Chicago police detective Jon Burge oversaw the torture - from the 1970s through the early 1990s - of more than 100 Black men (the exact number is unknown). Our recent book, Chicago’s Reckoning, documents how this torture swept through Chicago’s segregated south side neighborhoods. The book reveals how Richard M. Daley, both as State’s Attorney and then as Mayor, consistently denied knowledge of Burge’s “midnight torture crew,” while the City’s Law Department paid nearly a billion dollars to settle civil suits arising from these cases. Finally, in 2010, Department of Justice U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald prosecuted Burge for perjury and obstruction of justice – but not torture – resulting in a four-year sentence that was later reduced. We discovered in a sidebar transcript that at trial Fitzgerald’s prosecutors presented more extensive evidence of Burge’s criminal activities that was acknowledged but overruled for presentation in open court. The result was a kind of “code of silence” that can conceal high-level corruption. This corruption is a backdrop to a larger Chicago story to be presented in this lecture. | 
