John Blomster: Welcome to Discovery, an all-new podcast presented by the University of Washington School of Law. I’m your host John Blomster and today we’re speaking with Flint Taylor, founding partner of The People’s Law Office in Chicago and author of a new book, The Torture Papers: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago. He played a central role in the events of the book, which explores the 1969 murder of the Black Panther party chairman Fred Hampton, the ensuing litigation and Taylor’s decades-long pursuit of Jon Burge, who was the leader of an infamous torture ring within the CPD. Flint, thank you for taking the time for speaking with us.
Flint Taylor: Happy to be here.
JB: So, what inspired you to write a book focusing on these events right now?
FT: Well, now it’s what 50 years since I started doing this as a law student? And for the last three years I’ve been writing this book to try to chronicle what I had learned and different struggles we had been through to obtain various court decisions and exposing the torture and the assassination of Fred Hampton as well as the torture of over 125 African-American men in the city of Chicago over a 20-year period. So, it seemed to me and others that I knew that it would be good to get this down into a book from a personal point of view. But, yet, maybe look at it as a historical memoir that I tried to be as true to the record as I could. And I based it primarily on court transcripts and newspaper reports and that kind of thing, rather than interviews because I felt that the men who had been tortured—what they said then, what they testified about—that was the most accurate voice that I could give to them. And I felt it important to give voice to the survivors of police torture and the people who also survived from the murderous raid on Fred Hampton’s apartment.
JB: So, this book drops the reader right into the civil rights movement in Chicago where the Black Panther party had become a political force and its chairman, Fred Hampton, is the target of an FBI investigation. So who was Fred Hampton and why was he on the FBI’s radar?
FT: Well, Fred Hampton was a 21-year-old young man. He was the chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther party, back in 1969, and he was targeted because he was a charismatic leader. He was someone who the FBI decided needed to be neutralized, in their own terminology. The FBI had not only been investigating, but they had created an illegal and unconstitutional program called the COINTEL Program, and this was under J. Edgar Hoover, the notorious FBI director for decades. And he was devoted to and focused on, in his own terminology, neutralizing and ultimately destroying black nationalist and black liberation organizations. And so when the panthers became a real viable force in the community and were raising real important issues, then they became a target. And among the panther leaders, Fred Hampton was perhaps the most charismatic young leader and the FBI took notice. And so that is why he was targeted.
JB: So, what led up to and what happened on the morning of December 4, 1969?
FT: Well, now I’m bringing together an investigation and litigation that took some 13 years, but during that 13-year period we were able to uncover that this raid—now we’re talking about a police raid at a west-side apartment where nine panthers were sleeping at four-thirty in the morning, including Fred Hampton and Mark Clark—two of the leaders. The police went there with machine guns and shotguns and other weapons. And they burst in the front and the backdoor. They fired over 90 bullets into this little apartment and they killed Hampton and Clark and they wounded several of the other survivors. Not satisfied with that, they then charged the survivors with attempted murder, even though the ballistics evidence would ultimately show that only one shot, at most was fired by the panthers and over 90 were fired by the police. As we got deeper into the case, we found out that this wasn’t just a raid that was executed by the police—Chicago police—under the leadership of the state’s attorney Edward Hanrahan, the D.A. in Chicago, in Cook County, but was also masterminded by the FBI and this COINTEL Program that I mentioned earlier. And that there was an FBI informant by the name of William O’neil, who was in the Black Panther Party and had drawn a floor plan of the apartment I mentioned where the raid took place. And on that floor plan he marked the bed where Hampton and his fiancé Deborah Johnson would be sleeping. And this floor plan was supplied as part of the counter-intelligence program to the state’s attorney and to the police, in order to orchestrate this raid.
JB: Following the raid, many of the questions that came out of it, many claim that this was really what could be classified as an assassination. Was this an accurate claim?
FT: I think so. Yes. One of my partners Jeff Haas, who he and I tried the civil rights case for 18 months in the mid-seventies, he’s written a book called The Assassination of Fred Hampton. And Hampton was shot in the head while he was sleeping. The FBI took credit for the raid afterwards, gave a bonus to the informant that I mentioned, who set up the raid. Called the raid a success. And given the fact that assassinations carry a different connotation of course than murder, we always talked about it as murder, but as we learned more and more about the FBI being behind it and having a program, then it became he was targeted, not only because he was a black panther, but he was specifically was targeted because who he was like Martin Luther King was assassinated. Like Malcolm X was assassinated. Well, Fred Hampton was assassinated as well.
JB: So, you’re one of the prosecuting attorneys in Hampton v. Hanrahan. Can you tell us a little bit about how that case unfolded over those 18 months?
FT: Well, we brought the case in 1970, about six months after the raid. There was like six years of pre-trial litigation. There was an appeal. We fought very hard to get some of the documents that I just mentioned, including that floor plan. And then in 1976 it went to trial. And it went to trial, as you mentioned, for 18 months. The longest trial, at that time, in federal court history. During the trial we were able to expose the fact that the FBI had suppressed 200 volumes of FBI documents, some of which were very pertinent to the case. But we also had a judge who was very much dead set against our succeeding. So, after 18 months of trial and all the evidence we were able to uncover, the judge decided not to let the jury decide the case. So, he through the case out after 18 months. This led to an appeal, to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and we won that appeal. We then had to defend that victory in the U.S. Supreme Court. We were successful in doing that. So, then it came back to another judge in Chicago. It would have been 10 years, 11 elevens after we first filed the case. And we were able then because of what the higher courts had said about our evidence to obtain a settlement for the families of Hampton and Clark and the survivors, which at that time was the largest civil rights settlement in the history of the United States as far as we knew. So, 13 years of litigation. Both my partner Jeff Haas and I ended up in jail for a moment being held in contempt. But ultimately we were able to obtain some vindication and not only in court, but being able to get all of this evidence out into the public light and change the narrative of the case from a shootout, which was of course a false narrative to a shoot-in, to a murder and then ultimately to an assassination. And I think Jeff’s book, Jeff Haas’s book, helps cement the idea that, in fact, it was an officially sponsored assassination of a vibrant, young African-American leader in the city of Chicago.
JB: So, the other huge topic in this book is Jon Burge and your epic saga that spans 30 years.
FT: Yes.
JB: So, who is Jon Burge and how did you first hear about him and what he was up to in the CPD?
FT: Jon Burge grew up on the southeast side of Chicago in a changing neighborhood. Went to Vietnam as a military police sergeant and while on a POW camp in Vietnam he witnessed and may have participated in the torture of Vietnamese civilians and prisoners of war. That torture included using electric shock with various devices, including one that is pictured on the front of my book, which we call The Torture Machine. And when he came back from to Vietnam he became a Chicago police officer. He quickly rose through the ranks from detective to sergeant to lieutenant to commander. And during that period of time, he orchestrated and commanded a group of Chicago police detectives who tortured African-American suspects who were picked up on the south side of Chicago and later on the west side of Chicago. And they were picked up in serious cases and they used the kind of tactics, that being Burge and his men, that included electric shock, that included putting bags and plastic typewriter covers over people’s heads in order to cut off their breathing in order to make them think they were being suffocated. Mock executions, by putting pistols and rifles and shotguns in people’s mouths and pulling the trigger and making them think they were being executed. And beatings particularly on the genitals and other parts of the body. We first came to know about Burge in a very celebrated case where two African-American young men were arrested for killing two white cops. And they were brutally, brutally tortured. And this kind of opened the door to us ultimately representing one of those two men in a case in federal court alleging his human and constitutional rights had been violated by the torture. And then thirty years later we ended up representing the second man, Jackie Wilson.
JB: So, how did you first start to find cracks in the cover up? How did this saga unfold over those three decades?
FT: Well, Andrew Wilson was tortured in 1982, but because he was charged with death-penalty crimes, no one particularly cared, certainly in the administration of justice, cared about that. They wanted to send him to the death penalty as fast as they could. So, even though that evidence came out of his torture at that time, it wasn’t known it was a pattern and practice of torture. And what’s interesting and part of the reason my book is called The Torture Machine is not only because of the box, the torture machine box, but because in Chicago we had a democratic machine. We had a machine, the Daly political machine. So, this couldn’t have gone on for 20 years without the highest levels of county and city government, police department officials condoning it and participating in some level. And so when this first became known the state’s attorney, the chief prosecutor of Cook County, was Richard Daly and that’s who went on to become the mayor. And he made a decision at that time not to investigate the torture and not to bring to justice Burge and his men and because of that the torture scandal went on for another 10 years. During that time, we were involved in representing Wilson, as I mentioned, in a civil case. And in 1989 we started getting letters from an anonymous police source who was telling us “Hey, this isn’t just an isolated incident, this is part of a whole pattern and practice of torture under Burge.” That he’s a racist. That Daly knew about this, that other high level officials knew about all of this and did nothing. In other words, this anonymous source who we later dubbed Deep Badge, like Deep Throat in Watergate, that he laid out a roadmap for us to understand that his wasn’t just one outrageous case of police brutality and violence, but was a pattern and practice. So, he gave us enough information, or she—we never knew who the person was—to investigate, find other survivors of torture who told similar stories and were documented and led us on this path of decades of investigating, which led us to many other cases and led us to find out Daly’s role in it and also helping to get certain people off of death row who had been tortured into giving false confessions. And ultimately Burge was fired based on the evidence that came out and then 15 years later he was prosecuted for obstruction of justice and did four years in the penitentiary.
JB: Did you ever feel at risk with so many of these high level organizations involved?
FT: Well, on a certain level we did. We certainly received some threats and we heard we received some threats during the Hampton case and we received some threats, including one specific threat that was communicated to us that Burge had made a threat that he would blow us away with a shotgun if he in fact was prosecuted or fired. That didn’t happen. I mean he did he get prosecuted and ultimately fired, but he didn’t blow us away. Luckily for us. But yes, I don’t know how serious the threats were. They were never actually implemented, but when you’re taking on the political machine, you’re taking on the police department, you’re taking on people who are very violent individuals—that being police officers who torture and assassinate—you have to be very mindful of the fact that you might be in some danger. But in this country, unlike lots of other countries, lawyers haven’t been targets of assassinations, as least yet.
JB: So, from 1969 until now—all of your work—what do you feel is the lasting legacy ultimately of these cases and all of this litigation? And what do you want readers to take away from this book?
FT: Well, you asked me why I was motivated to write the book and I think it was a continuation of the work that we do as lawyers, as people’s lawyers. I think we’re very much committed to the idea that we’re not just lawyers in court, but we’re also responsible, we have the responsibility for educating people. Because we are learning about things that are really significant and what we’re trying to do as we uncover this evidence is to bring a true people’s narrative, so to speak, of the events. As I said, in these cases, it is obviously a very, very powerful attempt by power structure and by some degree the media to gloss over, cover up, put out a narrative that’s not true. It’s false. And so when you uncover the true narrative you feel a responsibility to put that narrative out. And so what I hope that people will take away from the book are several things and one is to understand the actual narrative of what happened in the assassination of Fred Hampton and the torture struggle. To give voice, to understand the humanity and the survivors, or the victims, of police torture went through. It was another important thing that I was trying to demonstrate as well. So, that’s some of the why I did the book and why I hope people will use it in terms of education, in terms of learning how far government entities, police, will go. And also to get the feel that you can fight for justice. You can fight against systemic, racial, police violence and that it’s important people do so. And I try to bring across the idea that community organizations, organizations that span the 50-year period in one form or another, right up until today with the movement for black lives and all the other organizations that helped to get us reparations in the city of Chicago for the survivors of police torture. So, those are some of the things that I hope people will take away from the book and learn from the book.
JB: Flint Taylor is a founding partner of The People’s Law Office in Chicago and author of the new book The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago. Flint, thank you again for joining us here on Discovery.
FT: You’re very welcome.