PERSONS of INTEREST
(May have or have had information helpful to the case)
Born May 30, 1920, on a farm in Greene County near Roodhouse, IL, Richard Husted was the son of Lee and Ethel (nee Thompson) Husted. Husted married Isabel C. Sabatini on January 21, 1941, in Bowling Green, Mo., They moved to West Dundee, IL, where they resided for over 40 years. Richard Husted died April 19, 2005.
Husted served in the Army during World War II.
Following the war, he completed law school and set up practice in Roodhouse, IL. He successfully ran and won the office of State's Attorney in Greene County in 1952, but resigned several months before his term expired to accept a position in Decatur, IL.
Husted was the Carpentersville Village Attorney in the 1970s and 80s, during which time the town, under the leadership of radical right-winger Orville Brettman, fought an aggressive legal battle against the federal government regarding the Village Trustee's right to issue permits and set zoning regulations that conflicted with federal law.
Richard's son, Mark Husted, died on September 14, 1982. The death was initially ruled accidental, the result of a cocaine overdose.
Husted apparently urged a re-investigation into the death of his son because of a feeling that his son may have been murdered. The re-examination showed that Husted's body tissues contained a lethal level of cyanide.
Mark Husted did not die from an overdose of cocaine. He died from a lethal dose of cyanide, just 15 days before seven more Chicago area residents would die from cyanide laced Tylenol.
What did Richard Husted know that led him to believe his son had been murdered?
It was reported on Friday, September 17, 1982 that agents from the federal Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) were investigating the September 14 death of Mark Husted in Des Plaines, IL. According to a source from the DEA, Mark A Husted, 32, son of Carpentersville village attorney, Richard Husted, was found dead in the home of a friend who was recently indicted with Husted on drug charges.
Husted was a convicted drug dealer who was to face further drug charges on November 8 in US District court for conspiring to sell cocaine. He'd been indicted on charges of operating a $10-million-a-year cocaine ring from a Florida prison while serving a three year sentence on a marijuana conviction.
The standard sentence for his prior conviction was five years, but Florida Circuit Court Judge Charles Carlton reduced the sentence to three years after receiving letters from then-gubernatorial candidate James R. Thompson, Sen. Charles Percy, R-IL., Rep. Robert McClory, R-13th, and Elgin Mayor Richard Verbic.
When Orville Brettman and the Carpentersville Village board of directors were jailed in 1979 for violating the order of a federal judge, Rep. Robert McClory (member House Judiciary Committee) asked Attorney General Griffin Bell to intervene and free the officials. However, Bell said the Justice Department did not have such authority.
Husted was found dead in the home of Louis Tedesco, 33, of 569 S. Anita St., Des Plaines. Tedesco, who was indicted on drug charges with Husted, told police he found Husted slumped over on a back porch. Before the paramedics arrived, Husted woke up and made light conversation but did not make any sense, Tedesco told police (a common symptom of cyanide poisoning is confusion).
The death was believed to have been caused by a drug overdose, but the initial autopsy was inconclusive.
Shortly after the September 29 Tylenol murders, toxicology tests were completed that showed lethal levels of cyanide in Husted's blood. The death, initially classified as an accidental cocaine overdose, was changed to homicide.
Why did officials investigating the Tylenol murders exclude from their investigation the murder of Mark Husted?
Why did Cook County Medical Examiner Robert Stein initially classify the death as a cocaine overdose?
It's interesting that cyanide was used to kill Mark Husted, and that the killer was never found; just like cyanide was used to kill the seven victims officially tied to the Tylenol murders, and the killer was never found.
Two More Cyanide Poisoning Deaths
Mark Husted wasn't the only murder victim whose cause of death was reclassified as a homicide in which cyanide was the murder weapon. Toxicology tests conducted by Cook County Medical Examiners on blood samples from two others who died around the time of the "official" Tylenol murders also found lethal levels of cyanide.
The Cook County Medical Examiner's office reopened investigations into the three "cocaine-related" deaths that occurred in the fall of 1982, after cyanide was found in the victims' systems.
Dr Michael Schaffer, chief toxicologist in the medical examiner's office, said officials were checking the deaths of Husted, Galen Parnott, 30, of Skokie and Marie Louise Watkins, 21, of Chicago "because of the close proximity (in time) to the cyanide deaths." After completing toxicology tests, the cause of death for all three was changed to cyanide poisoning.
When cyanide laced Tylenol was linked to deaths in Elkgrove Village and Arlington Heights on Wednesday, September 29, Investigators independently examining some unexplained deaths in two adjacent suburbs were alerted to the Tylenol threat by two firemen who noted that the separate ambulance reports said all the victims had recently taken Extra-Strength Tylenol.
Were the unexplained deaths being investigated in "adjacent suburbs" two of the three deaths initially classified as cocaine related?
Toxicology reports showed each of the three had ingested a lethal dose of cyanide.
Schaffer said Authorities found 3.54 micrograms of cyanide in Husted's system, and officials said 3 to 5 micrograms of cyanide is enough to kill an adult. As a result of that test, toxicologists are testing all suspected victims of cocaine overdoses for cyanide.
"We are continuing these investigations because we are finding now that cyanide is an easy poison to obtain, and we don't want to overlook any possible cyanide poisoning case," said Medical Examiner Robert Stein.
A detective on the task force looking into the Tylenol murders said it would be valuable to know if the cyanide reported to have caused these three deaths was the same type that killed the Tylenol victims, but he said it is impossible to conduct such a test.
The murderers of these three victims were never found; just like the murderers of the seven 1982 cyanide laced Tylenol victims in Chicago, the 1982 Cyanide laced Tylenol victim in Wyoming, the 1982 cyanide laced Tylenol victim in Philadelphia, and the 1986 cyanide laced Tylenol victim in New York were never found.
Also never found was the murderer who in 1975 poisoned 8 victims in Illinois with adulterated drugs, killing three.
Louis Tedesco
Louis Tedesco and fourteen other persons, including Mark Husted, were named in a seventy-nine count indictment charging them with conspiracy to distribute cocaine and other drug related offenses. The indictment was filed December 3, 1980, but numerous delays postponed Tedesco's trial until December 16, 1982. Defendant was convicted and sentenced to two years incarceration and four years probation.
Orville Brettman was the President of Carpentersville Village from 1977 until 1981, when he moved just outside of Carpentersville, to rural Huntley. He is a neo-conservative and former member of the defunct Legion of Justice; a Right-Wing Terrorist group.
Brettman and the Carpentersville Village Trustees spent three days in jail, in 1979, because they refused to obey a federal judges order to issue 11 sewer permits. While in jail Brettman befriended a South African gun runner, Richard Beck. He then mortgaged his house and everything else he owned to come up with the $30,000 bond to free Beck who was charged with, and later convicted of, smuggling $25,000 worth of guns into racially torn South Africa. Beck stayed at Brettman's house while awaiting a court hearing.
Brettman described himself, in 1979, simply as a man who does "what I believe is right . . . and I get myself in a lot of trouble."
He insisted that he doesn't go out looking for trouble, but just seems to stumble into it. "I know myself well enough to know something will come up in six months or maybe in six years.'' he said. "That's the way my whole life has been. I don't know what I'll fall into tomorrow."
*Herbert Radtke was Carpentersville Village President from 1981 to 1989.
Brettman and The Legion of Justice
In December 1978 Brettman and 20 others were named in an $8.5 million civil suit charging that they were involved in beatings and burglaries directed against the Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialist Alliance eight years earlier. Brettman had made statements to a 1975 Cook County grand jury investigating the beatings and burglaries, which were made public in January 1979. Brettman, under immunity, admitted to a grand jury that he belonged to the right-wing group, Legion of Justice, and that he planned and participated in raids against the two groups.
The Select Committee of the U.S. Senate investigated the relationship of military intelligence with the Legion of Justice. Former members of the terrorist group told the Committee that from 1968 until 1970 with assistance from the 113th Army Military Intelligence group in Evanston, IL, and the Chicago Police, they harassed, burglarized, and terrorized Left-Wing groups and their members.
They admitted that the Legion of Justice illegally broke into and burglarized the headquarters of the Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialist Alliance and assaulted some of the group's members. They testified that the Army had supplied tear gas, grenades, and bugging devices to be used against left-wing groups. Finally, they suggested that Army intelligence had received a film and various documents stolen by the Legion from left-wing organizations (this admission had already been stated publically in 1970 by then leader of the Legion of Justice, S. Thomas Sutton). - INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES AND THE RIGHTS OF AMERICANS - Socialist Workers Party v. Grubisic
The Legion of Justice, by all appearances, was a well trained politically connected wing of Posse Comitatus.
Covert Actions Against American Citizens Living in America
In 1982, Johnson & Johnson Health Care Systems operated a Managed Care Organization in Hoffman Estates IL (left center).
The attorney for Carpentersville Village (upper left) in 1982 was Richard Husted, an Army veteran. The President of Carpentersville Village, until 1980, was Orville Brettman, former member of right-wing extremist group The Legion of Justice. Brettman seems to have adhered to the ideology of Posse Comitatus.
Cyanide was used to murder the Carpentersville Attorney's son, Mark Husted, on September 14, 1982, in Des Plaines (A).
Empty Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules were found strewn across the Elgin Howard Johnson Restaurant parking lot (C) on September 28, 1982. In the middle of the capsules was a pile of white powder.
Osco Drug Distribution Center was, and is, located in Elk Grove Village (D).
Roger Arnold
Arnold was considered a "Survivalist type of guy." Like Orville Brettman, he seems to have followed Posse Comitatus ideology.
Arnold is shown here leaving his court appearance on gun charges.
Roger Arnold is Arrested
On Monday evening, October 11, Chicago detectives brought in Roger Arnold, a 48-year-old dockhand and amateur chemist, for questioning after police received a tip that he was "known to have cyanide in his house," said Police Detective James C. Gildea. With Arnold's permission the detectives searched his home.
For the previous 13 years Arnold had worked on the loading dock of the Jewel Foods warehouse in suburban Melrose Park.
At least five Tylenol bottles found to contain cyanide laced capsules, probably all eight, were packaged at a Jewel Foods facility in Franklin Park, and then shipped to local stores from Jewels' distribution center in Melrose Park. But Investigators only linked two bottles of the poisoned Tylenol to Jewel Foods. Two months earlier, the same Jewel distribution center in Melrose Park shipped Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules to the Osco Drug store in Sheridan Wyoming.
Arnold Questioned and Apartment Searched
Homicide Sgt. Monroe Vollick said that after questioning Arnold at the police station on Monday, detectives searched his apartment a second time on Tuesday. Arnold's automobile and work locker were also searched he said.
Items confiscated during search of Roger Arnold's home
The INCENDIARIES, BOOBYTRAPS, UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE DEVICES & TECHNIQUES, and MILITARY CHEMISTRY AND CHEMICAL AGENTS manuals confiscated from Arnold's home were published in the mid 1960s by the United States Department of Defense for use by U.S. Army Special Forces. Much of the content in these manuals came straight from the "Poor Man's James Bond" (vol. 3), written by right-wing survivalist and former member of the Minutemen, Kurt Saxon (aka Donald Sisco).
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the U.S. Army's 113th Military Intelligence group, located in Evanston, IL, supplied the Legion of Justice with money, electronic surveillance equipment, tear-gas, MACE, training, and training materials.
Police Area Commander Kenneth Curin and Lt. August Locallo said a "series of coincidences" surfaced when Arnold talked with investigators and they had no choice but to investigate further.
Arnold used cyanide for unspecified projects
During questioning, Arnold admitted that "some months ago" he had cyanide for unspecified "projects," but he said he had discarded it sometime in August.
You'd think that the police might have wanted to find out where the cyanide was supposedly discarded.
Attorney General Tyrone Fahner described Arnold's arrest as "another one of those (incidents) that are unrelated" to the killings.
Arnold was held without bond from Monday to Wednesday night while city detectives pursued what they said was circumstantial evidence that led them to consider him a possible suspect in the poisoning homicides, according to Vollick.
Royce, who described Arnold as a "soldier of fortune type of guy," told reporters that his client should either be charged with the murders or the police should back off.
While searching Arnold's apartment, Chicago Police turned up five unregistered guns, ammunition, and two one-way tickets to Thailand. Among the books found in Arnold's apartment was "The Poor Man's James Bond," written by survivalist Kurt Saxon, and drug manuals that contained instructions for encapsulating cyanide.
Arnold had a Skull and Bones tatoo on his forearm. The enigmatic image of the skull and crossbones is deeply entrenched in the minds of millions around the world as the symbol of piracy, death and even poison.
Arnold "said he was a closet chemist," and he had "a knowledge" of chemicals and compounds, Detective Gildea said. Arnold also bought two one-way tickets to Thailand in late September and had planned to leave the country Friday.
Police also turned up a suspicious-looking plastic bag of white powder in Arnold's apartment. The powder was turned over to the Chicago Health Department laboratory Tuesday and test results were expected sometime today (Wednesday), Gildea said.
But on Wednesday, health department spokesman Reggie Jones said that the lab had received no such samples and police declined to say where the samples had been sent.
Why did Detective Gildea say that test results on the powder were expected "today," when the police hadn't even turned over any evidence to the lab?
And why, after so freely volunteering information about the powder and the lab tests, did police suddenly shut-up when their information proved false? Were they caught in a lie?
On Thursday, October 14, Detective Marty Ryan said police arrested Arnold because of a tip that Arnold had two bottles of cyanide, but said none of the poison was found in the man's South Side home. "There was some white powder labeled potassium carbonate, and that's being tested, in the lab now," Ryan said.
Ryan said "it doesn't appear" the man is linked with the Tylenol poisonings.
Two days after police erroneously stated that the powder had been turned over to the Chicago Health Department, Detective Ryan was sent out to reveal to the press that the bag of white powder was actually labeled potassium carbonate. Why didn't Tyrone Fahner or any of the four detectives who talked to reporters on Tuesday mention that bit of information?
It was reported later that day that a lab test found the powder from Arnold's apartment to be a harmless carbonate. But police never confirmed or denied that the powder was tested at the Chicago Health Department lab. There's no proof that the powder had actually been tested, and nobody from any lab made public any information about the white powder found in Arnold's home.
Arnold was charged with 5-counts of unregistered firearms and one count of aggravated assault. Bond was set at $6,000 Wednesday night and Arnold was released after posting $600 cash bond. Arnold was not a "strong Tylenol suspect," Gildea said.
Detective Jerry Beam said the assault charge stemmed from a recent incident involving Arnold and a bartender at a local tavern. Beam said the bartender had provided police with the tip that led to Arnold's arrest, but declined to elaborate.
It was later revealed that the tip came from Tavern owner Marty Sinclair, who informed Chicago police that Arnold kept cyanide in his South Side Chicago home.
Upon leaving jail Arnold said, "They can say what they want, I am not a suspect."
"This is more circumstance than anything." Arnold said of his arrest. "It just happens that they blew it out of proportion."
"I was willing to take a polygraph but my lawyer advised against it," Arnold said. "I knew the family, unfortunately, but not the suspect."
Arnold said he goes to Thailand every year at this time, but his lawyer said he had never been to the country.
NBC News reported on Monday, October 25, that Arnold's Attorney, Thomas Royce, met with Tyrone Fahner over the weekend. The network quoted an unidentified high-ranking investigator as saying Royce was "trying to make a deal for Arnold." NBC quoted Royce as saying he only met with Fahner to try to find out why investigators are interested in Arnold.
In June 1983, Arnold shot and killed a man he believed gave Chicago police information that made him a suspect, but he shot the wrong guy.
John Fecarotta
Fecarotta was a juice loan collector and hit-man for the Outfit. He was also a business agent and organizer for Local 8 of the Industrial Workers Union, although federal officials charged he was a ghost employee. He lost the union job in 1982 during a federal probe of the union.
In April 1985, both Fecarotta and John Serpico, international vice president of the Laborers International Union of North America and President of Local 8, were called to testify before a Grand Jury probing organized crime infiltration of the unions.
Fecarotta's Demise
Fecarotta was gunned down by Nicholas Carbrese on September 14, 1986.
According to court records and law enforcement sources, Fecarotta was set-up on the ruse that he and other mobsters were going to drop off a bomb. Fecarotta apparently never figured out that the device they were carrying was fake, made up of flares taped together to look like dynamite. Nick Calabrese and Fecarotta were heading to the job site in a stolen Buick. As they pulled up near a bingo hall on West Belmont, Calabrese pulled his gun to kill Fecarotta. But Fecarotta fought him off, struggling with Calabrese until the gun went off, wounding Calabrese in the forearm.
Fecarotta ran for his life, and Nick Calabrese bolted after him, knowing if Fecarotta escaped, it would mean Nick Calabrese's own death sentence from the mob.
Calabrese shot and killed Fecarotta, but he left behind a bloody glove, which investigators recovered and kept. Years later, DNA tests tied Nick Calabrese to the glove and the murder.