Armed sheriff’s police officers storm a home in Chicago Heights, climbing over lawn furniture and dodging a bevy of windsocks in the yard next door.
When they finish with the house, they turn to a camera crew that’s tailing them and proudly show off a cache of guns they’ve confiscated.
Middle America is about to see how the Criminal Intelligence Unit of the Cook County Jail – a unit headed by lifelong Southlander Thomas Kinsella – investigates crimes committed inside the jail by any of the 10,000 inmates awaiting trial.
The 40-person unit uses those inmates as sources to try to crack other cases, funneling what they find out to the sheriff’s police gang unit that conducts raids and makes arrests.
Both gang-busting units are about to be featured in a documentary titled “The Squeeze,” which starts Friday on MSNBC.
A Chicago-based production crew spent about 16 weeks filming during the spring and summer, boasting what it called unprecedented access to the jail and sheriff’s department. Producers pitched the idea to the sheriff, who continues to make national headlines thanks to Craigslist prostitution stings, the investigation of a grave reselling scandal at the Burr Oak cemetery and his refusal to evict renters in foreclosed buildings.
Three episodes already are wrapped up, and a fourth is in the works. The crew plans to return to shoot more episodes, said Brittney Blair, a sheriff’s liaison to the production company.
Another three-part documentary, “Cook County Jail,” debuted in November on the Discovery Channel and focused on the lives of the inmates and corrections officers at the nation’s largest jail.
Kinsella, a Brother Rice High school graduate, said final edits on “The Squeeze” accurately show his team’s day-to-day operations.
“It’s more interesting than just the daily goings-on in the jail,” he said. “It’s a different aspect of the law enforcement coming out of the jail.
CIU investigators work with accused in the jail who are interested in cooperating to help solve other crimes. They snitch for leniency in their own cases, he said, and they talk about gang activity.
“We offer them some little minor stuff, so if you’re in here for a year or two it really seems like a big deal,” he said.
Perks, like lunch from McDonald’s, a chance to smoke or the opportunity to choose their cellmate are offered as incentives to cooperate, he said.
“Anything to break their daily routine of being in the jail.”
Tips about gang activity are turned over to Lt. John Blair and Sgt. Jason O’Malley of the Markham-based sheriff’s police gang unit, which gets warrants and executes raids.
But the unit also has garnered information from jail sources about the Lane Bryant killings in Tinley Park, he said. Inmates have claimed to know things about the February 2008 shooting rampage that left five women dead and a sixth one injured. Information has been passed along to the South Suburban Major Crimes Task Force, which is heading up the investigation, he said.
“We’ve called the task force out there (to the county jail) maybe a dozen times with inmates that say they have information on them,” he said. “The task force comes down here and interviews them.”
Still, nobody has been arrested in connection with the slayings.
No aspirations to be a cop
Born and raised in Chicago’s Mount Greenwood community, Kinsella signed up for a police cadet program during his senior year at Brother Rice High School. It was on a whim, he said, after his father, a longtime Chicago firefighter, told him he’d get a day off school if he went to check it out.
“I never had any intentions. I never even thought about becoming a police officer,” he said.
But he spent 32 years with the Chicago Police Department before moving to the sheriff’s police. In 2001, the powers that be moved the investigation of crimes inside the jail from Chicago police to the sheriff’s police in an effort to combat lawsuits inmates filed after being attacked in the jail by other inmates. Kinsella headed up that sheriff’s investigation unit.
Sheriff’s investigators looked into the fights and started solving crimes committed in the jail, he said.
“And as we started doing it, we realized the potential of the 10,000 informants and all the intelligence capabilities that the jail had,” Kinsella, 64, said. “So we continue doing the criminal aspect and the investigations and started developing more and more the intelligence gathering.”
What the graffiti means
Now the walls in Kinsella’s office at the jail complex and the CIU headquarters down the hall are covered in gang hierarchy charts and photos of gang graffiti. There’s an assortment of homemade shanks confiscated from inmates that they crafted from fan blades, table legs and even plastic-foam meal trays. One color flier shows how a skinny metal shiv could be stashed inside an innocent-looking packaged honeybun sold at the jail commissary.
“They make shanks out of everything imaginable. It’s unreal what they can make shanks out of,” Kinsella said. “They use them mostly against each other.”
The unit just printed a gang book for other law enforcement agencies that maps gang strongholds in Chicago and the suburbs and deciphers gang graffiti and hand signals. It explains what investigator Franco Domma can do in person – interpret graffiti to show which gangs dominate a neighborhood, and who their closest rivals are, he said.
In the Southland, the most graffiti turns up in Chicago Heights and Blue Island, said Frank Diaz, the CIU’s superintendent. Summit’s another hot spot because it borders Chicago, he said. Chicago Heights alone has four strong street gangs, according to its police department.
In the end, street gangs won’t be eradicated there or anywhere else, Kinsella said. They’re just too profitable to completely go away.
But he’s convinced they can be contained, he said.
“I’ve never seen the world through rose-colored glasses,” he said.
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