Fairfax County Police Watch: Walnut Ridge officer faces drug and fraud charges

By Jorge Quiquivix

Guilty verdict born of a dinner meeting

Former cop who plotted kidnapping, murder met the man who recorded plans at West Side restaurant

The story behind the bizarre trial of Steven Mandell and his plot to murder and dismember a businessman began at a quiet table at a popular restaurant on Chicago's Near West Side.

It was July 2012, and real estate mogul George Michael was lunching at La Scarola on West Grand Avenue. At the table was Albert Vena, a reputed Outfit boss, and several other alleged mobsters. A friend brought Mandell to the table and introduced him to Michael, and a relationship was born.

What unfolded over the next three months, culminating in Mandell's sensational arrest that October, was "so chilling, so grim ... it's almost stunningly hard to believe," as one federal prosecutor said in court.

Mandell, a former Chicago cop who was once on death row, was convicted Friday on charges he plotted to kidnap, torture, kill and dismember a suburban businessman. The jury acquitted him, however, in a separate plot to kill an associate of a reputedly mob-connected strip club. Mandell faces up to life in prison.

Michael secretly wore a wire for the feds and pretended to go along with the plan to kill Riverside landlord Steven Campbell. Michael found Mandell a suitable space to carry out Campbell's torture and murder — a Northwest Side storefront that Mandell referred to as "Club Med" — and had contractors outfit it with an industrial sink, butcher table and other equipment needed to drain the body of blood and chop it to pieces.

The undercover recordings made by Michael, as well as conversations caught on FBI cameras at Club Med, gave Mandell's trial the feeling of something out of a Quentin Tarantino movie. There was snappy dialogue, a cast of foul-mouthed underworld characters and moments of dark humor.

Jurors seemed to be stunned at times as they listened to Mandell and his alleged accomplice, Gary Engel, joke about mutilating Campbell before they killed him. Much of the action played out on a giant screen in U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve's darkened courtroom as jurors watched hours of video of Mandell and Engel making final preparations for Campbell's kidnapping. They laid out saws, knives, a meat cleaver and Ambien pills in case they needed to put Campbell to sleep. A chessboard was set up to pass the time.

The jury heard the two quibble over the workmanship of their torture chamber, with Engel pointing to the plumbing and exclaiming in a clipped Chicago accent, "What the (expletive) is this (expletive) abortion?" Engel hanged himself in his jail cell soon after his arrest.

Also featured was a 30-minute video from an infrared camera mounted on an FBI spy plane. An agent in the plane circling high over Arlington Heights followed Mandell as he placed a tracking device on a girlfriend's car and tossed what amounted to a killer's "to-do" list inside a garbage can in a secluded suburban park.

On the last day of testimony, some jurors cracked smiles as they listened to a series of phone calls Mandell made to his 82-year-old wife from a Loop federal jail after his arrest. Mandell told her to find her Nissan that he'd left parked near Campbell's home, instructing her in a cooing voice several times to "throw away" the trash in the car, explaining, "You need all your space for your groceries."

A frustrated Mandell could be heard trying to give his wife directions to the car as she wrote them down. "Just go to Joliet Road!" Mandell shouted.

"Oh my God, I'm telling you," she replied. "Ah, slow down!"

The jury also convicted him of obstruction of justice.

The trial offered a short course on the current state of the Chicago Outfit and included names like "Little Guy" Vena and Robert Panozzo, the convicted burglar who Michael testified introduced him to Mandell during that lunch at La Scarola.

One part of Michael's testimony went barely noticed amid the lurid charges against Mandell, but it undoubtedly caught the attention of the people who dined with Michael that July day at La Scarola. The FBI recorded the meeting, though the tape was never played during Mandell's trial and his attorneys were barred from delving into how or why it was made.

After the verdict was handed down Friday evening, U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon called the case "extraordinary" and praised the work of the FBI and federal prosecutors in taking a dangerous figure off the street.

Robert Holley, the special agent in charge of the Chicago FBI, acknowledged that Michael's role in the case was significant, but he stopped short of praising him for wearing a wire.

"Yes, there was a risk to him for his involvement in this case, but he did what he needed to do," Holley said.

Morrogh finds cop he doesn’t love. In other news, hell freezes.

Probe of fatal police shooting goes to federal authorities

By Justin Jouvenal/Post

The Fairfax County prosecutor has turned over the investigation of a fatal police shooting of an unarmed Springfield man to federal authorities, citing complications with the five-month-old case.

Commonwealth’s Attorney Ray Morrogh said the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia has agreed to continue the probe into the death of 46-year-old John Geer, who was shot during a standoff with Fairfax County police in August. No one has been charged in the incident.

“There is a conflict of interest that has arisen in the case,” Morrogh said Thursday. “And there is a second potential conflict of interest that has arisen out of my office. . . . This is the prudent thing to do.”

Morrogh declined to describe the nature of the conflicts because the investigation is ongoing. The U.S. attorney’s office said Thursday that it could not confirm or deny any investigation or comment on pending investigations.

Police went to Geer’s Pebble Brook Court home on Aug. 29 because of a report of a domestic disturbance. Geer’s father, Don Geer, said his son was upset because his girlfriend, the mother of his two children, had decided to leave him.

John Geer had thrown his girlfriend’s belongings in the front yard. She called police and told them that Geer had a firearm. Police said they tried for about 50 minutes to persuade Geer to leave the home, but he refused.

Don Geer said he watched the climax of the encounter. He said that he could not hear what officers were saying to his son but that he saw him standing with empty hands resting on top of a screen door at the home’s entrance.

At some point, John Geer began to slowly lower his hands and an officer opened fire, hitting Geer in the chest, his father said. Geer retreated inside and closed the door. A SWAT team eventually entered the home and found Geer dead.

Don Geer said detectives later told him that his son did not have a gun on him at the time of the shooting but that there was a holstered handgun a couple of steps from the front door.

Don Geer said it appeared to him that the shooting was unjustified, but he was unsure what to make of the probe being turned over to federal authorities.

“I don’t know whether that’s good or bad — if I had a better idea of why they are doing it, I could form an opinion,” he said.

Geer and friends of his son have been critical of how long the investigation has taken, but Morrogh said police and prosecutors were working to explore all the evidence. He did not think federal prosecutors would have to start from scratch.

“No one wants these things to linger on,” Morrogh said.

Our ink will outlast his career

Under the reign of former Chief of Police Rhorer the Fairfax County Police arrested a man for not wearing clothes in his house while he made coffee, set up an eye doctor on a gambling charge and then used the SWAT team to kill him. An investigation into the charge that the Doctor’s primary clients were cops has never been investigated. The police gunned down an emotionally unstable man because cop who shot him wrongly assumed the man was trying to escape. He wasn’t. The cops also shot dead four other citizens under highly questionable circumstances. The department under Rhorer was sued multiple times by citizens. So did they fire Rhorer? Naw they promoted him. According to news reports Rhorer draws a salary of $191,168 per year as Deputy Fairfax County Executive as well as a concurrent pension from the Fairfax County police of $173000 per year.

Occupation by force

According to the most recent U.S. Census figures, nearly one in five Fairfax residents (17.5 percent) is of Asian descent while Hispanics make up nearly 16 percent of Fairfax’s overall population. Those numbers drop considerably when applied to the Fairfax County Police Department, where only 4.3 percent of officers are Asian and 4.1 percent Hispanic. White officers make up 84 percent of Fairfax County’s 1,360-member police department, significantly higher than the county’s general population (54 percent white). Almost 90% of the force lives outside the county.