Stamps.com Advertiser (5:44)

Former detective Reynaldo Guevara has pled the fifth dozens of times, but stands accused of framing mostly Latino men while patrolling the streets of Humboldt Park.

Melissa Segura (5:52)

Dozens of convictions have been thrown out.

Jennifer Blagg (5:55)

Grabs guys, decides who did it, and then makes the witnesses tell his story. For a long time, it went unquestioned and a lot of men went to prison who shouldn't have gone to prison.

Melissa Segura (6:05)

These are just a handful of examples. If you delve into the history of police corruption in Chicago, you find plenty of other instances. After most of these scandals, a task force would issue a report full of reforms and the city would pay out police misconduct claims. From 2019 through 2024, those claims amounted to nearly $500 million. I'll say it again, nearly half a billion dollars. The cost of Police misconduct weighs so heavily on the city that its current mayor, Brandon Johnson, has proposed taking out a loan to pay for mounting police misconduct lawsuits.

Jennifer Blagg (6:49)

I think if I was a cop, I would want to choke somebody out sometimes.

Melissa Segura (6:52)

Jennifer Blagg, Alex's lawyer, she surprises me sometimes. We were talking about police corruption and how it relates to Alex's case and she chimed in with, I would want to choke somebody out sometimes too. Just to be clear, it's a dark joke, but it's also a recognition.

Jennifer Blagg (7:11)

It's a tough job. People are horrible to you. Nobody wants to cooperate. I think it's just tough to be a cop though.

Melissa Villa (7:18)

Right?

Melissa Segura (7:18)

Right. The point she was leading up to though, is that if cops do cross the line, they rarely experience any meaningful consequences. For generations, CPD's disciplinary system has been found inadequate. As recently as 2017, a Department of justice investigation said CPD's disciplinary system, quote, lacks integrity and is, quote unquote, illegitimate in the eyes of the officers and the public alike. Or as one former officer put it, cpd's disciplinary system is, quote, a great big washing machine. All the dirty cops that go in come out clean.

Jennifer Blagg (8:00)

They have an abysmal record of investigating any misconduct by an officer. And you're not going to be held accountable for your actions. And your actions are actually rewarded by applauded. You get promotions for closing cases. So the whole thing is just set up bass ackwards. You know what you'll typically see with a detective who's very quote, effective is many allegations of misconduct, whether it's violation of an unreasonable search, physical aggression. They have a storied history of that.

Melissa Segura (8:33)

I've spent some time looking into the specific officers who investigated Clifton Lewis's homicide. The lead detective in this case is named Anthony Noradin. He was one of the officers who interrogated Tyrone Clay, the guy who said he was playing NBA 2K. In 2005, Norden was part of a team investigating the death of a four year old boy. According to the boy's mother, Noradin and his colleagues subjected her to a grueling 27 hour long interrogation, screaming that she had strangled her son with a telephone cord. In court documents, she alleged they denied her access to an attorney and fabricated statements. The mother eventually broke down and confessed and then quickly recanted the confession. She spent more than seven years in prison for killing her son. Before her conviction was overturned on other grounds, a Cook county court awarded her a certificate of innocence in the case. Neither Noradin nor nor any of his fellow officers were ever charged in Connection with the case. The mother sued Noradin and his colleagues in federal court for damages, but the jury ruled in the officer's favor. Another key detective in her case is James Gilger. He's one of the detectives who questioned Melvin DeYoung. Melvin, you'll remember, is a type 1 diabetic who says police withheld his insulin. The one who thought he was about to die. I didn't have to do any digging to know that. Gilker has a reputation. He was a top investigator on another killing, a famous one if you're from Chicago. Involving the nephew of the city's former mayor. The nephew killed a man, but claimed he acted in self defense. It turns out there were all kinds of shady police behavior in that case. The city's inspector general found that Gilgar falsified a police report in a way that was favorable to the nephew. And I don't want to get too far into the weeds, but basically, he was found to have run a shoddy investigation. In 2015, the city's inspector general actually recommended that Gilgar be fired, but he retired before that could happen. Here's the kicker. The supervising officer in the investigation into the mayor's nephew was a sergeant named Sam Cerrone. Serone didn't just oversee the wrongdoing, he participated in it. According to the city's inspector general. By using a personal email address to edit a police report, the Chicago Police Board unanimously found that Cerrone failed to adequately supervise his officers. And for that, he received a reprimand, a penalty that didn't even cost him a day of vacation. Recently, he was promoted from sergeant to lieutenant. Turns out Cerrone was the supervising officer in the Officer Lewis case, too. The person overseeing Noradin, Gilger, and the others. So that's the lead detective, a senior detective, and the team supervisor in the Lewis case, all with serious allegations about their past conduct. Which brings us back to Alex's stabbing and Marisol and Melissa's suspicion that the CPD was somehow connected to it. But that's the kind of hunch that's nearly impossible to prove. Then, months after taking the case, Jennifer and her associate Eric Bisbee, were digging through documents.

Jennifer Blagg (12:13)

We were working at my house, and he was in the living room sitting on the couch with the dogs. And I was in my office, and I heard him yell, oh, my God. And Eric has a tendency to overreact to everything. So I walked into the living room, and I'm like, this better fucking be good because I'm so sick of you getting me excited. And then it's some nothing burger. And he's like, oh. Oh. And so he showed it to me, and I was like, oh, my God.

Melissa Segura (12:45)

What Eric showed her was an email he'd come across sent by a senior officer in the gang investigation division to some colleagues on the force. The email was written the day after Alex was attacked. Eric read it to me.

Eric Bisbee (13:00)

Merely an FYI but a 25th district copper was telling me that Flip, that's Alex's nickname, got stabbed at the movie co in Rosemont last night. Not gonna croak, though.

Melissa Segura (13:14)

An officer responds.

Eric Bisbee (13:16)

I believe operation snake doctor and 6580 has to take credit for this.

Melissa Segura (13:23)

Operation Snake Doctor. It's the nickname of a special operation launched shortly after officer Lewis was murdered, as alleged in court documents. The idea was to arrest a ton of Spanish cobras. And as one officer describes it in an email, tell them, quote, every time a cobra goes to jail, it's Flip's fault.

Jennifer Blagg (13:44)

What it was was telling them, basically, flip's the reason you're getting arrested. Flip's the reason all this heat's on your gang. We know Flip committed the officer Lewis murder. If you give us information on flip, we'll help you out. They would never say that that was part of it, but I know that was part of the flip speech.

Melissa Segura (14:00)

The Flip speech? It's a pun, I guess. A way to make the cobras flip unflip. Jennifer believes the speech has two potential outcomes.

Jennifer Blagg (14:10)

So it's basically a speech given to the Spanish cobras to make them either want to kill Alex or give evidence against them, whether it's true or not.

Melissa Segura (14:22)

So were Melissa and Marisol right? Was operation Snake Doctor linked to Alex getting stabbed outside the movie theater? There's no definitive evidence to prove it was connected, but as one officer put it in his email on the day after the attack, quote, his associate was left unscathed. It sounds like the Cobras are getting the word. For Jennifer and Eric, those emails were the first breakthrough after months of hitting their heads against a wall.

Jennifer Blagg (14:50)

You know, it's like finding the golden ticket to them.

Melissa Segura (14:54)

It was proof of so many things they believed went on within the Chicago Police Department. No one was ever charged with the attack on Alex at the movie theater. When I contacted Rosemont for the police file, I was told they no longer had it.

Reuben Rodriguez (15:25)

Foreign.

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Melissa Segura (16:56)

Alex's whole family was on edge. Marisol worked as a probation officer at the criminal courthouse, and in the hallways or eating lunch, she says she'd run into officers who'd spent two years investigating Alex. She says she'd had run ins with Detective Noradin.

Marisol Villa (17:13)

I would be in a cafeteria during my lunch break with my co workers, and he would a lot of times just be there hanging there, and he would like zero in on me. And then after that you see a flock of police officers come in and go sit at his table. And then they're all looking at me.

Melissa Villa (17:32)

It got to a point where I would drop her off and pick her up from work. You know, she we could all feel safe. And she could feel safe as well, knowing that she got to her car without having to look over her shoulder. Because you don't know what to expect at this point.

Melissa Segura (17:52)

For months, Alex and his sisters were watching their backs. Then, in November 2013, Operation Snake Doctor got Alex. For nearly two years, the only evidence the CPD had against Alex was what Edgardo Colon, Tyrone clay, and Melvin DeYoung had said in their statements. After what they say were days of grueling interrogation. And it wasn't enough to make a case against Alex stick. But three new witnesses, each saying Alex had told them he was the one who killed Clifton Lewis. That was different. The first statement came from a guy named Reuben Rodriguez. Reuben wasn't a member of the Spanish Cobras, but he hung around with a bunch of them in the winter of 2012, weeks after Lewis's death, he was arrested in Michigan for a vicious robbery. From his jail cell, he wrote to law enforcement in Chicago saying that he had intel on the Lewis murder. Rubin was still in prison. When I talked with him last winter, he recounted for me what he told detectives back in 2012.

Reuben Rodriguez (19:15)

I was at a barbershop. Flip was there. Flip basically admitted to what happened. He even said the dollar amount that they took from the store and everything like that.

Melissa Segura (19:27)

Both on the stand at Alex's trial and when we spoke by phone, Ruben talked about having been kidnapped by other Spanish Cobras because he'd heard Alex confessed, and the Cobras didn't want Rubin running his mouth. The second witness was a woman named Destiny Pettis. Ten months after Lewis's death, a cop pulled her over after allegedly seeing her pouring a can of Four Loko out the driver's side window of her car. The officer learns that she's 17, and while in police custody, she says that she bought weed from Alex a couple months earlier. And during that drug buy, he told her that he'd killed Clifton Lewis. And according to Destiny, Alex told her that he tossed the murder weapon in the Chicago river or in Mexico somewhere. It wasn't hard for Jennifer and Eric to call Reuben and Destiny's stories into question. Rubin's claim that he'd been kidnapped by the Spanish Cobras to shut him up didn't stand up to much scrutiny.

Jennifer Blagg (20:26)

Eric looked at his Facebook, and there were pictures posted of him at a comedy club when this happened, when he was supposedly being kidnapped. And we have his phone records that show he was texting and calling, you know, hundreds and hundreds of texts a day, so that showed that wasn't true. So I don't have anything to say to prove that he didn't overhear a conversation with Alex, but I can prove that he's an incredible witness in other ways.

Melissa Segura (20:53)

As for Destiny Pettus, would Jennifer look back at the case file? She noticed something odd in the state's timeline. There was a big gap in time between Destiny's initial statement to police and when they had her tell her story under oath to a grand jury.

Jennifer Blagg (21:09)

Usually when you see that, if I see that in a case and they don't send someone to the grand jury immediately to lock them in, you know, it's because they don't think that they're reliable, especially in this type of case.

Melissa Segura (21:20)

Jennifer and Eric tracked down Destiny and interviewed her about her statement. Pressing on the details, Destiny told him it wasn't true. She said she was young at the time and in trouble and felt pressure to implicate Alex. I made multiple attempts to reach Destiny Pettus, but I never heard back from her. The last witness, though, was harder to discredit. Her name was also Destiny Destiny Rodriguez. And the CPD talked to her for the first time in March 2013, about 15 months after the murder. That's when Detective Anthony Noradin heard from a cop in a Chicago suburb. The suburban cop tells Noradin that a young woman there has information on the Lewis killing. She said she was at a Chicago nightclub called Illusions hours after the murder when she overheard Alex tell her boyfriend

Reuben Rodriguez (22:13)

that he'd killed a copy.

Melissa Segura (22:21)

Destiny had a respectable job as an insurance broker. She spent most of her life in the suburbs, far from the gangs of Alex's neighborhood. Jennifer had tried every way she could think of to explain why Destiny Rodriguez would testify against Alex. She kept coming up empty. Truth be told, Destiny Rodriguez's testimony had always struck me as the most damning. She had no obvious motive to lie, no clear connections to the case. Her testimony was the proverbial rock in my shoe, nagging at me every step of the reporting. I sent her several messages. Nada. So I tracked down her boyfriend, the one she said Alex confessed to at the nightclub. He was clear. He couldn't say if Alex was innocent, but he could say Alex never confessed to him. Not at a nightclub he was at with Destiny, not anywhere. Then he gave me a clue. Destiny might have had a dust up with her roommate around the time she gave her statement about Alex. I filed public records requests in Franklin park, the suburb where she lived. Weeks later, I received police reports showing Franklin park officers busted Destiny with drugs and ammo. But minutes after that bust, another officer, Destiny testified that she knew and trusted arrived at the scene. The next day, that trusted officer took Destiny to meet with Noradin and give a statement about Alex Villa. Public records show she never faced criminal charges for the drugs or ammo. The fact that she was arrested was never disclosed at trial or to Jennifer, even though she too had filed public records requests. So it turns out all three witnesses that testified they heard Alex confess were themselves entangled with the law when they gave their statements, which raises major questions about whether they may have been incentivized after their statements. Alex was arrested in late November 2013 and sent to Cook County Jail to await trial. Alex was sent to a section of the jail called Division 9. Edgar the cologne had been held there since confessing back in January of 2012. When I spoke with Edgar, the Last year he told me there's jail and then there's Division 9.

Edgardo Colon (24:50)

Division 9 in Cook County Jail is considered a supermax. The danger in there is real 24 hour gang banging. Like that's what they live for in there is gang banging. You could be sitting there and two minutes later, everybody around you is fighting and stabbing each other.

Melissa Segura (25:05)

The violence took on every imaginable form, Edgardo says, and things you'd never imagine in your wildest dreams.

Edgardo Colon (25:12)

Like one of the guys was getting his commissary and the other dude ran behind him and just started beating him

Melissa Segura (25:19)

with a soap sock, a bar of soap in a container inside a tube sock.

Edgardo Colon (25:24)

And every time he hit him, you see the blood just squirt out of his head. That really stuck with me, you know, because it's like he almost killed that guy.

Melissa Segura (25:33)

There's no respite. Even at night, you might be trying

Edgardo Colon (25:36)

to sleep and you got the guy next door screaming to somebody three doors down and they're up till four in the morning, screaming back and forth. It's a real dark place.

Melissa Segura (25:47)

Edgardo spent five years in Division 9 waiting for a trial. He was convicted in 2017 and sentenced to 84 years. Alex would spend the next 10 years there. After he was arrested, his family would visit him on weekends. Sometimes his teenage daughter would come. Alex's young son Damian would be there too, with his mother, Amanda. Damien was four when Alex first went into Cook County. They'd have races in the visiting room, each on one side of the glass separating inmates from visitors. He'd read anime books that Damian was into so he could ask his son questions about his favorite characters. Over the decade, Alex was in jail, Damian went from playing at the park. Got over there, girl, Mommy's down at chiropractor Philippines to sing the Our father our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation. Those might seem like two little throwaway moments, but when Alex goes in, his kid is a preschooler. And by the time he goes to trial in February 2019, Damien is a young man. Like we heard in episode one, Alex's trial was short, his conviction fast. Two years after Alex's conviction, Jennifer and Eric were working to get Alex a new trial. One day, reading through Alex's trial transcript, Eric notices something strange.

Eric Bisbee (27:30)

If you read through the the trial, there was there's no conversation about cell tower data whatsoever except for the fact that Alex is texting at the the exact time of the crime.

Melissa Segura (27:40)

Cell phone data the bread and butter of so many criminal trials. Even back in 2019, Alex had always said that he and his then girlfriend Monica were arguing via text message before, during and after the murder at the Mini Mart. At trial, prosecutors had challenged Alex's text message alibi. They argued he could have just sent Monica a quick emoji as he rounded the corner to commit the crime. Eric notices that. The police report said Monica had handed over her phone so police could have it analyzed by forensics. But her phone records aren't in the files. Melvin, Tyrone and Agardo said police had their cell phone data extracted too. All those records were also missing. No maps, no call logs, nothing. And he spots another digital trail that wasn't followed or at least not presented in court. Tyrone Clay had always said he had an alibi, that he was on his PlayStation at the time of Officer Lewis's shooting. Eric is a gamer too. He knows the PlayStation would have left its own digital evidence. If they could find proof that Tyrone was gaming at home. Then he couldn't have been at the Mini Mart. The whole case would be in doubt. The PlayStation could be the key. So where is it? The Guardian made repeated attempts to speak with the Chicago Police Department. The department did not have anyone available to answer our questions, a spokesperson wrote in an email. In court documents, officers deny any misconduct. We also reached out on multiple occasions to Officers Noradin and Cerrone and their lawyers. We did not hear back. When I reached retired Detective James Gilgar by phone, he told me he didn't know what I was talking about and hung up. We also reached out multiple times to an attorney representing the Village of Franklin park and did not hear back. A spokesperson for the Cook County Jail said in a statement that it takes the safety of staff and those entrusted into its custody very seriously and aggressively investigates all incidents and allegations of violence or criminal behavior within the jail.

Reuben Rodriguez (30:19)

Foreign

Melissa Segura (30:23)

this is the Guardian.

Farnoosh Torabi (30:33)

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