Three days after a federal jury convicted Cicero Town President Betty Loren-Maltese and six others on corruption charges, one of the jurors on Monday expressed misgivings about the verdict even as the defendants were ordered to forfeit millions of dollars in cash and property.
The juror, a south suburban man who spoke on condition he not be identified, said he was the final holdout against finding Loren-Maltese guilty in connection with a mob-connected insurance scheme that siphoned more than $12 million from her town. He said he switched his vote on Friday under extreme pressure from the others.
By Monday, after the jury took a separate vote on the forfeiture, the man left court saying he had second thoughts. “You’ve got to have evidence,” he said. “You can’t send somebody to jail without evidence. They showed me some evidence she was involved, but I still questioned it.”
The man described the 11 days of deliberations as so rancorous that at one point another male juror jumped atop a table to emphasize a point.
Another juror, Sharon Schmitz, said the panel initially was split on several of the defendants. But she said the deliberations were prolonged in part because the south suburban man didn’t seem to want to convict anybody. “At times we couldn’t reach an agreement, and we would get frustrated to the point of tears,” said Schmitz, a bartender from the city’s Southwest Side.
Monday’s forfeiture order means that Loren-Maltese and several of her co-defendants, including reputed Cicero mob boss Michael Spano Sr., will have to turn over $4 million in illicit profits as well as a golf course and a vacation home, both in Wisconsin, bought with money stolen in the scheme.
Loren-Maltese was able to sneak away Monday from the Dirksen Federal Building out of sight of a horde of reporters and cameramen, but later at a news conference in Cicero, she remained defiant, saying she was stunned at her conviction and proud of her accomplishments in Cicero.
“I still am in shock, and I really feel that we will win on appeal,” Loren-Maltese said at her town Republican committeeman’s office. “I don’t want to think negatively.”
Speaking out for the first time now that the jury had completed its work, heads of both the FBI and IRS in Chicago made references to Cicero’s corruption and infamous ties to legendary mob boss Al Capone in lauding their joint investigative efforts that led to Loren-Maltese’s fall from power.
“I hope this is a final blow in Cicero to changing a way of life that’s gone on since Al Capone,” Thomas Kneir, special agent in charge of the FBI in Chicago, told reporters.
The jury’s forfeiture order was complicated. Loren-Maltese and most other defendants were ordered to turn over a total of $4 million in cash as well as the property. They also were assigned varying amounts of liability for which they each could be personally responsible if the government has trouble collecting.
For Loren-Maltese, her liability was set at $3.25 million. For Spano and his business partner, John LaGiglio, it was $4 million each. For Spano’s son, Michael Jr., it was $3.15 million; for attorney Charles Schneider it was $1.925 million; and for Emil Schullo, former Cicero public safety director, it was $1.8 million.
Authorities said the nine-hole Four Seasons golf course, located on a remote island near the Michigan border, could be worth an additional $2.5 million.
Spano’s Wisconsin vacation home, built in the early 1990s for $340,000, could fetch almost double that today, authorities said.
Assistant U.S. Atty. Mitchell Mars, chief of the office’s organized crime section, said prosecutors would try to freeze property and bank accounts owned by the defendants to collect the money.
Loren-Maltese’s lawyer, Terence Gillespie, said she was worried about losing her home in Cicero as well as another she owns in Las Vegas.
Prosecutors could also try to seize at least $300,000 in political funds invested in the golf course project.
Loren-Maltese and the others could be ordered at sentencing to pay large sums in restitution as well, said Mars, who prosecuted the case with Matthew Schneider and Stephen Andersson.
Sentencing isn’t likely until early next year.
Prosecutors are scheduled to return to court Tuesday in an attempt to have Spano Sr. and LaGiglio jailed as dangers to the community in light of their convictions.
Federal officials vowed to remain vigilant toward public corruption in Cicero. Other indictments could result from ongoing investigations of alleged kickbacks from Cicero vendors to win lucrative town business, according to sources.
Though many jurors declined to comment Monday, those who did talk had sometimes radically different takes on what occurred in the jury room.
More Top Picks Best Lenovo Laptops
Dick Petit, a 53-year-old electrical engineer from Hoffman Estates, described the prolonged deliberations as “grueling,” but said every one on the panel “got along well.”
“It was a very good–and I hate to use this word–team,” he said. “We had good discussions.”
Schmitz, on the other hand, was frustrated by the south suburban man, whom she described as almost always the holdout whenever the jury appeared near agreement. “We felt we were retrying the case again for [him],” she said. “I don’t know what planet they got him from. [He] didn’t want to convict anybody.”
The south suburban juror said throughout much of the deliberations the panel was split 9-3 to convict Loren-Maltese. Slowly, two of the three men who had voted to acquit Loren-Maltese changed their mind, he said.
Only on the last day of deliberations, the juror said, did he decide to convict Loren-Maltese with great reluctance.
“They ganged up on me,” he said of other jurors. “I was totally upset about the whole process.”
He said the jury struggled the most over the convictions of Loren-Maltese, Schullo and Schneider.
While the jury began deliberations as friends who exchanged home numbers, they ended with some people barely acknowledging each other, the juror said.
The juror said everyone agreed to deliberate until they reached a verdict.
But he said, “The question is when everything is so confusing, and it’s such a lengthy trial, there are disputes about what was said.”
The elder Spano’s reputed mob connections also came up in the jury room, the juror said, even though U.S. District Senior Judge John Grady had forbidden its mention in court as too prejudicial to the defendants.
That too upset the juror.
“They weren’t supposed to bring that up. We’re only supposed to use the evidence,” he said.
The same three jurors also decided to convict Schullo on the final day of deliberations, he said.
Schullo “got the rawest deal,” said the juror, who indicated he couldn’t find any evidence to connect Schullo to the conspiracy other than a sweetheart lease deal on a Cadillac.
The jury acquitted Joseph DeChicio, the town’s former treasurer, buying his defense that he was a figurehead who “was just signing the documents” that transferred millions of dollars in town funds to Spano’s company, Specialty Risk Consultants, the juror said.
At her news conference later Monday, Loren-Maltese said she hasn’t broken the news yet to her 5-year-old daughter that she likely will be going to prison.
Maintaining her innocence, Loren-Maltese said her appeal is about “personal justice.”
“It still does not make sense to me, because I did nothing wrong,” Loren-Maltese said of her conviction.
She blamed any divisions in Cicero on the news media and her opponents and said she was proud of her tenure as president, citing providing senior citizens with lawn mowing and snow clearing, organizing a youth council, cracking down on gangs and fighting a rally the Ku Klux Klan wanted to stage in the town.
Loren-Maltese claimed she was taken advantage of by people who claimed to be friends of her late husband, Frank Maltese, the town assessor and a convicted mob bookmaker who was instrumental in her appointment to town president in 1993, before he died of cancer.
Loren-Maltese denied she is as wealthy as some people think, saying she lost money on the sale of a vacation home in Indiana and has a $300,000 mortgage on her Las Vegas house.