. A
Speaker 1: R R A s q U ill Oh. Ronnie talks
Speaker 1: to me on a pay phone from his cell block.
Speaker 1: I'm currently sixty three years old. He's sixty four years old.
Speaker 1: In a couple of weeks, I'm currently residing in the
Speaker 1: Disincorrectional Center in Illinois. We've been communicating for a few
Speaker 1: months now. When he calls, a timer starts and we
Speaker 1: have exactly twenty minutes before were disconnected, which means there's
Speaker 1: really not a lot of time for chit Chad and Ronnie.
Speaker 1: He is a lot to tell me about his life
Speaker 1: and where and when it all started to go wrong. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I grew up in a gang infest the neighborhoods. I
Speaker 1: grew up with a single mother, uneducated, a father's divorce
Speaker 1: when we were young kids back in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: Ronnie was a poor Puerto Rican kid from the Humboldt
Speaker 1: Park neighborhood of Chicago. His dad was a chef who
Speaker 1: immigrated from Puerto Rico. Ronnie he joined a gang at
Speaker 1: an early age. He was a tough kid. He got
Speaker 1: a tattoo on his arm that read mad Dog ron
Speaker 1: He was eleven at the time. His mom died when
Speaker 1: he was fifteen, and in the years that followed, he
Speaker 1: found himself in some pretty dicey situations. And that brings
Speaker 1: us to the night that changed his entire life. It
Speaker 1: was October of nineteen seventy six. Ronnie was eighteen years old.
Speaker 1: That night. Ronnie says he was in rough shape because
Speaker 1: he'd been stabbed about a month before, But he says
Speaker 1: his friends they convinced him to go out early in
Speaker 1: the evening. We went through a party, and what happened
Speaker 1: in this party started six seven o'clock at night. Everybody's
Speaker 1: drinking all that long, so everybody's consuming alcohol, Ronnie says.
Speaker 1: At some point, someone at the party stepped out and
Speaker 1: went to a local tavern to get change for the bus,
Speaker 1: and that's when the trouble started. It was a dark
Speaker 1: skin Puerto Rican Latino. The Caucasians in the bar felt like,
Speaker 1: what are you doing in here? You don't belong here.
Speaker 1: He chased them out. Now the place where I was
Speaker 1: seventy five people, maybe a hundred people in a party.
Speaker 1: They all ran down the street to go get in
Speaker 1: the middle of this stuff. The situation quickly escalated into
Speaker 1: a full pitched battle rival gangs, one white the other
Speaker 1: Puerto Rican, like the Jets and the Sharks, the whole
Speaker 1: thing right out of West Side Story, only scarier, violent, chaotic.
Speaker 1: Ronnie says. At first, he didn't do anything. I didn't go.
Speaker 1: I was stayed in the house. I was stamped up.
Speaker 1: I'm just recovering. So I'm the last guy out. When
Speaker 1: you know, towards the inn. As i'm leaving out also building,
Speaker 1: there's a kid in the hallway and he's got a
Speaker 1: gun in his hand. He's telling me the guns jam,
Speaker 1: so I get the gun in my hand. That's why
Speaker 1: I acquired a pistol from So then Ronnie leaves the
Speaker 1: building and then looks around surveys the scene. Now this
Speaker 1: is where the story takes an unexpected turn. There's someone
Speaker 1: mixed up in the melee here who isn't a member
Speaker 1: of Ronnie's gang or a member of the rival White
Speaker 1: gang either. His name was Terence Loftis. He was a
Speaker 1: Chicago police officer, though that wouldn't have been clear because
Speaker 1: he was dressed in civilian clothing. Officer Loftis was there
Speaker 1: totally by chance. He just finished a late shift. He
Speaker 1: was off duty driving down the street when he saw
Speaker 1: this gang battle, and courageously he tried to break it up.
Speaker 1: So there's Officer Loftus. He grabs hold of one of
Speaker 1: the guys in Ronnie's gang. Reports from the time suggest
Speaker 1: that Loftus was trying to help this kid to rescue
Speaker 1: him from the rival gang. Somewhere around this time, a
Speaker 1: pattiwagon with uniform police officers arrives on the scene, and
Speaker 1: then there's Ronnie pistol in hand. It's late almost two
Speaker 1: in the morning, Ronnie's about one hundred and fifty feet
Speaker 1: away from Officer loftus. I've seen everybody wearing a round,
Speaker 1: so I said, has fired a gun, and there's a
Speaker 1: break off and they're going to run. So Ronnie says
Speaker 1: he decided to fire the gun at an angle above
Speaker 1: everyone's head to try and scatter the crowd, break things
Speaker 1: up with a few warning shots, you know, like a
Speaker 1: sheriff might do in some old timey Western. Only Ronnie
Speaker 1: he was eighteen and intoxicated. Ronnie said he had no
Speaker 1: idea there was a plain closed cop there. He also
Speaker 1: says he never intended to shoot anyone. After all, many
Speaker 1: of the people in the crowd they were his own friends,
Speaker 1: and shooting into the crowd would have endangered them. And
Speaker 1: that's why Ronnie claims he aimed up above head level. Now,
Speaker 1: this detail right here of where exactly Ronnie aimed his gun,
Speaker 1: it's hugely important. It's everything, really, and there's still disagreement
Speaker 1: over this to this day. A forensic investigation found that
Speaker 1: three of the bullets struck an abandoned building several feet
Speaker 1: above head level. This would seem to corroborate Ronnie's claim
Speaker 1: that he was aiming the gun up, not anyone in particular,
Speaker 1: but there was at least one more bullet, and this
Speaker 1: one it struck Officer Loftus in the head. His body
Speaker 1: then crumpled to the ground. Officer Loftus was taken to
Speaker 1: Saint Elizabeth's Hospital. He died a few days later. Ronnie
Speaker 1: was charged with murder. Secutors said Ronnie had quote intentionally
Speaker 1: and knowingly shot Officer Loftis, meaning he aimed the gun
Speaker 1: with the intent of killing him. At trial, one of
Speaker 1: Ronnie's buddy's fellow gang member testified. He said that Ronnie
Speaker 1: aimed the gun with both hands and held at level
Speaker 1: like he was aiming for Loftis. Now I should note
Speaker 1: that this buddy he may have been under real pressure
Speaker 1: to testify for the prosecution. See the gun belonged to him,
Speaker 1: so he could have been an accessory to murder. He
Speaker 1: was never prosecuted, by the way, so there were conflicting
Speaker 1: accounts of where the gun was pointed. But Ronnie maintains
Speaker 1: that he wasn't aiming at anyone. So I just fired
Speaker 1: four shots and I left. I walked out in run.
Speaker 1: I didn't know I shot anybody. I went walked up
Speaker 1: back in the house, I walked out of back door
Speaker 1: and I left. All right, Before we get any deeper,
Speaker 1: something I should mention about this trial. Ronnie he opted
Speaker 1: for a bench trial, no jury, just a judge deciding
Speaker 1: the outcome of his case. His trial attorney anticipated that
Speaker 1: there'd be a ton of cops in the courtroom to
Speaker 1: show their support for the slain officer. The attorney worried
Speaker 1: that a jury might be swayed by this, so it
Speaker 1: went to a judge. The case was assigned to Judge
Speaker 1: Frank Wilson, yep, the same judge who acquitted the hitman,
Speaker 1: Harry Alaman. Ronnie's lawyer at the time hoped that Judge
Speaker 1: Wilson would conclude that technically, legally this wasn't murder, that
Speaker 1: it was manslaughter. The decision to forego a trial by
Speaker 1: jury it was a big one. Judge Wilson would now
Speaker 1: be the sole arbiter of Ronnie's fate. If he decided
Speaker 1: Ronnie was guilty of manslaughter, well that's a lesser crime
Speaker 1: than murder, which would carry a smaller sentence. But if
Speaker 1: Judge Wilson found that Ronnie had intended to kill Officer
Speaker 1: loftus to murder him. Under the rules at the time,
Speaker 1: the judge could throw the book at him. The prosecution
Speaker 1: depicted Ronnie as a cold blooded murderer who deliberately aimed
Speaker 1: and shot the victim. Prosecutors brought another witnesses, friends of Ronnie's,
Speaker 1: who were there that night. One of them testified that
Speaker 1: Ronnie said something like I think I shot a pig.
Speaker 1: In closing arguments, one of the prosecutors said, Ronnie quote
Speaker 1: could not have hit that officer by accident. He shot
Speaker 1: because he had hate in his heart. Judge Wilson found
Speaker 1: Ronnie guilty of murder. Ronnie's current lawyer, Michael Deutsch, still
Speaker 1: can't believe what happened. Next. The judge gave him two
Speaker 1: hundred to six hundred years. Wait did you say six
Speaker 1: hundred years? Two hundred to six hundred years he gave him.
Speaker 1: I don't think I've ever heard of anything like that.
Speaker 1: I mean, in your fifty years of practicing law, have
Speaker 1: you ever seen a sentencing like this. No, never seen
Speaker 1: a sentence like that. And Wilson himself, because we went
Speaker 1: back and looked at all those sentences Wilson is given
Speaker 1: in the past, and all even for murder, all kinds
Speaker 1: of murders, all kinds of He never gave a sentence
Speaker 1: like that, only wants where a guy had a huge
Speaker 1: prior record. Michael Deutsch believes that the timing of all
Speaker 1: of this is suspicious. He notes that the judge had
Speaker 1: just let the hitman, Harry Alaman, walk free, and he
Speaker 1: believes that Wilson wanted to make an example out of
Speaker 1: Ronnie to restore his own reputation as a tough judge.
Speaker 1: Wilson took ten thousand dollars to quit Harry Aliman, and
Speaker 1: now he needed what's called compensatory bias. There's a concept
Speaker 1: in the law known as compensatory or camouflage bias. The
Speaker 1: idea is a judge takes a bribe in one case
Speaker 1: and then, to avoid suspicion, punishes the hell out of
Speaker 1: another defendant in a separate case, so it looks like
Speaker 1: that judge can be tough on crime. Then years later
Speaker 1: the bribe is exposed and the guy who got hit
Speaker 1: with the big sentence, he complains says, Hey, this wasn't fair.
Speaker 1: I got hit with this huge sentence because this corrupt
Speaker 1: judge was covering his tracks. In fact, in the wake
Speaker 1: of Operation Gambat. A number of other defendants have made
Speaker 1: similar claims against other judges in Chicago whose corruption was
Speaker 1: exposed by the FBI. Those defendants are challenging their sentences,
Speaker 1: and that's what Ronnie and his lawyer are doing. They
Speaker 1: believe that Ronnie's enormous sentence was a symptom of Chicago's corruption.
Speaker 1: I'm the one that brought this case to vacate his
Speaker 1: conviction and sentence based on this theory of compensatory bias.
Speaker 1: The judge he needed to cover up what he did.
Speaker 1: It was a lot of how cry about what he did,
Speaker 1: and he was in a situation where he had to
Speaker 1: rehabilitate his reputation. And here is that ripple effect, an
Speaker 1: unintended consequence of Bob Cooley's actions, a consequence that forever
Speaker 1: changed the fate of one man's life. At least that's
Speaker 1: what Ronnie's lawyer is claiming. We'll be right back. It's
Speaker 1: kind of hard to imagine how anyone would react to
Speaker 1: a prison sentence that's two hundred to six hundred years long.
Speaker 1: Can you talk to me about what you remember from
Speaker 1: the day that you were sentenced, when that sentence came down,
Speaker 1: Just like what your reaction was when we went through
Speaker 1: your head. I didn't know what it meant. I was
Speaker 1: that illiterate as a kid. I know that while six
Speaker 1: hundred years I don't know what it meant. It didn't register.
Speaker 1: And when I was in flow, I kept hearing like
Speaker 1: news media will come up to me, or do you
Speaker 1: think about Harry Altiman. I was so in and I
Speaker 1: thought it was a legal term. I didn't know what
Speaker 1: it meant until years later I said, oh, Alum is
Speaker 1: a man's name. To wake up and realize man. Ronnie
Speaker 1: sat in prison for decades. He exhausted his appeals. Then
Speaker 1: a faint hope emerged in the late nineteen nineties when
Speaker 1: Ronnie met Michael Deutsch. Michael's a criminal defense lawyer with
Speaker 1: the People's Law Office in Chicago. He's been doing this
Speaker 1: work for decades. Michael's represented animal rights activists, black panthers,
Speaker 1: and people with wrongful convictions. You've got a social justice
Speaker 1: issue with long shot odds. Michael, he's your man. Michael
Speaker 1: began taking a closer look at Ronnie's case and the
Speaker 1: judge who presided over it. How I got back in
Speaker 1: court with Michael Deutsch fouled a petition that I was
Speaker 1: void jurisdiction, that Frank Wilson had an old business sentence
Speaker 1: to me because he was a crook from the beginning,
Speaker 1: and he CAMOUSI himself as a good judge. Just to
Speaker 1: be clear here, the Harry Alaman case is the only
Speaker 1: case where it was alleged that Judge Wilson took a bribe.
Speaker 1: What's more, neither Ronnie nor his lawyer have any definitive
Speaker 1: proof that Judge Wilson threw his case in any way.
Speaker 1: Ronnie's argument about camouflage bias really hinges on a series
Speaker 1: of speculations. Plausible speculations, but speculations. Nonetheless, the core of
Speaker 1: these speculations come down to this was the judge using
Speaker 1: Ronnie's case to salvage his own reputation. Well, let's start
Speaker 1: by reviewing the facts. After the Harry Alaman trial, there
Speaker 1: was a big outcry. The state's attorney held a press
Speaker 1: conference to express his outrage over the verdict. One state
Speaker 1: legislator called the judge craven. According to Bob Cooley, the
Speaker 1: judge did get very upset after the trial and told Bob, quote,
Speaker 1: you destroyed me. And years later, when the FBI was
Speaker 1: investigating the Alaman and the corruption in Chicago. Wilson killed himself,
Speaker 1: But what does any of this really tell us? For certain?
Speaker 1: Does this explain why the judge handed Ronnie such a
Speaker 1: long sentence? Do we really know how Judge Wilson would
Speaker 1: have ruled at a different time in his career, or
Speaker 1: how another judge would have ruled at the time. We
Speaker 1: simply don't. That's what's so maddening about Ronnie's case and
Speaker 1: what's so insidious about the legacy of corruption in Chicago.
Speaker 1: The ripple effects continue in ways that are so consequential
Speaker 1: and yet also sometimes unprovable. It's odd to think about
Speaker 1: Ronnie Carriscio and Harry Alaman were both gangsters at some
Speaker 1: point in their lives. They both got in trouble with
Speaker 1: the law. They were both charged with murder. One could
Speaker 1: argue that the crucial difference in their fates was that
Speaker 1: Harry's gang simply had more powerful connections, and so he
Speaker 1: walked free. The question is what and Ronnie actually do
Speaker 1: about any of this? Well, what Michael and Ronnie wanted
Speaker 1: was a retrial, a new judge, maybe even a jury
Speaker 1: who could reconsider the facts of the case and determine
Speaker 1: whether Ronnie really was guilty of murder or some lesser
Speaker 1: charge like manslaughter. We had a long hearing in front
Speaker 1: of the judge, and the judge denied us relief, saying
Speaker 1: the law is very difficult to show this because you
Speaker 1: have to show a nexus between the case in which
Speaker 1: the judge was bribed and your case. The court essentially concluded,
Speaker 1: we can't know what Judge Wilson was thinking at the time,
Speaker 1: so we can't know for certain if Ronnie's case was
Speaker 1: influenced by the Alaman acquittal. Would not give me the
Speaker 1: granting of the judge Wilson being a group, saying that
Speaker 1: I did improve a pattern that we didn't know his
Speaker 1: state of mind, and we could improve his state of
Speaker 1: mind as far as being a group. So Michael Bois's
Speaker 1: contention was one he's got phoned up. He shot himself
Speaker 1: on the So Michael Deutsch was contending, how do you say,
Speaker 1: we don't know if the state of mind, you know
Speaker 1: exactly what he was going to do if he got caught,
Speaker 1: and he did do it. Since that Appellet ruling, Ronnie
Speaker 1: and Michael have soldiered on. They remain adamant that the
Speaker 1: facts of the case don't offer any solid proof that
Speaker 1: Ronnie knowingly and deliberately intended to kill this plainclothed policeman.
Speaker 1: But this alone isn't grounds for a retrial. Appeals are
Speaker 1: about challenging how a case was decided and whether the
Speaker 1: law was applied properly. They're not about re examining the
Speaker 1: same set of facts. Again, kind of frustrating, right, This
Speaker 1: is not the kind of drama that you typically see
Speaker 1: on TV, where the story has a clear beginning, middle,
Speaker 1: and end. No, Ronnie's case is dragged on through a
Speaker 1: lengthy process of motions and appeals and petitions, and so
Speaker 1: far they've gotten well, very little in the way of relief,
Speaker 1: and in the meantime time Ronnie remains behind bars. I've
Speaker 1: been incarcerated forty forty five years, like seven months maybe
Speaker 1: like them. That's more than five hundred months, more than
Speaker 1: sixteen thousand days. When he was last free, Jimmy Carter
Speaker 1: was president, the Soviet Union was still going strong. They
Speaker 1: are smartphones just phone booths, and all that time since then,
Speaker 1: Ronnie he's been well, surprisingly busy. He has this unrelenting
Speaker 1: positivity in a sense, I'm blessed in here He says
Speaker 1: he's seen what happens when his fellow inmates don't stay busy.
Speaker 1: When they give up. I see guys, they lose their
Speaker 1: faith and they lose their going. They don't sit their fans,
Speaker 1: they they don't bomb the air on brush their teeth.
Speaker 1: They just score around and then they get sick. So
Speaker 1: I'm not going to claim this over myself. So I
Speaker 1: keep my spirit up. Iron, I train ways, I train sports,
Speaker 1: I have, you know, and I keep going a ten.
Speaker 1: One day last year, Ronnie finally caught a break. The
Speaker 1: court said, in effect, we won't grant you a retrial,
Speaker 1: but we do have some concerns about how you were sentenced.
Speaker 1: They said, we have questions about his sense because we
Speaker 1: don't we think this sentence might violate the Illinois Constitution,
Speaker 1: which says you have to give a sentence based on
Speaker 1: the serious of the offense, with the idea to returning
Speaker 1: the offender to freedom and citizenship. Next time on deep cover,
Speaker 1: Ronnie has a shot at freedom. But there's a catch.
Speaker 1: We don't care. How must rehabilitation? We don't, you know,
Speaker 1: the constitution says, weblitzaed. We don't care. How must you
Speaker 1: gotta We don't care about none of that. You kill
Speaker 1: the police officer, and they blatantly say, I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: for a police killer. This episode of deep Cover was
Speaker 1: produced by Amy Gaines and edited by Karen Schakerji. Our
Speaker 1: managing producers Jacob Smith. Original music and our theme was
Speaker 1: composed by Luise Gera, mastering by Jake Gorski. Mia LaBelle
Speaker 1: is our executive producer. Additional thanks to Jesse de Bartlomeo
Speaker 1: and Emily Horner, formerly of Injustice Watch and now at
Speaker 1: the Chicago Tribune for her reporting on Ronnie's case. I'm
Speaker 1: Jake Halpern. Deep Cover is a production of Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: For ad free listening and early access to upcoming seasons
Speaker 1: of deep Cover. Consider becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. You
Speaker 1: can find Pushkin Plus on the deep Cover show page
Speaker 1: on Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot Fm.