(Chicago) Former Chicago cop Steve Mandell was sentenced to life in prison plus five years Thursday after a federal judge ruled that the public needs to be protected from him, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.
Convicted at the end of a spectacularly lurid trial in February, Mandell, 64, plotted to abduct Riverside businessman Steve Campbell, take him to a purpose-built Northwest Side torture chamber, extort him into turning over property, then kill him and chop him up with a meat cleaver and a buzz-saw on a man-sized butcher’s block. Much of his planning was captured on tape secretly by the FBI. The feds arrested him before the scheme could be carried out.
“Your actions in this case Mr. Mandell were evil and showed a complete disregard for human life,” U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve said.
“The thrill you showed in putting another person in pain and torturing was chilling,” St. Eve said. “The glee on your face was very apparent.”
The judge added that she did not see “an inkling of remorse” from Mandell.
The U.S. Attorney’s office argued that only a life sentence would protect the public from an “evil … psychopath” who took sexual pleasure in meticulously planning murder and should never have been freed from prison in the first place.
“This man over here actually takes pleasure from hurting people,” federal prosecutor Amar Bhachu told the judge Thursday, pointing to Mandell in the courtroom, “He likes it. It arouses him!”
Despite damning video evidence of him chuckling with accomplice Gary Engel about how he’d turn Campbell’s private parts into a “banana split,” then drain his blood in a giant sink, Mandell maintained his innocence. He told the judge in a long, rambling speech Thursday that he was framed.
His attorney argued Mandell should get credit for the years in the 1990s he spent on Death Row for a murder conviction that was ultimately overturned. He deserves a “glimmer of hope that he will one day be free at an old age,” defense attorney Francis Lipuma says.
A convicted burglar, suspected in a series of murders over the years, Mandell won a landmark $6.5 million civil verdict against the FBI after his 1990 murder conviction was overturned, only to see that verdict also tossed out by a judge who said there was strong evidence he was guilty.
In secretly filmed video evidence played at his trial earlier this year, he presented himself as an experienced killer and an expert at targeting wealthy burglary targets.
“Only the stiffest sentence is possible for a barbaric individual like Mandell, who obviously takes perverse delight in hurting and torturing others,” Assistant U.S. Attorneys Amar Bhachu and Diane McArthur wrote in court papers filed last month.
The filing includes lengthy excerpts from the transcript of Mandell chortling over his ghastly array of torture implements as he made his final preparations to torture Campbell, including portions in which Mandell seems to boast he has killed before, in which he claims he is physically aroused by the prospect of murder, and in which he groans “Ohhh, ohh, oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh” at the thought of also killing Campbell’s daughter.
Mandell’s accomplice, Engel, hanged himself in prison soon after their Oct. 2012 arrest.
–Sun-Times
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