Discontent is the constant companion of investigative reporters. They set out on their campaigns because a wrong needs to be righted, and when the campaign ends it’s rarely been righted enough.
In January 2011, Novak and his colleague Chris Fusco submitted a Freedom of Information request for the police files of Koschman’s death. It turned out the police had never closed the case, even though they weren’t working it, giving them an excuse not to hand anything over. But as the police stonewalled the Sun-Times, police superintendent Jody Weis ordered Area Five detectives to reinvestigate. (Novak tells me that what the Sun-Times eventually got from official channels was a police report so sketchy Vanecko wasn’t even mentioned.) Novak had to start somewhere, so he tracked down Koschman’s online death notice and started calling the people who’d signed it. This led him to the friends who’d been with Koschman that night, who gave him their own accounts of what had happened.
My own first reaction to Novak and Fusco’s stories was to wish they’d stick to real corruption and not go after some joker just because he was related to the mayor. Koschman was a little guy—about five and a half feet tall—and Vanecko was close to a foot taller and more than 100 pounds heavier. My nose told me this could easily be a tragic example of little-guy syndrome—a bantamweight drinks too much and decides to show the world how tough he is.
The special prosecutor, former U.S. attorney Dan Webb, made his case to a grand jury that went on to indict Vanecko, but no one else—even though several officers identified by name in Webb’s 162-page report come off looking terrible. Webb said there simply wasn’t sufficient evidence to go after the cops. “It’s not enough,” Novak says, referencing the fact that no one else was indicted. “We didn’t do this story to put R.J. in prison. We did it to figure out why they didn’t charge him. What we were always looking for was to see people held accountable for the two cases that went through the cracks. The first wallpapering was back in ’04, and it was wallpapered over again in 2011.”
“I know that’s not realistic.”
