Judge gives 7-year sentence to Willowbrook man in gun and drug case that revealed investigation into lawyer, rape settlement
A federal judge on Friday handed a seven-year prison sentence to a Willowbrook man in a long-running gun and drug case that veered from claims of law enforcement misconduct to allegations that he’d stolen settlement money from his niece after she was raped by a Buddhist monk.
Court testimony Friday also revealed for the first time that while investigating Terry Ferguson, federal agents had been given high-level approval to conduct a criminal probe of his attorney, Beau Brindley, though Brindley was never charged with wrongdoing.
In giving Ferguson a sentence well below the 14 years requested by prosecutors, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly said he took into account his previous findings that agents lied in reports about how a search of Ferguson’s home and car were conducted on the day he was arrested in October 2018.
“I have to look at the defendant’s lawbreaking, and I have to look at the corners were cut to take him down,” Kennelly said. “And corners were cut here.”
But Kennelly also rejected the defense notion that Ferguson was entrapped by agents into selling cocaine and stolen guns, noting Ferguson’s lengthy criminal history meant “there was predisposition all over the place.”
“This was not a situation in which there was any coercion, intimidation or repeated pushing,” the judge said. “That is not what happened here. Mr. Ferguson was given opportunities to do things and he took them.”
Ferguson, dressed in a black leather jacket and jeans, declined to address the court before the sentence was imposed. After the judge ordered Ferguson taken directly into custody, he was surrounded by security officials and removed his jacket and jewelry as family members stormed out of the courtroom.
After the hearing, Brindley issued a written statement to the Tribune that Kennelly “made the righteous decision” to acknowledge the wrongdoing by agents and “ensure that these acts of agent misconduct and dishonesty do have consequences.”
“It is a rare moment for a federal judge to find that agents told lies, damn lies, intentional lies, and cut corners in a federal investigation,” Brindley wrote. “This was vindication for the claims we have been making for years.”
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 Finest Deli on Wheels.
The cache of guns, which included 10 rifles, four shotguns and an array of pistols, had allegedly been stolen by one of Ferguson’s associates from a home in the Canaryville neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side near where Ferguson’s mother lived, according to court records.
In addition to the food truck transaction, 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.
Ferguson also pleaded guilty in a separate case alleging that he and his son, along with an associate, John Deir, tried to intimidate a witness against him after the drug and gun charges were unveiled in 2018.
The investigation into Ferguson, dubbed “Operation Sheriff of Nottingham,” took a deep dive into Ferguson’s drug dealing and fencing operation in his old neighborhood of Nottingham Park on the city’s Southwest Side.
According to court testimony, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were looking at Ferguson’s alleged ties to the Outlaws motorcycle gang and a series of businesses Ferguson helmed, including the food truck, an online betting site, real estate ventures and a high-end escort service called Chicago’s Finest Escorts.
“I don’t advertise,” Ferguson said about the escort business, on one undercover recording. “You gotta know somebody who knows somebody to get someone sent to you.”
But only recently did it come out in court documents that Ferguson was also 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.
Brindley also represented the niece in the lawsuit.
Two weeks after Ferguson’s arrest, agents interviewed his niece and 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 an ATF report of the interview.
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!!!!!”
On Friday, ATF Special Agent Christopher Labno revealed for the first time that at the same time they were investigating Ferguson, the U.S. Department of Justice had approved a criminal investigation of Brindley, who just three years earlier had been acquitted of unrelated criminal charges alleging he coached witnesses to lie in court.
Asked by Assistant U.S. Attorney Misty Wright to describe the relationship between Ferguson and Brindley, Labno testified, “Friends, business partners, possible co-conspirators.”
Labno said that when they first asked him whether he was doing anything “shady” with Brindley, he initially offered to cooperate. A report shown during Labno’s testimony quoted Ferguson as saying, “I told you I’m with you a thousand percent. … Like I said, everything is on the table. You want to talk about Beau, you want to talk about everyone that’s fine.”
Later, however, Ferguson denied any criminal activity with Brindley, and ultimately he never offered up any information on him.
Brindley, meanwhile, alleged in court filings that it was the ATF agents, including Labno, who lied repeatedly in the case, including when they wrote in their reports that they didn’t know Ferguson was “lawyered up” when they first interviewed him.
Among Brindley’s other claims: Agents threatened Ferguson’s niece to try to get her to cooperate; lied about how they later seized notes she’d written about the encounter; and teamed up with other agencies in Wisconsin and Will County to have Ferguson arrested after he’d made bond in the Chicago case.
In an impassioned argument at sentencing Friday, Brindley said the agents’ actions in the case showed they had a personal vendetta, noting that even the operation’s Robin Hood-themed title was a riff on Ferguson’s neighborhood.
“Terry Ferguson was the ‘Sheriff of Nottingham,’ and apparently Beau Brindley was the hopeful Prince John that never came to be,” Brindley said.
Brindley also scoffed, occasionally profanely, at the notion that agents didn’t know he was representing Ferguson when they tried to flip him.
“That’s not balderdash, it’s bull(expletive),” he yelled. “It was! That’s the only thing to call it.”
In the end, Kennelly said he didn’t have enough evidence before him to consider the niece’s settlement money as a factor in Ferguson’s sentencing.
Ferguson’s guilty plea in January came after he’d rescinded an earlier plea and demanded a jury trial. But on the day the trial was supposed to begin last year, Brindley tried to get an emergency continuance, saying he has dangerously high blood pressure after the high-profile child pornography trial of R&B singer R. Kelly, where Brindley won a stunning acquittal of Kelly’s longtime business manager Derrel McDavid.
Kennelly refused to let Brindley withdraw or postpone the trial, cutting the hearing short after Brindley offered in vain to get a note from his therapist. The next day, Brindley appeared and asked for a postponement again, this time claiming Ferguson was so distressed about the situation that he’d checked into the hospital and needed emergency gall bladder surgery.
The judge ordered Brindley to get the doctor on the phone immediately or he’d send a U.S. marshal over to the doctor’s office with a subpoena. “I have 50 American citizens who are involuntarily here waiting,” an exasperated Kennelly said.
After a lengthy meeting in Kennelly’s chambers, however, the judge reluctantly agreed to reset to Jan. 3. Instead of going forward that time, Ferguson instead entered a second guilty plea.
In his argument Friday, Brindley implored the judge to take the government’s alleged misdeeds into account when fashioning a sentence. “It did not have to be this way. It should not have gone this way, but it did,” Brindley said. “Something needs to happen to make it right, to make it even.”
He said he’s been friends with Ferguson for 20 years, calling him a stand-up, loyal guy who isn’t afraid to “get down” and help someone in need.
“From my own perspective, when I was indicted in my own case, Terry Ferguson was the one of the first people to reach out to me,” Brindley said. “He didn’t have to do that. Most people didn’t, all the colleagues and associates and all that. … That’s why this case means so much to me and why I hate it so bad.”
In rebuttal, though, Wright said that while Brindley argued that the agents had a personal vendetta, Brindley’s “outrageous” allegations against Labno and other made it “abundantly clear that the vendetta is going the other way around.”
“He said he has wanted to get (Labno) on the stand for years, a man who was not only investigating Ferguson but also investigating Beau Brindley personally,” she said.
