1951 | Editor blew lid off cop's cover-up
“The Moretti case stinks to high heaven.”
This was Pete Akers talking, an editor who kept a gun in his desk. He was incensed by what looked to be a whitewash:
On a night in 1951, Chicago Police Officer Michael Moretti, on a narcotics case, had shot and killed two suspects, one of whom was 15, supposedly in self-defense.
The Cook County state’s attorney had accepted Moretti’s version of the shooting and declined to indict.
But Akers saw a cover-up. Moretti wasn’t just any cop — he was assigned to the state’s attorney’s office, the very agency that had given him a pass.
“I want to go after this situation in a manner such as we have never gone after anything before,” Akers wrote in a memo to his staff. “The state’s attorney’s office should be blown wide open for its failure to indict Moretti.”
Reporters revisited the crime scene and interviewed witnesses. In no time, a more sinister story emerged. Moretti, it appeared, had gotten into a drunken argument with the young men in a tavern, followed them outside and shot them.
The state’s attorney’s office reopened the case. Moretti was convicted of manslaughter. He was paroled in 1964.
