Thursday, June 23, 2005

MOST UNDERREPORTED STORY

MOST UNDERREPORTED STORY: Drug ring in the sheriff's department

If you're like me -- in addition to earning my deepest sympathy -- you have occasionally wondered what big stories are being pushed off the front page when a block buster story utterly dominates a news cycle. Here's a tip:
A murder-for-hire plot was exposed during a Cook County sheriff's investigation that has implicated 12 current and former correctional officers in a jailhouse smuggling ring.
That was the lede of Frank Main's Sun-Times story on a six-month investigation that resulted in the largest crackdown of its kind at the jail, in which seven current and five former jail guards were busted.

A source in the Cook County State's Attorney's office tells me that there was grave concern that this story of sheriff department corruption would dominate the front page of both papers all weekend. And then the Kevin Fox/DNA story broke.

That story of gross error in the Will County State's Attorney's office probably didn't help the mood in Dick Divine's office, but it sure pushed the sheriff's department jailhouse drug smuggling ring to the interior of the papers.

A story of sheriff's police smuggling drugs into Cook County jail doesn't even merit the front page.

But I guess drugs are sold everywhere, just ask Mayor Daley.

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