Two Chicago Area Ex-Cops Charged With Extortion, Plotting To Dismember Businessman

By Chuck Sudo in News on Oct 27, 2012 4:00PM

Two former police officers were charged in court Friday with attempting to kidnap a businessman, shake him down for cash, then kill him and dismember his body.

Former Willow Springs police officer Gary Engel and disgraced former Chicago cop Steven Mandell were arrested Thursday as they were planning to carry out their plan. According to federal agents, Mandell and Engel had fake police badges and documentation on them to trick the businessman into thinking he was being arrested. They planned to take the man to a nearby office they called “Club Med” containing a sink, counter, shower, and tools to cut up the man’s body and drain it of blood and other evidence tying Engel and Mandell to the crime. Authorities said they seized a .22 caliber pistol and ammunition at the scene.

Steven Mandell has a long history of eluding the feds. He’s gone by the aliases “Steven Manning” and “Etienne Duvalier” and was accused in 1984 of posing as a DEA agent and torturing Charles Ford into handing him $55,000 next to an empty grave in a Kansas City cemetery. He was convicted and sentenced to Illinois’ Death Row in 1993 for murdering trucking kingpin Jimmy Pellegrino in 1990, but the conviction was overturned when a judge ruled that evidence, including a prediction by Pellegrino that Mandell would kill him, was improperly shared with a jury.

Mandell was awarded a $6.5 million wrongful conviction judgment related to the Ford case. An appeals judge ruled, however, there was significant evidence tying Mandell to the crime.

Mandell didn’t seem to sweat these latest charges. He was seen smiling bemusedly as he and Engel were indicted Friday and, according to one reporter, mouthed “BS” as the charges were read.