Aaron Patterson, the former Death Row inmate turned boisterous community activist, was demanding a federal investigation.
It was 9:30 p.m. on May 26 as Patterson pounded on windows at the Belmont Area police headquarters during a candlelight vigil for a fellow death-penalty foe who had just died while in custody for a drug arrest.
By then, Patterson already had the full attention of federal agents.
Just three hours before the protest, Patterson allegedly sold two bags of marijuana for $1,400 to a confidential informant in a quick transaction behind his mother’s South Side house as authorities watched.
There are “two Aaron Pattersons,” a federal judge concluded earlier this month, ordering Patterson to remain jailed as a potential danger to the community while he awaits trial on new gang-related gun and drug charges.
There’s the tireless celebrity fighter seeking justice for the wrongfully convicted. And, authorities insist, there’s Patterson’s other life as “Ranger,” a street-gang leader dealing in guns, heroin and marijuana when he’s not shouting at the Establishment.
“Which is more believable?” Patterson asked the Tribune in a jailhouse interview Wednesday. “Which have you seen me out there doing more than anything?”
Patterson doesn’t deny a handful of drug deals federal agents captured in taped conversations and surveillance in recent months. The self-proclaimed media stuntman said the transactions were simply his biggest stunt yet: a counter-sting against government agents trying to entrap him.
“I got all kinds of documentation,” he said, charging agents removed reams of evidence from his mother’s house. “I got videotapes, I got an audiotape. I got license plate numbers of the undercover cars. Serial numbers for all the money. Everything.”
Federal prosecutors declined to respond, saying Patterson’s claims will be answered in court.
Saying his risky amateur gumshoe work was inspired in part by documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, Patterson called himself “revolutionary but gangster.”
“Call me Captain Kirk,” he said. “I’m gonna go where no man has gone before.”
An activist path
Patterson picked up a bullhorn right away.
After years of lobbying anyone who would listen, Patterson hit the streets in January 2003 after then-Gov. George Ryan freed him from Death Row, exonerating him of two 1986 murders.
Over and over, Patterson told a story of a false murder confession obtained by police who tortured him. Wearing new business suits and a stern stare, he captivated students in dozens of high school and college classrooms. He filed a $33 million wrongful-conviction lawsuit. He brainstormed ways to lure gang members off the streets with legitimate jobs. Bullhorn in hand, he led protests against war and unjust prosecutions.
In February, for example, he confronted Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald and other authorities in his brash and fearless style, shouting down a news conference to announce a crackdown on gun trafficking.
Buoyed by Ryan’s emptying of Death Row, death penalty foes saw a rising political star.
“My vision for him was like a Bobby Rush,” said Jennifer Bishop-Jenkins, who brought Patterson to the suburban school where she serves as an assistant vice principal. “That was my hope.”
Patterson launched a political career last December with a campaign against state Rep. Patricia Bailey, a member of Chicago’s Democratic machine.
Weeks earlier, the seeds for the federal investigation of Patterson were planted through a seemingly routine drug arrest of an ex-con whose street name was “Fox.”
The Tribune is not naming the informant because he has not been publicly identified and authorities consider him to be at risk.
After being tipped by another street informant, eight cops burst into Fox’s Humboldt Park apartment at 6:30 a.m. Nov. 14. Inside, they found $7,900 in cash and $108,000 worth of drugs–37 bricks of marijuana and a bag of crack cocaine, according to police reports.
Fox, a ranking Latin King gang member who previously had been arrested 13 times, was facing 6 to 30 years in prison if convicted of the new drug charge.
Then he told authorities he could deliver Aaron Patterson.
After his release from prison, Patterson made no secret of his continued affiliation with street gangs. Patterson, a ranking Blackstone Ranger when he was sent to prison in the mid-1980s, used gang members this year to help in his legislative campaign, and he served as a peacemaker on the street, associates said.
But Patterson’s pardon never sat well at the Cook County state’s attorney’s office. For years, prosecutors fought Patterson’s efforts to free himself and are quick to recall he had three previous convictions for attempted murder.
By last fall, prosecutors said, Patterson’s name had surfaced in new gang investigations. Authorities noted he was making visits to gang leaders under watch in the Cook County Jail.
Then Fox “dropped in our lap,” as one prosecutor put it. Fox told authorities he had sold drugs to Patterson in 2003 and had heard him talk about buying an assault rifle, according to the new federal charges.
Court records show Fox bonded out of jail in mid-February and was poised to begin his undercover work as Patterson continued jumping from protest to protest.
More Top Picks Best Beach Umbrellas
On Feb. 23, with bullhorn in hand, Patterson joined a small group from the “We Demand Justice Committee” in front of the Cook County Criminal Courts Building. They marched against the prosecution of a man charged in a fatal 1989 beating outside a Chicago nightclub.
Protest organizer Ruth Pena said she was honored a “star” like Patterson would make time for such a modest event. “He’s inspirational and he’s strong,” Pena recalled thinking. “There’s actually an innocence about him.”
On March 9, at the direction of government investigators, Fox launched a series of taped conversations with Patterson. If they could catch Patterson with guns, the investigators reasoned, a federal conviction could send him back to prison for a minimum of 15 years.
State records show that while Fox got Patterson on tape, Patterson tried to help Fox get his kids out of foster care.
Patterson said Wednesday he knew all along that he was being taped. He said Fox, the government’s informant, was in on his plan to investigate corrupt cops but double-crossed him to solve his own legal woes.
“They did a six-month investigation of me right? Surveillance,” he said. “Where’s the money? I’m running around in my mother’s car because my van is down. How come my pockets ain’t loaded up? There’s no elaborate jewelry. They’re making like I have a criminal enterprise or some stuff.”
Case builds
Yet the taped conversations–as portrayed in the criminal complaint–appear to bluntly contradict Patterson’s made-for-television image as a man of redemption.
“I need some thumpers,” Patterson told Fox in that initial March 9 conversation. Federal officials called that a reference to guns; some of Patterson’s defenders translated it as a call for people to rally, possibly for the state House campaign.
A week after that much-debated remark, Patterson finished a distant third in the election.
“People say they were tired of the police harassing them or the drug dealers dealing from their porch steps,” Patterson said at the time. “But maybe they don’t want change.”
A week after the loss, prosecutors charged, Patterson quoted Fox a price of $2,500 per ounce for heroin.
On April 3, Patterson completed the first of several drug deals with Fox, selling him a half-pound of marijuana for $700, prosecutors charged. Three days later, Patterson and two dozen others rallied outside the offices of special prosecutors investigating fired Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge for systematic police brutality. Patterson told reporters he’d been asked to testify but declined, saying he felt like he was “being interrogated all over again.”
On June 2, while riding with Fox to a funeral, Patterson continued negotiations that soon led him and a third man, Isaiah Kitchen, to sell Fox an additional $16,000 worth of heroin and marijuana, prosecutors charged.
Patterson’s many loyal defenders see holes in the government’s case.
Why, they asked, should the public or a jury believe Fox, an ex-con and ranking Latin King gang member whom the government paid some $6,000 for his taped conversations?
Was it just, they asked, for Fox to go free after getting caught with $108,000 worth of illegal drugs just to set up a sting in which Patterson allegedly dealt in less than $25,000 worth of drugs?
And, they asked, why did Patterson’s arrest come less than a month before the scheduled deposition of Burge, one of the main defendants in Patterson’s civil case?
“Aaron [Patterson] has been subject to a wrongful conviction before,” said Jane Bohman, executive director of the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty. “The timing of this case is certainly suspect. It did occur in a political context.”
The day agents arrested Patterson and searched his mother’s home, a federal judge ruled in his favor, declining motions by the City of Chicago and Cook County to dismiss his civil suit. Those close to Patterson expect him to eventually receive a bountiful settlement.
“There was certainly no financial motivation to do the things the government alleges he did,” said David Protess, a Northwestern University journalism professor who helped free Patterson.
Family dreams
Patterson spent the weekend before his arrest with his newborn daughter, Cimmeria, his first child, born June 29.
Starting a family of his own, the bigger the better, was one of the dreams that sustained him on Death Row. Patterson is expecting another child with a different woman within weeks.
“He did not want to stop; now he wanted a son,” said Nathson Fields, who served time on Death Row with Patterson. Fields is awaiting a new trial.
Patterson used state funds he received for his wrongful conviction to pay for a bond last year to free Fields.
Agents arrested Patterson as he drove his mother’s black Dodge Neon just after an associate allegedly received four guns, including a machine gun, from Fox on Patterson’s behalf. When she later recovered the car, Jo Ann Patterson noted it still contained relics of her son’s activist life.
His trademark bullhorn was on the back-seat floor.
“I just didn’t think I’d ever be back in court again or trying to do a visit to see him in jail,” Jo Ann Patterson said. “I can’t get over this sadness.”
The school year would have meant a full calendar of speaking engagements and protests. Instead, Patterson’s back in a cell, debating whether he is more at home in jail than on the streets.
“Subliminally did I actually put myself in this situation like this and say, `Well, you know what, it’s so crazy out here that maybe I actually do want to go back in jail just to get away from the madness?'” he asked Wednesday. “I ask myself, `You know what? It might be safer being locked up somewhere.’ Wherever I go, I’m going to be all right. I’m going to work, like I work on the streets.”
Even a new conviction wouldn’t diminish Patterson’s past work to free himself and others, his defenders contend.
Rob Warden, head of the Northwestern University Justice Project, said, “If Aaron Patterson has incurred a new debt to society, it was certainly paid in advance.”
———-
AARON PATTERSON was released from Death Row in January 2003 after being pardoned by then-Gov. George Ryan. He walked out of a Downstate prison and into the spotlight and was seemingly everywhere as he protested alleged abuses in the criminal justice system. Now, Patterson finds himself back in jail garb, accused by federal authorities of moving drugs and guns on the streets of Chicago. See PAGE 21 for excerpts of an interview with Patterson.
More Top Picks Best Gaming Mice