those he hopes end up in his courtroom. The heaters can burn a judge, and many of his colleagues would just as soon keep their distance. Locallo likes the challenge.
No future heaters on this morning’s radio, though. Certainly nothing rivaling the Bridgeport case. Three white teens from the south-side Bridgeport neighborhood were charged last year with attempted murder, having allegedly beaten a thirteen-year-old black boy nearly to death for bicycling through their neighborhood. One of the defendants, Frank Caruso Jr., is the son of a reputed mobster. Locallo can’t imagine a hotter heater: President Clinton decried the attack in his weekly radio address, and Mayor Daley demanded the culprits be brought to justice. Reporters surely will flock to the trial. And Locallo is still pinching himself: the Randomizer—the computer program that parcels out 26th Street’s cases among its thirty trial court judges—kicked the case into his courtroom. The upcoming trial alone is reason to look forward to this year—and not just because of the certain publicity. No, the Bridgeport case is more than a heater; in Locallo’s mind, it is a pivotal case, a chance to show African Americans that the system isn’t really stacked against them.
He’s always known he’d do something momentous. When he was three, his mother sewed him aSuperman cape, and he wore it constantly. A flight from a bedroom dresser one afternoon that resulted in stitches under his chin didn’t shake his faith in his endowments.
At age ten, he saw To Kill a Mockingbird in a Little Rock, Arkansas, theater. Little Rock was his mother’s hometown, and his family was visiting relatives. He watched the handsome country lawyer, Atticus Finch, argue passionately on behalf of Tom Robinson, the black man wrongly accused of rape. He listened intently as Finch told the white jury and the packedcourtroom how the courts were “the great levelers,” how in the courts “all men are created equal.” No matter that Finch and Robinson lost; Finch had done the honorable thing, and the ten-year-old boy could picture himself in that dashing three-piece suit, arguing bravely in that crowded courtroom.
He got his chance in 1978, though as a prosecutor instead of as a defense lawyer. It took him less than nine years to win appointment to the bench, at age thirty-three. Thebar associations have praised his intelligence, diligence, fairness, and integrity as a judge.
When he reaches Jackson Boulevard this morning, he turns east. The road curves through Columbus Park and then straightens, slicing through a neighborhood markedly different from his own. Small frame houses with sagging porches are mixed in with boarded-up buildings and weedy vacant lots. A sign in one of the vacant lots promises “$10 for Good Used Radiators.” Discount food and liquor stores advertise the Lotto in their front windows. This is the Austin neighborhood, part of the city’s sprawling, poor, black west side—a fertile pasture for defendants. He finds the shift in landscape unremarkable; he’s driven this route or similar ones to the courthouse for years. He follows the sweep of the boulevards—Jackson to Independence to Douglas. He happens to cross the route Larry Bates hiked earlier this morning.
He’d never have recognized Bates on the street, though. Hundreds of defendants pass through his courtroom each year; he couldn’t remember each one. The heater defendants, for sure, but they’re few and far between. The vast majority of 26th Street cases don’t attract the eye of an alderman, let alone the mayor or the president. Car thefts. Possession cases involving sneeze-and-it’s-gone amounts of cocaine or heroin. No reporters watch these; often the defendant’s relatives don’t even show.
The judges in TV dramas and movies are always presiding over heart-stopping jury trials, with riveting testimony and passionate arguments—action punctuated by a banging gavel and calls for order by the
No future heaters on this morning’s radio, though. Certainly nothing rivaling the Bridgeport case. Three white teens from the south-side Bridgeport neighborhood were charged last year with attempted murder, having allegedly beaten a thirteen-year-old black boy nearly to death for bicycling through their neighborhood. One of the defendants, Frank Caruso Jr., is the son of a reputed mobster. Locallo can’t imagine a hotter heater: President Clinton decried the attack in his weekly radio address, and Mayor Daley demanded the culprits be brought to justice. Reporters surely will flock to the trial. And Locallo is still pinching himself: the Randomizer—the computer program that parcels out 26th Street’s cases among its thirty trial court judges—kicked the case into his courtroom. The upcoming trial alone is reason to look forward to this year—and not just because of the certain publicity. No, the Bridgeport case is more than a heater; in Locallo’s mind, it is a pivotal case, a chance to show African Americans that the system isn’t really stacked against them.
He’s always known he’d do something momentous. When he was three, his mother sewed him aSuperman cape, and he wore it constantly. A flight from a bedroom dresser one afternoon that resulted in stitches under his chin didn’t shake his faith in his endowments.
At age ten, he saw To Kill a Mockingbird in a Little Rock, Arkansas, theater. Little Rock was his mother’s hometown, and his family was visiting relatives. He watched the handsome country lawyer, Atticus Finch, argue passionately on behalf of Tom Robinson, the black man wrongly accused of rape. He listened intently as Finch told the white jury and the packedcourtroom how the courts were “the great levelers,” how in the courts “all men are created equal.” No matter that Finch and Robinson lost; Finch had done the honorable thing, and the ten-year-old boy could picture himself in that dashing three-piece suit, arguing bravely in that crowded courtroom.
He got his chance in 1978, though as a prosecutor instead of as a defense lawyer. It took him less than nine years to win appointment to the bench, at age thirty-three. Thebar associations have praised his intelligence, diligence, fairness, and integrity as a judge.
When he reaches Jackson Boulevard this morning, he turns east. The road curves through Columbus Park and then straightens, slicing through a neighborhood markedly different from his own. Small frame houses with sagging porches are mixed in with boarded-up buildings and weedy vacant lots. A sign in one of the vacant lots promises “$10 for Good Used Radiators.” Discount food and liquor stores advertise the Lotto in their front windows. This is the Austin neighborhood, part of the city’s sprawling, poor, black west side—a fertile pasture for defendants. He finds the shift in landscape unremarkable; he’s driven this route or similar ones to the courthouse for years. He follows the sweep of the boulevards—Jackson to Independence to Douglas. He happens to cross the route Larry Bates hiked earlier this morning.
He’d never have recognized Bates on the street, though. Hundreds of defendants pass through his courtroom each year; he couldn’t remember each one. The heater defendants, for sure, but they’re few and far between. The vast majority of 26th Street cases don’t attract the eye of an alderman, let alone the mayor or the president. Car thefts. Possession cases involving sneeze-and-it’s-gone amounts of cocaine or heroin. No reporters watch these; often the defendant’s relatives don’t even show.
The judges in TV dramas and movies are always presiding over heart-stopping jury trials, with riveting testimony and passionate arguments—action punctuated by a banging gavel and calls for order by the
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