Exclusive: Outgoing U.S. Prosecutor Gary Shapiro says goodbye
An ABC 7 I-Team Exclusive
CHICAGO (WLS) -- If Gary Shapiro looks more like your friendly neighborhood banker, he is proof that looks can be deceiving. On his last day of a career that began with the Justice Department in 1972, Shapiro talked terrorism, corruption and his career-long crusade against the Chicago mob.
As he boxes up the trinkets of a 42-year career Monday afternoon, Shapiro has already stored away an encyclopedic knowledge of Chicago crime.
"Sometimes doing these cases is like an archeological dig," Shapiro says. "You're literally going back, historically, 30 to 40 years."
That is what Shapiro says it took the government to win the landmark "Family Secrets" mob murder case in 2007, decades after the organized crime strike force that he worked on built the foundation of the prosecution.
In 2014 he says the outfit still exists on illegal gambling profits, but isn't what it was.
"They don't have the political connections that they once had in the city," he says, "They don't have the judicial connections."
VIDEO: I-Team's full interview with Gary Shapiro
The new organized crime is foreign terrorism, and since 9/11 Shapiro says federal authorities in Chicago have refocused on the jihadist threat.
"There have been public statements by terrorists organizations that Chicago is a target," he days. "I think that anybody with any common sense knows terrorists look for symbols, and the economic strength of Chicago and the American economy makes it a symbol."
A sore point for Shapiro is Jon Burge, who became a symbol of Chicago police torture. Burge is about to be released after 5 years in prison.
"The sorts of things he did to his victims, the sorts of things he did to the reputation of the CPD, are really beyond measurement," he says.
The most feared criminal Shapio ever put away was mob hit man Harry Aleman
"He was one of those guys who was very good at what he did, which was killing people or short of killing them, scaring the hell out of them," he says.
Shapiro also offered his final thoughts as we head into Election Day:
"I'd like to think our prosecutions of George Ryan and Rod Blagojevich had an effect on our political or judicial system," he says, "but I'm just not sure that's really true."
