Tag: Crime & Law
By Bryan Smith
MIGHTY MOUTH: The defense lawyer Sam Adam Jr. doesn’t merely argue cases—he performs, typically closing with an eruption of righteous indignation, and his clients (R. Kelly, for one) often walk free. Now Adam is set to strut and fret upon the brightly lit stage of former governor Rod Blagojevich’s corruption trial—and he aims to bring down the house Read more
By Jonathan Eig
Fresh information implicates a suspect other than Al Capone. Read more
By Bryan Smith
The Cook County State's Attorney's Office provides at least two reporters a memo containing scurrilous and unsubstantiated claims about the conduct of the Northwestern University journalism professor and his students in an earlier case. Read more
By Bryan Smith
Nearly two years ago, the body of Michael York turned up in an alley on the West Side. The high-school student had died of an apparent overdose after a weekend bacchanal at a St. Charles mansion, and his friends had dumped his corpse in the neighborhood where they bought drugs. Three young people have now been charged in a case that painfully illustrates how heroin has invaded the suburbs Read more
By Bryan Smith
The 1974 murder of Daniel Seifert, a Bensenville businessman, unhinged his two sons and set them off on separate, troubled quests to avenge their father. After 25 years, they confronted the man behind his killing—Joseph “The Clown” Lombardo—not at the end of a gun, but in court Read more
By Gwenda Blair
Lawyers for victims of two 20th-century terrorist bombings are trying to force the sale of a cache of 2,500-year-old Persian tablets currently on loan to Chicago's Oriental Institute. Read more
By Noah Isackson
In 2005, a young woman bent on self-destruction intentionally drove her car into the back of another. She lived. Three musicians on their lunch break died. This year, as her prison sentence comes to its end, the case remains a tragedy without closure or explanation. Read more
By Bryan Smith
After dermatologist David Cornbleet was murdered in his Michigan Avenue office, his son, Jonathan, devoted himself to finding the killer. Now a shy and troubled young man—a former patient of Dr. Cornbleet's—has confessed. But that man's anguished father is arguing that a drug prescribed by the slain doctor may have contributed to the killing. Read more
By Stuart Luman
Calling himself an electronic Robin Hood, Jeremy Hammond used his computer savvy to attack a conservative group's Web site. He called it an act of civil disobedience. The FBI called it theft. Read more