Shooting at Kings
By: Ken Pisani
Tags: Supreme Court, Corruption, Narrative, Justice, True Story

Dig great true storytelling? It’s all we do. Subscribe to our newsletter and don’t miss a word of our blockbuster nonfiction.

On the evening of June 19, 1969, attorney John Paul Stevens was playing catch with his youngest daughter, Sue, on the lawn of his home in Chicago’s modest Beverly neighborhood when the phone call came that would change his life.

Across town, Stevens’s beloved Cubs had just returned home after suffering a string of defeats on the road. These were the Cubs Stevens, 49, knew best: perennial losers, a ballclub that serialized disappointment across decades. Yet Stevens was not without hope: the Cubs currently led the National League East, and in each toss to his young daughter the lawyer could allow himself to dream of the Cubs’ first World Series in more than two decades.

Listen to the audio version of this story from Audm.

Maybe it was a year for hope. In exactly one month, Apollo 11 would depart for the moon. One month after that, the Woodstock music festival would be winding down “Three Days of Peace and Music” at a farm in upstate New York.

Stevens’s wife, Betty, beckoned him inside. He strode past his older daughters, Kathryn and Elizabeth, prone on their bellies and watching television in the manner of American teenagers. The ABC Evening News that night carried five different stories on Vietnam — each one a disconcerting reminder that their 20-year-old son, John Jr., recently drafted although not old enough to vote, would soon be deployed in the conflict.

The phone call was from the president of the Illinois Bar Association who, along with the president of the Chicago Bar, had been tasked with forming a Special Commission to investigate allegations of bribery and misconduct by justices on the Illinois Supreme Court. According to the bar president, they needed a “fearless and impartial” attorney to lead the investigation and had zeroed in on Stevens — quietly respected but little known.

Stevens, ear pressed to the phone, knew what they really needed: some damn fool who believed enough in fairness and due process to commit what would likely amount to career suicide. For an attorney practicing in Chicago who might some day argue a case before the justices, acting as Chief Counsel for the investigation risked making powerful enemies with long memories. As the Chicago Daily News later put it, “It is a job no attorney relishes — a job from which, in fact, numerous lawyers literally ran.”

In a town that famously crushed dissenting voices outside the 1968 Democratic Convention less than a year before, and where the only black defendant in the upcoming trial of the Chicago 8 would soon be shackled and gagged in an American courtroom, the abuse of power against the powerless was a very real circumstance. And it didn’t sit well with John Paul Stevens.

Original illustrations by Pinch Studios

Stevens, whose penchant for bow ties and refusal to bend the rules elicited respect and curiosity in the chummy world of Chicago law, didn’t have to think long. As his family continued its Rockwellian evening routine around him, the square shooter said yes on the spot. He’d later sum up his feelings about the challenge thusly: “If you’re going to shoot at the king, don’t miss.”

Sherman Skolnick was a man who demanded notice. Confined to a wheelchair since childhood, the 39-year-old also sported a top row of protruding teeth and thick glasses in heavy black frames that sat high on his temples. When encountered, he was usually shouting about this conspiracy theory or that political scandal. The eccentric founder of the Citizens’ Committee to Clean Up the Courts, Skolnick, although not a lawyer, had spent years filing numerous lawsuits against public officials and government agencies alleging all manner of malfeasance. His lack of success in these ventures did little to deter his fervor.

Skolnick was an unreliable crackpot, a man who shouted “Fire!” at the first puff of smoke… or even in the complete absence of smoke. But this time, there was indeed an incipient blaze. Skolnick suspected a judge on the Illinois Supreme Court had accepted payment to exonerate a defendant in a case of criminal fraud.

Three years earlier, in 1966, an appeal of People v. Isaacs was before the Illinois Supreme Court. The original charges were a 35-count indictment for state contract fraud against Theodore Isaacs, a politically connected Chicago lawyer and businessman, and former high state official. In March of 1967 the court exonerated Isaacs in what appeared to be a unanimous opinion written by Justice Ray Klingbiel.

Skolnick had recently discovered in public records shares of stock in downtown Chicago’s newly formed Civic Center Bank & Trust Company held in the names of Klingbiel’s grandchildren. That might not mean much to most people, but Skolnick connected this thread to that one and before you knew it, he had linked the stock’s acquisition by Klingbiel to Ted Isaacs — a founder and officer of the Civic Center Bank — while his fraud case was pending before the court.

In essence, Skolnick was suggesting a bribe had taken place. This is how it works, the system of corruption in a city famous for it.

Skolnick wasn’t the most reliable witness. He’d claimed evidence of a failed attempt to assassinate JFK in Chicago by a “second Oswald” three weeks before Dallas, and accused anti-war activist Tom Hayden of being an agent of the CIA. (He’d later claim a commercial airliner crash was deliberately caused to silence witnesses in the Watergate scandal, and that the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job.”) Few experienced journalists would have heeded a tip from Skolnick. Without proof, a newspaper could be sued out of existence. And Skolnick’s evidence was scant.

He was fortunate, then, to come across 25-year-old Ed Pound, a young and hungry reporter for the Alton Evening Telegraph, a town of fewer than 40,000 located miles from Chicago’s infamous corruption. Pound saw in Skolnick “an aggravating gadfly who, in his persistent digging, sometimes hits paydirt.”

Skolnick was happy to bend Pound’s ear about all manner of impropriety in Chicago’s corrupt courts. He also alleged that the current chief justice of the state Supreme Court, Roy Solfisburg, was a secret attorney for that same bank. And Pound’s own quick sleuthing confirmed enough suspicious activity to convince his editor to go to press with front page allegations. The story broke in the Wednesday June 11 edition of the Telegraph. Faced with a major scandal that threatened to paint the entire judiciary as corrupt, the Illinois Supreme Court came up with an idea: a Special Commission to investigate the allegations, one created by and reporting to none other than the court. In essence, the court would oversee its own investigation. Business as usual in Chicago, where dead people sometimes elected politicians, and Chicago Daily News columnist Mike Royko suggested that the city’s official motto, “Urbs in Horto” (“City in a Garden”), should be changed to “Ubi est Mea” (“Where’s Mine?”).

This is how it works.

But the court had miscalculated in its attempt to ensure a quick and easy conclusion to the matter. It had designated the president of the Chicago Bar Association to head up the Commission, a position then held by a prominent attorney who knew all the sitting justices and would have been favorably disposed in their favor. However, the favored attorney’s term as President of the Chicago Bar expired as the commission was getting off the ground, and the new president, Frank Greenberg, was no crony. And Greenberg, in seeking a defender of justice to lead the legal investigation into the state’s highest court, couldn’t have chosen better than John Paul Stevens.

While some viewed the allegations with skepticism and others expected nothing to come of any investigation into powerful local figures, Stevens’s sense of public service didn’t allow for either sentiment. He saw his assignment as straightforward: to ascertain the validity of Skolnick’s wild accusations linking the bank stock to the Isaacs case and to the justices who voted to exonerate him. He was to gather evidence, interview witnesses, and report back to the Commission in just six weeks. His first task was to assemble a team.

Kenneth Manaster, a 27-year old Harvard graduate less than a year at his firm, was joined by meticulous young forensic accountant James Nussbaum, on loan from Price Waterhouse. Rounding out the team were twenty-something associates Joseph Coughlin, William McNally, and Nathaniel Sack. Only assistant counsel Jerome Torshen, at age 39 a decade younger than Stevens, had any courtroom experience. With the exception of Torshen, the fledgling lawyers were assigned by their firms, as one later assessed, “as the most expendable lawyer[s]” in their respective offices. This wasn’t an A- or even B-Team; at best they were plucky underdogs in well over their hopelessly green heads. There was no upside here: no extra pay for what would turn out to be sixteen-hour days and seven-day weeks into August, a missed summer in a season of daily miracles at Wrigley Field. And in the early bloom of their legal careers, they faced the prospect of having one day to argue before the state Supreme Court justices they were about to investigate for judicial impropriety.

Stevens’s team also faced withering public criticism. The Special Commission was widely expected to be nothing more than a cover-up of back room Chicago-style corruption. Just five years after passage of the Civil Rights Act, Chicago’s Black population was still conditioned to expect unequal justice — one system for powerful white politically connected men, and another for the poor and disenfranchised. The city’s Black newspaper, the Defender, awarded the Illinois Supreme Court its “Onion for Today,” mocking the “appointment of a Special Commission to ‘investigate’ the alleged wrongdoings of its own membership.”

This is how it works.

Stevens’s team would spend very little time together, scattering across Illinois to attend to different aspects of the investigation. McNally spent much of his time in the state capital of Springfield, digging into court records and archives. Sack and Coughlin researched issues related to the presentation of evidence and the Canons of Ethics regarding judicial conduct. Manaster and Nussbaum were assigned to the Civic Center Bank for a deep dive into documents relating to its formation and the financial records of the parties being investigated. Manaster recalled his nervousness, and Stevens’s attempt to instill confidence in his inexperienced charges by walking them over to the Bank, like “daddy walking his kids to the first day of school,” a calming presence before vanishing.

Despite the confidence he showed before his novice team, for Stevens himself, with a wife and four children and his partnership in a small law firm to consider, this was a lose-lose proposition.

John Paul Stevens knew better than most the costs of an unjust system. He had dedicated his life to law, attending Northwestern University Law School on the GI Bill after serving in the Navy as a code-breaker of Japanese radio transmissions during World War II. Graduating magna cum laude and first in his class, his first job was clerking for Supreme Court Justice Wiley Rutledge during the 1947–48 term. Admitted to the bar in 1949, Stevens returned to Chicago and soon formed his own law firm with two other partners, making a name for himself locally as a first-rate antitrust litigator.

But it was a family tragedy, the wounds from which were still fresh, that cemented his dedication to fairness. In 1926, his family owned and operated the Stevens Hotel, then a Chicago institution that the family had founded with the grit and determination of two generations. Charles Lindbergh stayed there during a national tour celebrating his 1927 flight from New York to Paris. But by 1930, the hotel was in dire straits. The Depression had decimated business and, to shore up its debts, Stevens’s father borrowed money from the Illinois Life Insurance Company controlled by his father, J.W. Stevens, and older brother, Raymond. When business did not improve and the hotel failed, an overzealous state attorney indicted Stevens’s grandfather, father, and uncle on charges of embezzlement.

Stevens’s grandfather suffered a stroke, and Raymond, his uncle, committed suicide. His father was left to face trial alone, and was convicted. That conviction was later overturned by the Illinois Supreme Court — the very institution Stevens was now investigating. The exoneration came too late: the assets of the insurance company had been acquired and the hotel taken into receivership by the government. Years later it became the Conrad Hilton, whose vast, street-level glass windows were famously shattered in a police sweep of protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention.

The unjust prosecution of his family gave Stevens, as he recounted in his 2019 memoir, a “firsthand knowledge of the criminal justice system’s fallibility,” and no doubt influenced his pursuit of equal justice under the law. The abuse of power was not something that sat well with John Paul Stevens.

He had that in common with Sherman Skolnick, the polio-stricken agitator for justice who discovered what appeared to be a transparent case of bribery in the Illinois Supreme Court. Years earlier, his family’s life savings had been wiped out when a brokerage firm mismanaged money set aside for Skolnick’s future care. Skolnick filed a series of lawsuits, including one that reached the state Supreme Court, which ruled against Skolnick. Among the members of the court: Ray Klingbiel and Roy Solfisburg. That setback turned a victim into a crusader.

Skolnick recalled, “I vowed to my parents that I would devote my life to helping others in the courts.” That he’d discovered a scandal involving two of his prominent, perceived tormentors, Justices Klingbiel and Solfisburg, no doubt delighted him.

Though wildly different in temperament and approach, Skolnick and Stevens found themselves on the same end of a lopsided fight against a system of entrenched corruption.

No one thought they had a prayer.

June 26 was the hottest day of the year in Chicago, with temperatures soaring more than 30 degrees to reach 96. Manaster and Nussbaum were the odd couple beginning a weeks-long lockdown at the bank, Manaster nervous and untried and Nussbaum calm and obsessively systematic. They stared down a conference room at the Civic Center Bank stacked with disorganized files, loose papers, and incomplete corporate records. It was their misfortune to be assigned this sweltering archeological dig while at Wrigley Field, the Cubs were completing a four-game sweep of the Pirates.

Because the Special Commission had subpoena power, the bank was obligated to cooperate but officials there were not pleased with the intrusion. Multiple attempts were made to disrupt their work; perhaps the most creative, as Manaster recalled, was installing a female secretary in a short skirt just outside their door intended to distract both young men from the task at hand.

Somewhere in the document dump of checks, ledgers, stock registers, and inscrutable paperwork would be the key to the whole sordid case: tying the well-connected businessman Ted Isaacs to the transfer of stock to two of the justices who exonerated him of criminal fraud.

Ted Isaacs was an influential Chicago lawyer and key political ally of Illinois Governor Otto Kerner. As campaign manager, Isaacs had helped elect Kerner governor twice, and was rewarded with an appointment as Director of the Illinois Department of Revenue. He was part of a system of prominent men in prominent posts accustomed to free passes and special favors to win their influence. This is how it works.

The justices, equally powerful on their perch, denied everything in the press. But those denials proved troublesome enough from the start to provoke statewide public interest. Justice Klingbiel gave three different accounts of his acquisition of 100 shares of stock in the Civic Center Bank & Trust Company, while Justice Solfisburg, in denying that he represented the bank secretly or otherwise, was forced to acknowledge that he too owned stock in the bank — 700 shares. It looked bad.

From his war room overseeing the many moving parts of the case, Stevens found himself having to defend against a surprise rear guard attack — Sherman Skolnick, the very man who had started this whole process.

Shortly after the formation of the Special Commission, Skolnick had made it plain that he, like most of the public and members of the press, expected the handling of his allegations to be a “whitewash.” Skolnick even filed suit to disband the Special Commission and refused to be deposed, maintaining that the Commission’s lead attorney, Stevens, was doing the court’s bidding. It was a stunning and unexpected turn for Stevens, who needed Skolnick’s testimony. First, he had to know what Skolnick knew — and to get it under oath. But Stevens also had the veracity of the investigation to protect, and ignoring the accuser would feed the openly hostile public skepticism of the proceedings.

Stevens’s young charges were impressed with his refusal to be blindsided and his determination to press on. The gulf of a generation separated them. Stevens had enlisted in World War II in December of 1941, steadfastly decrypting Japanese radio traffic in the Pacific, while the others were still in diapers or yet unborn. Manaster sported a mop of wavy hair and impressive sideburns while Stevens preferred the close-cropped haircut of an astronaut. The tumult of the times — assassinations, political protests, an undeclared war in Vietnam, and the struggle for civil rights — further differentiated his young associates as a generation of change against an establishment of entrenched power, which was represented perfectly by the case before them. Yet they couldn’t help but be inspired by Stevens’s leadership. That he was confident and unwavering in the face of any setback caused them to strive to emulate his quiet example. They weren’t going to let him down under any circumstances.

Back at the Civic Center Bank, Manaster and Nussbaum dug into the haystack of documentation before them, Manaster with his lawyer’s eye for anything that smacked of evidence and Nussbaum carefully categorizing and collating. Eventually, two paper trails captured their attention.

The first involved Chief Justice Roy Solfisburg, who owned 700 shares of the Civic Center Bank. Of note, Solfisburg sold 300 of those shares soon after the court’s decision in People v. Isaacs, the case whose judgment was now under suspicion. That alone was enough to raise eyebrows, but Manaster and Nussbaum found an irregularity: The stocks had been sold for $24 a share while the sale was recorded at $25. It was a difference of $300 — not a great deal of money, but a puzzling discrepancy. Manaster and Nussbaum had a hunch they could link this irregularity to Isaacs. Poring doggedly over microfilm records of transactions from Isaacs’s account at the bank, Manaster spotted a cancelled $300 check written to the bank, and dated May 26, 1967 — the very next day after the criminal case against him was concluded in his favor. The young lawyer didn’t have to be a wartime code-breaker like his boss to know a clue when he saw one.

The second key discovery was a four-page handwritten list recording the distribution of stock to more than a hundred names. These were the final 12,850 shares in the bank, distributed mostly in lots of fifty or one hundred shares. Representing the last opportunity to invest in the bank, these shares would have been a valuable commodity, and the listed names reflected that privileged opportunity: judges, newspaper publishers, board chairmen, prominent attorneys, bank executives, and elected officials, including Illinois Governor Otto Kerner.

More importantly, there on page three was an entry of 700 shares to Roy J. Solfisburg Jr. in care of “Trust #931.” The transaction was recorded as May 27 1966 — while People v. Isaacs was before Solfisburg and the court. Oddly, although Ray Klingbiel admitted to owning 100 shares, his name did not appear on the list. But the final 100 shares on the list had been distributed to Ted Isaacs on October 11, 1966 — shortly after the case was argued and just before Klingbiel received his 100 shares from a mutual friend and prominent Illinois official named Robert Perbohner. Manaster and Nussbaum knew that if they could link Solfisburg’s 700 shares to Ted Isaacs, and those final 100 shares to Perbohner, they’d have their smoking gun tying Isaacs to the two justices.

Inquiries at the bank identified the author of the list as Jayne Kegley, a former secretary at the bank no longer employed there. Manaster was finally able to track her down on July 3, and persuaded her to meet him “as soon as possible” although it was already evening. They met at her home around 10:00 pm and she displayed what Manaster described as “an astonishingly good memory,” which Kegley herself boasted as “photographic.”

In other words, a perfect witness.

They went through the transactions on the list while Kegley identified who had instructed her to put each name on it. At nearly midnight, Manaster asked about the transfer of 700 shares to Roy Solfisburg via Trust #931. Kegley immediately recalled Ted Isaacs had directed that stock transfer.

Knowing how critical Kegley’s information might be, Stevens had told Manaster to call him after his visit no matter what the time. When Manaster called Stevens at home and told him what had transpired, Stevens knew it was important to get Kegley’s deposition on the record as soon as possible. Friday was the 4th of July, a holiday; but Kegley agreed to give her deposition on Saturday. The young, untried Manaster had never taken a deposition, and he was nervous. He needn’t have been. Under oath, Kegley was every bit as certain as she had been at home, recalling the sources of each transaction on the list. She also confirmed Isaacs’s personal involvement in the distribution of those 12,850 shares — essentially shares he controlled for his role in the bank’s capitalization.