1: A Shooting From A Mercedes

[Music] [Music] There's a federal jail in downtown Chicago. The windows in the cells are about seven feet tall, but only five inches wide, and they're randomly spaced. Kind of looks like someone stabbed the building with a flathead screwdriver. The jail's 26 stories tall and it shaped like a long, triangular prism. When I looked it up, it was built this way to hide from the city, like to hide it. In the summer of 2016, Maria Cardona was a journalist living in a high-rise apartment building with a direct view of the jail. And it was kind of this very theatrical thing because you're in this beautiful city and this gorgeous part of the South Loop where there's a lot of coffee shops and students, especially students and a lot of folks around, and then you have in the middle of the city just a bunch of prisoners looking down on you. And you really have no idea unless you look up. Across the street from the jail, there was a parking garage. There were sometimes be families out there in that garage, all the little kids and you know parents and grandparents would stand there and look at the prison and wave for hours on end. Sometimes they had signs like, you know, we miss you. Maria thought it was a touching scene. These families coming downtown to connect with their loved ones who are hopefully looking back at them from inside the jail. But one night, Maria saw something a lot less family-friendly on that roof. We see these two girls, these women are dancing, they're twerking, they're pulling one leg up and like shaking their buds. All of a sudden they start performing sexual acts on one another and it blew our minds. Maria looked over at the jail, the narrow cell windows were shimmering as the prisoners switched their lights on and off in a display of appreciation. It's very evident that they're getting excited because the flickering wind stopped. It was like constant. That was only the first strip show Maria saw. She saw them at least a dozen times. Maria couldn't stop thinking about the women. Why were they doing this? Who was making it happen? The next time she saw a woman on the roof, she went to talk to her. I remember my heart was pounding out of my chest. I felt like I was invading someone's privacy. Even though it was done in a public form, I felt like I just looked into her bedroom, which just sounds so bizarre. And I said, I saw what you were doing and I'm so curious as to why you do it. Do you have like someone that you love in there? She said yes, I have my boyfriend there. Maria thought there might be a good story here. So she gave the woman her number, the woman drove off. Maria took a deep breath and she went home. A month or two later, Maria got a text and it said, hi, this is a buddy of Thaddeus teaching him menas and if you don't know who that is, I recommend you look him up. He's interested in talking to you because he spoke to his girlfriend. Maria immediately typed the name Thaddeus, him menas into Google and she discovered this video. Thaddeus, him menas is getting into a Mercedes convertible with a red leather interior. His friend in the passenger seat has a gang tattoo in his face. Two grape sodas are sitting in the cup holders. Thaddeus whips out a big silver handgun and points it at the camera. A black assault rifle is propped at his friend's feet. The car starts to roll as Avi Maria blare us from the speakers. This video is infamous but the end of it, Thaddeus and menas shoot somebody on camera. It's that shooting that Thaddeus in the federal jail across from Maria's apartment. He was the one organizing those strip shows. So the minute I see this video and the minute I realize who this man is, it's like it's kind of like a fear that overcomes me. Out of all the people in this prison, this was the one that pinged me. I'm print me. I'm a newspaper reporter and I've written a lot of stories about Thaddeus and menas for the Chicago sun times. Here's some things I can tell you. He's a smart guy but he's done things that don't seem to make any sense. He's capable of kindness and generosity but he can be equally cruel. At 13 he was charged as an adult with murder. At 30 he was declared innocent and released from prison. Then he was awarded $25 million in compensation but Thaddeus and menas didn't take his money and move to a tropical island like you and I might have done. He spent the money on a gang, began calling himself Batman and started a war and the ultimate question is why? From WBZ Chicago and the Chicago sun times, this is Motive. A shooting from a Mercedes. There's a luxury car dealership in downtown Chicago. It's in an area called the Gold Coast where wealthy Chicagoans live in condos that overlook Lake Michigan. Thaddeus and menas grew up poor about six miles northwest of here. Soon after he became a multi-millionaire, TJ Budacar was serviced at this dealership. I wanted to see if anyone here remembered him. But the manager said no one was going to talk about a customer unless there was a subpoena. Apparently the feds have inquired about their clients before. The car that TJ bought was a black Lamborghini Marciolago. The cost was about $200,000. TJ cruised the streets in his luxury cars. He liked being seen. The music you're hearing is from a video that TJ put up on YouTube. In this video we're sitting inside an SUV driving around the Gold Coast. A little Wayne song is playing. We can't hear anything in the car. The camera moves in slow motion from shoppers on the street to a young woman sitting in the back seat. Now we pan to a man's hand flipping through a stack of fresh $100 bills. He has a jewel and crusted ring on his finger. The camera turns around and we see that TJ is shooting the video on his phone. He points it at his face, raises his hand and flashes a gang sign. So we're head toward Garfield Park and West Tumble Park. Besides buying fancy cars, TJ uses money to win over gang members on the West Side of Chicago. One of the poorest and most violent neighborhoods in the city. So think about here is it go down the street and you have this empty lot, building, building, building, empty lot and it's like broken teeth in a mouth. I'm on the West Side meeting a guy who knows a lot about what TJ was up to around here. Do you live in the West Tumble Park or are you down there? I actually live in a little bit. Yeah, because there are still some people in the neighborhood who are loyal to TJ. The guy asks only to be identified by his first name, Reese. Reese was a gang member on the West Side for a long time. So who is TJ him in as? Yeah, he was a guy that's not from here. So he's kind of legend. No, he's not no legend. You don't consider him a legend in this thing. He's not a legend. What do you consider a fool? A fool. Like I say, there's so many different layers to it with TJ, man. You know what I'm saying? So many different layers. I was shocked to see it. I've never seen nothing like that. It turns out TJ wasn't just buying a Lamborghini or two for himself. He was buying a whole armada of cars. What kind of crazy cars did you see during the TJ hero around here? Man, sport outies, porches, rangeros. I only heard about the Ferrari, you know what I'm saying? And TJ was giving these cars to kids in the neighborhood. One of TJ's cars was rumored to be bulletproof and it had a nickname. What's the tank? The tank. You ever heard of it? Did you tell about an else on a particular individual's name? No, a vehicle. The home. Tell me about the home. I'll find me where. He's driving in a big black hummin' blasting music. It's nighttime, and he's in a neighborhood on the northwest side. He gets out of the car and around eight younger men jump out of some SUVs behind him. They stand in the intersection flashing gang signs and shout out. TJ posted videos on YouTube under the name Bruce Wayne, and he started calling himself Batman. TJ was buying loyalty, building an army with millions of dollars he got from his wrongful conviction case. The money he was the way he was flung in the way TJ was given it away. He would literally take ten guys to the auction and buy them a Porsche and buy them a Range Rover. He told me he was 15 years old, 16 years old, and if you think about it, if they wake up every day to come out here and sell a pack for $400, a pack means drugs. You can imagine what he would do for a Porsche truck. Well, Range Rover or a house. What a goal to an all-star game in Atlanta. For them, it was fun. It was a time in their life. They couldn't pass up. So, mom, we got money. 20,000. 10,000. 15,000. Then all he'd do would need to do was shoot form. TJ showered money on these gang members. He took them on road trips. All expenses paid. Some of them even got tattoos on their faces with symbols from TJ's gang. All this created a lot of tension on the west side. These young guys were in a different gang, but they thought TJ was cool, so they flipped. See, gangs in Chicago have strict rules of forbid their guys from flipping, meaning switching from one gang to another. It's an offense that's punishable by a beat down or worse. Sometimes guys from different gangs work together to sell drugs, but flipping to another gang is almost unheard of in Chicago. That's what happened on the west side. TJ created a war. Well, nobody cool with you coming over here. Like, a lot of people got lost their lives. They're here on Chicago Avenue. And that's because of TJ. According to my reporting, at least 19 people were shot and four were killed in the summer of 2014. All within a few blocks were TJ's west side guys were from. Reese says one of his family members may also have been a victim of TJ's crew. Tell me about what happened to your cousin. Sorry. I look cousin lost his life, man, because he had a heart. He had courage. He's fit, nobody around him. That's why my little cousin, they fit him. And he used his hands. He didn't play with guns. Besides, that's all I got to say about it. Reese's cousin's name was Tori Bell. He was killed on December 15, 2014 when he stepped out of a car and two men opened fire. He was 23 years old. Neither TJ nor his crew were charged with the murder. No one was. The Ave Maria video was recorded eight months after Tori Bell was killed. There's a police scanner between TJ and his friend. The voice of the dispatcher crackles and competes with the music. You see the kick on that hole? TJ's friend touches the assault rifle at his feet. He gives it a couple of pads. [Music] I spent probably more time on one individual talking about him and his influence than any other person. Bob Tracy was the chief of crime strategy for the Chicago Police Department while TJ was cruising around the West Side. In a year, we were reducing violence to 50-year lows. I can only imagine how much better we would have done that year had that he is, Jim and his nap in around. TJ may have called himself Batman but he was acting more like a supervillain, a multi-millionaire assembling a team of henchmen to create chaos. So Bob and the chief of police took TJ's name all the way up to the top. We go once a week and we talk to Mayor Rahm Armanu and I remember his name coming up and we talked about this with with the mayor which is unusual to have someone say this is a guide it's causing us a lot of issues and these are the things that we're doing. In 2014, I first heard that the name Thaddeus Amenez was coming up in police meetings. Commanders said they were getting intel that he was driving around in expensive cars, shooting at people and they had to stop him. He was a thorn on our side for everyone that was involved. I had a from patrol guys that the gang intelligence guys. [Music] It's later in the Aave Maria video. The music is off now. All you can hear is the police scanner and TJ proclaiming that his gang rules the streets. We are the police over here. We are the wrong force man. We are the wrong government in the government. In our communities, self-suffering, true royalty. Nobody above us, nobody to rule for us. They can't protect you from us, that's what's going on. They don't get it too, they get it away. From what you've heard so far, you might think that TJ is just a shithead. Someone you shouldn't really care about. But some people, myself included, would disagree. He's far more complicated than that. TJ has a side he doesn't show people in his gang videos. If you watch a video that TJ made for his lawyer a couple years earlier, he sounds like a completely different person. My name is Thaddeus E-Mennus. I served 16 years, two months and 27 days for murder at the Nato. I remember getting to know TJ, I remember becoming friends with TJ. He's got a winning personality. TJ can be multiple people though, you know, obviously, when this all self-destructed on him, the world saw a different side of TJ. John Lovie was the attorney who got TJ the $25 million if he later used to finance his gang. For John, his client's self-destruction is no great mystery. TJ was trying to get back the power that was taken away from him when he was a kid. Thaddeus E-Mennus is believed to be the youngest person in the United States history to be wrongfully convicted and later fully exonerated. People are like, I can't make sense of why TJ self-destructed, you know, I just doesn't compute, I don't get it. Really? What doesn't compute about it? You know, he became a person in maximum security prison. It is not a surprise that TJ came out with his values a little bit warped. After his release from prison in 2009, TJ delivered a hopeful message at a press conference. I hope my story will get hope to others that when wrongful convictions occur in the criminal and juvenile justice systems, those injustices can be corrected. The system did permanent damage to TJ and to make up for it, the system gave him $25 million. It's almost like a cruel sociological experiment that you couldn't conduct in a lab. What do you do if you take a 13-year-old who's living on the streets, you know, making bad decisions and put him in maximum security prison and then release him in his 30s and give him a bunch of money. We interviewed a few attorneys before John Lovie and then we interviewed John and right off that I liked John, you know, he was passionate about what he did, you know, I could see that right away. John Lovie led the team of lawyers that sued the city of Chicago on TJ's behalf. We are civil rights lawyers, so police misconduct primarily, enforcement of people's constitutional rights, trying to do social justice. I first met John in the late 1990s. He was a young lawyer who wore his hair in a ponytail. Over the years, John's hair got shorter and his list of courtroom victories got longer. His firm, Lovie and Lovie, has won well over $100 million for their many clients. TJ was one of his biggest victories. Federal jury has awarded $25 million in damages to a man who spent more than 16 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. I've been vindicated in court, I've been vindicated in public and I could walk around out of my head up knowing that people know the truth. It's believed to be one of the biggest verdicts of its cost. It's made my life comfortable and it's made my life a lot better and I'm very, very grateful that I had John going beyond my side. I felt like a win for justice, for TJ and for John's law firm. The firm recorded that video of TJ praising their work. It was such a happy thing, but not anymore. It's embarrassing, it's horrible, it's a tragedy. I keep getting philosophical in the center of the Frank, but what is the definition of a tragedy? When things are on path to go away that would be good and then they veer into a way that is hopelessly bad, that's TJ, him and I. And I regard it and I guess I'm sort of confessing here and maybe it's against my interest, but I regard it as a tremendous failure on my part that when there were stories that TJ was acting like a knuckle. head that I didn't personally put a stop to it. Through a friend, John started to hear rumors about what TJ was doing with his money. He called TJ and asked what was going on. TJ said he had everything under control. You know, I wish I had intervened sooner with TJ and stopped it. But then, you know, when I tell myself that and I'm beating myself up, but some ways TJ was trying to destroy himself. He was a guy just trying to go 100 miles an hour at the edge of the cliff. And life was like giving him, "Well, here's a bunch of advantages. Here's a bunch of monies. I'm still going to try to destroy myself. In fact, this is going to help me do it better." That's what happened. You saw the video of the shooting from the car, right? I have. What was your reaction to that? I mean, I had the same reaction that many people did. It's not an act that is appropriate. And it's reprehensible that he did that. And I think TJ would be the first person to tell you that that was a dumb, mean, unfair, unjust, unjustified thing to do. For the end of the Ave Maria video, TJ and his friend are cruising aimlessly through a neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. A car pulls up next to them. TJ's friend grabs the assault rifle at his feet. The guy in the other car drives off. It seems like TJ and his friend were just randomly threatening him for the camera. TJ keeps driving. Now we see TJ slow down as a man wearing a black strap t-shirt gets out of a car. TJ pulls up to him. The man approaches sideways cautiously. TJ pulls out his handgun and chambers a bullet. TJ points the gun at the man's head. The name's lower. Tell me a little bit about the day that you were shot. Well, actually, when I had woke up that I had just actually woke up. Just before he was shot, Earl Castile looked out the window and saw that his wife had parked her car on the wrong side of the street. He went outside to move it. By the time I parked on the other side of the street and I cut my car off, I looked and I seen TJ. He was rolling up in a convertible Mercedes. He told me why shouldn't I blast you and he pulled a gun out and pointed at me. So I told him, I said, you know, I don't have a problem with you. When he sells me, he's like, oh, shut up and then he fired a shot. The first one hit me in my left leg. I knew I was hit and as he drove off, he fired another shot and it hit my right leg. All I had was, blah, blah. Next thing you know what I heard, like a car screeching off and I hear a sassel, yeah. Cecilia, Earl's wife came out of the house. She was like, what's wrong with you? What's going on? Why are you sitting on the ground? He thought that I had been hit by a car. He's like, no, I got shot and I'm like, what? By shot by who? I was like, TJ just drove by and for no reason, he shot me twice. I went into like a panic attack. I told her just calm down, give me the phone and I took the phone from her and I dial 911. Well, I heard on the radio when the police and ambulance there when they're trying to pick up Earl, you know, like help him get on the stretcher that they caught the suspects down the block and I was kind of like relief like, oh, they caught him good. After TJ had sped off, the police saw him run through a stop sign. There was a brief chase and TJ crashed his $90,000 Mercedes into a parked car. He was arrested within minutes of the shooting. Inside the car, the cops found Gucci bags filled with ammunition. Earl and TJ knew each other. Earl had been a leader in the Simon City Royals. The gang that TJ was trying to build back up. Earl says he left that life a long time ago. He and Cecilia have seven kids now. I consider myself a family man. The only people that I want to be around is my wife and my children and that's it and I'm happy with that. Earl says he doesn't know why TJ shot him. Watching the video, it does look pretty random. It doesn't seem that TJ was really searching for Earl, but they ran into each other and Earl ended up with both of his legs shattered. Have you ever been shot before? Yeah, there were some guys that were shooting down the street in the bullet. They went in one side, came out the other, went in my left leg and came out the other side. So, I got eight bullet holes in my legs all together. Did you see the video where he shot the guy? Yeah. What did you think of that? Oh man. Reese, the ex gang member who lost his cousin in a shooting on the west side was glad to see TJ go down. See me, I'm, I'm, I consider myself to be a realist man. I don't consider myself to be the pipe person that follow clowns or a leader. He was leading clowns and he had clowns following. He made him a clown. What he did was he threw his life away for a few minutes of gratification, fame, glory, whatever. I don't know. I don't know what's going on in that man here. He right now at this moment. But what I thought about it, it's so simple. You read what you saw. Please have arrested a local millionaire after a shooting. The shooting was all over the news. Well it sounds like just another shooting until you hear who this man is and why the city of Chicago knows him so well. The story had everything. Millions of dollars, flashy cars, violence, a lottery winner gone bad. The day his men has despite a $25 million payout, apparently squandering his fortune and returning to the only life that he has ever known. Only took five years for Thaddeus Hemenius to blow through his fortune. Some of the money was spent on guns. The cop seized his friend's cell phone. They quickly found the video of the shooting and the US attorney played it at TJ's trial. I think that video speaks for itself. I hate it because I worry that it's going to cause further reputational damage to a city that I and a host of you love and care deeply about. The video went viral. Federal prosecutors playing a draw-dropping video, disturbing and difficult to watch. Locked and loaded, with AvA Maria Blasting, Thaddeus Hemenius and his passenger, Jose Roman, cruised through a northwest side neighborhood. A frightening window into the brutal reality of Chicago streets. The judge couldn't believe what he saw in the video. He said, quote, "it just kind of boggles the mind." All right, there's a very disturbing video there to say the least. Video of something else. Something else is right. Sir, I'll thank you. The judge called TJ's case, Exhibit A for gun violence. He gave TJ a long sentence. Men as mother and supporters, leaving the courthouse without commenting. And men as will go back to familiar walls sentenced today to more than nine years in prison. And it said, "Hi, this is a buddy of Thaddeus, TJ, Hemenius." And if you don't know who that is, I recommend you look him up. He's interested in talking to you because you spoke to his girlfriend and he wants to tell you the story about why this happens in the parking garage. By the time Maria Cardona saw that text, I had already written a bunch of stories about TJ. Maria was a journalism student and she came to me for some advice. I encouraged her to respond to TJ. One day she got a collect call from the jail. And in me is trying to contact you, press one. At that moment I was shaking. I pressed one. Hello, this is TJ. I'm like, "Hi, this is Maria Cardona. I work with the Chicago sometimes. I'm working on a story with Frank Maine and that's when he made me very aware that he was not a fan of Frank Maine. But I also made him very aware that Frank Maine and I were doing the story together." What do you have to say about that? He said he didn't like you. He said he didn't like you as a reporter. He just did not. He was in your biggest fan. Apparently TJ didn't like the articles I wrote about him, but Maria kept the interview going. And I told him I was like, "I have a couple questions for you." And he was like, "Okay, ask away." Maria asked why the strip shows are happening on the garage. And he was like, "Well, you know, this is my girlfriend and she comes and visits me and she performs for me because she loves me and this is something that I enjoy, seen. I like flaunting my women around because I know that at the end of the day they're here for me. Like she's there for me and only me. And so it's okay if everyone else looks at her." Those strip shows are like the videos TJ posted online that these grand displays of power. We have seen it. saying, "Don't mess with me. I'm the man." So at the end of the conversation, I'm like, "Well, thank you for talking to me. I appreciate it." And I was like, "It was nice talking to you. And good luck." Maria helped me write a story about the strippers in the summer of 2017. It was perfect tabloid fodder, total clickbait. Like all the things I wrote about TJ, it documented the sensational things he did after he won his wrongful conviction lawsuit. But I never knew much about TJ before he got millions of dollars. So I dug into his original murder case back in the 1990s. I snapped thousands of pages of court documents into thick black binders and I read all of it. And I realized that I didn't really know anything about TJ. I didn't know anything about the child who decided to join a gang. I didn't know anything about the 13-year-old locked up for murder. I didn't understand the effect that all of those years in prison had. And I certainly didn't appreciate what it's like to have your life handed back to you when so much has been taken away. I didn't think TJ himself would talk to me. He doesn't like me anyway. So I've tracked down the people who could tell me his story. This season on Motive. It was fun to break people's cars or bricks that would go by, beat up people, got to rush off it, you know. He wrote me a poem about having picnics at the beach with his family in the summer. He was this other sad reality about prison because he was one of us is why he was safe. Is he safe right now? I don't think so. We participated in doing this young band, serious, serious damage. And then we give him $25 million, we expect him to build up the community. Well, silly can we be? I didn't even know he was in the royals till my nephew told me. And I grabbed him. The only game you got is your family. Motive is a production of WBEC Chicago based on original reporting from the Chicago Sun Times. I'm Frank Maine, the producer of Colin McNulty, the executive producer of Kevin Dawson, our engineer is Shelley Stephens, special thanks to listeners whose financial support of WBEC made this podcast possible.