Vietnam (1955-1975)

Jon Burge, a commander who oversaw the torture of more than 100 Black people, and a generation of future police officers enlist in the U.S. Military for the Vietnam War.

Burge enlisted in the army reserve in 1966 and began six years of service, including two years of active duty. He spent eight weeks at a military police (MP) school in Georgia. He received some training at Fort Benning, Georgia. He served as an MP in South Korea, and in 1968 he volunteered for duty a second time, in Vietnam, and was assigned to the Ninth Military Police Company of the Ninth Infantry Division.

Dong Tamp Base Camp

During his service, Burge spent time escorting convoys, providing security for forward support bases, supervising security for the divisional central base camp in Dong Tam, and serving a tour as a provost marshal investigator.

As an MP, he likely learned or observed a torture technique that he would later reproduce in Chicago: wiring Vietnamese prisoners to a black box and turning a crank that generates an electric shock. American soldiers in Vietnam called this “the Bell telephone hour,” where they would shock prisoners with a hand-cranked army field phone.

Burge denied knowing of torture in Vietnam, but many of his peers from the Ninth Military Police Company described the practice in detail to reporter John Conroy at the Chicago Reader.

Chicago

Burge returned to his childhood home in Chicago in 1969. He grew up in an all-white, post-World War II housing development on the southeast side, which was now rapidly changing demographics. He graduated from Bowen High School, where he was active in ROTC, in 1965. The school was 93% white when he graduated; seven years later, it was 14% white.

In 1970, Burge joined the Chicago Police Department (CPD), where he rose in power to become Commander of Area 2. At least seventeen of his associates were also veterans of the U.S. military, most from the Vietnam War.

Area 2 Police Station (1982)

Andrew Wilson (pictured) and Jackie Wilson, two of the earliest known survivors of torture at the hands of Chicago Police officer Jon Burge. They were arrested in 1982 on a tip—which was also coerced through torture— that the Wilsons killed Chicago Police officers William Fahey and Richard O'Brien. They were tortured into confession; both brothers were connected to a hand-cranked generator and given electric shocks. Their legal fights lasted decades: Andrew Wilson ultimately died in prison in 2007. Jackie Wilson was released in 2018 and granted a certificate of innocence in December 2020.

Area 2 Police Station (1983)

Darrell Cannon, tortured in 1983 and incarcerated for 24 years, testified that the officers played a terrifying game of Russian Roulette on him, where they would seemingly load a shotgun and stick it in his mouth, forcing him to pull the trigger. The officers then pulled down his pants and repeatedly shocked him in the genitals with a cattle prod. “For me this was the most sadistic act ever performed,” he told journalist Amanda Rivkin in 2016. “The feeling of it is something that is indescribable. I still live with it today.”

Sgt. John Byrne and Detectives Peter Dignan, who worked closely with Burge and were both Marine Corps veterans, participated in torturing and coercing Cannon's murder confession. Cannon was exonerated in 2004 and freed in 2007. His case became a touchpoint for other Burge-related cases. Today, Cannon organizes fellow survivors in the reparations and torture justice movement.

Over the next two decades, Burge and his affiliates tortured more than 125 Black people. Aided and abetted by prosecutors, city officials, and the Chicago Police Department, these officers routinely framed innocent Black men for crimes they didn’t commit. Often, these crimes were high profile, with an expectation and demand on police to catch the person responsible.

The Illinois Torture and Relief Commission continues to investigate a backlog of more than 540 claims of torture, within and beyond Burge’s network.

Area 3 Police Station (1988-1991)

Burge moved to Area 3 in 1988.

One of Burge’s contemporaries, Richard Zuley, also joined the Chicago Police in 1970. Zuley, who is most infamous for his direct link to torture at Guantanamo, took a leave of absence from CPD from 1982-1987 to work in counterterrorism for the U.S. Navy. It’s unclear what his counterterrorism work included, where he was deployed, or how it may have influenced his behavior in Chicago.

Area 3 Police Station (1992- )

When Zuley returned to Chicago, he briefly overlapped with Burge on the North Side: Burge in Unit 630, Area 3 (within what is now called Detective Area North), and Zuley in Unit 606, Central Investigations. Burge was fired in 1993, after the Chicago Police Board found that he had abused Andrew Wilson.

Although it is not in official records that they ever worked together, Zuley and Burge shared mutual colleagues. Zuley was seen as an expert in his 25-year career as a detective, investigating high profile crimes like the murder of 7-year old Dantrell Davis.

Over that same career, he tortured at least five people in Chicago. At Area 3, he tortured Lee Harris in 1989, who was once Zuley’s close informant, and Benita Johnson in 1995, whom he handcuffed to a wall for over 24 hours and threatened her family.

Gulf War (1990-1991)

Like Zuley, younger officers named in torture cases have drifted in and out of military and security work. Kenneth Boudreau, for example, is named in Burge-affiliated and Zuley-affiliated cases.

Boudreau took a leave from the CPD to serve in the Gulf War from September 1990-July 1991. He worked as a Protective Service Officer and Aide to Camp for the Commanding General of Engineer Forces. He has since been named in at least 46 torture claims, thirteen of them alongside now-deceased Michael Kill (between the two of them, 72 people have accused them of using torture; 20 of whom have been exonerated).

At the end of his CPD career, in 2014, he was commanding officer in the Gang School Safety Team, which collaborates with Chicago Public Schools, and was a leader in creating the team’s social media surveillance unit. He has not admitted culpability, decades later. In a 2018 interview, Boudreau called the exonerations “a travesty of justice.” Today, he is CEO at Embassy Security Group.

Recently, in August 2021, one of Boudreau and Kill’s youngest victims of torture and coerced confession, Johnny Plummer, won an appeal of his murder case to the Illinois Appellate Court, after 30 years in prison. He will now be able to present newly discovered evidence in support of his allegations that he was tortured at Area 3 Headquarters.

Plummer testified that in 1991, when he was 15, Boudreau and Kill tortured him into confession at Area 3 police headquarters by hitting him with a flashlight, punching him in the face, handcuffing him to a radiator and ring on the wall, and interrogating him for 39 hours.

Guantánamo Bay (2002-2004)

Richard Zuley, on leave from his position at Area 3, worked as a senior interrogator at Guantánamo Bay from 2002-2004.

As described in Spencer Ackerman’s reporting for The Guardian, Zuley tortured Mohamedou Ould Slahi into a confession, using prolonged shackling, family threats, mock executions, extreme temperatures, and sleep deprivation. Zuley befriended Slahi before the interrogation, and then used what he learned to threaten his mother with arrest if he did not confess.

Back in Chicago, Zuley was assigned in 2003 to Burge's old position, Commander of Police Unit 630 in Area 3 (within Detective Area North). After his time in Guantánamo and retirement from the CPD in 2007, Zuley worked as senior emergency management coordinator for Cook County Department of Health. Later, he worked for Chicago Department of Aviation as a projects administrator and interim emergency management director until 2017.

At the time of this publication, Zuley collects his pension and lives in Florida.

Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan and Iraq, Chicago Police officers in the military reserves took a leave of absence to join the Global War on Terror. By 2014, CPD had more than 300 officers serving on active duty in Operation Enduring Freedom, and more than an additional 100 officers enlisted in the U.S. Military.

Former officers of the CPD’s Special Operations Section (SOS), Randy Jalloway and Tom Walsh, took a leave in September 2002 to work together in Bagram as part of a Field Surgical Team.

SOS became notorious for invading homes without warrants, stealing money, and kidnapping suspects; it was shut down in 2007.

Stateway Gardens (2003)

Another crew of officers, the Skullcap Crew — composed of Edwin Utreras, Robert Stegmiller, Christ Savickas, Andrew Schoeff and Joe Seinitz – joined the Chicago Police in the late 1990s and were a widely feared team of officers within the Public Housing South unit. Former residents of now-demolished Stateway Gardens housing have described locking their doors when the crew approached. In 2003, for example, they invaded Diane Bond’s home twice at Stateway Gardens without a warrant, destroyed her altar and belongings, sexually violated her, punched her in the face, and threatened her and her son.

Al'Anbar, Iraq (2007)

Though the Skullcap Crew has been named in more than 20 federal lawsuits, all members are still part of the Chicago Police Department — except for Joe Seinitz. Seinitz retired in 2007 from CPD, and went on to advise the Department of Defense throughout Iraq.

He proudly discloses on his LinkedIn that he led the “CLEAT anti terrorism unit,” and posted photos of his SWAT team that combined Iraqi and American forces to run nighttime “capture kill missions to restore peace” in Al’Anbar, Iraq. Since 2016, Seinitz has described his role at the Department of Defense as “classified.”

The public does not know which officers have served in the military, and cases of torture, black sites, and disappearances are generally not matters of public knowledge. Neither are routine encounters with police that fit within this mode of policing — one that aids and abets the use of coerced confessions and power with immunity.

In infamous cases of a police killing or torture, backgrounds emerge: officer Eric Stillman, who killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo in 2021, was a Marine in Afghanistan.

Retired detective Dante Servin, who killed 22-year-old Rekia Boyd in 2012, previously trained police in Kosovo and Mexico. Two months after her death, he went to Honduras to lead a national police team on homicide investigations. Since 2017, he has been an international police advisor in Honduras.

In an interview for this piece, Khury Petersen-Smith, the Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, explained that these practices of torture in Chicago and the Global War on Terror track with American histories of violence. He argues these specific geographies are sites of knowledge and testing ground for new methods of control, and that these police and military actors are treated as “scholars of violence.” He calls the relationships between police departments and military history not linear or a direct chronology, but “circuits of violence between the U.S. domestic regime and the extent of the U.S. empire.”

“I think there’s this idea that something special happened to Jon Burge in Vietnam, and that that explains why he would do something so monstrous. And obviously lots of things happen to people who are in combat and it is a wildly traumatic experience. Look at the world Jon Burge grew up in. Look at the world Richard Zuley grew up in. You grow up in the United States and you are primed to then go and commit and develop and hone forms of violence elsewhere and bring it back here. It’s the most ordinary thing in the world for the U.S. to support and incubate violence, and then not just import it, but be in a relationship to it.”