Off Duty: The Police | Ep 3

0:00This is the Guardian. After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month, or not just the tutors, we're transported back to the age of restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on not just the tutors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. One night in May 2013, Alex Via and a buddy drove to a movie theater in Rosemont, a suburb just outside Chicago.

1:00It had been more than a year since Officer Lewis was killed. They parked in a garage next to the theater, Codillate showing up the hangover three, then headed back to their car. But Alex never made it. Minutes after the movie ended, he was lying at the bottom of a parking lot stairwell in a pool of blood. A few hours later, Alex's sister Marisol got a phone call, telling her Alex was in the emergency room. So he was hit with a golf club in the back of the head or something, and then he was stabbed with like a box cutter blade, multiple times on his arms. Four attackers had jumped Alex in the stairwell. His friend said Alex was behind him as they walked up the stairs. Then he heard him scream and turned to see Alex on the ground as the men pounded him. The whole encounter lasted just a minute, leaving Alex with a broken hand and three stab wounds

2:00and the attackers screeching off in a waiting car. Alex's friend didn't recognize any of the people, and the thing the sisters couldn't figure out is who would follow Alex to a movie theater in Rosemont and wait for him to come out and then attack him. It didn't seem random. For starters, they let his friend walk by, only assaulting Alex. But then who? So there was like a bunch of guys that had attacked him that knew his location, which is odd because who would have known that information? The reason Alex could even go to a movie that night is that he never confessed to the murder of Officer Clifton Lewis. During his interrogation, Alex had insisted over and over that he was nowhere near the M&M mini-mart, that he was texting with his girlfriend at the time Officer Lewis was shot and killed.

3:01But unlike Tyrone Clay, Melvin De Young, and Eduardo Cologne, Alex never once wavered in his story. At the end of those days of interrogation, Tyrone and Melvin and Eduardo went to jail, and Alex went home. But Marisol and Melissa suspected the Chicago police had been after Alex ever since the day he walked out of that police station. They couldn't prove it, but they suspected the CPD were somehow connected to the attack outside the theater in Rosemont. The sisters feared that one way or another, Alex would pay for the murder of Officer Clifton Lewis. From the Guardian, I'm Melissa Segura. This is Off Duty, Episode 3, The Police.

4:08Six months after the stabbing, Alex was arrested for Officer Lewis's murder. You heard him in the last episode, talking to me from prison. So how did the police put him there? Well, one thing I've come to realize over two years of reporting this story, it wasn't through textbook detective work. For anyone listening who isn't familiar with the history of the Chicago police department, it's been rife with corruption for over a hundred years. Back in the 1920s, Chicago cops were accused of running a, quote, goldfish room, where officers beat suspects with water hoses. In the 1950s, police officers teamed with a well-known burglar to rob businesses around the city, then other officers were later indicted for altering evidence in the case. In the 1960s, CPD fired 99 rounds into the apartment of Black Panther's leader, Fred Hampton, killing him. A Chicago newspaper called his murder a, quote,

5:10summary execution. In the 1970s, a commander and his subordinates used electric prods to shock the genitals of suspects until they confessed to crimes. Under Burgers' reign from 1972 to 91, more than 200 people, most of the African-American were tortured with tactics including electric shock and suffocation. In the 1990s, around Alex's neighborhood, a detective framed dozens of mostly Latino men for murders they didn't commit. It's a scandal I reported on extensively and is led to the exoneration of more than 50 people. Former detective Renaldo Guevara has pled the fifth dozens of times, but stands accused of framing mostly Latino men while patrolling the streets of humble park. Dozens of convictions have been thrown out. Grabbs guys decide who did it and then makes the witnesses tell his story. For a long time, it went on question and a lot of men went to prison who shouldn't have gone to prison. These are just a handful of examples. If you delve into the history of police corruption

6:11in Chicago, you find plenty of other instances. After most of these scandals, a task force would issue a report full of reforms and the city would pay out police misconduct claims. From 2019 through 2024, those claims amounted to nearly $500 million. I'll say it again, nearly half a billion dollars. The cost of police misconduct weighs so heavily on the city that its current mayor, Brandon Johnson, has proposed taking out a loan to pay for mounting police misconduct lawsuits. I think if I was a cop, I would want to choke somebody else sometimes. Jennifer Baig, Alex's lawyer, she surprises me sometimes. We were talking about police corruption and how it relates to Alex's case. And she chimed in with, I would want to choke somebody else sometimes too. Just to be clear, it's a dark joke, but it's also a recognition.

7:12It's a tough job. People are horrible to you. Nobody wants to cooperate. I think it's just tough to be a cop though, right? The point she was leading up to though is that if cops do cross the line, they rarely experience any meaningful consequences. For generations, CPD's disciplinary system has been found inadequate. As recently as 2017, a Department of Justice investigation said CPD's disciplinary system, quote, lacks integrity and is quote, illegitimate in the eyes of the officers and the public alike. Or, as one former officer put it, CPD's disciplinary system is quote, a great big washing machine. All the dirty cops that go in come out clean. They have an abysmal record of investigating any misconduct by an officer and not going to be held accountable for your actions and your actions are actually rewarded, applauded,

8:13you get promotions for closing cases. So the whole thing is just set up bass records, you know? What you'll typically see with a detective who's very quote effective is many allegations of misconduct, whether it's violation of an unreasonable search, physical aggression, they have a story to history of that. I've spent some time looking into the specific officers who investigated Clifton Lewis' homicide. The lead detective in this case is named Anthony Norton. He was one of the officers who interrogated Tyrone Clay, the guy who said he was playing NBA 2K. In 2005, Norton was part of a team investigating the death of a four-year-old boy. According to the boy's mother, Norton and his colleague subjected her to a grueling 27-hour long interrogation, screaming that she had strangled her son with a telephone cord. In court documents, she alleged they denied her access to an attorney and fabricated statements.

9:15The mother eventually broke down and confessed, and then quickly recanted the confession. She spent more than seven years in prison for killing her son, before her conviction was overturned on other grounds. A Cook County Court awarded her a certificate of innocence in the case. Neither Norton, nor any of his fellow officers were ever charged in connection with the case. The mother sued Norton, and his colleagues in federal court for damages, but the jury ruled in the officer's favor. Another key detective in her case is James Gilger. He's one of the detectives who questioned Melvin DeYoung. Melvin, you'll remember, is a type I diabetic who says police withheld his insulin. The one who thought he was about to die. I didn't have to do any digging to know that Gilger has a reputation. He was a top investigator on another killing, a famous one if you're from Chicago, involving the nephew of the city's former mayor. The nephew killed a man,

10:16but claimed he acted in self-defense. It turns out, there were all kinds of shady police behavior in that case. The city's inspector general found that Gilger falsified a police report in a way that was favorable to the nephew. And I don't want to get too far into the weeds, but basically, he was found to have run a shoddy investigation. In 2015, the city's inspector general actually recommended that Gilger be fired, but he retired before that could happen. Here's the kicker. The supervising officer in the investigation into the mayor's nephew was a sergeant named Sam Saroni. Saroni didn't just oversee the wrongdoing. He participated in it, according to the city's inspector general, by using a personal email address to edit a police report. The Chicago police board unanimously found that Saroni failed to adequately supervise his officers. And for that, he received a reprimand,

11:16a penalty that didn't even cost him a day of vacation. Recently, he was promoted from sergeant to lieutenant. Turns out, Saroni was the supervising officer in the officer Lewis case, too. The person overseeing Norden, Gilger, and the others. So, that's the lead detective, a senior detective, and the team supervisor in the Lewis case. All with serious allegations about their past conduct. Which brings us back to Alex's stabbing, and Marisol Melissa's suspicion that the CPD was somehow connected to it. But that's a kind of hunch that's nearly impossible to prove. Then, months after taking the case, Jennifer and her associate, Eric Busby, were digging through documents. We were working at my house,

12:16and he was in the living room, sitting on the couch with the dogs, and I was in my office, and I heard him yell, oh my god, and Eric has a tendency to overreact to everything. So, I walked into the living room, and I'm like, this better fucking be good. Because I'm so sick of you getting me excited, oh, oh, and so he showed it to me. And I was like, oh my god. What Eric showed her was an email he'd come across, sent by a senior officer in the gang investigation division to some colleagues on the force. The email was written the day after Alex was attacked. Eric read it to me. Nearly an FYI, but a 25th district copper was telling me that flip, that's Alex's nickname, got stabbed at the movie co in Rosemont last night. Not gonna croak though, dot, dot, dot.

13:16An officer responds, I believe Operation Snake Doctor and 6580, has to take credit for this. Operation Snake Doctor. It's the nickname of a special operation. Lawn shortly after officer Lewis was murdered, as alleged in court documents. The idea was to arrest a ton of Spanish cobras, and as one officer describes it in an email, tell them, quote, every time a cobra goes to jail, it flips faults. What it was was telling them basically, flips the reason you're getting arrested, flips the reason all this heats on your gang, we know flip committed the officer Lewis murder, if you give us information on flip, will help you out. They would never say that that was part of it, but I know that was part of the flip speech. It's a pun, I guess, a way to make the cobra's flip on flip. Jennifer believes the speech has two potential outcomes. So it's basically a speech given to the Spanish cobras to make them either want to kill Alex

14:17or give evidence against them, whether it's true or not. So where Melissa and Marisol right was Operation Snake Doctor linked to Alex getting stabbed outside the movie theater? There's no definitive evidence to prove it was connected. But as one officer put it in his email on the day after the attack, quote, his associate was left unscathed. It sounds like the cobras are getting the word. For Jennifer and Eric, those emails were the first breakthrough after months of hitting their heads against a wall. You know, it's like finding the golden ticket. To them, it was proof of so many things they believed went on within the Chicago Police Department. No one was ever charged with the attack on Alex at the movie theater. When I contacted Rosemont for the police file, I was told they no longer had it.

15:27After Civil War, Regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and this month, or not just the tutors, we're transported back to the age of restoration royalty from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on not just the tutors but the history hit, whatever you get your podcasts. After the stabbing, Alex's whole family was on edge. Marisol worked as a probation officer at the Criminal Court House and in the hallways or eating lunch, she says she'd run into officers who'd spent two years investigating Alex. She says she'd had run-ins with Detective Noridan. I would be in the cafeteria during my lunch break with my co-workers

16:27and he would, a lot of times, just be there hanging there. And he would like, zero in on me, and then after that, you see a flock of police officers come in and go sit at his table and they're all looking at me. It got to a point where I would drop her off and pick her up from work. You know, we could all feel safe and she could feel safe as well annoying that she got to her car without having to look over her shoulder because you don't know what to expect at this point. For months, Alex and his sisters were watching their backs. Then in November 2013, Operation Snake Doctor Got Alex. For nearly two years, the only evidence the CPD had against Alex was what Edgar the Cologne,

17:27Tyrone Clay, and Melvin DeYoung had said in their statements. After what they say were days of grueling interrogation and it wasn't enough to make a case against Alex stick. With three new witnesses, each saying Alex had told them he was the one who killed Clifton Lewis. That was different. The first statement came from a guy named Ruben Rodriguez. Ruben wasn't a member of the Spanish Cobras, but he hung around with a bunch of them. In the winter of 2012, weeks after Lewis's death, he arrested him Michigan for a vicious robbery. From his gel cell, he wrote to law enforcement in Chicago, saying that he had intel on the Lewis murder. Ruben was still in prison when I talked with him last winter. He recounted for me what he told detectives back in 2012. I was at a barbershop.

18:27Clifton was there. Clifton basically admitted to what happened and he even said the dollar amount that they took from the store was $10,000. Both on the stand at Alex's trial, and when we spoke by phone, Ruben talked about having been kidnapped by other Spanish Cobras because he'd heard Alex confess. And the Cobras didn't want Ruben running his mouth. The second witness was a woman named Destiny Pettis. Ten months after Lewis's death, a cop pulled her over after allegedly seeing her pouring a can of four-local out the driver-side window of her car. The officer learns that she's 17. And while in police custody, she says that she bought weed from Alex a couple months earlier. And during that drug buy, he told her that he'd killed Clifton Lewis. And according to Destiny, Alex told her that he tossed the murder weapon in the Chicago River or in Mexico somewhere. It wasn't hard for Jennifer

19:27and Eric to call Ruben and Destiny's stories into question. Ruben's claim that he'd been kidnapped by the Spanish Cobras to shut him up didn't stand up to much scrutiny. Eric looked at his Facebook and there were pictures posted of him at a comedy club when this happened, when he was supposedly being kidnapped. And we have his phone records that show he was texting and calling, you know, hundreds and hundreds of texts a day. So that showed that wasn't true. So I don't have anything to say, to prove that he didn't overhear conversation with Alex, but I can prove that he's an incredible witness in other ways. As for Destiny Pettis, would Jennifer look back at the case file? She noticed something odd in the state's timeline. There was a big gap in time between Destiny's initial statement to police and when they had her tell her story under oath to a grand jury. Usually when you see that and if I see that in a case and they don't send someone to the grand jury,

20:27because they don't think that they're reliable, especially in this type of case. Jennifer and Eric tracked down Destiny and interviewed her about her statement, pressing on the details. Destiny told him it wasn't true. She said she was young at the time and in trouble and felt pressured to implicate Alex. I made multiple attempts to reach Destiny Pettis, but I never heard back from her. The last witness though was harder to describe it. Her name was also Destiny. Destiny Rodriguez. And the CPD talked to her for the first time in March 2013, about 15 months after the murder. That's when Detective Anthony Norden heard from a cop in a Chicago suburb. The suburban cop tells Norden that a young woman there has information on the Lewis killing. She said she was at a Chicago nightclub, called illusions, hours after the murder when she overheard Alex tell her boyfriend killed a cop.

21:32Destiny had a respectable job as an insurance broker. She spent most of her life in the suburbs, far from the gangs of Alex's neighborhood. Jennifer had tried every way she could think of to explain why Destiny Rodriguez would testify against Alex. She kept coming up empty. Truth be told, Destiny had always struck me as the most damning. She had no obvious motive to lie, no clear connections to the case. Her testimony was the proverbial rock in my shoe, nagging at me every step of the reporting. It sent her several messages. Nada. So I tracked down her boyfriend. The one she said Alex confessed to at the nightclub. He was clear. He couldn't say if Alex was innocent. Alex never confessed to him. Not at a nightclub. He was out with Destiny. Not anywhere. Then he gave me a clue. Destiny might have had a dust up

22:32with her roommate around the time she gave her statement about Alex. I filed public records request in Franklin Park, the suburb where she lived. Weeks later, I received police report showing Franklin Park officers that minutes after that bust, another officer Destiny testified that she knew and trusted arrived at the scene. The next day, that trusted officer took Destiny to meet with Norton and give a statement about Alex via. Public records show she never faced criminal charges for the drugs or ammo. The fact that she was arrested was never disclosed at trial or to Jennifer, even though she, too, had no records requests. So it turns out, all three witnesses that testified they heard Alex confess were themselves entangled with the law when they gave their statements, which raises major questions

23:32about whether they may have been incentivized. After their statements, Alex was arrested in late November 2013, and sent to Cook County Jail to a wait trial. Alex was sent to a section of the jail called Division 9. A garthalcalone had been held there since confessing back in January of 2012. When I spoke with a garthal last year, he told me there's jail and then there's Division 9. Division 9 in Cook County Jail is considered a supermax. The danger in there is real. 24-hour gang banging. Like, that's what they live for in there. That's gang banging. And there and two minutes later, everybody around you is fighting and stabbing each other. The violence took on every imaginable form at Garthal says, and things you'd never imagine in your wildest dreams. Like, one of the guys was giving this commissary and the other door ran behind them and just started beating them

24:32with a soap sock. A bar of soap in a container inside a tube sock. And every time he hit them, he was stuck with me. You know, because it's like he almost killed that guy. There's no respite, even at night. You might be trying to sleep and you got the guy next door screaming at somebody, three doors down and they're up to four in the morning and screaming back and forth. It's a real dark place. At Garthal spent five years in Division 9 waiting for a trial. He was convicted in 2017 and sentenced to 84 years. Alex would spend the next 10 years there after he was arrested. His family would visit him on weekends. Sometimes his teenage daughter would come, Alex's young son Damien would be there too with his mother Amanda. Damien was four when Alex first went into Cook County. They'd have races in the visiting room. Each on one side of the glass separating inmates from visitors.

25:32He'd read anime books that Damien was into so he could ask his son questions about his favorite characters. Over the decade Alex was in jail. Damien went from playing at the park got over there. To sing the our father. What's our say? Our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses and forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation. Those might seem like two little throwaway moments but when Alex goes in his kid is a preschooler and by the time he goes to trial in February 2019 Damien is a young man. Like we heard in episode 1 Alex's trial was short. His conviction fast. Two years after Alex's conviction

26:32Jennifer and Eric were working at Alex a new trial. One day reading through Alex's trial transcript Eric noticed something strange. If you read through the trial there's no conversation about self-ower data whatsoever except for the fact that Alex is texting at the exact time of the crime. Cell phone data. The bread and butter of so many criminal trials even back in 2019. Alex had always said that he had a message before during and after the murder at the mini-mart. At trial prosecutors had challenged Alex's text message alibi. They argued he could have just sent Monica a quick emoji as he rounded the corner to commit the crime. Eric notices that the police reports said Monica had handed over her phone so police could have it analyzed by forensics. Eric's phone data extracted

27:32too. All those records were also missing. No maps, no collogues, nothing. And he spots another digital trail that wasn't followed or at least not presented in court. Tyrone Clay had always said he had an alibi that he was on his playstation at the time of officer Lewis's shooting. Eric is a gamer too. He had a lot of evidence. If they could find proof that Tyrone was gaming at home, then he couldn't have been at the mini-mart. The whole case would be in doubt. The playstation could be the key. So where is 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.

28:32In court documents, officers deny any misconduct. We also reached out on multiple occasions to officers Norden and Seroni and their lawyers. We did not hear back. When I reached retired detective James Gilgur by phone, he told me he didn't know what I was talking about and hung up. We also reached out multiple times to an attorney representing the village of Franklin Park. And did not hear back. A spokesperson for the Cook County Jail said in a statement that it takes the safety of staff and those entrusted into its custody very seriously. And aggressively investigates all incidents and allegations of violence or criminal behavior within the jail. This is the Guardian.