An immense and meticulously researched paper trail ultimately was the most significant evidence that led jurors to convict former Cicero Town President Betty Loren-Maltese in a multimillion-dollar insurance fraud after 11 days of often tense deliberation.
“The case was complex, but it was a tremendous government case,” said jury foreman Richard Kish, 38, of Geneva in an interview Tuesday. “The volumes and volumes of evidence they had acquired–the paper trail and the money trail and the wire transfers–were very important. They were able to put it all together.”
Each morning, in a small room on the 12th floor of the Dirksen Federal Building, the jurors gathered to weigh the fate of Loren-Maltese and seven others accused in the scheme, including reputed Cicero mob boss Michael Spano Sr.
They were surrounded by a sea of paper–the government exhibits filled four metal carts–including invoices, checks, income tax filings, ledger books and records of numerous wire transfers from the town to a mob-connected insurance carrier, Specialty Risk Consultants, that amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece.
There also were blown-up photographs of a golf course in Wisconsin, a horse farm in Indiana and several black Cadillacs, all of which prosecutors said were bought with Cicero town money laundered through Specialty Risk.
The records documented a money drain out of Cicero so enormous and constant that it would have been impossible for Loren-Maltese not to have understood what was going on, said juror Louvenia Dixon, 53, a West Side homemaker.
“It wasn’t right what they did, and how they had the guts to do it I don’t know,” said Dixon, reflecting Tuesday on Loren-Maltese, Spano and five others found guilty in the scheme. “How did they sleep at night?”
Another defendant, former Town Treasurer Joseph DeChicio, was acquitted.
Though Dixon and many other jurors found the government case compelling, the jury had a rocky time reaching consensus.
Kish, a supervisor in a private facility for abused and neglected adolescent girls, said the jury room would become warmer with the afternoon sun, prompting him to turn the thermostat down “as far as it would go–it only went to 68 degrees.”
As the temperature rose, so often did tempers. “But we always kept talking, we never stopped talking,” Kish said.
When the jury first got the case after 10 weeks of testimony, there was disagreement about the guilt of several defendants. But one juror, a man from the southwest suburbs, stood out to the point that others considered him an obstructionist bent on acquitting everybody.
Sharon Schmitz, 46, a bartender from Chicago’s Southwest Side, said she argued with the man almost daily. “I blew up at [him] at some level almost every day,” she said.
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At one point, she said, the man questioned whether failing to report income to the government, one of the charges, was really a crime. She assured him that it was, and then, sarcastically, suggested that an FBI agent be summoned to clarify that point.
“He was really antagonistic and very defensive,” she said.
Schmitz wasn’t the only one who lost patience with the man. At one point, another juror asked the holdout whether he considered Specialty Risk to be “a legitimate business.” “The man said `Yes,'” recalled juror Larry Odom. “Every juror’s mouth just dropped. … One of the other jurors said, `Where have you been? Have you been watching the same trial?'”
Holdout pressured, he says
The holdout, who spoke on condition that his name not be used, eventually voted guilty on all the defendants except DeChicio. After the trial, he said he was pressured by the other jurors into doing something he later regretted.
“No one forced him to sign the verdicts,” Kish said. “I was with him all the way, asking him, `What do you need?’ But we knew the verdicts had to be unanimous.”
Each day, the jurors methodically worked through evidence against a particular defendant, moving on to another defendant only if they became deadlocked on an issue, Schmitz said.
Schmitz said they relied heavily on notes taken at trial. She filled seven spiral notebooks. Another female juror filled 10. Most others filled four or five.
By the end of the first week of deliberations, most of the jurors felt they had evidence to convict seven of the defendants but acquit DeChicio, Dixon said.
Schmitz and Kish said the first defendant to be considered was Bonnie LaGiglio, wife of SRC official John LaGiglio. She faced only a count of tax fraud.
They then took up the cases against John LaGiglio, Spano and his son, Michael Jr., Loren-Maltese, former Cicero Public Safety Director Emil Schullo, DeChicio and then attorney Charles Schneider. “We all tried very hard not to lump them all together,” Schmitz said.
Odom, 44, of Itasca, an administrative manager for Xerox Capital Services, said the initial vote on DeChicio was six for conviction and six for acquittal. That changed, Odom said, as jurors came to realize how no evidence linked DeChicio to key elements and players in the fraud scheme as it unfolded.
“DeChicio went to work and went home. In the end, we couldn’t convict him just for doing his job,” Odom said.
When it came to Loren-Maltese, Odom said the initial vote was nine for conviction and three–including Kish–favoring acquittal. All three seemed unshakable for two days, Odom said. “I thought it was going to be a hung jury with Betty.”
Still, by the end of the first week, the deliberations had resulted in unanimous votes to convict Bonnie LaGiglio and acquit DeChicio. The jury was divided 11-1 for conviction on the remaining defendants, with the one male juror being the holdout. So the jurors went through the evidence again, in effect retrying the case, Schmitz said.
Trying to persuade the holdout to change his mind, jurors took turns working one-on-one with him to overcome his objections. With little else to do while this went on, the rest of the group gazed out the windows. “We spent a lot of time looking out at the city. It got to be like our home away from home,” Odom said.
No `smoking gun’
There was no single “smoking gun,” Kish said, “The case was based a lot on circumstantial evidence, but I felt that it was proven. The documents corroborated the testimony of witnesses.”
Odom said Loren-Maltese’s defense that she was an unwitting pawn of Spano and others in the scheme did not hold up in the face of testimony that she fired two deputies after they began to dig into improprieties at Specialty Risk.
“It was too weird that the two deputy treasurers who started really looking hard at SRC are fired like that,” Odom said. “Somehow, somebody got to Betty, and Betty took action.”
Prosecutors presented evidence at trial that Loren-Maltese had numerous phone conversations, business dealings and even long car trips to Wisconsin and Indiana with several others in the scheme, including Spano Sr. who invited her to refer to him as Cousin Mike. Odom said it was impossible to believe Loren-Maltese could have remained ignorant of the fraud after all that contact.
Kish and other jurors–contradicting a claim from the holdout–said there was no mention of organized crime during the deliberations. “I didn’t feel any presence of the mob,” Kish said.
Kish said the jurors were stunned after delivering their verdicts Friday to learn they were still not finished–that they would have to return Monday for a separate hearing, at which they ordered Loren-Maltese and most of the others found guilty to forfeit millions of dollars in cash and property to the government.
“We thought we were done,” Kish said. “The [federal] marshals led us out, taking us down into the basement and through a tunnel–it was like a spy movie, walking through catacombs with water dripping from the ceiling. They led us out of the [Kluczynski] federal building across the street.
“I came out and was just standing there with the buildings all around,” he said. “And suddenly I felt so lonely. I could see the press across the street. I just felt alone.”
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