Buried Ledes and The 'Wrongful' Conviction Industry

One cop that Jon Loevy likes

Steve Mandell leaves the Dirksen Federal Building in 2005 with his attorney Jon Loevy. | Sun-Times Media file photo

Unlike this crew, who have managed to completly avoid corporate and complicit media Inquiry altogether.

bury the lede

1. (idiomatic) (news writing style) To begin a story with details of secondary importance to the reader while postponing more essential points or facts. 

Lede - means The Man in Old English, interesting to note.

For years, I have written about the willful ignorance of politicians and the media that helped create Chicago's "Wrongful" Conviction Industry.  

Chicago is a Thug Comfort Zone thanks in large part to this Industry that benefits journalists, Marxist academics and unprincipled lawyers.  This Industry benefits very few people and was founded on wishful doctrine - John Dewey's replacement of Inquiry for Truth.  Begin with a premise like 'all police officers are paid racists, Uncle Tom Go-longs, or sadistic fascists operating for Systemic Racism' and any conviction even for the most horrific and bloody of acts can and will be tried in the media and over-turned.

Generations of Chicagoans have been emotionally, intellectually and spiritually water-boarded with the drip-drip-dripping yarns of electric testicle burners, Houses of Screams that no one but John Conroy seemed to hear, and sequestered testimony by disappearing boy scouts and of course Vietnam chestnuts.  Kids unborn when Officers Fahey and O'Brien were, in fact, tortured and murdered by the Wilson Brothers at 80th & Morgan deeply believe that Jon Burge tortured more Black persons than Idi Amin.

The Peoples Law Office, G. Flint Taylor, Jon Loevy, David Protess, Locke Bowman and Aaron Patterson are the founding founding fathers of Systemic Police Brutality and Wrongful Convictions, Llc.

Today, we learned, thanks to a public heads-up from police blog The Second City Cop, of the co-operation the law firm of Loevy & Loevy provided to a man hired to murder for the mob. SCC was required to dig the lede up that was buried deeply down page.

Former Chicago cop Steve Mandell took the stand in federal court Thursday to defend himself against charges he plotted multiple murders.
The risky move — rarely taken by defendants, especially in such a high stakes case — comes at the end of a two week trial at which jurors have heard how Mandell built a torture chamber on the Northwest Side, where he planned to extort, then kill a wealthy suburban businessman, and how he allegedly planned to kill an owner of Polekatz strip club and his wife.
But then this happened:
Mandell said he did “a little bit” of the spying he was being paid for, but was conning Michael by claiming to be doing more work than he was being paid for.
He said he used the computer databases and other tools at the civil rights law firm Loevy & Loevy, where he was working as an unpaid process server, to research half a dozen targets Michael had asked him to keep tabs on.
That’s a potential embarrassment for the highly-regarded law firm, which represented Mandell in a 2005 wrongful conviction case against the FBI.
Really? Do tell. The Loevys helped him win a suit against the FBI that was later overturned. And the Loevys also have a habit of scoring large payouts in suits against the City. It certainly sounds like Mandell was hip deep in the shit that got him placed on Death Row once before.
Very interesting. (emphasis my own)

Credit Kim Jansenn of the Chicago Sun Times for providing the  Loevy & Loevy info. Perhaps some investigative jornalist might begin to dig deeper into the Industry and the complicity of academics, lawyers and elected officials in creating the Chicago Thug Comfort Zone.

More interestingly a young Chicago police officer, Martin Preib*, has book coming out this month that sheds light on the protected species of the Wrongful Conviction/Police Torture Industry.



New City Communications **offers a taste of Preib's painstaking research and sharp insights -

 . . . a disturbing vision of David Protess and the Innocence Project emerged, as well as of the wrongful conviction movement itself. In 2011, Protess was caught by Northwestern University “knowingly misrepresenting the facts” in a matter related to an unrelated wrongful conviction case. The attorney for Northwestern told a judge that Protess had altered emails subpoenaed by prosecutors. Protess brushed aside the assertion that he had altered evidence, saying it was just a misunderstanding, but it was enough for Northwestern to conduct its own internal investigation. After this internal investigation, Protess was fired from the university and the school issued a public statement acknowledging Protess’ wrongdoing. I exchanged many emails with Protess and some phone calls with Paul Ciolino when I first became interested in this story. But as my questions eventually revealed my skepticism about the Porter exoneration and the conviction of Simon, as well as the manner in which Protess ran the Innocence Project—which he continues to run to this day independent of Northwestern—Ciolino refused to respond to my inquiries. Eventually, Protess, too, stopped responding to me. How deep did Protess’ lying go? How badly were his cases tainted? Perhaps the best people to answer this question are detectives Salvatore and Gray, and Alstory Simon, who wastes away in prison to this day. “I got accused of a lot of things I didn’t do. There were lies said about me in this case. If they’re lying about me, who else are they lying about? What other detectives are they lying about?” Salvatore says. -

It may be a beginning.  Truth is much tougher to swallow than Inquiry.

*Martin Preib is a Chicago police officer and writer. His first book, “The Wagon and Other Stories from the City,” was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2010. His essays have been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review (winner of the 2005 Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction) and Tin House.  His new book, “Crooked City,” will be available at Amazon.com this month. -

**Newcity.com is a Web site about Chicago. We start with the core coverage found each week in Newcity magazine, Chicago’s only locally owned and operated cultural weekly, where we’ve been covering the turf for more than 25 years, and extend it with your input on this site.  
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