It Could Happen Here - Four Stories of Torture, Rape and Murder from the Chicago Police Department Part 2

Episode Date: February 18, 2022

In part 2 of our jaunt staring into the abyss of the crimes of the Chicago Police Department we get the story of 2 internal CPD cartels and the CPD's blacksite Homan Square, which is still open to this day. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Here? All right. Well, that's the introduction. I'm Robert Evans and my work's done for today. Chris? Yeah, it's me. It's Christopher. We are back with two more stories of rape, torture, and murder from the Chicago Police Department. What a fun show we have.

Yeah, it's great. Well, you know, okay, this one will be more fun than last time, because... Okay, so basically, since I started showing up on this show, I have a case i have been dropping references to the fact that the chicago police department is literally a cartel and today i am finally telling the story of how the thing's a little unfair to cartels to be honest but yeah also also i didn't mention this before we go in there's also a bonus cartel because while i was doing research on one of the cartels i realized that i couldn't actually talk about it without talking about the other cartel so there's two there are two completely unrelated cpd cartels that will show up in this story uh yeah it's great so all right this is the story

of ronald watts now ronald watts joined the cpd in 1994 after serving in the army making him yet another example of the fabled troop cop combination that produces the worst people on Earth. Watts was assigned to patrol Chicago's old public housing projects. Now, Watts is from housing himself. okay so some of the people who knew him before he went into the police claimed that like he was just always like a drug dealer and that he went into the police to like drug deal more i don't know if that's true because i mean he's also in the army for a while so i i don't know it's sort of unclear but you know he's for other projects he knows the terrain well and that's why he was an extremely effective agent of terror in a place where officers would regularly drive by,

blasting the N-word and other racial slurs out of their cop car speakers. Yeah, here's the intercept describing what, like, Chicago cops are just doing at the projects. They were officers who founded a museum to toy with those under their power, arranging a foot race of heroin addicts to determine who would go to jail, for example, or forcing a woman they had searched on the street to walk home naked from the waist down. It's... Yeah, it's people who find joy in exerting their power

over other people, and they think it's funny. Yeah. That's why they become cops. Yep. And the other reason you become a cop is the second thing that they do constantly, which is they just walk into the lobbies of these buildings, just start taking everyone's money. And they literally call the lobbies of these public housing buildings, quote, their ATM machine.

So they're just doing this constantly. There's also cops. This is not every cop. There are specific cops who do this who would show up on the 1st and the 15th of the month, wait for everyone to cash their paychecks, and then rob them. And, you know, the thing I think is important about this is that, okay, so, like, Watts and, like, the specific cartels do this, but this isn't just Watts.

This is, like, this is everyone who's working at these projects is just walking up, like, to, like, the poorest people in Chicago and just robbing them constantly. Yeah, like, this is is you know this this is just how regular policing works and the elite units are even worse so uh cartel number one or i guess i guess cartel number two since we've introduced watts but so there used to be a an

elite unit in the chicago police force called the special operations section or sos and these guys these guys are different because they you know they're they're not attached to like an area or specific you know they're just completely their own thing they're just this like they're the special response team and sos would just go into projects and just ransack the entire building like they would go room by room like taking people's stuff and just looting it and then just like walking out and you know it's not even like it's not just that they're taking cash like they're taking tvs and i mean the thing that the thing the thing you if when you when you re-interview some people who lived through this like they're not just taking like stuff that's like you know the t's that are expensive they'll take people's like lamps like they'll just walk

out with anything like literally anything they can sell um and you know again like these are these are the people living in these projects are like huge like a lot and a lot of these projects are literally like segregation era right so they're they're almost entirely black and they're just take like they're just getting robbed but constantly by both the regular cops the special operations section and and there's not even like you know like cops nowadays have like they have like civil asset forfeiture where there's this like pseudo legal framework no no this like they're not even this is the 90s they're not even doing that they're just literally walking in and robbing these people at gunpoint um sos like

they eventually get shut down 2007 after so there's a series of scandals about them they they steal like hundreds of thousands of dollars from people. They do shakedowns on drug dealers. They start kidnapping people. At one point, an SOS dude, like, tried to hire his co-worker to do a hit on someone who was, like, going to report them to the feds. And, yeah, but SOS isn't the main story today because Watts is running an even larger version of this operation. And, you know, while i was researching this i had the realization that like so i've talked to people in chicago about like the cpd cartels right and i had the realization that there were conversations that i had people where we've been we've both been talking about different ones and we both we both thought we were talking about this like i've

had people looking back and was like oh they were talking about so i was like no no, no, I meant the Watts one. It's great. It's, oh, love our institutionalized just robbery system. Yeah, so the other thing I want to mention, because, so The Intercept did a, like, really good, like, huge four-part series on the Watts watts uh like cartel but i think it's worth mentioning that like even the you know there's like two quote-unquote good cops who like go after watts and for years they eventually bring him down but like even those cops are doing things that are objectively horrifying like most of the actual cop work in this story is done by is literally just the good cops like they they know a homeless guy they

call chewbacca who they they paid to be an informant in like blanket sleeping bags and food and like it's like it should be fair chewbacca like genuinely like likes the two of them but chewbacca is the guy who does all of the work here like what was Watts gets, like, he's the guy who's, like, wearing the wire. He's the guy who knows everything. The cops don't know anything. And, like, Chewbacca has known everything that was going on from the beginning. They just don't ask him for years. But, like, Chewbacca, like, goes to prison at one point because Watts, okay, so Watts is just, like, a drug dealer, right?

at one point because watts okay so what watts is just like a drug dealer right um so watts and uh so so chewbacca would like you know he was like he was like a sort of low level like runner right you'd get a bag you'd like move it sometimes and one time uh and watts also used information so one time like watts was like trying to get information on where a drug stash was so we could rob it and then like well he could do a police raid on it and then take the drugs and sell them and Chewbacca just like didn't know so Watts just like threw him in prison for two years

and it's just like you know this stuff happens constantly there are so many people who are just you know like people trying to survive in the city and then oh hey you don't have the exact specific information that this cop wants on this drug thing, so we're just gonna send you to prison for two years.

And Chewbacca, who, like, risks his life wearing a wire and brings down one of the biggest cartels in the CPD, as best I can tell, is still living on the street because the society is just broken in ways that, like, are difficult to comprehend and incredibly bleak yeah

yeah so okay back to watts's operation watts has this thing called the watts tax and the watts tax is if you run drugs you pay the tax to watts and this tax gives you protection from the police if you don't pay the watts tax the cops show up they put you in prison they take all your cash they raid your drugs and then watts resolves your drugs at a profit i mean that is like objectively that is a decent grift like in terms yeah it's pretty good grip oh it's incredible logistical planning yeah like yeah okay i can i can see how the how this would actually be very profitable yeah it's genius and like and the other thing about these taxes like these taxes are enormous amounts of money like if if so if if you're running a drug that's like okay so you you have a drug that you move and the drug yeah i know i've

i've ran drugs for 30 years i know yeah so the the tax for the for that single drug can be as high as fifty thousand dollars a week so he is he is making that's a lot of money so much money like just an incomprehensible amount of money off of this. We could do that. We could. We're not cops. I guess we would have to become cops. I have an idea for a pivot.

We're doing the cartel pivot. This is how we get funded by the Sinaloa cartel. I mean, we've always been a cartel, but... We'll move from podcasting into drugs. We can partner with our friends at the Sinaloa Cartel. Yeah, that'd be great. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows

as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Eventually, there's a guy named Big Shorty who's another like player in the scene. And he. Yeah. All the people in this name in this story great names yeah it's great so big shorty is like i'm not paying like 50k a week per drug to do this anymore i'm gonna go to the feds and uh so so a big shorty like he threatens to go

to the feds and he goes to the da and then like a couple days later she's gunned down the street by yeah you never someone the feds yeah no like yeah well if you do you have to make sure they like disappear you because uh well you never threaten it like that's the oh yeah yeah yeah you don't yeah these worlds you mention like cops and going to in any combination and everyone around you's just like all right well this person's got to be dead that's just how that's got to go yeah it's i it's not it's not the best strategic move i've ever seen it's yeah so you know and this is when this is when the cops the the two cops are going to bring watts down like actually start to take notice because like literally for years i mean there's they tell stories about this

like people they'd be locking people up and people would say things like why are you going after me for two bags and watts is running the dope and just no one believes them like the cops are being told constantly for years like the cops who aren't in on the uh on the in the hotel are being told literally for years that that this whole thing is you know that that oh yeah well why why are you bothering me watts is running this operation they don't believe them and they they don't they don't believe them basically until big shorty gets shot because when big shorty goes down like another they they they they get another guy who's like pretty big in the scene that guy's like oh yeah uh no he got shot by watts and they're like wait hold on now the the cops go to the fbi and the fbi it turns out has

been trying and failing to put again put together a case against watts for so long that like they're on their like second like agent who they've had in charge of the case because the first guy like just couldn't do it and left and so they had another guy and almost immediately after this uh there's there's another guy there's another dealer named fears who uh he has this fierce has this great grift which is like all of his people wear obama shirts this is like this is like 2008 like just no just 2007 or something but yeah so like that all the people doing this thing they wear obama shirts and they they call the drugs like obama and so when everyone is their lines called hope and so

and like this this this actually works on the fbi like the fbi doesn't understand that they're running drugs because they think that they're, that like all the Metro references of Obama are just like, they're talking about like Obama. It's like, oh, there's so many, there's so many great like FBI weird incompetence things in the story. Like there's one point where the cops are going through the documents and they see the word, they see Lou and it's,, so Lou's just short for Lieutenant. Right.

But the FBI thinks that Lou is like a name. And so they're kind of tracked down this guy named Lou, which is just, it's, it's, Oh, just baffling. Incredible.

And I was never thrilled when they have to investigate cops. Yeah. Yeah. Even though it is literally their job. Yep.I. is never thrilled when they have to investigate cops. Yeah. Yeah. Even though it is literally their job. Yep. But hey, I hate doing my job too, so please continue, Chris. So that fierce guy who's doing the Obama thing, like,

takes 17 rounds to the chest, and so the F.B.I. are like... That's a good number of rounds to take to the chest. Yeah, that's a lot. It's an interesting number too, right? Because like... It does have a cult significance yes yeah but also like like is did they like reload like do they have a gun that has exactly 17 like there's 17 round magazines yeah no no there's yeah there's that's not that's not is it is it like a handgun or is it a uh rifle i think it's a handgun.

Yeah. Or like multiple people with handguns. Yeah, Glock 17s have 17-round magazines. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, so after this, the FBI investigation intensifies. And so the FBI goes to the Internal Affairs Division, or IAD, who are like the most hated cops of all cops by other cops because they're people who are supposed to investigate the police and you know so so they

they tell the two guys you're going to have to watch they're going to be protected and this works for like a year and then the head of aid changes and it's like a cop cop guy instead of so they had this like they had they brought an fbi guy who would be the head of aid and then he gets kicked out and they bring in like a cop and that cop just immediately tells literally everyone that that those two cops are running an investigation against watts and so uh do they die with the next few months or stunningly no i i especially i can tell watts seem to have thought that like they wouldn't just wouldn't be able to get him because he had too much protection, which worked for a while. I mean, yeah, he has a lot of power.

Yeah, well, and also, the other thing that's interesting about this is his stuff starts getting wilder. So he goes after this guy. He tries to go after the drugs of this guy named Monk. And Monk is carrying a bunch of drugs. He's trying to rob Mon um from the intercept a wild car chase ensued on the dan ryan expressway lakeshore drive and ultimately into the hyde park neighborhood where monk lost control of the car and crashed in a park he fled on foot watts and his team seized the dope and cash they didn't even check on the condition of the woman and infant who remained in the car which is great and also that's that's standard that that's that that's like standard cpd procedure

i i have literally seen this happen like in hyde park like i i have i there when i was in college i almost got run over in a seat and like the cpd almost ran me over this like car chase that went bad ends this giant multi-car crash and like there's like 16 cops right they all just run past the car crash after the two guys are chasing and And like, I have to go make sure no one died. And I was like, I, this is great. You have just almost murdered me.

And then also you're not checking on all of these people in this car. Cause you've been in a wreck. I hate the CBD. I hate them a lot. They sound, they sound nice. Yeah. It's great.

They're there. Yeah. This just happens like all the time. Like, often enough that, like, literally in the same place. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting the way in which, like, all of these big, because you've got, like, a few really big, shitty, big city police departments. You've got your LAPD, your NYPD. You've got your Chicago Police Department.

By God, you've got St. Louis cops. And they you've got st louis cops and they're all they're all shitty in simultaneously the same in different ways like they're they're it's the same basic idea it's brutality it's violence it's robbery um but they they find unique ways to do those shitty things which is fascinating yeah like i've always felt like like the nypd's like their big thing is if you get a large number of people together the nypd is just going to annihilate you like lapd has like the nazi gangs cpd thing cpd's thing just seems to be crime yeah cpd is just do crime the mob torture it's torture and yeah yeah st louis police department will attack you with dogs if you're not a white person like yeah

they've all got they've they've they've they've chosen their cop subclass yeah now okay so back in the investigation the two cops and investigating watts are like even so basically all the researchers get cut off it's literally just them to watch note like basically knows that he's they're coming for them and they almost get him anyways because cops are just not very smart um and you know they're about to get him on a sting for drug running and then uh right before like look i think it's like the day of that they're running the sting they suddenly get like transferred to the police academy and they basically just like get detained in this police academy for like weeks and it's it's extremely weird and eventually like the and you know this is when like everything just completely comes apart like the liaison

between the cpd and the fbi literally tells them they can't move on the case because if they move on the case it's going to reveal that watts murdered a dude because well so they don't have good evidence on big shorty but they have they have evidence that they have good evidence that he killed fears and i and the head of internal affairs basically tells them like yeah like i won't do anything about watts because it comes out that another cpd unit had gone rogue after sos i'll be done for so i'm just gonna cover for them the second cartel is too much yeah it's like no no only one cartel it's it's great um i can excuse one cartel but i draw the line and two

but once you hit four cartels we're back to good which is why i am such a big fan of the los angeles police department it's great look you you got it you got it you got you you just you just gotta get over the cartel hump and once you're over yeah you got it it's department it's great look you you got it you got it you got you just you just got to get over the cartel hump and once you're over yeah you got it's like it's like growing out your uh your hair right there's going to be that period where it looks really awkward that's when you that's when you've got two cartels and then you get hot at four cartels then you're fuckable again yeah it's great so there's an interesting description from one of the two cops that i want to read because it gets at how the code of silence works from The Intercept.

He had, she said – this is about the AID guy. He had, she said, made too many deals, thereby neutralizing his ability to act. Attributing her understanding of this dynamic largely to conversations with Rivera himself, conversations he denied ever occurred, conversations she denied ever occurred she described him as ensnared in a web of mutual blackmail in which bosses have leverage over one another by virtue of their shared knowledge of the deals they've made she gave an example i'll make the cr against your guy go away if you promote my guy within your unit the code of silence and clout are thus entwined rivera she recalled once remarked to her that the bosses quote trade crs for favors like baseball cards so yeah this is this is what the code of silence is it's it's an informal code

sort of that's also called the thin blue line which is great uh yeah that basically it says that cops you know it's that cops will protect the road but but it's more than that if if you if you cross the thin blue line and you break the code of silence, you will be formally retaliated against by your commanders. And when I say breaking the code of silence, what that means literally is if you take any action against another cop, like it literally doesn't like they can be torturing people. They can be literally running a cartel. It doesn't matter if you say anything about them, you will be like formally retaliated against by every other cop. And so the two cops who are investigating Watts, like they get arrested by internal affairs and internal affairs, like tries to like basically make a fake case against them. attempted to like do the thing sort of that cops are normally supposed to do and uh they just immediately get arrested um and you know and they have a lot of other stuff happen to them like uh one of the two cops comes home to a mailbox literally full of shit with a note that says since you like shit so much thought you'd enjoy this amazing yeah you know what i mean like that's what that's fun like that's fun that should happen more often just that should happen a lot more often other other scenarios yeah yeah it's it it sucks that these are the

cops that this is happening like of all of the this is like the only time i i like do not approve of like sending cops shit this is like this is when this is this is the wrong reason wow this is the wrong reason to send you shit. You're gonna get cancelled. That's true. They have probably done stuff. They have done stuff. I will say, make sure it's better, it can be safer

if dog shit is used. Then DNA is harder to track. You know what the safest shit of all to use? No, I don't. Panther shit. Panther shit. Panther shit.

FBI's never going to figure that one out. They don't have the technology. I'll get right on that. Yeah, we're going to go collect Panther shit. It'll be gone for a month. You could be their unabomber for like 15 years. They're trying to track down what kind of shit is getting put in people's mailboxes

until your brother sends them a letter saying, I know someone who has access to a lot of panther shit and grudge. Tragic tale. Tale as old as time. And then you can get an HBO miniseries where they make you

like look slightly like you're in a boy band only slightly it's like you were in a boy band but aged out yeah yeah you were in a boy band yeah Yeah, yeah. by I Heart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the

legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning

of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So the code of silence also extends to friendly politicians. Here's from the Anderson report. Soon after he came to the confidential section, he was given the assignment of investigating a deputy superintendent. The allegation was officer the official lived outside the city mills worked on the case for months and concluded the allegation was true he produced a thick file how does that take months i'm sorry how do you have to take months to figure that out they're cops like you got you

gotta make allowances for cop the caper of where does this guy who works here live yeah uh very funny the next day the file came back to him it was mart there was a yellow posted note with a handwritten message make it unfounded so that's fun awesome amazing yeah yeah make it cops are cops are a breed of their own poetry poetry yeah so actually there's a long history of like yeah politicians do this stuff with cops all the time like uh if i'm remembering the story right like rama manuals like nephew or something killed a guy in a car crash and the cpd he got emmanuel got the cpd to just like never investigated it they just were like oh someone died in a car crash and it just went away it's it's real fun um yeah so so eventually shortly after this sort of the the those two cops get, like, detained at, like, the police academy.

The FBI and the, and the CPD move on Watts and his partner Muhammad. And no one else, interestingly, because, again, if you think about this for about five seconds, there are an enormous number of people who either know about this operation or are actively involved in running a fucking drug cartel. That is one of the biggest players on the South Side who are still just cops. And, like, the CPD goes after exactly two people. There are, like, dozens of people who were actively involved in this who are still cops. And, you know, the only real interpretation of this

is that the FBI and the CPD are complicit, which is that, you know, I mean, so parts of the CPD want to keep running the cartel. The FBI is, like, both fbi and the cpd are complicit which is that you know i mean so parts of the cpd want to keep doing keep keep running the cartel the fbi is like both the fbi and the cpd also have an interest in keeping this covered up because they don't want like you know oh hey look at the look at the loss of trust in in law enforcement it comes out that there were actually two cartels running in the same place at the same time parallel to each other and then we didn't catch them like it's yeah but it's great because literally nothing happens to these people they're still out there they're still doing cop shit uh

yeah only two people went down for that and yeah so the cartel is just still there it's that's good it's still still operating well it proves that if you put in the work you can really build something that lasts and i think that's a lesson we all should be inspired by. Hold yourself up by your jack bootstraps. Wow. Yeah. That's good stuff. Okay, so interlude number two.

On May 4th, 1886, someone threw a stick of dynamite at some cops in Haymarket Square in chicago to be a general strike for the eight-hour workday they sure did the cops fired wildly into the crowd and the state rounded up a bunch of completely random anarchists who by their own admission had nothing to do with it and had them executed now the cops for their part built a statue uh for the cops at haymarket now the first of these statues was destroyed on may 4th 1927 by a guy good job guys this this was great so he he he he had the hit he was like he's a streetcar driver right he had to like every single day he had to go past the statue of the haymarket cop and one day he was just like no and he he ran his streetcar off of the streetcars are like on rails right he ran them off of the rails and rammed it into the statue this guy rules dope so the cops built another statue and that second statue was blown up by

the weather underground on october 6th 1969 uh the cops make another statue the third statue is also blown up by the weather underground on october 5th 1970 good work guys that was like that was less than a year later yep yep and so the country they originally they rebuilt it again right and originally they have it under like a 24-hour armed guard jesus christ and then and then and then but you know even then they were like okay we can't protect it so they moved it into an enclosed courtyard in the middle of the chicago police academy because they're too cowardly to show it in public. See, that's good. That's a win.

That's a win. They realize everyone hates them so much that they have to hide the statue to the assholes who got killed. That's great. One day, that fourth statue will follow the first three. One day.

One day. By the mere cosmic forces of the universe. One day. By entropy. The force of entropy will one day destroy this statue. Yes. Okay, so on to story number four. Story number four is the Chicago Police Department's black site.

So the Chicago Police Department has a black site called Homan Square. So normally, you know, you go to a police station and you get booked right they they book you they put you into the system and you know because you're in the system like you know where um like people people can find you right because you can just look someone up you can look someone up in the system uh at home and square they don't book people if you just if you go there you just disappear there's no record of you uh there's no there's no way to contact a lawyer if you're in there uh your lawyer doesn't know where you are because again there's no records of where you are you've just been grabbed off the street and taken to a building um yeah and and this is a so storage people there tends to be pretty short.

They don't tend to hold people longer than a couple of days. But what it's there for is this is a confession machine. This is a way to force confessions out of people by just literally disappearing them and denying them access to lawyers or literally anyone knowing where they are. And they're just holding them until they confess. literally anyone knowing where they are and they're just holding them until they confess uh and also yeah so so at home and square uh prisoners are routinely shackled for for hours like like tens of hours sometimes 24 hours uh beaten denied phone calls and uh robbed constantly this is this is another fun cpd tradition is yeah they'll just take you to this black site and then rob you and then maybe they'll release you but you, you know, they've still robbed you. And yes, you know, they do these beatings and these beatings are incredibly intense.

Like, you know, they're punching people. They're doing like knee strikes. You're doing elbow strikes. You're hitting people with batons. Sometimes you're tasering people. We have a report that the cops filed of listed as a cop being assaulted. And the thing that they're listening as a a non it was like like non like fist assault was the guy spat blood yeah well yeah they listed that as an assault

on the cop his blood on them yeah it's great it's yeah they also do things like they put like flex cuffs around people's necks oh my jeez torture yeah that is yeah they yeah that's a way for someone to die it's almost like that's maybe part of the intention is that maybe someone will quote accidentally die oh we'll get to that uh okay well so not great yeah yeah yeah it's it's not it's it's bad uh there's another guy who okay so the cops are completely convinced this guy who is completely innocent... Okay, I do want to say, I'm going to say a lot of people are innocent because they are, but also, even if you're guilty,

no one deserves this. Maybe the cops doing it deserve it, but even then, I don't even think they do. It's not a thing you do. So this guy... You might knock down a statue or three, but you don't do that. It's not a thing you do. Yeah. So this guy. You might knock down a statue or three, but you don't do that. Yeah.

It's really grim. Yeah. So they hold this guy's mouth open with a pen, right? And then they keep elbowing him in the stomach until he throws up. And so he tries to get medical attention because he keeps throwing up because he has asthma. I mean, also because he just got elbowed in the stomach. Yeah. There's a mouth yeah um and instead of uh giving him medical treatment even though he like easily could have died the cops just uh beat him up for asking yeah there's

another guy who gets uh sexually abused with the barrel of a gun and when he starts screaming the guard the gun goes on a rant about how he needs to be careful or he might accidentally pull the trigger. Oh, boy. It's bad. This is all within that specific. Yeah, this is all just in Homeland Square. He claims that, like, the cell he's being held in, he doesn't get any food, doesn't get any water. They keep him there for hours. And the cell just smells like blood and uh like feces

because yeah yeah they don't let people go to the bathroom uh two other individuals uh stephanie martinez and calvin kofi described relieving themselves while shackled in a home and square interrogation room martinez locked up in 2006 was told by a guard that she did not have the key to martinez's handcuffs and could not take her to the bathroom kofi to take into home and square on uh the 6th of february 2015 on suspicion of narcotic activity defecated on the floor after two hours fruitlessly requesting for the bathroom a police officer made calvin clean it up with his skull cap the lawsuit alleges it's these people are sick they're yeah well yeah it's it's yeah yeah yeah they i hate that it's like yeah it's cop shit huh yep and you know that's how they do it they're holding children in

here like they have people as young as 15 who are being sure just literally everything about this is that when so sometimes sometimes you get sort of like arrested normally although again i should mention that uh the the constitution does not exist like it's it's fake it's a lie no one ever gets fucking read the miranda rights it doesn't matter because uh the constitution doesn't exist if you're poor yeah it sort of exists if you're not but i will guarantee you they're reading their miranda rights to people who look like they got oh yeah yeah yeah no these people there's actually a story of these two puerto rican guys who got brought in and they like the cops are like trying to get them to

give us something and they just like they start name dropping like civil rights lawyers and the cops are like oh okay okay uh uh we're good uh we'll we'll drive you back if you don't talk we'll we'll drive you back to like where you came from yeah and it's yeah it's it's extremely grim uh yeah they just want to fuck with people who can't defend themselves yeah yeah and you know and the way they do this right like they they they do these raids where like everyone's there's they're not wearing badges everyone's just like wearing mat like like black armor and like black masks and so people describe getting like dragged out of their house and like they don't know if they're getting robbed or like if they're being kidnapped and then they are being

kidnapped but just being kidnapped like by the cops and they get dragged, but they're just being kidnapped, like, by the cops. And they get dragged, then again, they're dragging, like, 15-year-olds into this thing. There's one guy who gets found unresponsive in an interrogation room. Now, the police say that he died from a heroin overdose, but this makes literally no sense. So, the first reason why it doesn't make any sense is that the cops initially lie about where he had the overdose and died because they don't want to reveal that he was in their secret black site. So they lied and said that he was at another site. Now, the other thing that contradicts their claim that this guy had a heroin overdose is that when the hospital saw him, they wrote that he was sober. So... I mean, he could have had a heroin overdose in terms of the

cops injecting him full of heroin. Yeah, that's the most likely thing. And there's another part of this. So this guy was selling cocaine, right? But again, he's selling cocaine, not heroin. And his partner, there was another guy he was selling cocaine with. His partner other and you know his his partner like there was another guy

he was he was selling cocaine with like his partner and everyone who knew him was completely insistent that you know he does he doesn't do drugs right he sells them because you know you sell drugs but yeah and and the the cops and the other things the cops do the cop thing where they change their story twice so originally they said that he like committed suicide by heroin overdosing and then they changed their story to he died by accident um the the other thing that that indicates that uh he probably did not in fact die from heroin overdose is that there's bruises all over his face he has a busted lip his neck is super red and none of that shows up in the in the police autopsy and oh yeah yeah and this all reads just like a standard

burge error interrogation so like they beat him they put a bag over his head to suffocate him and then you plant heroin on him and you know you you call him yeah that's a that's a day's work yeah yeah and you know and there's another thing that that i should mention here about the story which is that okay so this guy is in a chicago police department black site right how did he get heroin in like everyone in this black site is literally shackled to a wall like there's no the old the only place the heroin could possibly have come from is the cops so it's like you know and and yeah independent autopsy says he dies of asphyxiation uh so yeah i'm gonna read something from the guardian about the guy who uh the guy's partner who was in the next sellover the other partner who requested to be cited as

john doe while he rebuilds his life post-conviction was in a home and square interrogation room near galvin's while doe was unable to see inside he told the guardian he heard a lot of commotion then booming and banging and then a gagging sound coming from his friend's cell. His partner, yeah, so this guy, like his partner, like he's, that guy's also like chained to a wall for like 12 hours. He has a poor thing to say. I heard a holler. I heard officers talking to him. After that, I just heard a lot of commotion.

Like boom, boom, boom, boom, and banging boom boom boom boom boom and then i didn't hear nothing after that my door was kind of cracked and then they shut it after that they shut my door all the way before the police shut the door doe said i heard a gagging sound like it makes a choking noise like choking like somebody was choking after the commotion like choking uh yeah oh yeah it's very it's very obvious what happened from the get-go yeah yeah like they they tortured this guy to death and yeah it's yeah and the other fun part about homeless square is that homeless square is also used to torture political prisoners uh so brian uh brian jacob church is a member of the nato 3 which is a group of anti-nO protesters in 2012 who got set up by an incredibly elaborate government entrapment scheme and arrested for it.

And he was taken immediately to Homewood Square. He's never read his Miranda rights. He's cuffed to a bench for 17 hours. And he asked to call his lawyer because, like a good leftist, he has a National Lawyers Guild number written on his arm. And this is something that's important. So the guardian talked to like dozens of people who were held here right um exactly two of them were able to contact a lawyer and they were both white and church is one of them and this is actually how uh part of how

home and square goes public because brian jacob church like talks to the press about it and uh spencer ackerman is a great journalist does a bunch of incredible reporting and like brings the black site to light and so there's there's 7185 people we can prove were taken to home and square uh six thousand of those people are black less than one percent of those people had their arrests logged which means the cops just vanished them uh it's almost certainly more people now i'm gonna read something about this from uh from the book uh writings from the world of policing this homo score revelation seems to me to be an institutionalization of practices that date back more than 40 years said flint taylor the civil rights lawyer most associated with pursuing area 2 commander john burge

back when i first started working on torture cases i started representing criminal defendants in the early 1970s taylor continued my my clients often told me they've been taken from one police station to another before ending up in area two where they were tortured that way the police prevent their families and lawyers from seeing them until they could coerce the torture or other means confession from them so yeah that that's our fucking police reform uh instead of having a but instead of taking them to police station to police station the police have now been reformed so that they have uh one institutionalized black site instead of multiple ones uh home and square is still open to this day like this came out in 2015 there have been like over half a decade of protest against it

um so supposedly the rules have changed and if you get arrested they have to put you in the system but home square is still open there's probably another one like somewhere that they've just they've they've they've switched which side they're doing their black sites on and yeah well yeah i have i have a i have a closing statement okay sure it is it is an inhuman crime that a single one of these fucking demons is allowed to roam our streets with a badge and the authority to rape torture and murder us and the certainty that the system will beat us into a pulp if we attempt even in the smallest way most symbolic way possible to resist them the police must be abolished there is no alternative for the sake of our survival for the survival of our survival, for the survival of our children, and for the sake of every

generation that has borne its horrors before us, we can only abolish the police, salt the earth upon which it stands, and drive the very concept of policing into a space of such infamy and terror that even the worst among us would not dare to even propose bringing it back. Also, get rid of that last statue. Yeah, that one. Destroy it. Let's knock that one out of there, too.

Yeah. I mean, I feel like everyone who's ever been to that site should have the universal right to take a hammer, maybe an RPG, and just do whatever they want to that building. Yeah, I think the men who continued to, and women, who continued to work in CPD, like anyone who was ever arrested by them or otherwise brutalized them should just forever have the right to just give them like a solid shot to the balls, you know, like just just like they get to wear a little sign around their neck. And it's like, oh, that guy used to that guy was, you know, was one of Burgess dudes. So anybody who sees him can just give him a give him a little haymaker right in the right in the breadbasket. Yeah, that is a proposal that is.

I'm running for mayor of Chicago. and we we can propose a solution to this problem that is so unbelievably not proportionally violent to what the police have been doing that it boggles belief and i'm pretty sure i can still manage to be corrupt yeah yeah i mean it's chicago you can't not i mean i guess i mean life what's sort of corrupt life what's less corrupt than normal she She's just bad. But yeah, it's Chicago. You'll find... Corruption will be foisted upon you. I'm actually fine with that. Well... How are we doing?

Another uplifting, inspirational episode of It Could Happen Here. Yeah, I will say this. Or as Garrison named it last yet earlier today hi here's a problem bye you know i will say this at any time any time someone tells you that like no it's fine we're going to reform the police just like remind them that reforming the chicago police department went was that the reform was that we now have black sites we now have we now have consolidated the black sites. Yeah, yeah.

We went from multiple black sites to one black site and also they probably moved it again. You just have to get rid of them. That is the essence of police reform. You just have to. Anyway, yep, there's a problem. Okay, bye. Bye. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow Rush. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of rife. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.