A federal jury on Tuesday found the reputed leader of the Wicked Town gang faction and one of his top lieutenants guilty of racketeering conspiracy involving a string of murders, shootings robberies, and narcotics trafficking stretching back two decades.
After a seven-week trial, the jury of six men and six women deliberated for about 18 hours over three days before finding Donald Lee, 41, and Torance Benson, 31, guilty on the most serious charge against them, which carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison.
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The verdict marked the end of hard-fought trial involving testimony from more than 100 witnesses about a seemingly unrelenting onslaught of violence, from blood-splattered cars and bodies on sidewalks to morgue photos, to the accounts of survivors who told the jury harrowing tales of being in Wicked Town’s crosshairs.
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The trial at Dirksen U.S. Courthouse has presented a crash course in the entrenched gang lifestyle that drives so much of the city’s seemingly endless violence, from typical disputes over drug turf to the more recent phenomenon where tit-for-tat disses on social media foster a cycle of retaliation and murder.
In closing arguments last week, federal prosecutors told the jury that as appalling as it may seem, the bloodshed was just the ordinary course of business for the Wicked Town gang, a faction of the Traveling Vice Lords operating on the city’s West Side.
“That’s all Wicked Town does,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Meghan Morrissey said. “That is who they are.”
The Wicked Town case is one of several racketeering indictments brought in recent years under U.S. Attorney John Lausch. In May, four reputed members of the Goonies, a faction of the Gangster Disciples, are scheduled to go on trial in a string of killings and other shootings in the Englewood neighborhood from 2014 to 2016.
The trial has been subject to tight security, including metal detectors outside the courtroom and a ban on electronics. Several witnesses who failed to appear out of fear of reprisal had to be arrested and brought into court on orders of the judge, records show.
Attorneys for Lee and Benson, meanwhile, argued the prosecution’s case is built largely on the testimony of other Wicked Town members who are cooperating with authorities in order to get a break in their own cases. Some of them are killers and admitted liars, while others have been paid by the government both in money and in promises of reduced sentences, according to the defense.
In his closing argument Wednesday, Matthew McQuaid , an attorney for Benson, labeled the parade of flippers the “Mercenaries of Cooperation,” con artists unmoored from any truth or facts and willing to do or say whatever the government wants to save their own skin.
“They’re not trying to reset the karmic balance of the Earth that they offset with their behavior,” McQuaid said. “They’re buying back their life. It’s purely selfish.”
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Among them was Dante Dockett, a longtime Wicked Town associate who pleaded guilty to fatally shooting six people and trying to kill two others over a four-month span. Dockett testified last month that after learning in 2018 that members of his own gang had executed his longtime friend over suspicions he was a snitch, he decided to do the unthinkable — wire up for federal agents and help them solve the crime.
Lee’s attorney, Lisa Wood, said that when Dockett was confronted by inconsistencies in his statements on the witness stand, he just started “making up lies on the spot.”
“Are we really believing Dante Dockett’s trial testimony at this point?” Wood asked. “The serial killer who was doing this all for justice?”
The defense also urged the jury not to get swept up in all the bloody imagery they’ve seen and instead hold prosecutors to their burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
“You can’t be overcome by the graphic violence, the result of the violence and what it does to a human body,” McQuaid said. “Those things are always ugly. It’s intolerable. It shocks the system. But as you sit there and you have to absorb all of this, you have to remain impartial and fair.”
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