In 2020, attorneys representing a man accused of killing two Chicago police officers in 1982 made, in their view, a stunning discovery in the form of a nearly 30-year-old baptismal certificate from England.
The defendant was Jackie Wilson, whose infamous case was critical to unveiling systemic practices of torture within the Chicago Police Department, and he was being tried for a third time for murder in the slayings of Chicago police Officers William Fahey and Richard O’Brien.
The certificate showed that Nicholas Trutenko, a former Cook County assistant state’s attorney who prosecuted Wilson during his second trial in 1989, flew to the United Kingdom a few years later to serve as godfather for the daughter of one of the key witnesses against Wilson — a jailhouse informant with a long rap sheet.
This baptism record, when revealed in court, set off an explosive series of events: the special prosecutors trying Wilson dropped all charges, Trutenko was fired from the state’s attorney’s office and he and another assistant state’s attorney who represented him in the proceedings, were eventually hit with criminal charges.
“I’ll never forget that day,” Wilson’s attorney Elliot Slosar, a partner at the high-profile civil rights firm Loevy & Loevy, testified in a courtroom in Rolling Meadows Wednesday.
The trial for Trutenko, 69, and Andrew Horvat, 49, a former Cook County assistant state’s attorney, now moves into its second week after an 11-month break for an unusual, mid-trial appeal.
Trutenko is charged with perjury, official misconduct, obstruction of justice and violating a local records act in relation to his testimony as a witness at Wilson’s third and final trial in 2020. Horvat, who represented Trutenko in that proceeding when he was an attorney with the office’s Civil Actions Bureau, is accused of official misconduct.
The proceedings — rare in that county lawyers are standing trial in connection with a wrongful conviction case — have occasionally grown contentious as they shed light on a period of intense turmoil for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office.
Nearly every witness called has been an attorney. Testimony throughout the week was at times dull and arcane; other times, it veered into the territory of personal insults (whether an attorney passed the bar exam on the first try) and allegations of further wrongdoing by lawyers not charged in the case.
The matter is being heard before Judge Daniel Shanes, a Lake County judge who stepped in for the recused Cook County judiciary. Throughout the week, Shanes has frequently interrupted prosecutors asking them to cut to the chase with their questions, and at times admonished attorneys for raising their voices.
“It’s sort of a mutual combat situation,” Shanes said at one point, in response to special prosecutor Lawrence Oliver II objecting that defense counsel was arguing with his witness.
One morning, Wilson watched the trial from the courtroom’s gallery, which was often populated by other attorneys.
The friendship
Largely at the center of the case is the bizarre friendship between Trutenko and William Coleman, the witness who named the former prosecutor as godfather to one of his children. To understand Coleman’s role, you have to go back more than 40 years — then fast forward to 2020.
Jackie Wilson, then 21, was behind the wheel of a car with his brother Andrew Wilson, who shot and killed the two officers.
Jackie Wilson has said he did not know his brother would shoot the officers, but in 1989, at his second trial, Coleman testified that Wilson had admitted his role in the crime while they were locked up together in the county jail.
In his opening statement last year before the appeal interrupted the case, Oliver, who was appointed to investigate because of the conflicts with the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, alleged that during Wilson’s third trial in 2020, Trutenko hid his 30-year friendship with Coleman. The prosecutor then lied on the stand during that trial when defense attorneys asked if he discussed Coleman in prep sessions with special prosecutors, Oliver said.
Oliver alleged that Horvat, who represented Trutenko, failed to “take obligatory and rudimentary steps to avert continued concealment of information about Trutenko and Coleman.”
Wilson’s convictions were vacated twice before, which is how he came to be tried for the third time — by special prosecutors due to conflicts in the state’s attorney’s office — in 2020.
Because his testimony was critical, prosecutors sought to put Coleman on the stand, while Slosar and his team looked to discredit him.
But special prosecutors Larry Rosen and Myles O’Rourke could not locate Coleman, and thus were allowed to enter his 1989 testimony into the record. This meant that Wilson’s attorneys couldn’t cross-examine an accuser, a fundamental right for those criminally charged.
So, Slosar testified, his team intensified their investigation into Coleman.
They spoke to family members who believed him dead, Slosar said.
Then, via a church in England, they received their silver bullet.
The revelation
On Oct. 1, 2020, Trutenko was called as a witness during Wilson’s third trial, and Slosar asked him about his relationship Coleman.
On the stand, Trutenko acknowledged the friendship and revealed another bombshell — that Coleman was alive, and the two had recently been in touch.
Last year, Rosen testified that he spoke to Trutenko before he testified, and made note of the fact that Coleman’s testimony would be read into the record because he couldn’t be located. Rosen alleged that Trutenko untruthfully testified that Coleman did not come up in prior conversations with Rosen.
“He was red. He’s kind of shaking,” Rosen’s co-counsel O’Rourke testified last year, regarding Rosen’s reaction to Trutenko’s testimony.
Attorney Lawrence Rosen testifies as former Cook County Assistant State’s Attorneys Nicholas Trutenko and Andrew Horvat stand trial on misconduct charges related to the Jackie Wilson prosecution on Oct. 16, 2023.
The revelation set off a flurry of activity — assistant state’s attorneys with the Civil Actions Bureau testified to a series of calls, texts and emails late into the night on Oct. 1.
Jessica Scheller, a supervisor in the Civil Actions Bureau, testified Thursday to a conversation she had with Horvat, who had represented Trutenko.
“Andrew expressed that he was very upset and he had watched his client, I think the phrase he used was ‘blow himself up on the stand’ that day,” she said.
Scheller testified that she asked Horvat when he learned about Trutenko’ relationship with the witness and why he didn’t alert his superiors.
“He told me there was no time,” Scheller testified, adding that Horvat expressed concern about attorney-client privilege.
The defense
Throughout the trial’s first week, attorneys for Horvat and Trutenko have spent hours cross-examining the state’s witnesses, some of whom were on the stand for multiple days.
Trutenko’s attorneys have maintained that their client simply misspoke, as Slosar intentionally tried to ensnare him in a perjury trap. Horvat’s attorneys have said he was bound from any disclosure by attorney-client privilege.
In particular, the attorneys engaged in a combative, hourslong cross with Slosar, alleging that he himself violated the rules by not turning over the baptism certificate to Rosen and O’Rourke. Instead, they said, he wanted to confront Trutenko with it on the stand with television-like dramatics.
“Did you want to surprise Nick Trutenko with this baptismal certificate while on the stand?” Trutenko’s attorney Jim McKay asked.
“Sir, how could it be a surprise to your client who knew about this for 20 years,” Slosar answered.
McKay alleged that Slosar had an obligation to turn over the baptism certificate, though Slosar contended that Rosen and O’Rourke never served him with a motion for discovery to compel that information. McKay noted that Slosar had hinted to Rosen that he had uncovered information that would ruin Trutenko’s career.
“You were taunting Mr. Rosen that you were going to end Nick Trutenko’s career,” McKay said to Slosar.
“The fact that he became a godfather to the biggest witness in his case should have ended his career in 1992,” Slosar shot back.
Trutenko was in private practice in 1992 and later returned to the state’s attorney’s office, though Slosar noted in his testimony that Wilson’s appeal was still ongoing at that time.
McKay tendered social media posts made by Slosar that called Trutenko and Horvat corrupt, asking if he considered the statements inflammatory and defamatory.
“Nope it’s the truth,” Slosar responded.
The trial is expected to resume Thursday.
