Former Chicago cop Steven Mandell tried to arrange the
murder of a federal witness from behind the bars of the Metropolitan
Correctional Center, prosecutors alleged.
The onetime Death Row resident, 61, is awaiting trial for a
pair of grisly murder plots, including one in which he allegedly planned to
abduct, torture, extort, murder and dismember an unidentified businessman with
a butcher’s knife in a custom-built killing chamber.
Held in isolation at the MCC after he allegedly asked his
wife to clear up evidence against him following his Oct. 25 arrest, he was
recently released back into the jail’s general population on a judge’s orders
after he complained his health was suffering.
But Assistant U.S. Attorney Amar Bhachu told Judge Amy St.
Eve on Thursday that Mandell was returned to the jail’s Segregated Housing Unit
after he spent his time in the general population “soliciting the murder of a
federal witness.”
A furious Mandell — wearing shackles and an orange jail jump
suit — angrily denied the allegation.
He alleged members of the Latin Kings street gang acted as
snitches to help the government set him up.
“What I tell inmates
at the MCC is utter nonsense — what I say here is the truth,” Mandell said,
urging St. Eve to take the allegations with “a pinch of salt.”
“I’m not on oath when talking to the Latin Kings,” he added,
insisting he was looking forward to his trial.
Though prosecutors did not identify the informant they say
Mandell targeted, Mandell himself named North Shore businessman George Michael
as the alleged informant.
Recordings secretly made by the informant are at the heart
of the case against Mandell. They capture the former cop revelling in the gory
and sadistic details of his kidnap plot, the feds say.
Mandell, of Buffalo Grove, has a long history of battling
federal law enforcement.
In addition to the Oct. 25 murder plot, he’s also accused of
plotting a second murder on Oct. 5 — in return for income from an “adult
entertainment club.”
A Chicago cop for a decade until 1983, he’s a convicted
fraudster and jewel thief who has been in and out of court for much of his
adult life.
Convicted of a 1984 kidnap plot that bore striking
similarities to his most recent arrest, and sentenced to death for a 1990
murder, he was later freed on appeal on both cases and awarded $6.5 million by
a civil jury for wrongful conviction, only to see that verdict also overturned.
Unanswered questions remain around the murder of his father,
and the disappearances of several of his associates, while his alleged
accomplice in the October plots, Gary Engel, committed suicide in prison last
year.