A Tale of Two City Workers

Meet John Ardelean

A goof with a badge who got hammered and then ran down and killed two citizens.

Fury over cop DUI case
'07 CRASH | Officer filmed drinking before fatal accident, but judge throws out evidence

April 28, 2010

BY KIM JANSSEN Staff Reporter kjanssen@suntimes.com

A Chicago cop filmed drinking at least five shots of liquor minutes before he crashed his SUV, killing two young men, could walk free after a Cook County judge ruled that key evidence against him was illegally seized.

In a ruling greeted with fury and anguish by the families of victims Miguel Flores, 22, and Erick Lagunas, 21, Judge Thomas Gainer Jr. found there was "no conspiracy" among Officer John Ardelean's fellow officers to protect him.

It prompted ugly scenes and arrests outside his courtroom as the families clashed with Cook County sheriff's deputies. And it may have fatally damaged the case against 35-year-old Ardelean, who's charged with four counts of aggravated DUI and two counts of reckless homicide in the Thanksgiving Day 2007 deaths.

Video footage from the Martini Ranch Bar showed the officer downing shots just minutes before the crash between Ardelean's SUV and a sedan carrying Flores and Lagunas at the intersection of Damen and Wellington in Roscoe Village.

But Ardelean's attorney, Tom Needham, challenged his arrest because two fellow officers and a sergeant from the Belmont district station where he works and a paramedic said he didn't appear intoxicated at the accident scene.

Prosecutors implied that the officers turned a blind eye.

Ardelean wasn't arrested or given a Breathalyzer test until seven hours after the crash, when the officers' supervisor, Lt. John Magruder, said he noticed Ardelean had bloodshot eyes, smelled of booze and "was walking kind of funny with a limp or something.''

Based on the 0.032 blood alcohol level Ardelean recorded, an expert prosecution witness was due to testify that the officer would have been nearly twice the legal limit of 0.08 at the time of the crash.

But Gainer ruled Magruder did not have probable cause to arrest Ardelean, meaning the Breathalyzer results and expert testimony can't be used.
...

(For those of you keeping score at home, you might remember that Gainer's meaty thumb has shown up on the scales of justice on behalf of dirty cops before [from almost exactly one year ago...h/t to the award-winning Beachwood Reporter]

"Some legal experts are questioning a judge's invocation of the 'fighting words' doctrine to acquit three police officers charged with beating businessmen in a bar," Abdon Pallasch wrote in the Sun-Times.

"'Their use of 'fighting words' does not allow police officers or anyone else to beat them up. Police officers confronted by fighting words have a duty to control themselves,' said Indiana University Law Professor Patrick Baude, who argued a 'fighting words' case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

"Criminal Court Judge Thomas Gainer noted in his opinion Tuesday that the police officers claimed one of the businessmen called one of the officers a 'p - - - -' and another of the bus

Now meet James Lobianco

A city employee who got hammered and slammed into a parked car. but who is not a cop:

Official out after alleged DUI in city car
Refused test after rear-ending vehicle at red light

April 22, 2010

BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter/fspielman@suntimes.com

A $119,184-a-year deputy commissioner charged with providing shelter and emergency services for Chicago's homeless has resigned after getting into an accident in a city car while allegedly driving drunk.

On April 15, James V. Lobianco was charged with driving under the influence and failure to reduce speed after rear-ending a car waiting for a red light to change at Broadway and Ainslie.

James V. Lobianco resigned as deputy commissioner in charge of providing shelter and emergency services for Chicago's homeless following an April 15 crash in which he was charged with driving drunk.

No one was injured in the chain-reaction accident. Lobianco was driving a Toyota Prius registered to the city when he hit the car in front of him, causing that vehicle to rear-end another car.

Chicago Police Department spokesman Roderick Drew said responding officers "detected alcohol," but Lobianco "refused the field sobriety test and the Breathalyzer test." He was taken into custody and released the next morning. He is scheduled to appear in court in June.

Lobianco could not be reached for comment.

Got that? Lobianco piles into another car, and CPD have no problem remembering phrases like "field sobriety" and "Breathalyzer". But after pounding 'em down at the Martini Ranch all night long:

"Before the crash, Ardelean had spent hours in a River North bar, the Martini Ranch. According to the bartender at the preliminary hearing, Ardelean drank two beers, a rum and coke and a shot of tequila. There were several other shots, but the bartender said they were plain shots of water."

It must have been Plain Shots of Water Night. Dare to drink one, get a second for free...

Ardelean mows down and kills two people, and suddenly on all matters related to checking a suspect's sobriety, the cops come down with a vicious case of whatever is was that Guy Pearce had in "Memento".



The inability to form new political memories after Angelo Torres found his way onto the front page of the Sun Times.

Or was it after Jon Burge skipped town for Florida?

I always forget.

And of course it helps to have a friendly judge available to wipe off any shit that might have dribbled down your chin.

Not much to add except this.

Inside parts of Cityguv, there is a cop culture. It has its own mores and rituals and powerful, protective mechanisms.

Inside parts of Cityguv, there is also a booze culture; places where, if you want to get ahead, you're often much better off tossing back a few with the boss or other Department insiders than you are being, say, really well qualified.

And then tossing back a few more.

And then maybe a few more.

You see, at the City, there are all kinds of places where not-very-bright, not-very-competent people have a lot of power, and if you are in doubt about whether or not you're working inside such a place, look around and ask yourself the following:

• In your workplace, do eager, stupid flatterers get ahead, or do the competent and able?
• Are excellence and creativity welcomed, or driven out with pointed sticks like a rabid dog made of mercury fulminate?
• Are relationships and personal information are the coin of the realm?

Well, if you find yourself inside one such confederacy of mediocrity, you will often find that booze is the lubricant that makes the clout engine hum, because it always has been, and for some very practical reasons. People can end up end up doing or saying very stupid things when they're drunk, and that can end up being very useful to the young executive on the make, or the low-wattage boss who needs leverage.

And if you end up knee-walking drunk and behind the wheel of a car?

Well let's just say that if you wanna go boozing and you're not po-lice or otherwise a member of the Chicago alpha-male political club, but just have one of those regular, overpaid, nobody-at-the-Hall-gives-a-shit-about-you-unless-you-land-your-happy-ass-in-the-Sun-Times city middle-management jobs...

...and you decide to take your vehicle for a walk up on the curb, or up the ass of the stopped car in front of you...

...then you'd better make damned sure you actually have a "chinaman" and that you have his number on speed-dial.

Because, in Chicago, there is a club.

And woe betide the dumbass who thinks he's in it, fronts like he's in it, walks like he's in it, and finds out, too late, that he ain't.

Here, Kurt Russell explains what happens when cop culture goes fatally wrong in the underrated "Deep Blue" "Dark Blue":