Chicago City Wire

Trump’s announcement that he will pick former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi as U.S. Attorney General could be just what Chicago needs to reverse some of the wreckage done by the anti-police radicalism among the city’s top officials, wrote former Chicago Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) spokesman, Martin Preib, in his column “Crooked City.”

One case that calls out for federal scrutiny, Preib says, is former Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx cutting loose members of the vicious street gang, the Spanish Cobras, arrested in the 2011 slaying of off-duty police officer Clifton Lewis.

“The entire swamp of Chicago united behind efforts to free three Spanish Cobras for their role in the 2011 murder of Officer Clifton Lewis in a liquor store where Lewis was working an off-duty security job to earn money for his upcoming wedding,” Preib wrote. “But the evidence of their guilt is so overwhelming that Trump’s new DOJ should initiate a federal criminal case against the men.”

U.S. Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi | Bondi

In the case, Foxx dropped charges in June 2023 against two of the suspects, Edgardo Colon and Tyrone Clay. In the process, two of her top prosecutors were left hanging out to dry. And just this past October Foxx’s office told a Cook County judge it would not retry the case against Alexander Villa, convicted in 2019 of the murder. He was released from prison two days later.

The FOP was furious, according to Preib, as the evidence against Villa was overwhelming, including:

-Surveillance video from multiple angles;

-A car in an alley near the convenience store where the shooters fled matches one owned by Villa’s girlfriend;

-Villa attempted to erase his entire Facebook account after hearing police were near his house;

-A few weeks after the murder, Villa spoke to a friend in the presence of a witness about getting rid of the weapons used in the murder. That witness later testified in the grand jury and at trial regarding what they overheard from Villa regarding his involvement in robbery and murder;

-A witness testified before a grand jury that the day of the murder Villa bragged about killing a “pig.”

As head of the U.S. Department of Justice, Preib believes Bondi could pursue charges against the three.

“Such a move would restore some measure of justice into an obscene betrayal of the police and the justice system in Chicago, a betrayal that is hardly unusual,” Preib wrote. “The claims that paved the way for attorneys under the most corrupt prosecutor in the country, Kim Foxx, are media-driven fantasies. One judge who reviewed a third defendant’s case rejected a claim of innocence, even after two of the three Spanish Cobras were cut loose. The case leaves Chicago in a kind of legal schizophrenia, charges against two gang members dropped in one courtroom, then upheld in another for the third defendant.”

Preib added that bringing charges against the three would also “put a spotlight” on the new Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke, sworn in on Dec. 2, to follow through on her claims of being a “reformer.”

“So much potential hidden benefits could be revealed in an investigation, for which there is ample probable cause to justify such a federal inquiry, that it would be foolish for Trump’s new head of the DOJ to ignore the opportunity,” he wrote.