Chicago skyline

Holmes:  Friday evening in America’s second city.  As the light fades, its front line troops prepare for battle. 

00.06

Map showing Chicago Illinois

Commander:  OK lets see we got Hetman[?], Gallaso[?], 44 Beutel, Deakis[?], 52 Blazes [?], Rosenthal [?], 43 Trowalski [?], 41 Terriakis [?], Roseto [?], 42 O’Sullivan, Gallagher.

Commander calling roll call

Super:  4:45pm:  Chicago Police 12th District Roll Call

Commander:  OK tonight, on the shooting on Grenshaw we had an individual last night who turned himself in to Area 4.  We have one suspect and there’s two at large still. We’re trying to find out the identity.  There’s no identity at this time.  OK?  Go out there.  Be careful

00.25

Ambulance leaving station

Super:  5:00pm:  Chicago Fire Department Ambulance No. 3

Ambulance Man:  Two good shootings last night, a three-year old gun shot victim shot in the groin.  The other one was the police shot at a fellow on a motorcycle fleeing.  He had a gun.  A little bit of a shoot-out and he lost.

00.40

Policeman:  You know, if it doesn’t rain tonight all hell’s gonna break loose cos it is Friday night and the three-day weekend, Columbus Day on Monday, and everyone just wants to get stupid right away.

00.56

Interior of Hospital trauma unit

Super:  5.15pm Illinois Masonic Trauma Unit

Kirby:  The gunshot wounds that we see represents a higher velocity firepower that produce more severe injuries.  Overall you see conversion from a low-velocity civilian weapon to a higher velocity fire more characteristic of a military weapon. 

01.08

Holmes:  So basically … it’s a war out there?

Kirby:  Yes very much so.

Interior of police car driving.

Super:  5.30pm  Gang Investigation Section, Chicago Police

Radio call:  Shot fired at Rockwell and George, there’s been four shots fired in the back of the corner building near the alley.

01.27

Figueroa:  We used to see a lot of sawn-off shotguns that was about as sophisticated as they got.

Figuera:  You guys got it?

Policeman: Yeah we got it.

01.40

George:  Now it’s very seldom that you see a gun that isn’t a semi-automatic hand gun.

Hands playing piano

Music

Holmes:  Former piano teacher Stephen Young admits he’s rusty these days. 

02.02

Holmes:  He and his wife Maurine are now full time campaigners for nationwide gun control. 

02.10

Holmes:  They have been ever since the June day three years ago when their oldest son Andrew drove down to the local store with his twin brother Sam to cash a check.

02.19

Holmes:  Across the street, a group of young gang members were looking for trouble.

02.28

Stephen Young

Young:  These kids threw a brick at the car and they yelled something at them and Andrew yelled something back but what they didn’t know was that one of the kids in this group had been told that in order to be initiated into this gang you had to shoot somebody.

02.32

Family photo

Holmes:  As Andrew and Sam drove off, two gang members followed on a bicycle.

02.48

Stephen Young

Young: And they caught up to ‘em in about a block and a half because they were stopped at a red light and the kid just hopped off the bike, walked up to Andrew as far as I am from you right now and shot him point blank in the shoulder and it went straight through his heart.

02.52

Photo of Andrew

Music

Holmes:  Andrew Young, aged seventeen, died before his brother could get him to the hospital, two minutes down the road.

03.06

Chicago skyline

Holmes:  Like everywhere else in America, violent crime in Chicago is declining. 

03.18

Holmes:  Even so, last year there were five hundred and thirty six murders committed with guns in Chicago. 

03.24

Police car arrives at project building

Holmes:  A few of the victims are as randomly innocent as Andrew Young.

03.38

Holmes:  The vast majority are members of the Hispanic and African-American gangs that rule the streets and the grim public housing projects of the inner city suburbs. 

03.41

Beutel:  There’s two different kinds of gangs over here.  There’s a New Breed gang and a Viceroy gang and neither of ‘em get along and a lot of the time they’re fighting for territory to sell their dope, that’s basically what they do a lot of them.

03.56

Holmes:  Routine police patrols like this usually find that the birds have flown.

04.08

Officer Beutel & other policeman walking through corridor of project building

Beutel:  Sometimes they’ll sell dope in the hallways, usually when you come up they’ll see you, they’ll run, so that’s basically what we do here, is search and make sure nobody’s committing any crimes.

04.12

Holmes:  Fortunately for police, shoot-outs between them and the gangs are rare.

04.30

Officer Storck

Storck:  They got their automatics, they got their machine guns, they got their shotguns, they got everything, you know we just carry this little 9mm is all we got so it’s a definite advantage for them. 

04.36

Street scene which George Figueroa and a suspect.

Figueroa:  What’s your name.  How do you spell it.

04.50

Holmes:  Meanwhile, in  north side  suburb, George Figueroa and Frank Scrock of the Gang Investigation Section are making life miserable for a new member of the Imperial Gangsters.

Figueroa: What’s your nickname?

Chicko: Chicko

Figueroa: Chicko lets see the ID that you got.

04.58

Holmes:  It’s George’s job to know every member of a gang that’s hundreds strong and has territories right across the city.

05.16

Figueroa: When you got arrested did you get arrested under this name?

05.24

Scrock:   Put your hand down so I can see your face.  Don’t worry about them.

Figueroa: Have you ever, listen to me, have you ever been arrested at any time?

Holmes:  He knows their real names and their nicknames, their habits and hang outs and feuds.  And he’s not a fan.

05.37

Driving in car past gang members

Super:  Officer GEORGE FIGUEROA Police Gang Investigation Unit

Figueroa:  The gangs are so entrenched in some of these neighbourhoods that honest, law-abiding citizens are afraid to say anything for fear that their houses are going to be burned down or their children are going to be victims of drive-by shootings.

05.44

Holmes:  It’s been a serious crime for years to own or buy a hand gun in the city of Chicago.  But where there are gangs there are guns.

05.57

Figueroa:  I’ll give you an example when we turn this corner here this is a building where a lot of people like to hang. This gun could be half a block away it could be under one of these cars under the hood, inside, well here we go, here’s what I’m talking about, right here.

06.06

Holmes:  And what would they be needing that gun for?

06.19

Vantilberg:  And this would be a representative sample of what we’ve collected.

08.17

Holmes:  Most of the guns are not old, or stolen from legitimate owners.  They’ve been bought quite recently in the State of Illinois. 

08.20

Vantilberg:  This happens to be a .45 semi-automatic pistol and we have one in here which is a 9mm and is capable of firing 50 cartridges.

08.28

Holmes:  50 cartridges.

Vantilberg:  50 cartridges can be loaded into this drum magazine, yes Sir and it will fire as fast as you can pull the trigger.

Holmes:  Outside Chicago city limits, anyone who possesses a Firearms Owners Identification Card – an FOID card – can legally buy almost any kind of weapon from a tiny semi-automatic to a notorious Tec 9.

08.49

Super:

Officer JIM VANTILBERG Police Firearms examiner

Vantilberg:  Another high capacity firearm here which is very popular among our gang members is an Intratech, this is also 9mm.  It has a magazine capacity of 32 rounds so again you have high firepower right here.

09.01

Holmes:  A convicted felon cannot get and FOID card from the Illinois State Police.  But that hasn’t stopped the gangs from buying guns.

09.18

Officer Figueroa on the street at night.

Figueroa:  They’ll get someone who has, a legit person, who’s never been arrested and say listen, here’s 300 dollars, I want you to buy me that semi-automatic hand gun.  Whatever the change is you can have it.  Maybe the guy will pay 250 for it, well the guy just made a 50 dollar profit.  They’ll do it for money.  That’s where the straw purchasers come in, where someone who can buy a gun will, for the person who cannot.

09.26

Exterior of Breit & Johnson gun shop.

Holmes:  Six years ago, in this gun-store in a Western suburb of Chicago, a straw purchaser by the name of Mariano DiVittorio, bought the gun which killed 17 year-old Andrew Young.  The real buyer, a Chicago gang member and convicted criminal was standing right beside him at the time.

09.59

Stephen Young

Super:  STEPHEN YOUNG Victim’s Father

Young:  The owner of the gun store asked the criminal “Can you fill out the 4203 form?”, which is the background check from, one “yes” and you can’t buy a gun.  He said, “I can’t fill that out,” but anyway, in spite of that, the dealer brought out about six guns and they finally decided on a Bryco 9 mm, and then as they filled out the paperwork with the identification card diVittorio, who was fronting as the buyer, the criminal passed the cash in full view of the dealer to the buyer and then three years later that gun was out on the street, it was in the hands of a 15 year-old and it cost my son his life.

10.18

Exterior of Breit & Johnson

Holmes:  diVittorio has since been convicted of gun running.  But the store is still in business which is why Stephen Young is suing it.

10.55

Holmes:  Wearing a concealed microphone, I asked the manager if he wanted to talk on camera about the case.

11.04

Gun owner’s voice:  All up in litigation , any information that you want about Cook County laws, I suggest you go right to the horse’s ass.

11.12

Holmes:  It’s not surprising that Breit and Johnson’s gun store wouldn’t comment because they have a much more powerful opponent than Stephen Young.  The City of Chicago itself is suing them in the civil courts for creating a public nuisance.

11.17

Holmes outside Breit and Johnson gun store

Holmes:  The location of Breit and Johnson’s gun store exemplifies the problem that’s faced by the City of Chicago.  Where I am now, I’m within the city limits where it’s illegal to buy or own a hand gun.  But that street that I’ve just crossed is the city boundary.  Beyond it is Cook County where the gun laws are much more lax.  Chicago City Police Department have long suspected that a whole string of gun stores strategically placed around the city limits have been mainly and routinely supplying the Chicago gangs with guns.  Their problem was to prove it.  So they set up a remarkable undercover sting operation which targeted this store, among many others.  It was code-named, perhaps rather dramatically, Operation Gunsmoke.

11.31

Commander Harvey Radney

Radney:  What we did was we got several police officers and put them in roles of obvious gang bangers or other criminal types and sent them into gun stores with fake drivers licenses, identification and in the course of about 63, 64 days of actually buying weapons we purchased over a hundred and seventy weapons.  Utilising 3 officers doing the purchasing. 

12.10

Police undercover video operation

Holmes:  Operating outside their own jurisdiction, the Chicago Police weren’t authorised to use concealed microphones.  But they did tape some of their encounters from outside the store.  In this case the two African-American customers are policemen posing as gang members.  The shorter one has a Firearm Owners Identification Card, the taller does not.  But the gun shop counter clerk willingly lets both handle a variety of weapons – itself an illegal act.

12.43

Holmes:  It’s the man without the FOID card who actually pays the deposit on the guns although the gun dealer willingly records it as a purchase by the FOID card owner.

13.13

Holmes: Obvious straw purchases like this are bad enough.  Worse still, the police claim, they made it perfectly plain to the dealers that the guns were to be used for criminal purposes.

13.23

Harvey Radney

Radney:  The conversations that took place between the officers and the dealers or the counter people in the stores were absolutely revealing and amazing to us.

13.33

Exterior of B & H Sports

Holmes:  B & H Sports is just one of 12 gun dealers targeted by Operation Gunsmoke and in this court document there are pages of evidence  of conversations that allegedly took place between undercover policemen posing as gang members and the sales clerks here.  This is just one of them.  An undercover policeman says to the sales clerk that someone owes him money and needs to be dealt with before he leaves town.  He need, quote, “to get a Tec for his ass”.  A second undercover policeman agrees that they have to, quote “take care of business today.”  The sales clerk recommends an Intratech 9mm assault weapon that can fire 100 rounds per load.  He tells them, quote, “You made a good choice.  This will take care of the business.”

13.43

Ostrander preparing gun

Music

Holmes:  This is not an illegal hand gun.  It’s a very expensive Swiss-made pistol bought for his own use by expert target shooter Joel Ostrander.

14.50

Holmes:  Mr Ostrander says he has great respect for firearms.  But as the lawyer representing B & H Sports Gun Store, he has no respect for Gunsmoke and its alleged evidence.

15.01

Ostrander

Ostrander:  What I’m saying is that the kind of assertions that they made are fabricated because I know in the instance of my clients that what they say happened did not occur.

15.16

Ostrander:  They will not sell to a gang banger.  They will not sell to a dope dealer.  They cross T’s they dot I’, they don’t take prisoners when it comes to a gun sale they will throw ‘em out of the store.

15.24

Holmes:  Is that the case?

Ostrander:  That is the case.

Holmes:  So essentially the police have been fabricating this entire…

Ostrander:  That’s correct.  They’ve been doing a lot of that lately.  Now if you take a look at the suits against the City of Chicago and the problems that the police department has I’m not – I think they’re second only to the Los Angeles Police Department.

Scrock & Figueroa on the street with gang members

Holmes:  Like big city police forces the world over, Chicago’s finest have a reputation for cutting corners when it suits them – and the gun dealers’ lawyers will try to make the most of it.

15.59

Scrock:  Are you bad-ass? You ain’t bad-ass?

Figueroa: Carlos, you’re under arrest dude.  Right?  You gonna show me up, I’m gonna show you up, that’s how this shit works, all right?

16.11

Holmes:  But the undeniable facts are that guns are here on the streets in huge quantities and most of them are being sold by the same handful of people. 

16.22

Cop:  This guy, we had problems with him once before too.

16.30

Figueroa:  Carlos?

Cop: Yeah he’s a ….

Holmes with Smurf and Jay

Holmes:  Is it easy to get a gun if you want one?

16.35

Smurf:  Not really, I wouldn’t even know.  I don’t know

Holmes:  So you wouldn’t know how to get a gun if you wanted one?

Smurf:  No

Holmes:  Come on!

Figueroa in his car.

Figueroa:  That’s not true, the taller one is on a bond for a gun case.  I’m not familiar exactly with the case, I know that when he was arrested he had a pistol on him.  The smaller kid, I entered his house with a search warrant, we got drugs out of it and another gun.

16.52

Holmes:  And these kids could get guns just about any time they wanted them?

Figueroa:  Oh sure they can, sure they can.

Holmes:  How?

Figueroa:  They get guns..

Scrock:  One one forty three North Rockwell shots fired…

17.13

Holmes:  That call proves to be a false alarm.  But at ten past one in the morning comes a call that isn’t. 

17.19

Following ambulance into trauma unit.

Holmes:  We catch up with the ambulance on its way to Illinois Masonic Hospital’s trauma unit.

17.29

Inside the trauma unit

Holmes:  The victim is a 17 year-old member of a gang called the Spanish Gangster Disciples.  He’s been shot twice through the heart by a 9mm semi-automatic pistol, fired by a member of a rival gang.

17.37

… Can I get bicarb?

17.57

… on the right side of the sternum

Holmes:  The team doesn’t hesitate.  With scalpel and shears they open the chest wall and expose the heart and lungs.

18.03

.. there’s no cardiac activity

18.12

Holmes:  They begin desperately clamping arteries and manipulating the heart by hand. 

18.14

Holmes:  It’s expensive high tech medicine that the patient has no way of paying for.  The taxpayer will foot the bill. 

18.22

Woman:  He has a pulse.

18.31

Holmes:  After twenty long minutes, almost miraculously, the patient’s heart beings to beat again.

18.37

Holmes:  They know that the odds are still heavily against their patient’s survival and even if he lives he may well be disabled for life.  In that case, the cost will run into millions

18.52

Daley speaking to community

Super:  RICHARD DALEY Jr Mayor of Chicago

Daley:  We as adults are coming together to protect our children.  And all these children are our children.  It doesn’t matter how young they are, doesn’t matter what colour they are, what religion, it doesn’t matter where they come from.  And when you pick up  newspaper, you hear about a child getting killed, another one getting shot because of drugs.  Enough is enough.  That’s what it is.  Enough is enough.

19.05

Holmes:  Mayor Richard Daley has certainly had enough.  Each Saturday morning, in community after community around the battered edges of his city he tries to rally concerned citizens to fight the gangs and the drugs and the guns.

19.36

People marching down the street.

People chanting:  We want peace

In the street

Up with hope

Down with dope

19.52

Holmes:  But Mayor Daley knows that what’s needed is a change of heart far beyond inner-city Chicago. 

20.00

Holmes:  That’s why his city and two dozen others are suing not jut the small-time gun dealers, but the firearms manufacturers, domestic and foreign.

20.06

Holmes:  Colt an Smith & Wesson, Beretta and Glock have been scooping profits from the illicit gun trade in Chicago, he says – and he wants them to change their ways or pay for the lethal consequences.

20.18

Daley

Daley:  They’re selling guns outside the city and Tec weapons and they know they’re coming in the city.  Simple as that.  It’s called a public nuisance.  If they’re sending x amount of weapons each week and each month, enormous amount of weapons outside the city of Chicago, they’re not ending up in California or Australia.  They know they’re going to end up right here on my backdoor.  And I have an obligation and responsibility to defend the people of the city of Chicago.

20.31

Holmes:  And you claim that manufacturers know perfectly well that that’s where the guns are ending up?

Daley:  Definitely.

Holmes:  And that’s what you’ll be, have to prove.

Daley:  Oh yeah, that’s what we’re gonna prove, yes.

Ostrander firing gun

Holmes:  To Joe Ostrander, it’s absurd to blame the gun makers just because some people misuse their products.

20.51

Ostrander:  We could take the same theory and sue automobile manufacturers because if you don’t have cars you don’t have drunk drivers.

20.58

Ostrander

Super:  JOEL OSTRANDER Lawyer to B & H Sports Ltd.

Ostrander:  Or, lets do this one, the silverware manufacturers, lets sue them because forks cause obesity, that’s the same rationality you’re using with this piece of metal.

21.05

Ostrander:  Actually I think the ulterior motive and I think it’s pretty obvious to everyone is that by bringing all of these suits they’re trying to bankrupt the gun makers and the entire industry.

21.15

Beutel driving car through Chicago streets

Beutel:  A lot of times when they’re using a weapon against a police officer it’s always been, for the most part it’s been a hand gun.

21.25

Holmes:  There are certainly plenty of people in Chicago who wouldn’t be sorry if every hand gun manufacturer in America followed Colt and got out of the business. 

21.32

Holmes:  Of course, that won’t happen.  But those who remain, say the activists must be made accountable for the mayhem their products cause.

21.41

Maurine

Maurine:  For me you know it almost feel like a river of violence and at the mouth of that river are the manufacturers.

21.50

Stephen

Young:  I think somewhere along the line we’re going to get a major breakthrough which will bust these guys right down to their shorts and they’re going to have pay up. 

21.18

Holmes: Then they’re going to stop pumping these guns into the streets when they have to start paying for it.

22.07

Interior trauma unit

Holmes:  For now, it will be his grieving family that will pay for Gilberto Arellano’s funeral.  Forty minutes after his heart was restarted, it stopped again, this time for good.  In the small hours of the morning, the doctors declared him dead. 

22.17

Doctors:  2: 23

Call it

Yeah 2:23

22.32

Holmes:  In the bloodless columns of the City of Chicago’s crime statistics for 1999 Gilberto Arellano will be listed as homicide victim number five hundred and thirteen

22.38