podcast
CNN Presents: Tortured Justice with Omar Jimenez
CNN Presents is the home for powerful, narrative-driven audio storytelling, featuring in-depth reporting from CNN journalists. The new season, Tortured Justice with Omar Jimenez, follows the story of James Gibson, who was tortured by the Chicago Police Department and sent to prison for 30 years for a crime he was later cleared of. In this three-part series, Jimenez tells the story of how a CPD unit nicknamed “The Midnight Crew” violently produced wrongful convictions, the toll it took on survivors like Gibson and if — even with a massive public reckoning — justice can ever really be served. Tortured Justice drops in this feed on September 17, 2025. Also in this feed: Persuadable with Donie O’Sullivan and All Over the Map with John King.
Tortured Justice: The Midnight Crew
CNN Presents: Tortured Justice with Omar Jimenez
Sep 17, 2025
It’s 1989. James Gibson is back in Chicago for Christmas when he’s picked up by police on suspicion of murder. He will end up spending nearly 30 years in prison, convicted of a crime he’d one day be cleared of. That cold December night would spark a decades-long fight for justice — one that’s entwined in a dark legacy of torture perpetrated by Chicago police commander Jon Burge and his “Midnight Crew.”
This is part one of a three-part series. This episode contains descriptions of violence.
Host: Omar Jimenez
Producers: Graelyn Brashear, Madeleine Thompson, Emily Williams, Kyra Dahring, Sofia Sanchez, and Lauren Kim
Editor: Lacy Roberts
Technical director: Dan Dzula
Executive producer of CNN Podcasts: Steve Lickteig
Production help from: Jake Sorgen, Joe DeCeault, David Guggenheim, and Jessica Pupovac
Episode Transcript
Omar Jimenez
00:00:00
Before we start this next episode, I've been thinking about what we're covering here, and I was stuck on something. And hi, maybe we haven't been formally introduced. But some of you might know me from a few years ago in Minneapolis during the demonstrations after the police murder of George Floyd.
Archival
00:00:19
And that command we heard from from almost a block away.
Omar Jimenez
00:00:23
So let me take you back. This was May 29th, 2020. My team and I had been covering the protests for days. Things were peaceful during the daytime and then progressively getting more violent in the overnight hours. Windows broken, things set on fire, stuff like that. Well, on that morning, my team and I were reporting live from a location that had seen a lot of damage. No real police presence in the really early morning hours when we first got there. Then, from what felt like nowhere, honestly, police pulled up to the scene. We actually saw them slowly advancing down the block, so we cleared out of their way to let them do their thing. We were reporting live outside of their perimeter, when all of a sudden...
Archival
00:01:12
I'm sorry? You're on your arrest. Okay. Do you mind telling me why I'm under arrest, sir? Why am I under arrest?
Omar Jimenez
00:01:20
You're under arrest. Those were the only words I ever heard from any officer in that moment as my team and I got handcuffed and taken into custody for reasons I'm still not totally sure of. All on live TV.
Archival
00:01:37
If you're just tuning in, you are watching our correspondent Omar Jimenez being arrested by...
Omar Jimenez
00:01:46
We got released later that morning. And while that was crazy, that's not why I'm telling you this story. After we were taken into custody, and I still think about this, the Minnesota State Patrol wrote on social media, "In the course of clearing the streets and restoring order, four people were arrested by State Patrol troopers, including three members of a CNN crew. The three were released once they were confirmed to be members of the media." Come on. We had our credentials front and center. We said we were live on TV. And even if you weren't sure, once you let us away, you had my name, Google me. I'm pretty sure I pop up right there, top of the list. Anyway, everyone saw what happened live on television. I didn't have to explain it. You saw it. You were my witness. But if that camera hadn't been there, it could have been my word against theirs for the rest of time. The world wasn't watching when James Gibson was picked up by Chicago police. It was his word versus theirs. And in those days in Chicago, his word didn't have a chance. Maybe the only reason James' story ever saw the light of day is because of one unlikely man. Maybe the unlikeliest man imaginable, who told his own story, over, and over, and over, until enough people started to pay attention. Today — the story of that man. His name was Andrew Wilson. I'm Omar Jimenez. From CNN Presents, this is Tortured Justice. Our story starts with one of the largest manhunts in Chicago history, February 1982.
Archival
00:03:45
They were the kind of killings that scare cops most, murders with no apparent motive.
Omar Jimenez
00:03:50
It was seven years before James Gibson's arrest. He was a teenager at the time. Two white police officers, William Fahey and Richard O'Brien, pulled over a car on the South Side.
Richard Brzeczek
00:04:01
They were coming back from another police officer's funeral.
Omar Jimenez
00:04:06
Richard Bresek was superintendent of the Chicago Police Department at the time and says the two officers were conducting a routine traffic stop.
Archival
00:04:13
Witnesses say the two policemen were shot by a motorist and his passenger after stopping a car for a routine check.
Richard Brzeczek
00:04:20
They overpowered the two officers, bang bang, they killed them, and then they took off.
Archival
00:04:26
Patrolman Richard O'Brien, shot once in the head, died in a hospital Tuesday. Patrolman William Fahey, shot three times in the chest, died yesterday.
Omar Jimenez
00:04:36
The two police officers' deaths shocked the city. The mayor issued a $50,000 reward for any information leading to the killers, and the Chicago Police Department came down hard.
John Conroy
00:04:50
The manhunt was pretty extraordinary.
Omar Jimenez
00:04:53
John Conroy is a long time Chicago journalist.
John Conroy
00:04:56
Police officers went a little crazy. You know, one detective who later became a defense lawyer, he said, I don't know what Kristallnacht was like, but I think this was pretty close.
Flint Taylor
00:05:12
They completely terrorized the entire west and south sides of the city of Chicago.
Omar Jimenez
00:05:18
'Flint Taylor is a legendary Chicago civil rights attorney who would go on to represent many victims of police torture. He's 72 now, but in 1982, he had already been a partner at his co-op law firm, the People's Law Office, for a decade. He's a really focused guy, direct. It seems like he remembers every detail from this time.
Flint Taylor
00:05:40
They kicked down doors. They beat Black people indiscriminately. They dragged certain young Black people to police stations and tortured them and beat them because they thought they might have some information about who killed their bretheren, the white cops.
Omar Jimenez
00:05:57
Now, Brzeczek, the police superintendent at the time, has a different perspective on how the manhunt went down. He said police were under intense pressure to find the killers.
Richard Brzeczek
00:06:08
We knew what we had to do because we had two vicious killers out there. So steps had to be taken. People want action.
Omar Jimenez
00:06:19
Brzeczek believes most of the neighborhood thought the manhunt tactics were justified.
Richard Brzeczek
00:06:24
How do you deal with violence? One of the ways is violence has to meet violence. It may have to be superior violence. I don't think what we did back in 1982 was offensive to most of the people who live in those neighborhoods that we were operating in, who pay the taxes, who go to work, who send their kids to school. They're not the ones complaining.
Omar Jimenez
00:06:55
In the end, the search did turn up two suspects, Jackie Wilson and his brother, Andrew Wilson. Jackie has his own story, but we're gonna stick with Andrew. Here's journalist John Conroy again.
John Conroy
00:07:08
He was at large for about a week. And then they got a tip that he was holding up in an apartment on the west side. So Jon Burge put this team of people together to go arrest him.
Omar Jimenez
00:07:25
Jon Burge, the Chicago police officer at the center of this series. By this time, Burge had been a Chicago police detective for a decade. He had risen through the ranks and was now commander of the Violent Crimes Unit for Area 2, a collection of police districts on the South Side.
John Conroy
00:07:42
They did it very early in the morning, I think it was between four and five a.m. Burge was the first one through the door. Those kind of guys often ruled from a chair. They weren't in the field. Burge a field guy. No shots were fired, Andrew Wilson was arrested, and Wilson later testified that Burge said something like, take it easy on him, we'll get him at the station.
Omar Jimenez
00:08:20
The story of what the police did to Andrew Wilson took years to come out. The brutality of that story is part of the reason why we know about Jon Burge and his Midnight Crew at all. The details matter, so we're gonna tell you some of the specifics. And if descriptions of violence aren't for you, you can skip the next few minutes. Andrew Wilson described what happened in hours of depositions, in lawsuits that would come later. We had actors read a few passages from one of those depositions. You'll hear Andrew first being questioned by a lawyer for Jon Burge.
Actor 1
00:09:01
Well, while they was beating me up, one of them took the bag out of the garbage can and put it over my head.
Actor 2
00:09:10
A plastic bag or a paper bag?
Actor 1
00:09:13
A plastic bag. They knocked me back down to the floor and the big dude, he was clean cut. He kicked me, but he didn't fully kick me. But he was trying to. And I moved some, and I got my eye messed up.
Omar Jimenez
00:09:35
John Conroy wrote about Andrew's account.
John Conroy
00:09:38
One of the officers kicked him in the eye, and that tore his retina. He described being electroshocked. He said that alligator clips had been attached to his ears. Jon Burge had turned this crank on a generator, and that had resulted in severe pain.
Actor 2
00:10:05
All right, so, you felt the shock in your ear. Did you feel it in your ears or nose or both places?
Actor 1
00:10:17
It goes to your brain and and you, you feel your, your teeth shattering
Omar Jimenez
00:10:26
Flint Taylor was in the room for the deposition we've been referencing.
Flint Taylor
00:10:31
'The torture machine was a box that had a generator in it, and they attached wires to the generator in this box. And they had clips, alligator clips, on the wire. They had him strapped, handcuffed, across one of those old heat radiators that have bars, a steam radiator. And so when they shocked him, his chest and face and leg went against the red-hot radiator.
Actor 2
00:11:03
How many times did you cry out?
Actor 1
00:11:07
I don't know about three, four times? I just stopped.
Actor 2
00:11:15
You stopped hollering after a while?
Actor 1
00:11:19
Yes, because nobody wasn't coming. Nobody wasn't coming to help me.
Actor 2
00:11:28
What happened next?
Actor 1
00:11:31
He stopped with the crank and then he went and got the other one off.
Omar Jimenez
00:11:36
The other one was another kind of electroshock device, sort of like a cattle prod. Andrew said police shocked his genitals with it.
Actor 2
00:11:47
And then what happened?
Omar Jimenez
00:11:59
'The testimony has a few of these breaks. Even years later, it was difficult for Andrew to talk about what happened to him without crying. His longtime lawyer told us Andrew hated that he cried like that. Eventually, after 15 hours, Andrew signed a 13-page statement police put in front of him saying he'd killed the two police officers. This is the story Andrew Wilson would tell and retell for the rest of his life. Nobody has substantially questioned Andrew Wilson's guilt and the murder of the two officers in 1982. There were witnesses. This doesn't appear to be a case where police pinned a crime on someone who was innocent. But torture is still torture, even if someone's guilty. Police had their man. They had his confession. They had two, actually. They'd arrested Andrew's brother, Jackie, who I already mentioned. He also was beaten by police until he said he told them what they wanted to hear. It looked like it would be a slam dunk case. With their confessions, prosecutors would be able to convict them. But police also had a problem.
Dr. Raba
00:13:21
On February 15th, 1982, I was called by the attending physician who was working at Cermak Health Services.
Omar Jimenez
00:13:28
Dr. John Raba was the medical director at the clinic that served the Cook County jail. He later gave interviews about what happened when he examined Andrew Wilson, including this one. It was for a 1994 PBS documentary called The End of the Nightstick.
Dr. Raba
00:13:42
I examined him quickly and was able to identify multiple, very unusual injuries that we have never seen here at Cermak Health Services.
Omar Jimenez
00:13:53
The injuries were severe enough that Raba immediately wrote a letter to the man in charge.
Richard Brzeczek
00:13:58
I got a letter from the attending physician at the Cook County Jail.
Omar Jimenez
00:14:05
The letter went to Richard Brzeczek, the superintendent of police.
Richard Brzeczek
00:14:08
Who told me that Andrew Wilson had injuries consistent with being burned by a radiator.
00:14:20
Dr. Raba described Andrew Wilson's injuries and he ended his letter demanding a quote, investigation of this alleged brutality. The letter, along with photos of Andrew taken around the same time were entered into evidence. And I wanna pause on this moment because in a story like this with dozens of victims, there are always potential turning points, moments in this case, when people in power could have done something to stop the torture that was happening at the hands of John Burge and the Midnight Crew. When the letter came to Brzeczek, he had two choices, ignore it or pursue it. When I talked to Brissek about this, he said he pursued it. He opened an internal investigation and then he did something else.
Richard Brzeczek
00:15:08
I wrote a letter to Richard M. Daley.
Omar Jimenez
00:15:11
Daley went on to become the longest serving mayor in Chicago's history. At this time, he was the state's attorney.
Richard Brzeczek
00:15:18
He's the chief law enforcement officer of the county. He's prosecuting a case. I sent him a copy of the letter. And if you read the letter, I talked about, I'm conducting the investigation, but I also am looking for some guidance so as what you want me to do and what you don't want me do so I don't interfere with the criminal prosecution of the case.
Omar Jimenez
00:15:43
'He didn't want to interfere with the criminal prosecution of the case. Brzeczek knew, and surely then state's attorney Richard M. Daley knew, that if it became clear that Andrew Wilson had been tortured by police before he confessed, their case against him could be destroyed. What then? Would a cop killer go free? The letter Brzeczek wrote Daley is short — seven sentences. He said he didn't want to jeopardize the prosecution's case, so besides starting an internal investigation, he'll do nothing unless he hears from Daley. But as far as we know, Daley didn't respond. There were no follow-up calls or meetings, and Daley also didn't respond to my requests for comment. Maybe in another city, or at another time, or in another institution, something would have come out of Brzeczek's actions. But the police didn't police the police. Not then, at least. I was kind of surprised Brzeczek even spoke to me at all for this story. The fact is, almost no one on the force ever spoke on the record about police torture on the South Side. Brzeczek was young to be leading the Chicago Police Department at the time. Now he's 82. There just aren't many other former police officers left who were around then. And as you can imagine, Brzeczek has had a lot of time to think about what happened in February of 1982.
Richard Brzeczek
00:17:13
I'm not sure, you know, what else I could have done other than maybe gone out to the Area 2 headquarters, taken my jacket off, rolled my sleeves up and take over the whole investigation and do it myself. When you get a reputation for doing the right thing or trying to do the right things, sometimes people don't want the right think done. That's all I can tell you.
Omar Jimenez
00:17:45
This case ended up following Richard Brzeczek for years. He was actually listed as a defendant alongside Jon Burge and other officers who were accused of torture. I almost wonder if Brzeczek spoke to me because he wanted to make it clear that he didn't consider himself one of them.
Richard Brzeczek
00:18:01
I'm not saying that Burge did this because I never saw him do it. He never admitted it to me. In my opinion, okay, I think Burge was an out and out racist. And I think that he looked at people arrested of a color other than white as being subhuman. That's the way I looked at him.
Omar Jimenez
00:18:34
Now, Brzeczek is far from the only person who's accused Burge of being racist. It's an accusation Burge denied. But in Andrew Wilson's case, whatever Brzeczek thinks the right thing to do might've been, Wilson was still a cop killer, which to him embodies a particular kind of evil.
Richard Brzeczek
00:18:53
You know, they snuff out people's lives over what? Hatred? You know? Because they committed a crime and the people in blue are the ones that stand between them and anarchy, tyranny, you know? I mean, what's a justification for killing a police officer?
Omar Jimenez
00:19:17
Andrew Wilson was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1983. He would spend the rest of his life in prison. Stay with us, we're taking a quick break. We'll be back.
Flint Taylor
00:19:33
Andrew was a very quiet and introverted man.
Omar Jimenez
00:19:37
Chicago civil rights attorney, Flint Taylor, became Andrew Wilson's lawyer in 1986. By that time, Wilson had been imprisoned for three years for the murder of the two police officers.
Flint Taylor
00:19:49
He had obviously suffered a great deal of trauma by being tortured mercilessly by Burge and his men. He clearly didn't trust people, including us, even though he knew who we were and had asked for us to be involved in the case.
Omar Jimenez
00:20:11
Wilson's young life had been lived in a series of institutions. It started when he was a kid and he couldn't focus in school. He was sent to a school for kids with behavioral problems and he never learned to read. Then he ended up in a juvenile detention facility as a young teen for burglary. A doctor there diagnosed him with seizure disorders, emotional disturbance, and hyperactivity. As an adult, Wilson had a long rap sheet. Prison wasn't new to him by the time he landed there for murder. By the time Flint Taylor took on his case, Wilson had already launched an appeal.
Flint Taylor
00:20:49
Unlike a lot of cases, we had physical evidence that supported Andrew's torture.
Omar Jimenez
00:20:59
The bruises, swelling, the scabs on his body from the alligator clips that delivered the shocks to his nose and ears. There were photographs. There was that hospital letter that had been sent to Police Superintendent Brzeczek.
Flint Taylor
00:21:14
The evidence was so strong that the Illinois Supreme Court reversed his death penalty case and ordered that his confession be thrown out of evidence.
Omar Jimenez
00:21:29
To be clear, that didn't mean that Andrew Wilson was free. It just meant that one piece of evidence, the confession, couldn't be used against him. There was enough other evidence supporting Andrew Wilson's guilt that he was convicted in a second trial. This time, he was sentenced to life. That's where it could have ended.
John Conroy
00:21:53
Anonymous letters started arriving at the offices of Wilson's attorneys.
Omar Jimenez
00:21:59
John Conroy again.
John Conroy
00:22:01
And these anonymous letters came in Chicago Police Department envelopes. And there were four of them.
Omar Jimenez
00:22:11
Four letters from inside the Chicago Police Department. They came from someone or maybe more than one person close enough to the torture to know names and details.
Flint Taylor
00:22:25
We called the source Deep Badge.
Omar Jimenez
00:22:27
The letters showed up over the course of months, while Flint Taylor argued Wilson's case on appeal, and then later defended him in his retrial. But the folks at the People's Law Office never found out who Deep Badge was.
Flint Taylor
00:22:41
There was some feeling that perhaps these sources or source, when there'd be something on TV about the case, that he or she would have feelings of guilt and reach out. But that's all kind of speculation. What's not speculation is the information that we got in those four letters. What it did was lead us to other torture survivors, other torture victims in the prisons, and this led us to uncover other cases. The source told us to look up a man by the name of Melvin Jones in the county jail. We did, and we found out that Melvin had been tortured by the same torture box nine days before Andrew Wilson had, by Burge. And so now we had another case that was highly similar to Andrew's case.
Omar Jimenez
00:23:34
And Melvin wasn't the only one, because when they went to talk to him, Melvin Jones knew about a man named Anthony Holmes.
John Conroy
00:23:41
They find Anthony Holmes, and he says, oh yeah, same thing happened to me in 1973.
Omar Jimenez
00:23:51
One person led to another, and another. John Conroy can still rattle off the names.
John Conroy
00:23:58
Holmes goes on to say, and it happened to George Powell, and it happen to Maurice Powell, and then it happened to Lawrence Poree, twice. And they came into the case thinking they had one torture case, and now — oh. These machines have been used broadly.
Omar Jimenez
00:24:17
What started with the Andrew Wilson case is now all these other cases, including some people who'd been sentenced to life in prison, or death. And the reports of the electrocution machine lined up perfectly with Jon Burge's career. Burge became a detective in 1972. The first victim Taylor and his team found, Anthony Holmes, said Burge tortured him in 1973. Now, 16 years later, people were finally seeing a pattern. And that pattern was crucial. It's what Andrew Wilson and Flint Taylor needed to build out a solid civil suit against Burge, police leaders, and the city of Chicago. At this point, Wilson was never going to get out of prison, but he could still sue for damages over the torture. John Conroy was reporting for the Chicago Reader and was there when the suit went to court in the late 80s.
John Conroy
00:25:21
At the time, the federal courthouse was covered by one reporter from each paper. There was a sports agent who was on trial, famous guy, and they were bringing in celebrity witnesses. And so, you know, what's more interesting? So that's how I ended up hearing the whole thing while other reporters didn't.
Omar Jimenez
00:25:47
Conroy was the right reporter in the right courtroom at the right time. He dove into the story head first and spent months poring over the documents that had amassed in Andrew Wilson's file over the past several years. Conroy published a massive story in the Chicago Reader about the whole thing. Wilson, the torture, the lawsuits, all of that in January 1990. It was headlined House of Screams. At almost 20,000 words, it reads like a detective novel. What John laid out was all the evidence that convinced the jury that police and the city that employed them were sanctioning torture. He knew he was publishing a bombshell. He was just waiting for it to go off.
John Conroy
00:26:33
We were so sure that the dailies, the daily newspapers, were going to take over this story and throw a bunch of people on it. But the dails didn't come to it for like almost two and a half, three years.
Omar Jimenez
00:26:49
Conroy was shocked that other journalists weren't rushing to the story.
John Conroy
00:26:53
Millions of people now knew that there had been torture in the Chicago Police Department. And there were guys on death row who were gonna die if nobody did anything, and nobody did anything. Why do people not react when there is an emergency like that?
Omar Jimenez
00:27:16
'Meanwhile, Andrew Wilson's first civil suit against Burge and the city of Chicago ended in a hung jury. But then, when he appealed, he scored a weak sort of half-victory. The court said, yes, his constitutional rights were violated. And this was important, because for the first time, it was there on paper. The city of chicago had a de facto policy that resulted in abuse. All those names added up to something undeniable for the jury. But none of the men Wilson sued directly, including Burge and Brzeczek, were found liable. But Conroy kept following the story. He wrote article after article for the Chicago Reader with headlines like, Town Without Pity, The Shocking Truth, Pure Torture. And slowly, people started to pay attention. It started with protests like these. Citizens Alert, the Malcolm X Grassroots movement. These were groups that had been organizing and demonstrating against police brutality in Chicago for years.
Flint Taylor
00:28:25
It was an organic thing that was happening. There was a movement that was building.
Omar Jimenez
00:28:31
Flint Taylor was often out there on the streets with the protesters.
Flint Taylor
00:28:34
Activists were demonstrating, people were going to city council and demonstrating right in the chambers. And so the council people couldn't miss it.
Archival
00:28:47
I think it's going to be up to us people are going to do something about it.
Omar Jimenez
00:28:54
Those protests helped put a global spotlight on what was happening in the city. In December of 1990, Amnesty International issued a report on the allegations of torture of suspects by the Chicago Police Department.
Archival
00:29:07
The goal of this report is fairly clear, to put public attention and pressure on the people whose job it is, to make sure Chicago police follow the law themselves.
Omar Jimenez
00:29:16
The report called on top prosecutors and city leaders to investigate the torture allegations. Civil rights activists used the report to keep the pressure on the police and the mayor, who by now was Richard M. Daley, the former state's attorney.
Archival
00:29:31
Mayor Daley was state's attorney at the time. He knew about this and did absolutely nothing.
Omar Jimenez
00:29:38
'And remember, Daley was state's attorney in the mid-80s. He must have known about what happened to Andrew Wilson. Superintendent Brzeczek sent him that letter about Wilson's injuries.
Archival
00:29:49
Here's the man at the top, and he stands there with his arms around Jon Burge and says it's okay. He says the allegations against Burge don't amount to anything. It's okay to torture young Black men in the city of Chicago.
Omar Jimenez
00:30:04
'The activists began carrying a replica of one of the torture devices so many people had described, a hand-cranked black box with wires coming off it.
Archival
00:30:13
I would like to show everybody the ah, black box. An electric shock box the task force says is a copy of one used to terrorize suspects.
Omar Jimenez
00:30:23
But as the protests grew and the pressure built on the city to address the allegations, city leaders appeared to do nothing. In Mayor Daley's public comments, he didn't even seem to take the allegations seriously. Here he is commenting on the charge that the city was sanctioning torture.
Richard M. Daley
00:30:40
If you're trying to portray that superintendents of police are for police brutality, you're greatly mistaken. And the police officers are not, and the people are not.
Omar Jimenez
00:30:50
But behind the scenes, out of the public eye, there was an investigation.
Francine Sanders
00:30:56
I knew that there was something important going on here and that there was a lot at stake.
Omar Jimenez
00:31:03
If Andrew Wilson was an unlikely person to blow open the Burge story, so was Francine Sanders. She grew up in the Chicago suburbs. She was a movie buff who majored in journalism. You might not expect her ending up in a job investigating misconduct in the Chicago PD's Office of Professional Standards, but she spent a decade doing exactly that, starting in the late 1980s.
Francine Sanders
00:31:27
It was a job where nobody really liked you a whole lot.
Omar Jimenez
00:31:32
The Office of Professional Standards, OPS, a civilian team that was part of the Chicago Police Department, but it was also meant to operate independently. It was tasked with reviewing allegations of police misconduct.
Francine Sanders
00:31:45
The police didn't really trust you because you're not one of them. And then the community, you're riding up in an unmarked squad car and carrying a badge, you know, and then, you're unit reports to the superintendent. There's skepticism there, understandably.
Omar Jimenez
00:32:01
'OPS had investigated Andrew Wilson's case. Richard Brzeczek, the former superintendent, had told them to. That was the internal investigation he said he opened. The result was a one-page report that the public never heard about. This was true of a lot of OPS investigations, and it definitely reflected what a lot of people in the public thought about how the department policed itself. Sure, maybe there was a report, but nothing ever happened. This time, with protesters in the streets and eyes on the case, it went differently. The assignment fell to two people, an OPS investigator named Michael Goldston and Francine Sanders.
Francine Sanders
00:32:46
There were just more eyes on this. There was this outcry and there was this atmosphere. You've been picked to do this really big job, me and Michael.
Omar Jimenez
00:32:57
'Goldston was tasked with looking for patterns of abuse within the department. Sanders' focus was more narrow, re-investigate what happened to Andrew Wilson while he was in custody. So she started by reviewing the documents and reading John Conroy's House of Screams cover story. Then she went to interview potential witnesses, but almost nobody in the department would talk to her. And this actually wasn't typical. She investigated a lot of claims of misconduct while she worked at OPS. Police might not have loved it when she came knocking, she said, but they generally cooperated. Some of them she was friendly with.
Francine Sanders
00:33:34
I loved when I was able to prove that an officer did the right thing, you know, that was super satisfying. I didn't have like an agenda, like I've got to, we got to nail these guys, you know. I was just trying to figure out what happened, and to me there was no question in my mind after going through all this documentation and evidence, there was no other way to explain Wilson's injuries.
Omar Jimenez
00:34:07
And that's where Sanders landed. Her investigation came to the conclusion that John Burge and another officer had tortured Wilson, beaten him, shocked him, failed to intervene, refused to give him medical treatment. Goldston, the other investigator, was also meticulous. He made a database of every allegation of abuse by detectives that he could find. There were 50. There was systematic abuse over more than a decade. It was methodical. It was planned. It was torture.
Francine Sanders
00:34:46
I guess my hope was just that it would all come to light and that there would be some justice here.
Omar Jimenez
00:34:53
Sanders and Goldston's reports were packaged up into two binders, stamped on every page with confidential, and delivered to the superintendent of police, where they stayed. Because the superintendent at the time, Leroy Martin, kept the report secret for a year and a half. Martin died in 2013, so we couldn't ask him about this, but at the time, he claimed he didn't know about the wrongdoing or the report.
Leroy Martin
00:35:20
No, I had no knowledge of it. If I had any knowledge of wrongdoing, any time, any place, I have taken action and I think my reputation speaks to that I'll take action.
Omar Jimenez
00:35:29
The only reason we can read the OPS reports that Sanders and Goldston wrote is that Flint Taylor and the People's Law Office fought in court to have them released. They'd come across them during discovery in a police brutality case, but the reports were under a protective order. They claimed the public had a right to see them, and a federal judge agreed.
Flint Taylor
00:35:49
So that's when you had the banner headlines all across the country and in Chicago, you know, about torture in Chicago, pattern of torture.
Archival
00:35:59
'Tonight, a confidential report implicates a high-ranking Chicago police officer in the alleged torture of criminal suspects.
Omar Jimenez
00:36:05
Channel 5 News in Chicago quoted the report.
Speaker 18
00:36:08
Abuse did occur and was systematic. The time span involved covers more than ten years. The type of abuse described was not limited to the usual beating, but went into such esoteric areas as psychological techniques and planned torture. Particular command members were aware of the systematic abuse and perpetuated it, either by actively participating in or failing to take any action to bring it to an end.
Omar Jimenez
00:36:34
The release of the report was like a dam breaking. All eyes were on Chicago. Immediately, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley pushed back.
Richard M. Daley
00:36:43
This is a report by an individual, it is not fully documented, it's a lot of rumors. There has been police brutality, it has not been systematic.
Omar Jimenez
00:36:52
Just days after the report went public, the Chicago Police Board launched hearings to decide whether Burge and two other officers should be fired. It's worth noting, like OPS, the police board was run by a group of civilians. But it had teeth. It could fire police officers.
Archival
00:37:08
The police board is still deciding whether to fire Burge and two other officers.
Omar Jimenez
00:37:17
'The hearings began on a cold, gray February day in 1992. Outside police headquarters, protesters marched up and down the sidewalk, hoisting poster board signs, beat back the racist attack, fire Burge, end systematic torture. By this time, Burge had given testimony in not one, but two civil trials as a defendant. He denied everything he was accused of then, and he denied it again to the police board. The examiner asked him if he'd applied a hand-cranked electric shocking device to Andrew Wilson by applying clips on the ends of wires to Wilson's ears and nose. No, sir, Burge said. Did he apply a shocking device on Wilson's little fingers? No, Sir, I did not. Did he put a gun to a suspect's head? Did he cause Wilson to be burned on a radiator? Did he pull a typewriter cover over a suspect head? He denied it all, concisely and categorically. These hearings, it was an administrative procedure, but it unfolded like a hearing in a court of law with the board acting as the judge. Francine Sanders was there for one of the hearings, watching with the public.
Francine Sanders
00:38:34
All I remember is like a sea of police officers looking back.
Omar Jimenez
00:38:42
Among them was Jon Burge. At one point, he turned and looked at her.
Francine Sanders
00:38:47
It was uncomfortable, you know. It just made me aware of how much support he had.
Omar Jimenez
00:38:58
The support was vocal and visible. In the middle of the hearings, thousands of people showed up to a fundraiser at Chicago's Teamsters Auditorium for him and other officers accused of torture.
Archival
00:39:10
It's a waste of time, it's a wast of taxpayers' money, and it's an insult to the law enforcement. And what they're doing is trying to...
Omar Jimenez
00:39:17
The board fired Burge.
Archival
00:39:19
Tonight in one of the most infamous cases of police brutality in Chicago history.
Archival
00:39:23
The Chicago Police Board found him guilty of torturing suspects, and they fired him.
Omar Jimenez
00:39:27
It had been 11 years since Andrew Wilson was arrested and tortured. And now, while it might not have been justice, it was at least some accountability. But when journalist John Conroy read the police board's decision...
John Conroy
00:39:44
The most vaguely worded decision you could imagine. Jon Burge did kick and or punch and or deny medical attention to. So the newspapers ran with stories that said Jon Burge fired over torture charges, but in fact the word torture wasn't used in the board's decision.
Francine Sanders
00:40:06
I was happy that there was something, but it wasn't enough.
Omar Jimenez
00:40:11
Francine Sanders' job had been a straightforward one. Investigate, find out whether rules were broken. But she said her report and Goldston's in particular revealed a lot more than that.
Francine Sanders
00:40:24
Clearly, whether you've got the bad apple or not, there's a lot of bad apples. There's a lotta people turning away, looking away, not doing the right thing. You know, it's so much bigger than Burge.
Omar Jimenez
00:40:43
The people who knew about what John Burge was doing on the South Side or suspected it. The leadership who never took a second look when they should have. They would have been ordinary police officers like the ones she'd gotten to know on the job and liked.
Francine Sanders
00:40:58
I don't want to get too philosophical, but I go back to, you know, like the movie Chinatown, which is one of my favorite movies, Chinatown. And there's a line, something like, you know, at the right time, in the right place, people are capable of anything.
Omar Jimenez
00:41:21
Jon Burge moved to Florida in 1993 at age 46. He still had his pension. It had been over a decade since Andrew Wilson's arrest and torture. Andrew Wilson wasn't the first person beaten and electrocuted by Chicago police officers. His fight and his lawsuits prove that, but he also wasn't last. All through the 11 years between Andrew Wilson's arrest and Jon Burge's firing, Black men in Chicago were being tortured, including James Gibson, who we started this story with. He was picked up by police in late December of 1989, accused of murdering a mechanic and an insurance salesman in his Englewood neighborhood. He was held by police for four days. And then convicted in a bench trial months later based on a statement police say he gave them, putting him at the scene. James and Andrew never met each other, never knew the details of each other's lives or cases, but they're linked in time. Andrew Wilson won his civil suit against the city just months before James was arrested. The swelling and bruises James got from being beaten by police were still healing when John Conroy's House of Screams article came out in January of 1990. You almost wonder if things had just happened faster, if the excruciatingly slow crawl toward some kind of accountability over 11 years could have been sped up, maybe James's life would have gone differently. By the time Burge was fired, James had already spent three years in prison. He'd been sentenced to life. He maintained his innocence. He said police had manufactured the whole story of his presence at the crime scene. But at that point, what did it matter? He felt like nobody cared. Except for one person. His mom. They couldn't really talk on the phone because she was deaf, so whatever prison he was in — he was moved around to a few over the years — she'd take the bus to come visit.
James Gibson
00:43:39
And she would say, baby, I know how you feel. She said, but you got to get them things out your heart. She said you got get those things out of your heart so that God can do what he need to do for you. She said you coming home. She said but them white folks, they ain't going to play fair for you. She'd say you gonna have to do about 20 years. She said but you gotta get that stuff out your heart. I say, I say this, if you say I'm coming home, I'm comin' home.
Omar Jimenez
00:44:04
His mom wouldn't live to see it happen. James found out that his mother was dying after a dream he had, locked up in a prison cell.
James Gibson
00:44:15
And I wrote her and I told her I had a dream I was in a white car. And I came to your house and there was no presence. I said, somebody's gonna die. And she told me it was her. She wrote me back, and she told me that the doctor told her she had to get her affairs in order.
Omar Jimenez
00:44:39
James' mother died in April 2002, 12 years into his prison sentence. He would spend another 18 behind bars.
James Gibson
00:44:49
She told me I was coming home and I believed that. And I put every effort in tearing they ass up. I didn't miss a beat. And I'm still mad too.
Omar Jimenez
00:45:11
Rage. Sadness. Frustration. Loss. Might have been what fueled Andrew Wilson's fight, too. Andrew died in prison in 2007. He did eventually get a settlement from the city, a million dollars, most of which went to his lawyers. The rest went to the family of one the murdered officers. But he left this unlikely legacy. He set off the chain of events that eventually freed dozens of men who had been wrongfully imprisoned.
John Conroy
00:45:46
He was remorseless and persistent.
Omar Jimenez
00:45:50
The journalist John Conroy.
John Conroy
00:45:52
'Remorseless in that he didn't seem to feel, you know, particularly bad for having killed two cops, and persistent in that he just kept going with this civil suit when he could easily have just dropped it. There was no benefit to him to keep going. The other survivors, I understand their persistence because they're hoping to get out. Had no hope of getting out. Some people would have just dropped it at that point because going through a civil suit like that is really brutal. The cross-examination was just nothing I would ever want to submit to. And you know, Wilson did it over and over again. I think he was just driven by his hatred of what had happened to him. I don't think anybody anticipated the impact Andrew Wilson would have.
Omar Jimenez
00:46:55
Andrew Wilson's persistence is the reason we can tell this story. And let's be clear. He did an awful thing. He killed two police officers. And he ignited this series of events that exposed another awful thing. Because of Andrew, we know what Jon Burge and the midnight crew did. And even today, decades later, there are still people like James picking up the pieces of their lives, the time they lost, the time that was taken from them. How do you get justice for that? Next, in the final episode.
Lawrence Ralph
00:47:42
An open secret is something that people know, it's just that we also know that nothing is going to be done about it.
Betsy Biffl
00:47:49
We knew that this was really where we might have our hook. So how do we prove it? How do we proof that he lied?
James Gibson
00:47:56
I've been fighting so long, I'm still swinging. I still carry scars on my body 36 years later.
Bill Benjamin
00:48:02
We thought we had justice, but I don't think there is any right now. Not for my family, anyway.
