The two top police officials in Cicero turned in their badges and radios Saturday, one day after being suspended by the very government they had begun to investigate.
Police Supt. David Niebur, hired in December with instructions to clean up the town, then headed out of state Saturday afternoon, saying he no longer felt safe in Cicero.
“For the first time in my life, I believe there are a number of people who would like to see me assassinated,” Niebur said as he prepared to leave.
All morning, Cicero squad cars cruised past his home, some slowing to a stop out front. Before driving to the police station, Niebur and his deputy, Phillip Bue, who also was suspended Friday, asked for an escort from the Illinois State Police.
“In my career, I have had people shoot at me and I have killed people. But I have never been so scared as I am this week here,” Niebur, 55, said. “This is big-time crime. This is big-time corruption.”
In a series of interviews last week with the Tribune, Niebur and Bue disclosed some of what they say they found when they began digging into the government of Cicero, a town that has long been associated with corruption, the mob and hardball politics.
The charges made by Niebur and Bue are explosive: Cops making thousands of dollars a month by shaking down undocumented immigrants. Police making false arrests to elicit bribes. Solvable slaying cases languishing for years without arrests. Cops with extensive criminal records.
Niebur and Bue also said they are cooperating with federal investigators who want to know whether town officials are profiting from a lucrative towing contract.
Federal sources on Saturday vouched for Niebur and Bue, calling them “reformers” and supporting their claims that they are working with the U.S. attorney’s office and the FBI. One source said the town’s action against them “appears to be retribution” for their cooperating with federal authorities.
State Police Capt. Bill Davis, a director of investigations, called Niebur and Bue “outstanding individuals who were trying to do the right thing.”
“It is a travesty what is being done to that community,” Davis said. “It doesn’t look like Cicero is ready for reform.”
Now under subpoena by a federal grand jury, the two said they are unable to talk further about their investigation.
But Niebur did say Saturday: “This is the first time the window has ever been opened to the inner workings of the Town of Cicero government. Outsiders don’t come in to Cicero. As soon as outsiders and professional investigators came in, it didn’t take very long to see what was happening here.”
Niebur was hired away from Joplin, Mo., after a yearlong search by the Illinois Police Chiefs Association–a move instigated by Cicero Town President Betty Loren-Maltese, who encouraged her new superintendent to bring reform to what she called a police department “in turmoil.”
But that relationship quickly soured. Loren-Maltese and other officials announced Friday night that they had suspended Niebur and Bue, saying the two had refused an order to cooperate with the town attorney in the town’s own investigation of the towing contract. That investigation had been launched Thursday.
In a 20-minute meeting Friday morning, Niebur and Bue told Town Atty. Merrick Rayle that they had been advised by the U.S. attorney’s office not to discuss the matter with village officials, according to Niebur.
Attempts to reach town officials for comment Saturday were unsuccessful.
Niebur has found himself at the center of storms before. In Minneapolis, he was an aggressive street cop who clashed with brass. When hired to run the police department in Collinsville, Ill., he began investigating town officials and irked some locals with his policing style. He was written about in a Wall Street Journal article as a “Dirty Harry” in a small town.
Bue, whom Niebur describes as the only person in Cicero he trusts, was police chief in Hanover Park and, before then, chief in Sedalia, Mo. Son of a Chicago butcher, Bue spent the first 20 years of his career in the Chicago Police Department.
Niebur said he believes he ran into problems in Cicero because he wasn’t just looking for crime on the streets but also in the police station and Town Hall.
Town officials seem to agree with some aspects of that analysis.
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“The police department is not a mini-inspector general,” Rayle said Friday night.
In the end, it was the towing operation that led to the confrontation between Niebur and town officials.
Shortly after coming to Cicero, Niebur began holding community meetings. He said he heard something curious and disturbing: Many residents, especially Hispanics, complained that the city was towing their cars for no apparent reason and forcing them to pay hundreds of dollars to get the vehicles back.
“There would be 200, 300 cars towed in a night,” Bue said. “There are people standing in lines to pay $200 to get their vehicles back. We would watch them in line, some of them holding children, and we just said, `This is unbelievable. What a rip-off.’ “
Niebur said he learned that Ram Recovery Inc., a Cicero company, had won the town’s no-bid towing contract even though it was incorporated for less than a week before being selected by the Town Board–a claim supported by state records. He also learned that Ram was towing about 45,000 vehicles a year, which seemed to be an astounding number for a small municipality. The City of Chicago, which has nearly 40 times more residents than Cicero, tows about 140,000 illegally parked cars a year.
Niebur said town officials told him that Ram was not providing the city with an accounting of how many cars were recovered by citizens or how much money the company was earning on fines and in sales of unclaimed vehicles.
The battle over the towing contract culminated last week, when, according to Bue and Niebur, Bue found one of the towing company’s officers going through police towing records.
Niebur said he immediately called state police to seize the documents, directly disobeying an order of the town president.
“When we started really getting into this, I suspected they were going to destroy the records,” Niebur said.
Niebur and Bue claim to have found much more in Cicero than a suspicious towing operation.
One of the first things that Niebur did in Cicero was to run criminal background checks on the police officers, something he said had not been done before they were hired.
According to Niebur, one officer had five assault charges and a gambling charge. A second had been arrested for impersonating a police officer and carrying a weapon.
A third officer, Niebur found, had more than a dozen arrests–including stalking, battery and resisting arrest–and an assault conviction before he was hired.
According to court records, this man was given 6 months’ court supervision after he spit on a woman’s face and made telephone threats to her.
“I am coming to your job,” the officer said, according to the records. “I am going to pull you out by your hair.”
Niebur said he believed he was only scratching the surface and began a review of the department’s investigative files on its own officers. He said he found that the Cicero police ignored evidence that officers committed crimes while on duty.
“The whole operation was conducive to extortion, bribery, burglaries by police officers,” Niebur said. “Supervisors never left the station.”
In one case, two officers were captured on videotape in an electronics store allegedly helping a third man use a stolen credit card to buy an expensive video camera. When the store manager checked the credit card and found a problem, Niebur claimed, the officers intervened and told the manager, “You have to take that credit card.”
The two officers and their friend left the store without the video camera after the manager threatened to call other law-enforcement officials, according to Niebur.
Niebur said the same two officers, whom he has since suspended, are also under federal investigation for allegedly shaking down Hispanic motorists.
According to Niebur, the two officers would stop Hispanics in Cicero and ask for immigration papers. If the motorists were in the U.S. illegally, the officers allegedly told them they would be deported unless they gave them several hundred dollars.
The officers, Niebur said, even had a cellular phone on hand if the motorist needed to call a relative for the cash.
When contacted by the Tribune, one of the officers denied that he had tried to rob the electronics store or had ever extorted motorists. He called the video store incident “a misunderstanding.”
“You’ve got to understand this town,” said the officer. “There are lies flying around like crazy. My integrity is impeccable.”
Niebur said he suspended another officer in February for allegedly kicking a 15-year-old Hispanic youth in the head several times. Another officer, he said, resigned after he confronted her with evidence that she allegedly took a $5,000 bribe in exchange for dropping charges against two suspects.
“That is absolutely not true,” said the former officer in an interview. “I resigned because I felt that I couldn’t fight (Niebur).”
Ironically, the former officer said she thought Niebur had done a good job bringing discipline and direction to the department.
“We needed straightening up,” she said. “It’s just that he got a little too carried away.”