City faces $35.2M in police abuse settlements, 2 tied to disgraced ex-cops Jon Burge and Reynaldo Guevara
Mayor Brandon Johnson’s hard-fought 2025 budget set aside $82 million to cover settlements and judgments tied to allegations of police abuse. That amount was exhausted by April.
Now two of the most notorious bad actors in the history of the Chicago Police Department will put the city — which ended last year with a zero balance in its operating checkbook — $35.2 million deeper into a hole.
Four police abuse settlements are on the agenda when the City Council's Finance Committee meets Monday. Two of them — for $17 million and $12.7 million respectively — are tied to two disgraced former cops: Area 2 Cmdr. Jon Burge and Detective Reynaldo Guevara.
The $12.7 million Burge settlement would go to Jackie Wilson, who was exonerated in 2020 after serving more than 30 years in prison for the murders of Chicago Police Officers William Fahey and Richard O’Brien in 1982.
Wilson was in his car with his brother, Andrew, when Fahey and O'Brien pulled them over at 81st and Morgan streets.
Jackie Wilson’s attorneys argued that he was merely present — and shocked — when his brother grabbed Fahey's gun and fatally shot him and then O’Brien during the traffic stop.
Jackie Wilson maintained that he confessed to the double murder only after being beaten and electrically shocked by Burge and his notorious “midnight crew.”
Andrew Wilson died in prison in 2007.
Burge was fired from the police department in 1993. Nearly 20 years later, he was sentenced to serve prison time on federal perjury charges for denying allegations of abuse raised in a civil lawsuit. He died in 2018 after being sentenced to 54 months in prison.
By February of this year, federal lawsuits linked to Burge's actions had already cost the city about $130 million in legal settlements and judgments, not including millions in lawyers' fees.
Four lawsuits involving Burge are still pending, one of them, the Jackie Wilson case. Three more potentially costly settlements still loom.
The largest of the four police-related settlements on the Finance Committee’s agenda — for $17 million — would go to Roberto Almodovar.
Almodovar was 19 with no criminal background when he was wrongfully convicted for the 1994 double murder of two teenagers killed in a drive-by shooting based on evidence “fabricated” by Guevera, according to Almodovar's attorney Jennifer Bonjean.
Bonjean said Guevara showed one of the witnesses a Polaroid and said, 'This is the guy who did it. You pick him out.’“
When asked why Almodovar deserves a $17 million settlement, Bonjean replied, “If your child was in prison for 23 years for something he didn’t do, what do you think that was worth?
“My client ... had an air-tight alibi that was ignored because you had detectives like Guevara, who fabricated evidence in the form of rigged identifications of people who have since come forward,” Bonjean told the Sun-Times. “My client was 19 years old. They sought the death penalty on him. He almost died. And then, he did 23 years in a maximum-security facility. ...He had an infant child at home who he had a minimal relationship with because prison makes it difficult. ... He went in when she was ... several months old, and he came out when she was a woman.”
Guevara, 81, is accused in lawsuits of framing people for murder. Forty-three people, including three women, have been exonerated after they were sent to prison on murder convictions in cases handled by Guevara in the 1980s and 1990s. Most of them lived in Humboldt Park.
Lawsuits targeting him had already cost the city and Cook County at least $80 million before the new $17 million settlement surfaced. Forty lawsuits against Guevara are pending.
Most of the exonerations in the Guevara cases came between 2016 and 2024, while Kim Foxx was Cook County’s state's attorney.
One man, Jacques Rivera, was exonerated in 2011 under Foxx's predecessor Anita Alvarez. Guevara, who couldn't be reached for comment, now lives in Texas. He has never been charged with any crime and still collects a Chicago police pension.
Johnson has repeatedly blamed his predecessors for refusing to confront the police fepartment’s checkered past. Instead, prior mayors looked the other way and left those “legacy” cases at his doorstep, he told reporters after another tranche of settlements in May.
“We had brutality that existed. It was ignored when people came forward. ... It was covered up,” Johnson told reporters then, pointing to the 2014 police shooting of Laquan McDonald that preceded former Mayor Rahm Emanuel's decision to not to seek reelection. “There are multiple cases in which police brutality occurred in the '80s, in the '90s, that we are dealing with today."
Another settlement on Monday’s Finance Committee agenda — for $2.5 million — would go to the family of Gilbert Mendez, whose 5- and 9-year-old children had guns pointed at them during a wrongful police raid in November 2017.
A $3 million settlement would go to Marley Aguilar, who was struck by a squad car driven by Chicago Police Officer Eric Duron in October 2018. Aguilar suffered a broken leg, broken arm and multiple facial fractures.