Jeff Coen - Murder in Canaryville

The grandson and great-grandson of Chicago police officers, Chicago police detective James Sherlock was CPD through and through.

His career had seen its share of twists and turns, but on this day, he was at the records center to see the case file for the murder of John Hughes, who was seventeen years old when he was gunned down in a park on Chicagos Southwest Side on May 15, 1976. The case had haunted many in the department for years, and its threads led everywhere. More than forty years after the Hughes killing, Sherlock was hopeful he could finally put the case to rest.

Then the records clerk handed him a thin manila folder. A brazen murder in a public park, which had supposedly been investigated by teams of detectives for years, had been reduced to a few meager reports and photographs. What should have been a massive file with notes and transcripts from dozens of interviews was nowhere to be found.

Sherlock could have left the records center without the folder and cruised into retirement, and no one would have noticed. Instead, he tucked the envelope under his arm and carried it outside.

Revealing, shocking. Superbly crafted, this is a tragic, clear-sighted account of how Chicagos mighty mob was brought to heel.

Publishers Weekly

[An] authoritative account of one of the most amazing Chicago Outfit cases in history indispensable.

John Kass, columnist, Chicago Tribune

A telling look inside the twisted world of organized crime.

Kirkus Reviews

Moves with the urgency of a cant-put-it-down novel.

Rick Kogan, author, journalist, and radio host

A stellar recounting of the systematic dismantling of the Chicago Outfit.

Mens Book

Reads like a fast-paced crime thriller fascinating reading.

Times (Northwest Indiana)

Like a true-life Sopranos, complete with life-and-death drama, Family Secrets is a story of crime, corruption and the subterranean streams of money that built fortunes and sucked life from entire sectors of society.

Shepherd Express (Milwaukee)

All those interested in the Blago drama or political intrigue in general can dive into this book with relish.

Publishers Weekly, starred review

Through indefatigable reporting and deft writing, [Coen and Chase] take us into a fascinating, Byzantine world of Chicago politics and power that largely goes unseen.

David Mendell, author of Obama: From Promise to Power

[Coen and Chase] offer a nuanced context of political corruption overlaid with Blagojevichs extraordinarily flamboyant personality, from the profanity to the hair obsession and outsized ego.

Booklist

Golden presents complicated political machinations in plain-facts terms, accessible to readers of all backgrounds. Highly recommended to anyone interested in learning what really drove the Blagojevich scandal.

Midwest Book Review

The most ambitious book yet on the former governors spectacular rise and fall.

Chicago Tribune

Copyright 2021 by Jeff Coen

All rights reserved

Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

ISBN 978-1-64160-281-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020946265

Interior design: Jonathan Hahn

Photo of John R. Hughes courtesy of the Hughes family

Printed in the United States of America

5 4 3 2 1

For Tracy and Sloane

And in memory of John R. Hughes

Source material for this book comes primarily from interviews with the family and friends of John Hughes; interviews with retired police officers; police records and reports; author research and conversations with confidential sources; federal court records and transcripts; and materials written and gathered primarily by retired Chicago police detective Jim Sherlock, while he was working for the FBI.

Attempts have been made to stay as close to the official record as possible, though the official record is at times limited, and perhaps intentionally so.

Those limits are especially apparent in the official Chicago Police Department file, which was used by the author. Items that were gathered in a separate collection of material recovered by Sherlock, which became known as the Gorman file, are noted as such; they include police records not found in the official file. That paperwork originally was gathered by James Gorman and attorney Brian Gilmartin. Eventually it was entered into the official CPD record by Sherlock, as described in the following pages.

Direct quotes from reference materials, including published news accounts and books, are noted in the text where they are made. Other reference items that were helpful to the project are listed later in the Additional References section at the end of the book.

Quotes from interviews and police reports are cited as such.

Quotes taken from police reports are also described according to which report is being used in the text and which file it was kept in. Those quotes are as close to the original material as possible. However, since such police reports are notorious for their misspellings, abbreviations, and accepted shorthand, some efforts have been made to smooth out those quotes for the reader without changing the original meaning of what was written. That is to say that obvious spelling errors have been corrected in the text without a [sic] note so as not to constantly distract from the narrative. Major changes for clarity include paraphrasing in a few instances, but again, not to a level that would change the meaning of the quotation.

Additionally, in two cases, names of individuals in this book have been fictionalized. Both fictional names are indicated by the use of S MALL C APS on first mention. This decision was made in fairness to those people, as they found themselves under some scrutiny in a criminal investigation but have not been formally charged with any crimes. Any similarity between the fictionalized names and the names of other real people is strictly coincidental. In other instances, the proper names of some who were interviewed by investigators have simply been excluded or replaced with general descriptions. This was done for similar reasons, and in an effort not to unfairly lead to the identification of the two people whose names were fictionalized.

J im Sherlock sat in a black Jeep Cherokee on a residential street in a town more than fifty miles from Chicago.

The SUV was unmarked, but he had made sure to use a vehicle that you could see had bars of emergency lights lined inside its windows, if you had a reason to look a little closer.