Wicked Town Gang Investigation Starts Small, but Brings Down Large Drug Organization

According to many news sources, the case that brought down one of Chicago's most notoriously violent gang factions started small. What grew out of those early strands became the Wicked Town racketeering case, one of the biggest gang prosecutions in years at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse in Chicago.?

Part of a federal effort The case against Wicked Town was indicative of a collaborative push by local and federal investigators to target the drivers of Chicago's gun violence with racketeering conspiracy charges that typically were used against the outfit or sophisticated drug trafficking organizations.

In addition to using the RICO law to hold large numbers of gang members responsible for their organization's activities, the Wicked Town case employed the VICAR act, or Violent Crimes in Aid of Racketeering Activity, an offshoot of RICO created by Congress in 1984.

While the U.S. attorney's office ultimately took the death penalty off the table in the Wicked Town case, the prospect of that punishment came up repeatedly in testimony of cooperators who decided to flip against their colleagues, despite the gang's strict "No-snitch" policy.

The ATF agent and his supervisors told news media that while racketeering cases are by no means a "magic solution" to the city's seemingly endless cycle of gun violence, shootings and homicides in the area where Wicked Town operated are down significantly since the case was brought.

"Instead of running around and going from this small case to another small case where violators we are arresting are going to be right back on the street in a case like this, they're going away for a long time and it's going to make a definite impact," said Will Panoke, the assistant special agent in charge of the ATF's Chicago bureau.

The Chicago police investigation that ultimately targeted Wicked Town was widening in 2017 when the ATF first got involved, the case agent told the Tribune, looking at some of the ballistics leads such as analyzing shell casings from crime scenes and tracing any guns that had been recovered.

While Chicago police had employed state wires in the case early on, wiretaps targeting key members of Wicked Town's hierarchy started in mid-2019, more than a year after the initial murders, the agent said.

"A wire is a lot of raw investigative information coming in," the Wicked Town case agent said.

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