Longtime Chicago police Detective Richard Zuley was on special assignment at Guantanamo Bay in 2003 aiding the interrogation of a key terrorism suspect when he allegedly sent a memo describing a ramped-up plan to disorient the detainee to try to get him to talk.
The plan was to have military police in riot gear take a blindfolded Mohamedou Ould Slahi from his cell and drive him around on a boat to make him think he had been taken off the island, according to a scathing 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee report on the treatment of U.S-held prisoners around the world.
In reality, Slahi would be taken to another part of the notorious base, where the interrogation was to continue.
According to the Senate report, Zuley wrote in his memo that military police dogs would be used during Slahi’s movement to “assist developing the atmosphere that something major is happening and add to the tension level of the detainee.”
The Chicago cop’s little-known role as a Guantanamo interrogator — called into duty as a lieutenant in the Navy Reserve — received wide attention last week in a two-part series in The Guardian. The British newspaper interviewed several former military investigators and culled details from the Senate report as well as Slahi’s recently released memoir, “Guantanamo Diary,” to paint a portrait of Zuley as a brutal and ineffective interrogator.
Slahi, arrested in 2002 as a suspected al-Qaida recruiter, remains at the prison but has never been charged. He claims in his book he was beaten and subjected to a mock execution and death threats.
The Guardian also drew similarities between Zuley’s interrogation techniques at Guantanamo and those he allegedly employed as a Chicago police detective — methods that are now under fire in at least one pending lawsuit. In interviews with the newspaper, three imprisoned suspects claimed that Zuley, who retired from the police department in 2007, shackled them to walls for extended periods, threatened family members and coerced confessions.
The newspaper also highlighted the case of Lathierial Boyd, who has accused Zuley in a federal lawsuit of framing him for a 1990 slaying outside a reggae club in the Wrigleyville neighborhood.
Boyd, who was freed from prison in 2013 after prosecutors re-examined the evidence and threw out the charges, alleged Zuley had ignored his ironclad alibi, planted evidence implicating him in the shooting and elicited false testimony from a surviving victim who fingered Boyd as the gunman.
Last week, a court filing in Boyd’s case revealed that the Conviction Integrity Unit of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office is planning to subpoena Zuley’s entire complaint history from his 30-year career as a police officer, an indication that more cases he handled are being reviewed.
Sally Daly, a spokeswoman for State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, declined to elaborate on what prosecutors may be seeking in asking for Zuley’s personnel files.
Boyd’s attorney, Kathleen Zellner, told the Tribune she was surprised when she found out about Zuley’s time at Guantanamo Bay. She said she plans to ask him about it under oath when she takes his deposition in a few weeks.
“I don’t know what the recruitment process was for Guantanamo interrogators, but he definitely seemed to be a person of authority there,” Zellner said. “I’m certainly going to try to ask him about it. … I’ll take him through his whole career.”
Zuley, 68, who now works for the city’s Department of Aviation, did not return calls seeking comment.
After joining the police department in 1977, Zuley made detective quickly and was assigned to the Belmont Area homicide squad on the North Side. In 1980, a group of men opened fire on Zuley as he drove down an alley in the Cabrini-Green public housing complex, hitting his unmarked squad car with a barrage of bullets and wounding Zuley, then 33, in the leg.
“It happened so fast, just ‘boom-boom,'” Zuley told the Tribune in an interview from his hospital bed. “I managed to get back into my car, radio my situation and drive to the hospital.”
In his 25-year career as a detective, Zuley helped investigate some of the area’s most notorious crimes, from the 1989 robbery and murder of a young Gold Coast woman to the sniper-slaying of 7-year-old Dantrell Davis at Cabrini-Green three years later.
Zuley’s high-profile cases were often cracked by a dramatic confession. As a lead investigator in Dantrell’s murder, Zuley said suspect Anthony Garrett admitted to accidentally shooting the boy with a high-powered rifle while firing at rival gang members from the 10th floor of a high-rise apartment building.
“He slumped, nodded his head and said, ‘Yes, I did it,'” Zuley testified at Garrett’s 1994 trial.
Garrett’s attorneys contended he had signed the confession only after police had beaten him during the 24-hour interrogation. But the allegations went nowhere — Garrett was convicted and sentenced to 100 years in prison.
Zuley also served on the investigative task force into the 1993 massacre of seven people at a Brown’s Chicken restaurant in Palatine, a crime that at the time was unsolved and had become an embarrassment to law enforcement.
Jerry Bratcher, at the time the chief of Palatine police, was quoted in a 1996 Tribune article as saying Zuley was convinced — based on the account of a jailhouse snitch — that gang member Jose Morales Cruz was the killer.
“He believes this is the guy. We have never, ever dismissed Cruz as a suspect,” Bratcher said at the time.
More than six years later, two other suspects, Juan Luna and James Degorski, were arrested and confessed to the murders. Both were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
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