‘Did you just pick up your law license at Walmart?’ Sentencing in gun case veers into lawyer’s conduct, funds allegedly stolen from girl raped by monk
The federal charges filed against Terry Ferguson in 2018 seemed pretty straightforward: Undercover federal agents allegedly caught him selling cocaine and arranging the sale of guns from his popular food truck.
But the case dragged on for five years, bogged down by guilty pleas entered and withdrawn, a trial demanded and canceled, and allegations of entrapment, illegal searches and witness intimidation.
Now things have taken a truly bizarre twist, as prosecutors revealed on the eve of his sentencing that Ferguson was under investigation for allegedly burning through much of a $1.2 million settlement his niece won from a Buddhist temple in Chicago after she was raped and impregnated by a monk when she was underage.
What’s more, law enforcement reports made public last week show the investigation into the stolen settlement funds was also focused on Ferguson’s criminal defense lawyer, Beau Brindley, a controversial Chicago attorney who’d also represented Ferguson’s niece in her civil suit.
After Ferguson’s arrest in the gun and drug case in October 2018, he was asked by agents with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives about potentially cooperating with investigators, including against Brindley, court records show.
When asked if he believed he had Brindley “dead to rights” on criminal conduct, Ferguson allegedly replied, “I believe I do.”
Two weeks later, the same agents interviewed Ferguson’s niece, who by then was an adult living in northwest Indiana. They showed her evidence that Ferguson had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in her settlement money to buy a big house in southwest suburban Willowbrook, pay off credit cards and give cash to an associate, according to the ATF report.
According to the papers, the interview ended with agents telling her to get a new attorney to investigate the possible crime. When one of the agents later texted her for the new attorney’s contact information, the niece allegedly responded: “My lawyer is Beau Brindley.”
“I have nothing to say,” she texted, according to the report. “Contact him. I have talked to him I gave him your number!!!!!”
Ferguson never followed through with any incriminating information on Brindley or anyone else.
Brindley, meanwhile, has alleged in court filings that it was the ATF agents who lied and threatened Ferguson’s niece to try to get her to cooperate. The agents kept up the harassment even after she told them they were wrong about Ferguson, a trusted uncle who always gave her money when she asked, Brindley said.
Brindley had planned to call the niece to testify at Ferguson’s sentencing Thursday in a bid to show that the lead agent, Christopher Labno, “victimized a psychologically damaged young woman” in order to satisfy his “personal vendetta” against Ferguson.
But in a last-minute filing before the hearing, Brindley said the niece was too frightened of Labno to take the witness stand, and he instead submitted a lengthy affidavit denying much of what was in the AFT report. Brindley also filed affidavits from Ferguson’s sons alleging Labno had harassed them, too, and that they also were too scared to testify against him in open court.
When U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly took the bench Thursday and learned that Ferguson’s sons were sitting in the gallery, he asked Brindley what was preventing them from “walking the 30 feet” to the witness stand and testifying.
The judge also asked if the relatives were aware their affidavits would be publicly filed. When Brindley said they apparently did not know, Kennelly cut him off.
“What in God’s name were you thinking?” Kennelly asked. “Did you just pick up your law license at Walmart this morning?”
“You know I didn’t, your honor,” Brindley started to respond.
Kennelly continued: “I mean, I’m trying to understand the level of stupidity here.”
The sentencing hearing lasted for six hours Thursday and is scheduled to conclude Friday after Labno takes the witness stand.
According to court records, Ferguson’s niece was just 13 when she was approached in a Southwest Side park near her home by Camnong Boa-Ubol, a monk at the nearby Wat Dhammaram temple on West 75th Street. Dressed in the orange robes of the order, Boa-Ubol offered to pay her if she swept up around the outside of the temple, records show.
The monk’s overtures became sexual on the girl’s second visit to the temple. Over the next two years, Boa-Ubol fondled and raped her repeatedly in a trailer on the temple grounds, according to court records. He paid the victim more money to keep quiet about it and threatened to kill her relatives if she spoke of the abuse.
The assaults and threats continued until the victim became pregnant in late 1999. Records show she said nothing to her family about the temple or the monk, claiming instead that the baby was the result of her having been raped by a masked stranger in the park. She gave birth in 2000 to a daughter with disabilities.
It wasn’t until years later that she first confided in Ferguson what had actually happened. She told investigators Ferguson was like a father figure to her, and that it was his idea to start looking for lawyers and file a lawsuit, which she was initially reluctant to do.
Brindley filed the suit against Boa-Ubol and the temple in in September 2010, listing the plaintiff as Jane Doe.
In 2011, the Tribune reported that Boa-Ubol, then 61, had faced similar accusations years earlier and was not only allowed to stay on as a practicing monk, he was still interacting with children at a temple in California. Survivor groups and other activists held demonstrations outside the Wat Dhammaram temple calling for justice.
Boa-Ubol, who by that time had fled to Alaska and was working as a dishwasher, was charged in 2012 with multiple counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault and extradited back to Chicago. He pleaded guilty the next year and was sentenced to 15 years in state prison.
Meanwhile, Brindley referred the niece’s lawsuit to another law firm for a fee in 2012, a common practice in the civil courts. The case was settled by the temple in September 2014 for just over $1.2 million, with the temple admitting no wrongdoing, according to Cook County court records.
The first check was disbursed to Ferguson just weeks after Brindley’s law office in the Monadnock Building across from the federal courthouse was raided by the FBI as part of an unrelated investigation, leading to Brindley’s indictment on charges of soliciting perjury from clients.
Brindley’s law license and reputation were spared a year later when he was acquitted in a bench trial of all charges.
After he was acquitted, Brindley told reporters that he had a new perspective after standing in the shoes of the accused, and that the ordeal would make him a better lawyer.
“It validates aggressive defense on behalf of your clients and doing everything you can to try to achieve the best result, which is our ethical duty,” Brindley told reporters at the time.
Brindley’s law practice was again thriving in October 2018 when the investigation into Ferguson culminated with a raid on his home on Sunset Road in Willowbrook, where agents allegedly found large sums of cash, jewelry and other valuables.
On Nov. 15, 2018, two weeks after Ferguson was charged, Labno and another ATF agent interviewed the niece at the Department of Children’s Services in Gary, where she’d been talking to caseworkers about her financial struggles.
According to a report of the interview, the federal agents told her point-blank they believed her uncle had already stolen $630,000 of her settlement money, and asked whether she was aware of the amount that was missing.
The niece at first said she “had been told by her uncle and his lawyer that if she discussed the money or the settlement that she could go to jail,” the report said. She told them she was OK at first with Ferguson controlling the money because “she felt like she would blow it on useless things.”
In fact, she said they had formed an agreement, signed in the presence of a notary, that she was to receive a house, a car, a $10,000 shopping spree for her kids and a trip to Disneyworld. Ferguson was to keep the rest of the money for her “when she needed it,” according to the report of the interview.
According to the report, Ferguson received yearly checks every September, including an initial payment of $395,517 on Sept. 4, 2014, which he deposited into his bank account in Bridgeview. Within days, he had used it to buy the four-bedroom, 2,600-square-foot home on Sunset Road in his wife’s name, according to the report.
Over the next several years, Ferguson used more of the settlement funds to make large payments to his personal credit cards and buy a $50,000 home in Gary, the report stated.
During the interview, Ferguson’s niece acknowledged her uncle had occasionally had given her money over the years when she asked. She also got the shopping spree, but not the house, car or trip. Instead, she was struggling to make rent on her home in Gary and was behind on her car payments for her used Kia, according to the report of her interview.
“(She) stated that every time her kids see Ferguson, they ask him when he is taking them to Disneyworld, but Ferguson has never followed through with the agreement,” the report stated.
Agents then showed her a photo posted to Facebook by another Ferguson relative from a year earlier. It showed Ferguson, his wife, his ex-wife, seven of his 10 children, five grandchildren and two other family members “standing with Mickey Mouse in a castle at Disneyworld,” the report stated.
The niece said she had no idea they’d taken this trip, according to the report.
“Agents should note (Ferguson’s niece) became visibly upset,” the report stated, “again explaining that her children had never been to Disneyworld despite Ferguson’s promise and her settlement money.”
In court filings, Brindley has accused Labno of duping Ferguson’s niece into the interview by having child services “lead her to believe she had to appear to discuss the custody of her children.”
“When she got there in a state of anxious concern, she was put in a room with Labno and another agent,” Brindley said. “They tried to get her to say that her uncle had mishandled the settlement money related to her molestation by a Buddhist monk, and that he had somehow stolen from her. She refused.”
In her affidavit filed by Brindley late Wednesday, the niece stated that Ferguson has been one of her “greatest sources of support” and that he and Brindley fought for years to get “justice” for her in court. She said she’d tried to tell this to Labno, but he kept pressuring her to implicate Ferguson.
“I told him I wanted to have my lawyer present,” the affidavit stated. “He asked who it was and said, ‘I hope it’s not that piece of (expletive) Beau Brindley.’”
The affidavit stated she was “terrified” by the experience. Once she was allowed to leave she immediately called Ferguson and talked to Brindley. “I think he called Labno to get him to leave me alone,” she said.
Recently, as the case neared sentencing, Brindley accused Labno of improperly trying to contact Ferguson’s niece in another effort to intimidate her and dissuade her from testifying. Prosecutors called the allegation “outrageous.”
Ferguson, 59, pleaded guilty earlier this year to helping arrange the sale of two dozen stolen guns from the back of his popular food truck, Chicago’s Deli on Wheels.
Ferguson admitted in the plea agreement to selling cocaine over a three-year period beginning in 2016 and also fencing an array of stolen goods from his warehouse in Hickory Hills, including snap-on tools, deck furniture, lawn mowers and pallets of dog food.
He faces a mandatory minimum of five years in prison.
Despite the allegations surrounding Ferguson’s niece, Brindley has painted Ferguson as a devoted family man who loves and supports his extended family, attending dance competitions and wrestling matches and “continually hosting pool parties and pajama parties and barbecues.”
“The crowning event of every year is a trip to Florida where he goes shark fishing with his sons,” Brindley said.
