Don't They Watch "CSI"?

CBS reports that two Chicago men were sentenced for their parts in a strange murder plot.

The prosecutors’ story goes like this:

Joseph Kalady was allegedly operating a fraudulent document mill out of his Chicago storefront. Feeling the hot breath of Johnny Law on his neck, Kaladay, Harry Rand, and Raul Rodriguez decide to murder a homeless man and then misidentify the corpse to police as the wanted Kalady. Can’t put a dead man on trial right?

So that’s what they did. They murdered an innocent homeless man, William White, and had Kalady’s brother misidentify the body to the paramedics and police.

Chicagoist has to admire CBS’s use of understatement when they write, “Officials soon grew suspicious, though, because the dead man weighed 175 pounds, while Kalady, 62, weighed about 450 pounds.”

One would hope.

Fingerprints confirmed that the body wasn’t Kalady’s, so the search was on.

There is a man dead here, so we don’t want to be too glib, but how did the alleged Forger & Friends think they were going to get away with it? How are you going to pass off the body of Moby for the body of two Roger Eberts? “No, really, officer, this crashed wreck right here that looks like a Vespa is actually my Ford Expedition that was also trailing a boat. Can I get my insurance check now?”

So the men sentenced were Rand for setting up his friend to be murdered (he got life) and Rodriguez for his role in the suffocation (he got 28 years).

And on a final note, investigators did track down the real Kalady, who had high-tailed it to Boston. However, in an irony unworthy of Alanis Morissette, Kalady died in prison before he could be tried for the murder. Chicagoist is going to guess it was heart disease.