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About this Episode
On the evening of 29 December 2011, Officer Clifton Lewis was moonlighting as a security guard at a Chicago minimart when two men walked in. They shot Lewis several times, then took off with his gun and police star. A week later, police had their suspects: four men affiliated with a gang called the Spanish Cobras. For hours, under intense police questioning, they all said they didn’t do it. But that didn’t seem to matter. This is episode one of Off Duty, an investigation by the Guardian’s Melissa Segura. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/politicspod
Hosts & Guests
Transcript
This is the Guardian.
The world is on the brink.
War is contentious elections, disinformation, spreading of warp speed, and Donald Trump at the center of all of it.
But what does it mean for the rest of us?
Every week on Potsy the World Tommy V Tour and I cut through the noise to explain how global power is shifting.
No jargon, no homework, just clear honest conversations about what's happening and why it matters.
From breaking news to long-simmering international conflicts, we dissected all with critical analysis and some jokes that will surely embarrass our children Monday.
Tune in to Potsy the World every Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts, or catch it on YouTube.
Hi, Pippa Carrera here, host of Politics Weekly.
You're about to hear episode one of a brand new series from Guardian Investigates,
all about a murder in Chicago and one man's 12-year fight to prove his innocence.
To hear the rest of the series, search for off-duty or Guardian Investigates, wherever you listen to your podcasts and hit subscribe.
Hope you enjoy.
On the evening of December 29th, 2011, Clifton Lewis showed up for his shift at the M&M Mini-Mark on Chicago's West Side.
He worked days as an officer in the Chicago Police Department, but was moonlighting as a security guard to pick up a little extra cash.
He was chit-chatting behind the counter with the store owner and a clerk around 8.30 pm, when two men walked into the M&M.
They shot Lewis several times, then took off with his gun and police star.
Seconds after the gunmen left, a bystander called 911. Lewis was rushed to the hospital.
More than 200 police officers gathered in the parking lot of Strasier Hospital where Lewis was pronounced dead.
He had been on the force for eight years, a black officer who lived in the neighborhood he served.
And he'd gotten engaged four days earlier on Christmas morning.
Police launched a massive manhunt for Lewis's killer, the brass ordered that police work only this case until it was solved.
Tips poured in, and many pointed to the four corner hustlers, the gang that controlled the area around the M&M.
A week later, police had their suspects, but they weren't hustlers.
They were four men affiliated with the gang called the Spanish Cobras.
For hours, under intense police questioning, they said they didn't do it, but that didn't seem to matter.
The Chicago Police Department decided these were the guys responsible for the brutal murder of officer Clifton Lewis.
In the years that follow, confessions would be made and recanted, evidence missing and exposed.
The case against three of the men will fall apart.
But one, Alexandria via, would remain behind bars, in a system that seemed determined to keep them there, at all costs.
From the Guardian, I'm Melissa Segura. This is Off-Duty, episode one, The Crime.
I first heard the name Alex Via in 2019.
I'd been reporting on a series of wrongful convictions in Chicago, and his sister wrote me shortly after he'd been convicted of killing officer Lewis.
But my editor at the time wasn't interested in another wrongful conviction story.
Heard one, heard him all.
Except, I couldn't let it go. It tugged at my brain. And eventually, I realized why.
It's because we tend to think that a great injustice requires some grand plan or some comic book villain.
But what happens when that's not the story at all?
When instead, every single part of the criminal legal system, police officers, their supervisors, forensics, prosecutors, did not do its job.
When people with power refuse to admit that they could be wrong and double down, again and again, when the pursuit of truth takes a backseat to what they really might think of as a pursuit of justice.
Institutions are supposed to have safeguards to make sure that doesn't happen.
This is the story of what happens when they fail. Those decisions ripple out. They reinforce each other and magnify.
And only when you look back at them from the perspective of years, can you see how much destruction they've caused.
Alex Bia was tried for the murder of Clifton Lewis in February 2019, more than seven years after Lewis was killed.
From the beginning, Alex War, he didn't do it. He never changed his story in the years that followed.
I thought my brother had the case beat the whole time. Like my brother could have done many things. He's definitely not an angel, but he definitely wouldn't do that.
I would bet everything that I wound up.
That's Alex's older brother, Stephen. They grew up in Chicago in a big Puerto Rican family, who all showed up for Alex's trial.
Stephen, Alex's two older sisters, his young daughter and son, his mother, and his elderly grandmother.
The trial was a massive event, especially for the Chicago Police Department.
One of their own had been killed, and they had finally gotten their man.
For four days, Alex's family arrived to a wall of Chicago police officers staring them down.
The whole front of Cook County in jail would be lined up with police cars, the whole front, in the middle of the street every court day.
Once they got inside, the tension was even worse. It was like Officer Lewis had been killed yesterday.
Like there was a hundred cops in the courtroom. I let any of my 80-year-old grandma sit down at court. It was crazy. It was like Gotham City.
Like he had the Joker on trial here.
In the courtroom, the prosecution laid out their case. They showed surveillance footage from the night of the murder.
A man jumping over the counter at the mini-mart, pointing his gun, and firing at Clifton Lewis.
That man was Alex, they said. They had a confession from one of Alex's alleged accomplices, and statements from three people who said Alex told him he's the one who committed the murder.
Alex's sister Marisol told me the whole time she felt like the fix was in. She said it felt like prosecutors would openly taunt Alex in the courtroom.
Looking at their body language, like even the prosecutors, like, ha ha ha, going away, you know.
After four days of testimony, the jury reached a verdict in under four hours. Guilty.
Marisol caught Alex's eye as he was let away in handcuffs.
I specifically looked at Alex and was telling him, don't worry, you're going to come out of this.
And he just held like this blank face. And then I was looking at the rest of my family.
You know, his daughter was there, his son, like, my other brother, Stephen.
He like fell to the floor and started crying in the middle of court.
Lauli was like, he didn't do this. He didn't do this.
They escorted me out like eight county sheriffs. I was just all over the place.
The sentence would come later, but Alex's siblings knew that being convicted of killing a cop,
meant their brother was spending the rest of his life in prison.
He was 30 years old and he was never coming home.
My mom has heart failure. His daughters are getting big. My grandma's getting older.
There's a possibility that he's going to lose people that he loves all his life.
And he's not even going to be there to see it. And he's sitting in jail for something he didn't do.
Marisol knew better than to wallow or to wait.
She worked as a probation officer in the same courthouse where Alex was tried.
And so she knew the first thing they'd need for an appeal was a copy of the trial transcripts.
Even before they left the courtroom, she put her sister Melissa to work.
She's like, make sure you call the court reporter's office and request the trial transcripts
because things mysteriously disappear and especially a high profile case like this.
Melissa did something else right after Alex was convicted. She reached out to me.
Like I said, I couldn't write about the case at the time.
But years later, I found out the case was still moving through the courts.
So I reached out to Melissa.
And then I went to visit her and Marisol in the home they share in the utmost on neighborhood where they grew up.
Alex is the youngest. Six years younger than Marisol and four years behind Melissa.
He's always been, you know, the baby of the house and grandma's favorite.
And I say he was the favorite one jokingly, but he's truly loved since he was very little.
My mom was so protective of him like he was her world is her world.
Their parents split up when they were kids and they all moved with their mom to the city's northwest side.
They were eight or so gangs fighting for turf back then in Admosa and neighboring Humboldt Park.
Gunfire was often the soundtrack of their neighborhood.
There was even a time I was like sitting outside the front steps of my home and those were drive by happening.
And I had to hide underneath the stairs and like duck there with my friends.
The girls hid from the violence.
Melissa poured herself into motherhood after getting pregnant at 15.
Marisol escaped into school, getting herself into college, then a master's degree in social work.
It was different for boys, Stephen told me.
You're either in a gang or you are its target.
He joined the Spanish Cobra's when he was in middle school.
Our father was in a gang, our uncles were in gangs.
So it wasn't that we were trying to be in gangs.
It's almost like it's second nature to kind of be in gangs when you're in Chicago.
Specifically in my area as well, you know.
It's almost like you're not doing nothing bad.
It's almost like that's what you're supposed to do.
Because it's almost like depending on what side you're on, dictates what you will be.
Alex joined the Cobra's too at age 13.
Stephen says they both been having run-ins with the cops ever since.
I mean when we were young, the things that police used to do to us was just crazy.
Like they'll drop us off in different gangs.
They were hoods, they're maces, they'll beat us up, pin drugs on us, they'll lie.
And say we did things that we didn't do.
I mean we grew up fighting that all our lives.
Alex was arrested dozens of times over the years for everything from possession of marijuana to robbery.
But those charges never stuck.
Which, as Stephen sees it, made him even more of a target.
Like my brother was a well-known guy and he's been around in this area a long time.
You know, and he's a charmer. He's got the girls.
You know, he's always dressed nice. He's got a car.
You know, my brother, he's just well-known, well-known.
And the police hated him all his life.
That police department's 25th district couldn't stand those.
Listen, there's something I need to tell you upfront.
And it doesn't really have anything to do with the story I'm telling you, not directly.
But I don't want to pay a false picture of Alex as some kind of angel.
Like his brother says, he wasn't.
Case in point, Alex did get one conviction.
And it's a serious one.
He killed someone in a hit and run 11 months after Officer Lewis's murder.
And I have to say, part of me wishes I could tell you in need or story
of a man who doesn't know wrong accused of a crime he says he didn't commit.
That's the movie narrative, the Shawshank Redemption, the fugitive.
We want nice bright lines between offenders and victims.
But the reality is so much messier.
Most people who commit crimes are also the victims of crimes.
It's a finding that holds true across the globe.
Wait being, when Alex went hunting for a lawyer to handle his appeal, he had two strikes against him.
The first was a hit and run.
But the bigger problem was that he had now been convicted of murdering a cop.
Thanks to her job in probation, Marisol knew about law clinics that specialized in representing the wrongfully convicted.
She said she contacted all of them.
And she says they all turned her away.
And I was like, what?
This is what you specialize.
This is what you do.
Why do you want this?
So did at least 10 private defense lawyers, Marisol says.
A moment, you know, you even mentioned, okay, this is a murder, but this is not just a murder.
It is a murder of a police officer.
It almost felt like we were being judged without even getting to know us or just the whole situation.
For a year, the sisters got nowhere.
The moment they mentioned their brother's name, the Spanish cobras, the murder of a police officer,
it was like they could see the gate come down right before their eyes.
And the courts wouldn't wait forever for Alex to find a new lawyer.
They felt like they were running out of time.
We were like out of money almost.
We kind of exhausted our options at that point.
They paid Alex's first lawyer a lot of money, but they both felt like he never cared enough about their brother's defense.
During the trial, he called only one witness to the stand.
The sisters tracked down a second attorney for Alex's appeal, but they felt like he was worse than their original lawyer.
In one embarrassing incident, he got Alex's name wrong and referred to him as Miguel.
Like the prosecutors would even laugh at Quirk, as he was presenting his defense and all of that.
They were not at all shook or anything by him.
The first one failed does. The second one was just absolutely lousy.
There were times we felt sick physically.
And exhausted.
Yeah, and we still pushed ourselves or we pushed each other.
It was a big, big roller coaster ride.
Then, in February 2020, Alex called them with an idea.
The window to argue for a new trial was closing.
In jail, he'd read some legal filings in another Chicago case.
They were thorough, well argued, and all of the names seemed to be correct.
And he thought, now, this is the kind of attorney I need.
That attorney's name was Jennifer Black.
The world is on the brink.
War is contentious elections, disinformation, spreading of warp speed, and Donald Trump at the center of all of it.
But what does it mean for the rest of us?
Every week on Potsy the world, Tommy V. Turner and I cut through the noise to explain how global power is shifting.
No jargon, no homework, just clear honest conversations about what's happening and why it matters.
From breaking news to long simmering international conflicts, we dissected all with critical analysis and some jokes that will surely embarrass our children Monday.
Tune in to Potsy the world every Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts or catch it on YouTube.
Marisol and Melissa typed Jennifer's name into Google.
And when they saw the results, they're like, what is Alex thinking?
Why her?
Jennifer had represented high-profile cops in murder cases.
She had successfully defended an off-duty officer charged with killing an unarmed black woman.
Then she represented a white police officer named Jason Van Dyke.
If that name sounds familiar, that's because Van Dyke was the cop who killed a 17-year-old black boy named Laquan Mcdonald.
It was a horrific case that received national attention, both because of the shooting.
Van Dyke fired 16 shots at the boy.
And because it took over a year and a lawsuit for the CPD to release the dashcam video of the incident.
The case and the allegations of a cover-up prompted mass protests throughout the city.
How could someone who defended cops turn around and defend their brother?
Someone accused of killing an officer?
I didn't feel comfortable about that.
Neither did I.
They knew Alex was getting desperate.
But still, this woman?
Really?
But he was a bit adamant.
And of course, he was frustrated and he's like, go talk to her.
Let's see, he was very optimistic about her.
In March 2020, Marisol Melissa drove to Blague's office.
The woman who greeted them was not what they expected.
When Melissa and Marisol met her, Jennifer Blague wasn't dressed up.
She wasn't wearing makeup.
She definitely didn't sound like some slick city lawyer.
She grew up in a town called Hamburg, Arkansas.
Population 2400.
She just might be Hamburg's second most notable export to Chicago.
Home of Scotty Pippin.
This is claimed fame.
We lived in a concrete house that was across the cotton field for my grandparents.
We had a pet cow named Daisy that I kept in touch with my cow until my mom gave it to a farmer
and he promised not to kill a cow anyway, that's a whole another story.
Jennifer was a tomboy growing up.
She played basketball, hated dresses, and wanted to leave her small town for as long as she can remember.
But after college, she settled down in Arkansas and worked in HR.
Still, she couldn't shake the feeling that she was meant to be doing something else, somewhere else.
So she worked full time and went to law school at night.
I got a job at first selling pantyhose at Dillards.
I am not a fashionista.
I do not like wearing dresses.
I do not like wearing pantyhose.
It's absolutely hilarious that I would be selling pantyhose and giving women recommendations
on if they should use ultra sheer or sheer, you know, a man's just a hoot.
Jennifer eventually walked across the stage in her cap and gown.
No pantyhose, of course, to collect her law degree.
She moved to Chicago and took on some high profile cases.
She's proud of all of them, the wrongful conviction she's overturned, and the police officer she's defended.
Even though the Jason Van Dyke case was really controversial.
It wasn't just the via sisters who were skeptical about that one.
Jennifer's friends were too.
She didn't represent Van Dyke at trial.
But took on his case when she saw the sentence the prosecution was asking for.
Viag wasn't apologetic when talking to the sisters about the case.
They wanted every shot of the bullet to count towards his sentence and it to be a consecutive sentence.
If he got sentenced that way, every defendant after him would be sentenced that way.
And that is, that's not how the law should work.
Marisa Melissa were still skeptical.
But they were there because Alex asked them to be.
So they put aside their own misgivings and told Jennifer that they were certain their brother was innocent.
Full stop.
And they needed someone good to represent him.
I always take what family says to me with a grain of salt.
Not that they would be lying or anything like that.
But there's sometimes things that family just don't know.
She said, well, what makes him innocent?
Anybody can say, you know, especially your family, that's your loved one, isn't it?
Well, what makes him innocent?
For the next two hours, the sisters laid out their reasoning.
First, the M&M mini-mark is not in Cobra territory.
No Cobra would travel to another gang's turf to rob a store.
Second, the confessions from Alex's alleged accomplices.
Those happened after days of grueling interrogations, the sister said.
Then there was the surveillance tape from the mini-mark.
The man who leaps over the counter and starts shooting officer Lewis.
He puts his left hand on the counter to vault over it.
That couldn't be Alex, they said.
Alex was shot in his left hand six months before the crime, and it never fully healed.
No way he could put his weight on it to jump over a counter like that.
He has permanent nerve damage to the point where his fingers they get stiff,
even when he would eat.
The way he would hold the spoon, it's not like what a normal person right how you would hold the spoon.
It wasn't, can't do that.
Also, they said, it wasn't just his hand that made the idea of him jumping over the counter implausible.
Alex is a chubby dude. He's always been chubby.
He's short chubby, you know, has a hand injury.
I mean, let's be logical here.
The other thing was, Alex had presented an alibi that he was arguing with his girlfriend
over text messages at the time of the murder.
Prosecutor shot that down, arguing he could have just sent a quick emoji as he entered the store.
Speaking of the prosecutors, the sisters told Jennifer that they didn't trust them.
Their names were Andrew Varga and Nancy Aducey.
Jennifer stopped them right there and said, wait, you need to understand that I'm friends with Nancy Aducey.
We've worked together on a lot of things, and I like her.
And right there, the sisters doubt about Jennifer came rushing back.
I was cringing at my seat. I was like, oh, what a leave.
You know, we're like, I don't like her.
They said they're goodbyes.
And when Alex called to see how the meeting went, they didn't hold back.
She's not right. They told them. She's not the one.
Alex told them he didn't care.
If she wanted to take on his case, then he wanted her as his lawyer.
Back in her office, Jennifer told her associate attorney a guy named Eric Busby about her meeting with the sisters.
From what they told me, it just seemed impossible that Alex would have done this.
And then when you have a huge gap in time between like the crime and somebody being charged,
then you're that always is as the kids say says.
There's always shenanigans when there's a cop murder.
Plus, she said she liked Marisol Melissa, and she felt bad for them,
which Eric pointed out is not a good reason to take on a case.
And then Eric was like, I don't think we should take it.
I was like, well, I might have already said we would.
So against his better judgment, Eric went ahead and requested the case file
from Alex's previous lawyer.
It was just massive.
I remember I showed up one day, we have five banker boxes full of documents on the back porch,
and I'm just thinking, how are we going to do this?
I mean, it was a lot.
He started with the trial transcripts.
And right away, he thought, this is even worse than I imagined.
They've got confessions of alleged accomplices.
They've got three other people saying that Alex told them that he killed officer Lewis.
I looked at the summary, I'm like Jennifer's lost her mind.
He watched one police interrogation after another.
Recordings of the confessions made by Alex's alleged accomplices,
the men who were supposedly at the M&M during the robbery.
And nothing in any of them gave him a sliver of hope.
Eventually, he got to one of a guy named Melvin De Young.
And it's the same story Eric heard on all the other tapes.
Then Alex was a shooter.
He's thinking, this case is open and shot.
And then, just as he's about to stop the video,
he says something catches his attention.
The detectives who've been interrogating Melvin leave the room,
but they don't stop recording.
And Melvin, once he's alone,
he looks up at the camera and he whispers.
It was a lie.
Eric looks back into Melvin's face.
His eyes staring right into the lens.
And Melvin says it again.
It was a lie.
This season, on Off-Duty.
So there was like a bunch of guys that had attacked him
that knew his location who would have known that information.
He says, I had a brain eating amoeba.
Next day, you know they got the beat no more though.
You know I'm lying to you because I told you from the beginning
that I had nothing to do with this.
There's nothing on this.
Are you effing kidding me?
Every phase of this experience is something being taken from me.
You have to be a fucking idiot to do this job and win, right?
Like, you've got to have some blind faith.
I was like, bring it.
The Guardian made repeated attempts to speak
with the Chicago Police Department.
The department did not have anyone available to answer our questions,
a spokesperson wrote in an email.
In court documents, officers denied any misconduct.
Former prosecutors Nancy Aducey and Andy Varga,
along with legal representatives for each party,
did not respond to multiple interview requests
or a detailed list of questions.
Prosecutors denied any misconduct in court papers.
No officers or prosecutors have been accused of wrongdoing
by officials in connection with this case.
This is The Guardian.
