After 10 years, CPD wants to talk to mom

Nanci Koschman | Sun-Times file photo

Editor's note: Nanci, this is the same kind of clout that allows the Probate Court of Cook County to run roughshod and victimize helpless wards.  Lucius Verenus, Schoolmaster, ProbateSharks.com

 

 

After 10 years, CPD wants to talk to mom

PUBLISHED BY: Chad Merda

CATEGORY: Latest News

Originally published June 1, 2014
By TIM NOVAK AND CHRIS FUSCO
Staff Reporters
A month after Nanci Koschman filed a federal lawsuit accusing the Chicago Police Department of botching the investigation into her son’s death in order to protect a nephew of former Mayor Richard M. Daley, the department sent a letter to one of her lawyers.
Would she talk with internal affairs investigators, the department wanted to know, about the death of her son David Koschman?
The police last spoke with her 10 years ago, after her son died from a punch thrown by Daley nephew Richard J. “R.J.” Vanecko — one of only two times the police spoke with her.
But Koschman won’t be talking with the police now, according to a letter her lawyers sent to Internal Affairs Division Sgt. Sean Rice, the investigator who asked to interview the Mount Prospect widow.
“It is obvious to us that the CPD, and particularly its Internal Affairs Division, has a conflict of interest when it comes to investigating the allegations made in Ms. Koschman’s complaint,” her lawyers, G. Flint Taylor and Locke Bowman, wrote. “Among other things, the complaint alleges that the Internal Affairs Division first failed to investigate for seven years and then conducted a sham investigation into the mishandling of an official police file.”
Koschman’s lawyers also questioned whether an internal affairs investigation would “lead to appropriate discipline for all the officers . . . who are implicated in this decade-long police cover-up.”
Koschman first spoke with the police hours after her son was punched, when Detective Rita O’Leary called Northwestern Memorial Hospital to check on her comatose son’s condition.
No one from the police called her again — not when he died 11 days later, not when they initially decided not to charge Vanecko and not when they re-investigated the case seven years later and again decided not to file charges.
Koschman requested a meeting with the police weeks after burying her son. She ended up speaking with Ronald E. Yawger, the lead detective. She said he told her that her son had provoked the other man, whom he refused to identify.
Koschman’s federal civil rights lawsuit, filed March 24, apparently triggered the IAD investigation, according to Rice’s letter, dated April 21.
IAD got involved in the Koschman case three years earlier, when Sgt. Richard Downs conducted a brief investigation after Lt. Denis Walsh said he’d found some of the original files from the Koschman investigation, which had been reported missing. No disciplinary action came out of that.
Walsh is one of six police officers special prosecutor Dan K. Webb considered charging with crimes for their handling of the investigation in 2011, which ended with the police closing the case, saying Vanecko acted in self-defense. Webb said he didn’t have enough evidence to charge the officers, who are all being sued by Koschman’s mother.
The officers remain under investigation by City Hall Inspector General Joseph Ferguson.
Webb’s investigation led to Vanecko, 39, pleading guilty Jan. 31 to involuntary manslaughter for punching Koschman outside the late-night bars along Division Street in April 2004. He served 60 days in jail and is now on home confinement.
Vanecko is also a defendant in Nanci Koschman’s lawsuit, though he’s asking to be dropped from the case.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration is using the city’s law department and four law firms to defend the suit:
1) Vince Connelly, a former federal prosecutor now a partner with the firm of Mayer Brown, has been hired to defend the city, former police Supt. Jody Weis and former Deputy Supt. Ernest Brown. Mayer Brown has long ties to the Daley family. In the past four years, the firm has gotten more than $2.5 million in legal fees from City Hall.
2) Andrew Hale is representing six cops involved in the original investigation of Koschman’s death: Cmdr. Michael Chasen, Lt. Richard Rybicki and detectives Robert Clemens, Anthony Giralamo, O’Leary and Yawger. O’Leary is the only one still with the police department. Since 2010, City Hall has paid Hale’s law firm more than $12 million to defend police officers accused of misconduct.
3) The firm of Borkan & Scahill is representing Phil Cline, the police superintendent under Daley when Vanecko killed Koschman. The firm also represents 11 cops involved in the 2011 investigation: Downs, former Deputy Supt. Steven Peterson, former Chief of Detectives Thomas Byrne, Deputy Chief of Detectives Constantine “Dean” Andrews, Cmdr. Gary Yamashiroya, Cmdr. Joseph Salemme, Lt. Maureen Biggane, Sgt. Thomas Flaherty, Sgt. Sam Cirone and detectives James Gilger and Nick Spanos. Peterson and Byrne are retired from the department. City Hall has paid the Borkan firm more than $3 million since 2010 to defend police officers.
4) The firm of Johnson & Bell has three lawyers defending Walsh. “He will be represented separately because, unlike the other officers, he was not assigned to either the original investigation or the 2011 investigation, and his involvement concerns the missing files,” a law department spokeswoman says. City Hall has paid the firm $2.2 million since 2010 for legal work.
Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez is using her own staff to defend herself, her predecessor and former boss Richard Devine and her chief of staff Dan Kirk.
And she has hired the law firm of Tobin & Munoz to defend Darren O’Brien, the prosecutor who decided not to charge Vanecko a decade ago. O’Brien, who recently retired, told Webb he threw away his agency’s Koschman files after deciding the police didn’t have enough evidence to charge the Daley nephew.

Webb: Who viewed hospital records?

Dan K. Webb. | Tim Boyle/For Sun-Times Media

Webb: Who viewed hospital records?

PUBLISHED BY: Paul Saltzman

CATEGORY: Latest News

Editor's note: Your ProbateShark believes the same kind of clout used in Cook County in the Koschman case was used in the Probate Court of Cook County against the family of Alice R. Gore.  Lucius Verenus, Schoolmaster, ProbateSharks.com

Published March 31, 2014
By  TIM NOVAK AND CHRIS FUSCO
Staff Reporters
Special prosecutor Dan K. Webb subpoenaed Northwestern Memorial Hospital to find out who accessed the medical records of David Koschman, who died there after being punched by Mayor Richard M. Daley’s nephew Richard J. “R.J.” Vanecko, according to sealed court records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.
The subpoenas show that on June 27, 2012, Webb sought “documents evidencing when any medical record of David Koschman’s was accessed, reviewed or printed, and by whom, from April 25, 2004, to the present.”
Webb also subpoenaed Koschman’s medical records — including X-rays, CT scans, doctors’ notes, operative reports, patient charts and “written and electronic correspondence (including e-mails).”
What the special prosecutor wanted to know and why hasn’t been made public. Nor is what he found out.
Webb’s 162-page report on the Koschman case says little about the Gold Coast hospital, where Vanecko’s father, Dr. Robert M. Vanecko, has been a thoracic and cardiac surgeon for decades. Dr. Vanecko is the husband of Daley’s sister, Mary Carol.
Webb and his staff won’t talk about the subpoenas. Nor will Northwestern. Dr. Vanecko did not respond to a request for comment.
Webb’s report — released after R.J. Vanecko pleaded guilty Jan. 31 to involuntary manslaughter — did make clear, though, that he wanted to know what Daley knew, and when he knew it, regarding his nephew’s involvement.
Koschman’s death went unpunished for nearly 10 years, until a Chicago Sun-Times investigation led to Webb’s appointment.
Though Webb wrote he found no evidence that Daley was involved in keeping his nephew from being charged, the special prosecutor’s report revealed the mayor knew his nephew was involved within days — even as Koschman lay in a coma at Northwestern Memorial. Koschman’s mother filed a federal lawsuit last week accusing the city, the police department, Cook County and the state’s attorney’s office of violating her son’s civil rights by covering up the crime to avoid charging Vanecko.
Webb’s report says nothing about whether there was any contact between Northwestern or Dr. Vanecko and the mayor or his staff. Nor is there any indication that Vanecko’s father ever accessed Koschman’s medical records. And Dr. Vanecko, who was once the hospital’s chief of staff, never treated Koschman, medical records obtained by Koschman’s mother show.
Dr. Patrick M. McCarthy — who had replaced Vanecko as head of cardiothoracic surgery on April 1, 2004 — did coronary-bypass surgery on Koschman on April 29, 2004, records show.
That was a week before Koschman’s mother took him off life-support.
Dr. Vanecko and his wife were among seven Daley family members who gave “voluntary sworn statements,” which were read to the grand jury that indicted their son, according to court filings. Their daughter, who is a nurse at Northwestern, also gave a statement.
Those statements haven’t been released. They remain sealed under court order.
Vanecko, 39, is serving a 60-day jail sentence for killing Koschman.
Webb’s report found that police and prosecutors botched their 2004 investigation of the case, as well as a 2011 re-investigation prompted by a Sun-Times request for records on the case.
Webb considered but did not file criminal charges against six police officers, instead turning over the mass of evidence — 300,000 pages in all — to the FBI.
His report documents three conversations between the hospital and the police within 12 hours of Koschman being hit.
Webb also revealed that patrol Officer Edwin Tremore — the beat cop who answered the call when Vanecko hit Koschman on Division Street near Dearborn Street and then ran away — went to Northwestern’s emergency room and spoke with Dr. Matthew Levine, who told him Koschman was in serious condition. Tremore didn’t mention the visit or Koschman’s condition in his report, which was the first police report on the case.
A few hours later, at 9:30 a.m. on April 25, 2004, Detective Rita O’Leary called Northwestern and spoke with an unidentified nurse who told her “Koschman was unconscious, unable to be interviewed, and was in critical but stable condition,” according to Webb’s report.
O’Leary called again at 3:20 that afternoon and spoke with the same nurse, who handed the phone to Koschman’s mother, Nanci Koschman. It was the only time Nanci Koschman heard from anyone with the police until months after her son’s death, when she was told no one would be charged.
After O’Leary’s second phone call to Northwestern, detectives didn’t work on the case for the next 13 days. The investigation resumed only after Koschman died.
It’s unclear whether O’Leary was made aware of Vanecko’s involvement. Her supervisor, since-retired Lt. Richard Rybicki, testified under immunity from prosecution that he knew the mayor’s nephew was involved within a couple days — while Koschman was still on life-support.
Matthew Crowl, who was Daley’s deputy chief of staff for public safety, told Webb’s investigators he alerted the mayor about his nephew’s involvement within days, though Webb wrote, “It was not clear whether Mayor Daley was already aware of the incident.”
Three days after Koschman’s death, Rybicki assigned the case to Detective Ronald E. Yawger, whose files included the notations “V DAILEY SISTER SON” and a now-disconnected phone number for Northwestern.
Webb said the number wasn’t assigned to a particular individual, though it once belonged to a Northwestern office where Dr. Vanecko worked, other records show.
Koschman underwent four surgeries, including two brain operations and two heart procedures, while at Northwestern, where he was in the neurological surgical intensive-care unit. Blue Cross Blue Shield paid about $250,000 for his medical bills under an insurance policy Koschman’s mother had for her 21-year-old son, according to Webb’s report.

Judge to rule Nov. 13 on unsealing report

Judge Michael P. Toomin

Editor's note: Would "Joe Sixpack" have a sealed report.  This Shark recalls having the Judge in the Estate of Alice R. Gore, a disabled 99 year old ward of the Probate Court of Cook County,  order the psychiatric evidence of a guardian of Alice who had a long mental illness history.  This was a CYA sealing.  Lucius Verenus, Schoolmaster, ProbateSharks.com

Judge to rule Nov. 13 on unsealing report

PUBLISHED BY: Paul Saltzman

CATEGORY: Latest News

Published Nov. 8, 2013
By Michael Lansu
Staff Reporter
A Cook County judge said Friday he’ll rule next week whether to unseal a special prosecutor’s report in the David Koschman case.
Judge Michael P. Toomin scheduled a hearing Wednesday to rule on the motion by the Chicago Sun-Times and WMAQ-Channel 5 to make the report public.
Toomin had sealed the report at the request of Dan K. Webb, the special prosecutor he appointed last year to reinvestigate the 21-year-old Mount Prospect man’s 2004 death and also to determine whether police and prosecutors should be charged over their handling of the case.
Webb’s investigation led to the indictment last December of Richard J. “R.J.” Vanecko, a nephew of former Mayor Richard M. Daley, for involuntary manslaughter. Vanecko, now living in southern California, is accused of throwing the punch on April 25, 2004, that led to the death of Koschman after a drunken confrontation on Division Street near Dearborn Street.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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Get the ebook “The Killing of David Koschman: A Watchdogs Investigation.” Download now
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________In September, Webb decided no one from the Chicago Police Department or the Cook County state’s attorney’s office should be charged and filed his 162-page report with Toomin.
Lawyers for Daley’s nephew don’t want the report made public before Vanecko stands trial in February, saying that could prejudice potential jurors.
Adding its objections Friday was the Fraternal Order of Police, which said the report could harm the reputation of police officers.
Webb’s appointment came after a series of reports in the Sun-Times that questioned the handling of the case by police and prosecutors.
Email: mlansu@suntimes.com
Twitter: @mikelansu

Vanecko judge has link to old Daley Machine

Editor’s note: This would not be the same Machine that operates the corrupt Probate Court of Cook County? Lucius Verenus, Schoolmaster, ProbateSharks.com

Vanecko judge has link to old Daley Machine

By TIM NOVAK AND CHRIS FUSCO

Staff Reporters/tnovak@suntimes.com

Last Modified: Mar 11, 2013 01:15PM

When the high-profile manslaughter case of a nephew of former Mayor Richard M. Daley was shifted to a McHenry County judge, the judge quickly made one thing clear.

“I do not know anyone involved,” Judge Maureen P. McIntyre, who got the case because of concerns regarding Cook County judges’ ties to Daley, said on Jan. 18. “My family does not know anyone involved.”

But McIntyre, a Republican originally from New York, does have family connections to the Democratic Party in Chicago going back to the time it was run by the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, whose grandson Richard J. “R.J.” Vanecko’s involuntary manslaughter case is now before her, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation found.

In a politically explosive case in which connections are a central issue, McIntyre’s newly revealed ties are likely to draw close scrutiny.

Now divorced, McIntyre married into a family that for two generations held government patronage jobs.

Her live-in ex-husband and former law partner Raymond X. Henehan’s late parents both had patronage jobs in Cook County government until they retired in 1981.

And fresh out of college, Henehan had government jobs in the early 1970s with Cook County, the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois. His longest tenure in those posts was two years as a traffic investigator for a Chicago City Council committee headed by Ald. Paul Wigoda (49th). He quit that patronage post a few weeks before a federal grand jury indicted Wigoda in April 1974 in connection with a bribery scheme that landed the alderman in prison.

The young federal prosecutor who put Wigoda away: Dan K. Webb, now a powerhouse attorney leading the case against Vanecko, who is charged in the 2004 death of 21-year-old David Koschman of Mount Prospect.

Webb was appointed special prosecutor in the Koschman case last April after a series of reports in the Sun-Times cast doubt on the handling of the investigation by police and prosecutors. He is now weighing whether to bring criminal charges against anyone from the Chicago Police Department or Cook County state’s attorney’s office. Those agencies twice declined to charge Vanecko during the time his uncle was mayor.

Henehan, 64, is a disbarred attorney who lost his license for misappropriating money from his clients.

He and McIntyre, 65, divorced in 2006, but Henehan has continued to live with the judge in Barrington Hills, the Sun-Times reported last month.

Henehan was born in 1948, the first child of Raymond M. Henehan, a tavern owner who served in the Army in World War II, and Dorothy Henehan, a housewife. When Henehan was young, the family lived in East Garfield Park on Chicago’s West Side. His father also owned a business that installed parking-lot bumpers.

The family moved to Glenview in the late 1950s, when Henehan’s father went to work as an engineer for the Cook County highway department, a job he held for 22 years.

Henehan graduated from Loyola Academy in Wilmette in 1966, then attended Christian Brothers University in Memphis, Tenn.

On Oct. 26, 1970, he joined his father on the Cook County payroll, making $5,142 a year as a field auditor. A month after being hired, Henehan got a 27 percent pay raise. He left the job in September 1971, records show.

By 1972, Henehan had moved to Rogers Park, the North Side neighborhood represented in Springfield at the time by state Rep. Daniel J. O’Brien Jr., a family friend. O’Brien was politically active in Wigoda’s ward, having worked as a lawyer at City Hall under the first Mayor Daley and serving as president of the 49th Ward Regular Democratic Organization. He would go on to become a Cook County judge.

The Henehan and O’Brien families were friends going back to Henehan’s and O’Brien’s parents.

On Feb. 16, 1972, Henehan was hired by Wigoda, chairman of the City Council Committee on Traffic and Public Safety, city records show. Wigoda was one of the city’s most powerful aldermen. He and another Daley stalwart, Lt. Gov. Neil Hartigan, were the political bosses of the 49th Ward.

Making $4,800 a year to start, Henehan got a 23 percent raise less than a year later and another 5.7 percent raise by the time he left the city payroll on March 16, 1974, about three weeks before the indictment put an end to Wigoda’s political career.

Three days after Henehan left the city job, his mother was on the Democratic Party primary ballot for state representative, seeking one of three seats in the Illinois House representing the North Shore. Dorothy Henehan finished second behind incumbent Rep. Harold Katz of Glencoe, qualifying for the November 1974 general election, which she lost to Katz and two Republican incumbents: Reps. John Edward Porter and Brian B. Duff.

She then got a job with the Cook County assessor’s office.

Meantime, her son had moved on to his third government job, nearly doubling his salary — to $11,340 — when he went to work on April 1, 1974, for the audit division of the Illinois Department of Transportation under Democratic Gov. Dan Walker and his lieutenant governor, Hartigan.

Henehan got three pay raises in less than a year and a half before leaving the state payroll on Sept. 15, 1975, two weeks after marrying McIntyre, his classmate at IIT-Chicago Kent College of Law.

They both got their law licenses in May 1976. That same month, Henehan also got his state license as a certified public accountant.

Henehan started a law practice in Cary, while McIntyre joined a Loop law firm. The first of their four children was born in 1978, and the couple soon opened their own law practice — Henehan & McIntyre Ltd. — in McHenry County.

McIntyre left the firm in 1996 when she was appointed an associate judge in McHenry County, an appointment she held until she won election as a circuit judge in 2000.

That was also the year her husband began engaging in a series of financial transactions with clients that led to his being stripped of his law license in 2009 for misdeeds including misspending nearly $100,000 of two clients’ money, the Sun-Times has reported.

In 2006, the judge divorced Henehan, who, records show, owed more than $700,000 in court judgments to his former law clients and $21,110 in federal income taxes to the Internal Revenue Service. McIntyre got most of the couple’s joint assets in the divorce, including their Barrington Hills home, though her ex has continued to live with her, records show.

David Matthiesen — a retired businessman whose late father sued Henehan over four unpaid loans and won a $471,534 judgment — has called the couple’s living situation “a divorce of convenience, where he still lived in the house,” telling the Sun-Times last month, “It helped separate her from his problems.”

Neither McIntyre nor Henehan responded to requests for comment.

McIntyre got the Vanecko case after Cook County Circuit Judge Arthur Hill Jr., who was originally assigned the case, stepped aside, citing his ties to Daley, whom he’d worked for as a prosecutor when Daley was Cook County state’s attorney.

Webb successfully argued that the case should go to a judge outside Cook County to try to avoid such potential conflicts of interest. The Illinois Supreme Court then shifted the case to McHenry County, whose chief judge, Michael Sullivan, gave it to McIntyre, a juvenile court judge.

http://www.suntimes.com/18646746-761/vanecko-judge-has-link-to-old-daley-machine.html

Former Mayor Daley’s police detail under scrutiny in Koschman death

Former Mayor Daley’s police detail under scrutiny in Koschman death

BY TIM NOVAK, CHRIS FUSCO AND CAROL MARIN Staff Reporters January 21, 2013 12:00AM

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Sam Roti, head of then-Mayor Richard Daley's security detail, with the mayor at a news conference at the West Englewood Library Branch on May 18, 2010. | Sun-Times Medi

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• Victim in 1992 bat attack at Daley summer home now runs tea company

Updated: January 21, 2013 2:14AM

F or the 22 years he was mayor, Richard M. Daley relied upon a select group of police officers to ensure his safety and that of his family.

The security detail was more than a palace guard. Its members routinely traveled with Daley and his family. They drove his kids to school. They ran errands for the family.

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Now, members of the police detail that served Daley are being questioned by Dan K. Webb, the special prosecutor appointed by a judge last year to reinvestigate the 2004 death of David Koschman.

Sources say Webb wants to know what the security detail’s members know about Koschman’s death — a case that resulted in an involuntary manslaughter indictment last month against Daley nephew Richard J. “R.J.” Vanecko.

Webb continues to look into why police and prosecutors from the Cook County state’s attorney’s office didn’t charge Vanecko.

Webb’s team has questioned retired police Cmdr. Sam Roti, who became the detail’s commander in 2004, about two months after Koschman’s death.

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Roti replaced James Keating, a retired police officer who is now head of security for the Chicago Transit Authority.

Keating and Roti both grew up in Bridgeport, the former mayor’s old neighborhood. Each joined the detail on April 25, 1989 — the day after Daley was first sworn in as mayor.

Neither Roti nor Keating would comment.

Nor would Webb, who has refused to discuss the investigation.

Daley spokeswoman Jacquelyn Heard said: “We understand that to be an ongoing investigation and therefore inappropriate for anyone, particularly the former mayor, to comment at all.”

Daley was in Florida, celebrating his 62nd birthday, when the police say the 6-foot-3, 230-pound Vanecko punched the 5-foot-5, 125-pound Koschman during a drunken confrontation in the Rush Street nightlife district on April 25, 2004. Hospitalized in a coma, Koschman died 11 days later from brain injuries.

Vanecko ran away, according to the police, who have said they had no contact with him until May 20, 2004, when he appeared in a lineup at Area 3 detective headquarters at Belmont and Western.

The Chicago Police Department had 25 officers assigned to Daley’s detail between April 25, 2004, and May 20, 2004, police records show. Among them were:

◆ Roti, who became commander of the detail on July 1, 2004. He stayed in that job until he retired Nov. 15, 2010, six months before Daley left office.

◆ Keating, the son of a Chicago firefighter. Keating headed the detail between Feb. 16, 1998, and June 30, 2004. He then moved to another post in the police department and eventually became a deputy chief, retiring on Jan. 15, 2011. He became the head of security at Navy Pier and now has the same job at the CTA.

◆ Brian Thompson, who is now commander of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s security detail.

◆ Carol Weingart, who is among several police officers suing the city after being removed from the detail after Daley left office. Her brother-in-law, Lt. Denis Walsh, was an officer in the police department’s 18th District, where Koschman was injured. Walsh is now a detective in Area 3 who was involved in the 2011 reinvestigation of the Koschman case — including the discovery of previously missing police files in the case.

◆ Anthony Fosco, who committed suicide by shooting himself in the stomach on his basement couch about a month after Daley left office, according to authorities. Fosco had recently retired.

“The city is fully cooperating with the special prosecutor,” says Melissa Stratton, a police spokeswoman. “Because of a protective order in this matter, the city cannot comment.”

There’s no information in any of the police reports the department has released to indicate that any member of Daley’s security detail had any involvement in the Koschman case.

That wasn’t the case nearly 21 years ago, at the time of another incident in which Vanecko, then just a teenager, was involved.

Daley’s son Patrick, then 16, had thrown a beer bash at his family’s summer home in Grand Beach, Mich. It ended after a fracas in which another teen was hit in the head with a baseball bat outside the home and ended up hospitalized with brain injuries.

The mayor was in New York, but the police chief in Grand Beach, Mich., knew who to call: Daley’s security detail.

“I had orders at the time to never call the mayor directly — to always get them through the detail,” Chief Dan Schroeder recalls.

Schroeder tried to contact Michael Marano, then head of Daley’s detail, hours after the March 1, 1992, fight. Instead, he reached Gregory Ramirez, another officer on the detail, according to Michigan State Police records.

Marano and Ramirez resigned from Daley’s detail in 1997 after the Chicago Sun-Times revealed they were also running a security company that got government business from city-related agencies.

The Michigan police records show this exchange took place during the call from Schroeder to the mayor’s security detail:

Schroeder: I’m trying to get a hold of the mayor, I need to talk to him, we had a fracas out here last night involving his son. . . .

Ramirez: Could you fill me in on the details, um, the mayor is also in New York with Mike. . . .

Schroeder: OK, what happened was apparently Pat and some of his friends were having a party up there and, um, ah, a friend of Pat’s had brought some other friends over from Michigan City.

Ramirez: OK.

Schroeder: OK, and apparently, ah, they weren’t welcome there, there was some racial slurs back and forth.

Ramirez: Were they black kids or something like that?

Schroeder: They were Filipino kids . . . And they were told to get out and on the way out one of them, one of the Filipino kids, got sucker punched. . . . So they decided they wanted some revenge. So they had come back later on with reinforcements and there was a fracas in the driveway. One kid from the Daley house had brandished a weapon.

Ramirez: What kind of weapon, do we know?

Schroeder: I think it’s a .20-gauge shotgun. Nobody’s admitting to it and I didn’t see it . . . That was somebody from the Daley clan up there.

Ramirez: OK.

Schroeder: Then the worst part is somebody up there also took a baseball bat and cracked one of the kids in the head.

Ramirez: Holy Christ.

Schroeder: Yes, he’s in the hospital. He’s had brain surgery this morning. . . . Like I say, it’s getting around so I need to talk to the mayor.

Ramirez: Yeah, okay. Well, I’ll call Mike back in New York right now and I’ll have him advise him from here what’s going on.

During their investigation, the Michigan police learned that Patrick Daley and Vanecko, then 17, had gone to a basement closet and grabbed the shotgun. Vanecko apparently assembled it and went outside, where Daley’s friends were fighting with another group of teens — including 15-year-old Andrew Buckman — who had come back to the party with the two Filipino teens.

Mark Lawler, one of Daley’s classmates from Mount Carmel High School, hit Buckman in the head with the baseball bat that he got from the Daley garage.

Two days after the brawl, Vanecko told the Michigan police, including State Trooper DeWayne Hellenga, that Daley’s detail kept Patrick Daley and Lawler from running away, according to a transcript of Vanecko’s interview.

Vanecko told the police that, while they were still in Michigan, Patrick Daley had decided to run away after getting a call from someone threatening to publicize the party. Vanecko drove Patrick Daley back to the mayor’s home in Bridgeport, leaving behind the Daleys’ Chevrolet Blazer, which had its windshield broken during the fight.

From the police transcript:

Vanecko: He wanted to leave, you know, run away, and he wanted me to take him to like a Greyhound bus, he was just really, really nervous and scared. I talked him out of that and I took him home, and he’s just like, ‘Well, I’m gonna call Mark, and we’re gonna leave probably tomorrow.’ And I said, ‘You know, just wait it out for a while.’

According to Vanecko, the following day he got a call at his home in Sauganash from his cousin, who still wanted to run away because the Michigan police had called him to talk about the gun.

Vanecko: And then Patrick called me back, and he’s like, ‘I’m going to leave. Do you still have the Blazer keys and my wallet,’ because he had left them in my glove compartment. I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he said, ‘All right, well somebody is going to come up to get them.’ . . . And my uncle’s aid[e], Pat McLain, called me and he’s like ‘I’m sending some of the detail up to get the keys, and then we’ll take the Blazer back into Chicago.’

Hellenga: You’re talking about the security detail?

Vanecko: Yeah, and I told them that Pat was thinking of, you know, leaving. And he’s like, ‘I know, we’ll keep an eye on him.’

Later, a member of Daley’s detail showed up at Vanecko’s home, according to the transcript.

Vanecko: It was a lady . . . security, and she got the keys and I was like ‘Here’s Patrick’s wallet.’ . . . I was like, ‘I think he’s going to run away, you guys have got to watch him.’ They’re like, ‘We know. He’s really scared.’ And so then, you know, they left, and I’m sitting around and my Uncle Rich called me, and he’s, you know, ‘What went on?’ And I was just, I told him everything, and he said that Patrick had left, that he’d run away, and he wanted to know if I had any idea where he was going, and I told him, you know, he wanted to go to a Greyhound bus, or whatever, get out of there, he was going to leave or pull out.

So then I get a call from the second in command of the detail security, Mike Marano. He’s like, ‘Patrick’s gone, you know he’s talked to you before. Where do you think he went?’ . . . I was like, ‘You should check the Lawler kid’s house because Patrick had said Lawler was coming in to get him.’ . . .So then, at like 6, Patrick calls me, and he’s like ‘R.J., I need some money and I got to get my wallet and some of my camping stuff.’ And I’m like, ‘Where are you?’ And he’s like, ‘I can’t tell you.’ . . .

[Vanecko then asks] ‘Where are you guys going?’ and he’s like, he said something about going to Wisconsin, like to Green Bay or something. . . . So I told him meet me at the parking lot near my house, in the church parking lot. . . .

So I hung up from him, called the detail, told them that I was in contact with Patrick and they should send their guys to my house, and we’ll bring him back down. . . .

Vanecko and the detail drove to the parking lot at Queen of All Saints Church in Sauganash, where they met the mayor’s son and Lawler. Vanecko said he told his cousin, “ ‘Patrick get out of the car, here’s your wallet and stuff. . . . I brought the detail with us, they’re going to take you back down.’ And he got all mad, started yelling

http://www.suntimes.com/17637987-761/former-mayor-daleys-police-detail-under-scrutiny-in-koschman-death.html