CHICAGO (CN) – Chicago was slapped with two police misconduct lawsuits Monday alleging a city-wide conspiracy of high-ranking police officials turning a blind eye to dirty cops planting evidence and framing innocent people for crimes.
Armando Serrano spent 23 years in prison after cops in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood framed him and two other Latino men for the shooting death of Rodrigo Vargas in 1993, a crime that went unsolved for four months until now-retired police detective Reynaldo Guevara and his team took over the investigation, according to the lawsuit Serrano filed in Chicago federal court.
Vargas was shot to death while sitting in his van in front of his home. When police arrived they found $190 in his pocket and a radio in his hand, and it appeared as if nothing had been stolen.
According to Serrano’s complaint, Guevara aka “the Hook-up Artist” and his team of officers used a heroin-addicted gang member with a rap sheet as a phony witness to help them set up Serrano and others.
Guevara and his partner Ernest Halvorsen allegedly convinced Francisco Vincente to work for them by offering him food and candy during heroin withdrawal and help with his own criminal cases, and “smacked him around” until he agreed to cooperate.
Serrano claims former Assistant Cook County State’s Attorneys Matthew Coghlan and John Dillon conspired with Guevara, Halvorsen and violent crimes unit supervisor Edward Mingey to use the “snitch” witness to secure indictments against five men, “knowing full well that the men were innocent of the crimes for which they were accused.”
During the murder investigation, Vargas’ widow Wilda reportedly told Guevara that three men in a light brown car may have seen her husband at a gas station carrying a large amount of cash.
“Consistent with a pattern of framing Latino men from the Humbolt Park area, detectives Guevara and Halvorsen decided to frame three Latino men who had previously been convicted of or accused of committing armed robberies,” Serrano’s complaint states.
The detectives allegedly ran criminal histories on Serrano, Jose Montanez and Jorge Pacheco to determine who would be framed. They showed photos of the men to Vargas’ widow in an attempt to convince her that they were the men she saw at the gas station.
“Detective Guevara then told Wilda that the ‘bullet hole’ on the passenger side of Montanez’s car had been ‘matched’ to ballistics evidence found at the scene of her husband’s shooting. That statement was a lie. No ballistics evidence connected Montanez’s car to the crime scene,” the lawsuit alleges.
Back at the states attorney’s office, and in the presence of Halvorsen, Coghlan and Dillon, Guevara allegedly coached Vincente to use crime scene photos and a fabricated narrative that Montanez admitted his involvement in the murder and implicated Serrano and Pacheco.
Serrano claims Guevara prepared a police report based on the bogus information and arrested him. Serrano says he refused to confess to the murder despite being physical abused and “tag-teamed” by Guevara and Halvorsen for 24 hours.
In exchange for his testimony before a grand jury, according to the lawsuit, Vincente received cash, access to drugs, three years of protection in witness quarters and pre-trial custody credit toward his own jail sentence.
