He kept a semiautomatic pistol under a slough of magazines by the bed of his Prospect Heights home and a blue steel revolver in the top drawer of his highboy dresser.
Amoco Oil Co. executive Charles E. Merriam would not open his front door to someone he did not trust.
The autumn of 1987 was a particularly volatile time for the 52-year-old former Marine. He was recently separated from his wife of 28 years. And at work, he was forced to ride herd on 825 “pumpers” and mini-marts, some run by rough-and-tumble operators who tried to cheat their customers or the government.
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Among them was station owner Frank Milito, who courted Chicago politicians and top police officials.
When Milito was sentenced to federal prison for tax fraud, Merriam moved to terminate his Amoco leases.
Milito responded with a veiled threat, court and police records allege, although Milito today denies making one.
Merriam was ready for sleep, clad in blue- and red-striped pajama bottoms and a gold Seiko watch, when the doorbell rang sometime after 10:20 p.m. on Nov. 4, 1987.
His porch light was on and three small windows framed each side of the front door, making it easy to see who was outside.
He opened the door then tried to pin it shut. The effort split his lip and pressed a foot-long bruise across his ribs.
A bullet smashed through the door and into his stomach. Another tore through his chest.
The third slug came from a smaller pistol, a .25-caliber handgun held to the top of Merriam’s head.
This is a story about Chicago’s twin towers of respectability and corruption. It is about the murdered and the living, and a past that won’t stay dead.
For 13 years, the executive’s unsolved slaying has licked at the consciences of police officials in this prairie metropolis and stood as an emblem of crime’s brazen reach into the highest echelons of civic life.
The events of that night and new details about the deeply rooted conflict between Merriam and Milito have been drawn from court records, interviews and internal records from eight law enforcement agencies. Milito, who declined to cooperate with the homicide investigation, said through an attorney that he has no connection to the killing.
But Milito’s personal and financial relationships with Chicago and Cook County sheriff’s police officials–including his extensive bonds with former Chicago police Supt. Matt Rodriguez–cast a shadow over the ill-starred homicide probe, records and interviews show.
News of the slaying and the high-profile investigation made headlines for days. Overseen by a friend of Rodriguez’s on the Cook County Sheriff’s Police Department, the probe bogged down amid weeks-long delays in processing the crime scene and the loss of internal computer files.
Rodriguez and retired Cook County Sheriff’s Police Department Capt. George J. Nicosia said in Tribune interviews that their friendship had no bearing on the case.
Rodriguez publicly acknowledged his friendship with Milito during a November 1997 Tribune interview, and a day later he resigned in disgrace.
Milito’s ties to Rodriguez and the specter of police corruption caused at least one important witness in the Merriam killing to be frightened to cooperate and caused some investigators to privately question the integrity of the probe, records and interviews show.
In October 1988–two months before the homicide investigation would be quietly shelved–Milito got involved in a business deal that tied him to officials from the agencies that investigated him.
Milito and a mob-linked Chicago police officer invested alongside a top sheriff’s department official on the Caribbean island of Curacao, where they bought shares of a hotel and casino tied to the crime syndicate.
In internal reports, local police and FBI agents linked Merriam’s killing to two other unsolved 1980s homicides because three close-knit gas station owners surfaced as witnesses or potential suspects in each. Besides the Merriam slaying, investigators focused on the 1982 killing of mechanic Richard Campbell and the 1986 killing of gambler Giuseppe Cocozza.
Authorities have never publicly declared Milito a suspect in the Merriam homicide, although he is described that way in internal law enforcement reports.
No physical evidence emerged linking any person to the crime, and although the case has been reopened periodically, no charges have been brought.
Milito’s attorney, Paul Julian, said there is “a wide-open field” of others who had incentive to harm Merriam. In the months before he was slain, Merriam presided over Amoco’s effort to convert some repair garages to mini-marts, a policy that angered some rank-and-file dealers who feared profits would shift to the parent company.
And Julian suggested that the killing could have stemmed from Merriam’s family or personal relationships.
Some of Merriam’s friends, relatives and colleagues told sheriff’s investigators they suspected that Milito had a role in the Merriam killing, but others at Amoco dismissed that possibility. Julian noted that some Amoco officials continue to dine and travel with Milito.
“What that tells you is, the people who know him best don’t believe he is capable of this kind of behavior,” Julian said.
A tumultuous rebirth
Sorting through the fragments of Merriam’s life, investigators cobbled together a portrait of hard-won pedigree.
His grandfather Charles E. Merriam was a University of Chicago political science professor, former Hyde Park alderman and unsuccessful reform candidate for mayor in 1911.
His uncle, former 5th Ward Ald. Robert Merriam, was a decorated World War II captain who ran as a Republican against Mayor Richard J. Daley in 1955, then served on President Dwight Eisenhower’s staff. As an alderman and later as a public figure, Robert Merriam was a fierce critic of the way Chicago’s political patronage system had clouded the integrity of its police department. In one speech, he demanded that Daley reform the Police Department after the Summerdale District police burglary scandal broke in 1960.
At 52, the scion of this legacy was undergoing a tumultuous personal rebirth.
Since he joined Amoco after his 1959 Marines discharge, Charles Merriam developed a reputation as an exacting taskmaster who sometimes humiliated those who disappointed him. He had hit a corporate dead end when Amoco denied him a vice presidency during a 1986 company reshuffling that put him in charge of the volatile Chicago district.
He opened Amoco’s 100-person district office each morning at 6:30 with a Dr Pepper in hand and he pummeled a handball at the Lattof YMCA in Des Plaines. In August 1987, after marriage counseling failed, he told his wife their union was over and moved into a townhouse on the second fairway of the Rob Roy Country Club golf course. He dated the secretary who helped him run the district office, a 52-year-old whose husband had died five years earlier. Barbara Brand declined to comment for this report.
As he wrestled to control stations across three states, Merriam’s job put him on a collision course with a man who was in many ways his social opposite, Frank Milito.
Milito started with next to nothing when he arrived in Chicago from a picturesque Italian village in the Salerno province in 1962. Within two decades, Milito had built up an array of businesses that employed more than 50 people and included eight gas stations, two travel agencies, a popular Old Town restaurant and condos and commercial buildings worth $1 million, records show. Some of those businesses were turned over to family members, although Milito still has a strong voice in their operation, his attorney said.
He showed up at work at 7 a.m. most days and sometimes slept in his gas station. He was among the Midwest’s largest and most loyal sellers of Amoco’s brands of tires, batteries and auto accessories. He sponsored a Boy Scout troop and a Gordon Tech bowling team, and became a Mason and a member of the Lion’s Club.
In the evenings, he held court at his restaurant, Orso’s, at 1401 N. Wells St. As he shared the bounty of his kitchen and bar, his conversation flowed from stilted English to a rich, lyrical Italian. He gave generously to charities and political campaigns. Between 1984 and 1995, for example, Milito donated an office below his 732 W. Fullerton Ave. travel agency to the 43rd Ward Democratic Committee.
Chicago politicians returned the immigrant entrepreneur’s largesse.
During the 1980s, Milito worked as a $600-a-month investigator for the City Council Committee on Traffic and Public Safety, a patronage job that came with health benefits for his family. He was appointed a Cook County Holiday Court bailiff, which brought the right to carry a gun and badge. And Milito held a second badge as an unpaid deputy coroner of Kane County.
Up-and-coming police brass flocked to Orso’s to discuss department politics and to toast promotions. Ushered past a gallery of framed pictures of judges and aldermen, they demurred when Milito picked up their tabs.
But Milito’s relationship with Rodriguez went deeper. Milito took him on trips to Italy and Israel. He hired Rodriguez’s son-in-law at the restaurant, registered Rodriguez with a travel association so he could enjoy discount fares, and donated $1,000 to a police party held to honor Rodriguez’s 1992 appointment to superintendent.
Until 1986, Milito’s criminal record consisted of a single city pump ordinance violation, for which he paid a $15 fine.
But during the 1980s, he failed to report the sale of $4.6 million worth of gas from four stations–about a quarter of the total volume, federal prosecutors alleged. In 1986, he pleaded guilty to mail fraud and a tax charge.
Milito’s felony conviction gave Amoco the right to cancel his leases, and Merriam intended to do so.
The enforcer
Merriam moved quickly to terminate Amoco’s leases on Milito’s stations, forcing Milito to sell the businesses to third parties at greatly reduced prices.
Milito’s conviction was humiliating, his attorney later said in court, but “even more devastating to Milito is the action taken by Amoco Oil Co. against him as a result of his conviction.”
Milito fought to keep his last station, a 24-hour operation at 1106 W. Fullerton Ave. that featured a car wash, Amoco CertiCare mechanics and full-serve pumps in the heart of the wealthy DePaul enclave.
He enlisted the help of then-Chicago parks Supt. Edmund Kelly, who called Merriam personally to request leniency. Merriam brushed off the powerful North Side ward heeler, saying he intended to follow Amoco’s rules, court records show.
Amoco sales manager John Aldworth–a mid-level executive who dined with Milito and received gifts of wine from him–asked Merriam to be compassionate with Milito and arranged a meeting between Milito and Merriam at the Town & Country restaurant on North Avenue. Over a cup of coffee, Merriam refused to budge. “My opinion was that he would keep none of the service stations,” Merriam said in a later court deposition. “[I] told him this to his face.”
According to an internal Amoco Law Department memo, Milito responded that if Amoco took his Fullerton Avenue station, he might as well get a gun and take his own life.
After he was petitioned by other Amoco salesmen, Merriam agreed to a compromise: Milito could keep his last station as long as his prison sentence was less than 60 days.
“I didn’t like it, but I could live with it,” Merriam testified of the deal.
But instead of issuing a 60-day sentence, U.S. District Judge Prentice Marshall chastised Milito for his “massive fraud” and ordered him to serve 9 months in prison.
To keep his last station, Milito began a series of maneuvers in and out of court.
His attorneys pleaded for a sentence reduction, telling Marshall that Amoco had agreed to let Milito keep his lease if he spent 60 days in jail followed by a longer work-release program.
An Amoco attorney later told a federal judge there was “no evidence” of any such agreement. But on the basis of those assurances, Marshall modified Milito’s sentence to 60 days followed by 7 months of work release, when he would be allowed to leave the prison for eight hours on weekdays.
Milito immediately phoned Amoco salesmen and told them his sentence had been reduced to 60 days–not mentioning that he would spend another 7 months in prison while on work release, court records show. When he was gone from the station that spring, he told Amoco salesmen he was in Italy, instead of prison.
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When Amoco asked for written confirmation of his sentence, Milito’s attorneys sent a letter claiming he was imprisoned for a total of 58 days.
Milito spent 114 full days in prison, plus 154 evenings and nights while he was on work release, court records show. When Merriam learned about the work-release program, in the summer of 1987, he moved to cancel Milito’s Fullerton lease.
Milito responded with a federal lawsuit. On Sept. 3, the day after the last night he spent in prison, Milito pitched himself into his civil court battle.
Over the next week, he sat as a silent witness at the depositions of a dozen Amoco employees.
At his deposition, Amoco Territory Manager Patrick M. Saunders recounted a meeting in Milito’s office as Amoco was taking Milito’s stations. Milito said “that he didn’t believe in judges, lawyers or courts, and that Merriam had better not mess with his last station,” Saunders said.
An Amoco attorney asked Saunders if he felt Milito was threatening Merriam.
“I believed he was serious,” Saunders replied.
Merriam, who testified at the trial, told his grown children that he was nervous Milito might retaliate, sheriff’s department records show.
Through his attorney Julian, Milito today denies making that statement to Saunders or threatening Merriam in any way.
Milito’s words may sometimes be strong, Julian said, “but his use of language doesn’t translate into a serious intent to do bodily harm. Frank is not the kind of guy who is going to act on a threat.”
On Sept. 15, Judge Harry D. Leinenweber ruled against Milito, saying that Amoco had a right to revoke his lease. “It is amply supported by common sense” that Milito spent more than 60 days in jail, Leinenweber ruled.
Over the next five days, lawyers for both sides eventually settled on the compromise offered by Merriam months earlier: They agreed that Amoco would transfer the Fullerton lease to Milito’s sons.
With that truce, the litigation was dismissed Sept. 22.
Six weeks later, on Tuesday, Nov. 3, Merriam drove to Milwaukee for a scheduled meeting with Wisconsin territory managers. He told Wisconsin field sales manager Roy A. Mathias about the Milito case, saying an Amoco attorney had asked him if he was concerned for his safety. To his subordinate, Merriam admitted to no concerns.
About 2 p.m. the next day, Merriam began the roughly three-hour drive home. At just before 5 p.m.–about the time he might have arrived–a six-second call was made to Merriam’s home from the pay phone inside the gas station of Pierre Zonis, a friend of Milito’s who later joined the Police Department.
Police believe the purpose of the call was to see if Merriam was home. When sheriff’s investigators interviewed him, Zonis denied any knowledge of the phone call placed from his station. When they asked him to take a polygraph test, Zonis said through an attorney that he would answer no further questions.
Zonis said in a recent interview that he had no idea who made the call.
Merriam wasn’t home to answer his phone because he had stopped for dinner with a friend at a Greek restaurant in Oak Brook. He got home around 9 and called Brand to invite her over. Her stomach was upset from a bad dinner at a shopping mall, so she stopped by for less than an hour.
About 10:15 on the last evening of his life, Merriam gave Brand a bottle of ginger ale and walked her to her Oldsmobile Cutlass.
`A solvable case’
The homicide investigation was handled by sheriff’s Capt. Nicosia, who declared it “a solvable case.”
Nicosia and Chicago police Supt. Rodriguez had been friends and golfing buddies since 1977, when they both attended a nine-month police administration training program at Northwestern University’s Traffic Institute.
Word of Rodriguez’s links to both Nicosia and Milito spread through law enforcement and Amoco circles, and then to Merriam’s family and friends, sheriff’s department reports and interviews indicate.
In one 1988 report, a woman close to Merriam said she was terrified of cooperating with police because she feared harm to her children or herself. Years later, another sheriff’s investigator pressed her to elaborate.
According to the investigator, the woman cited Rodriguez’s friendship with Milito and asked: “How are you going to offer me protection?”
Rodriguez said in an interview that he did not believe his relationship with Milito affected the case–and he suggested that investigators might be “using that as an excuse” for their failure to solve the crime.
Nicosia personally directed the processing of the crime scene. The procedure, which usually takes hours, dragged on for weeks.
The team did not search Merriam’s house thoroughly enough to find the gun by his bed until two days after the slaying, sheriff’s police reports show.
It took two more weeks before sheriff’s investigators again searched the house and found shells and fragments from the bullets that killed Merriam and that could help identify the pistols used.
Two days after that, sheriff’s investigators decided to test the blood-stained jackets in the foyer to determine if anyone else was hurt in the struggle.
It was not until three months later that sheriff’s investigators hypnotized a neighbor who had heard noises and noticed a strange car from her window. Under police-monitored hypnosis by a forensic psychologist, the neighbor recalled vivid details about the getaway car. The vehicle was never found.
Sheriff’s investigators hired an assistant who worked overtime typing clues into a computer database, but those computer diskettes disappeared. The loss of the computer records slowed the investigation and frustrated investigators who tried to reopen the case in the mid-1990s.
A potential break in the investigation came four days after the killing, when a neighbor down the street found a small piece of paper with Merriam’s address on one side and “241 W. Palatine” written on the other.
Figuring the second address might have been the killers’ meeting place or a drop-off point for cars, sheriff’s investigators drove to the 200 block of West Palatine Road in Prospect Heights and found a small shopping center on that side of the street.
In fact, West Palatine Road runs through four northwest suburbs, including only one with the exact address of 241 W. Palatine Rd. In neighboring Wheeling, the address is about a half mile from Merriam’s home. But Sheriff’s investigators never found it.
In 1987, the site held a ball-bearing manufacturing plant with a parking lot that usually emptied by 8 p.m. The lot was unsecured and secluded from the street, a plant official said. It was visible from a nearby housing development, where potential witnesses might have been located.
Another missed opportunity concerned a friend of Merriam’s who saw a stranger casing Merriam’s activities shortly before the killing. The friend was shown a set of photographs by the Tribune and identified the stranger as a violent mob associate.
Merriam’s friend asked that he not be identified because he feared for his family’s safety and said he did not want to be put in contact with authorities because he suspected police corruption played a role in the case.
He had described encountering the stranger to sheriff’s police days after the killing, a former investigator said in an interview. But for reasons that are not clear, his account of the incident was not included in the 112-page homicide report sheriff’s investigators completed 13 months after the killing.
During the Tribune interview, Merriam’s friend gave a description of the man’s car that closely matched that given to sheriff’s investigators by the hypnotized neighbor.
Thirteen months after the slaying, in December 1988, sheriff’s police filed a memo suspending the case “due to the lack of active, viable investigative leads.”
Nicosia, who retired in July 1999, said he recalled few of the case’s forensic details.
“There were a lot of dead ends in that case and a lot of leads that never got closed for whatever reason,” he said. “You just keep trying everything that’s there.
“Mr. Milito was probably the strongest lead that we had because of recent issues with regard to his businesses and Mr. Merriam testifying against him in a federal trial.”
Nicosia added: “I don’t know of anything at the time that could be done that wasn’t done. I was very proud of the investigators.”
Still in business
After Milito completed his 1987 prison term, his cluster of businesses was diminished–but still bolstered by government contracts.
His wife, Nicolina–who asked the judge to reduce Milito’s sentence because she would be helpless if he was sent to prison–ran a company called Peacock in the Park Ltd., which held several Chicago Park District contracts to run food concessions on the lakefront.
Peacock held the concession leases for about a decade, until 1996. Park District officials said they could locate only 12 pages of records pertaining to the contracts and could not determine how much Peacock earned from the concessions.
Milito’s Car Wash held a city contract to wash police cars. Milito’s wife also is listed as the president of that company, which has been paid more than $90,000 by the city since 1990. To qualify as a women- and minority-owned business, Milito’s Car Wash listed a subcontract to a firm that sells frozen chocolate-covered bananas. City purchasing officials raised no questions about the subcontract, records and interviews show.
Starting in the late 1980s, state officials notified Milito that his stations owed about $1 million in penalties and interest on state tax debts, according to court and revenue records and Milito’s attorney. Milito’s attorneys petitioned the Illinois Department of Revenue Board of Appeals to reduce his tax debt “so that he can go on with his life without the burden, stress and frustration that this heavy tax debt imposes,” board papers show.
As part of his successful effort to lower his tax obligation, Milito gave state revenue officials a list of his assets and liabilities as of May 1989. Not mentioned was the $240,000 Milito invested in a Caribbean casino run by Chicago mob figure Vincent “Jimmy” Cozzo.
Milito’s attorney said the Curacao investment was not included because the shares were held in the names of Milito’s sons. In casino correspondence, Cozzo refers to them as Milito’s shares.
In the early 1990s, federal agents investigated whether Amoco gas station operators submitted false claims for defective batteries. Stations operated by Milito’s son, Zonis and Milito’s brothers-in-law Vincenzo and Marco D’Agostino were among the 19 locations that made $146,000 in questionable battery claims between 1984 and 1989, internal Amoco records and court papers show.
None of the station operators was charged with wrongdoing, but Amoco territory manager Kenneth Rago was convicted in 1992 of federal fraud for mailing battery claim reimbursement documents to Zonis’ gas station as part of the scheme.
Rago declined to comment. Zonis said in an interview that he didn’t remember getting the letters from Rago and that he made no improper battery claims.
The investigation into the battery claims was just one probe that brought Milito, Zonis and Vincenzo D’Agostino together. The three men were examined as part of an investigation into the Merriam homicide and two others. Those cases led detectives into grease-smeared garages where crime figures and police officials passed time.
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In recent years, federal agents have investigated whether Milito paid his employees in cash, understated his income and concealed his financial interest in the Curacao casino, an internal federal law enforcement report shows.
No charges have been brought against Milito from that ongoing investigation, and Julian said Milito accurately reported his finances to government agencies.
Federal prosecutors last year convicted Milito’s two in-house bookkeepers of tax fraud for not reporting their cash income.
Milito, who still has many friends among Amoco executives, in 1996 brought then-Supt. Rodriguez as his golf partner to an Amoco outing at Indian Lakes Resort in Bloomingdale, a company employee later told federal investigators.
A year later, he traveled to Italy as a delegate to a Cook County-sponsored trade mission to promote overseas business.
While Milito thrived, Merriam’s family and friends struggled to make peace with his slaying.
In the shopping season before Christmas a few years ago, Merriam’s youngest son, Kenneth, took Merriam’s widow, Carol, to lunch at Milito’s restaurant, Orso’s.
Ken chose a table that gave his mother an unobstructed view of the wall of autographed photos of top city and police officials.
A police portrait of then-Supt. Rodriguez was inscribed with a heartfelt testimonial to the convicted felon who ran the restaurant: “Frank–you have bridged that gap between a friend and a brother. Matt.”
Ken Merriam turned to his mother. “Now do you see why this case has never been solved?” he recalls asking.
Before she could catch her breath, Milito himself appeared at their table to serve them.
A handsome man with dark eyebrows and snowy hair, he was gracious and attentive, and gave no hint he knew anything about the family.
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Tuesday: Gas stations, cops and killings