Abolition of the death penalty in Illinois kicked off a decade of criminal justice progress
Leo Koretz suckered investors, wooed women with his ill-gotten wealth
Ten years ago Tuesday at a somber, sparsely attended event in his office in the state Capitol, Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn ended nearly two months of suspense by signing a bill that abolished the death penalty in Illinois.
His stone face in the photo on the front page of the Tribune the next morning reflected the gravity of the moment, the pressure he had been under from both sides and his own ambivalence. He’d campaigned and won the governor’s race the previous fall as both a supporter of capital punishment (“for particularly heinous crimes”) and a supporter of the moratorium on executions that had been put in place in 2000 by Republican Gov. George Ryan over concerns about the frequency of wrongful convictions.
Then on Jan. 6, 2011, with no votes to spare, the House passed an abolition bill. When the Senate followed suit five days later, Quinn lost his perch on the fence: Would he listen to Attorney General Lisa Madigan, county prosecutors throughout the state and the families of some murder death who warned of the dire consequence of taking death off the table? Or would he listen to justice reform advocates, faith leaders, editorial boards, strident columnists and other victims’ families telling him capital punishment was barbaric, capricious and prone to error?
“I thought it was healthy for democracy to let everybody have their say,” Quinn told me recently. “I listened. But as time went on it became increasingly clear to me that there were too many problems
with the death penalty to keep it on the books.”
At the time, 15 states and the District of Columbia did not allow for capital punishment. Only three states had abolished it in the previous 25 years. Polls showed a majority of Americans preferred the death penalty for murderers over life without parole, despite the well-documented and well-publicized miscarriages of justice that had put innocent men on death row. Abolition in Illinois was “like taking the finger out of the hole in the dike,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington-based think tank that is critical of capital punishment.
It was the culmination of a local story that had captured national attention. Ryan, long a staunch supporter of the death penalty who had OK’d an execution on his watch, had responded to a series of high-profile exonerations by declaring a moratorium, commissioning an exhaustive review of the capital punishment system and, finally in 2003 emptying out death row by commuting
the sentences of more than 160 condemned prisoners.
“Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error, error in determining guilt, and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die,” Ryan said in a speech announcing that decision. “The legislature couldn’t reform it. Lawmakers won’t repeal it. But I will not stand for it. I must act.”
In the years following Ryan’s dramatic initiative, three states — New York, New Jersey and New Mexico — got rid of the death penalty.
Then, in the decade after March 9, 2011, when Quinn signed the Illinois abolition, six more states followed suit — Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware, Washington, New Hampshire and Colorado. Virginia is poised to become the seventh — on Feb. 23 the state legislature passed a bill to abolish capital punishment in the commonwealth that Gov. Ralph Northam has pledged to sign.
In addition, four other states — Oregon, Pennsylvania, Ohio and California — currently have formal or de facto moratoriums on executions, meaning that more than half the states have abandoned the practice. And it’s unlikely that anyone on federal death row will be executed as long as Joe Biden is president, given his groundbreaking campaign pledge to “work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level.”
Fifty-one prisoners were executed in the U.S. in 2010, according to Death Penalty Information Center data. Only 17 were executed in 2020. Similarly, courts handed down 114 death sentences in 2010, and just 18 in 2020, all part of a long decline in a punishment that, whether or not it’s cruel, is certainly becoming unusual.
And in 2019, pollsters at the Gallup Organization found, for the first time since they began asking the question in 1985, that a majority of Americans, 60%, favored life without parole over death as a punishment for murder. That was up from 46% in 2010.
The murder rate in Illinois has ticked up slightly in the last decade, as it has nationally, but the explosion of violent criminality that opponents of abolition had envisioned did not materialize. As scores of studies dating back more than 40 years have illustrated, the abstract threat of the death penalty is not a statistical deterrent to those contemplating murder.
Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, whose predecessor Anita Alvarez was among those who asked Quinn to maintain the death penalty, says abolition has been a success and has allowed her office to redirect energies and resources it used to devote to the highly involved capital system into areas that better promote justice.
Similarly, Laura Nirider, co-director of the Northwestern
School of Law’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, said that Illinois “eliminating the death penalty has created opportunities to talk about reforming other criminal justice policies, such as life without parole for juvenile offenders, mandatory minimum sentencing and so on.”
Two and a half years after Quinn quietly signed the abolition bill, he held a jubilant celebration in front of thousands of supporters at the University of Illinois at Chicago Forum to sign a bill legalizing same-sex marriage. He and others saw it as his legacy moment, the achievement for which he will be best remembered.
But while it was a bold stroke of the pen, the U.S. Supreme Court sapped it of some of its significance 19 months later by legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide.
Now, 10 years on, Quinn’s decision to reject capital punishment is looking increasingly pivotal, more and more like his legacy moment. Yes, it was a somber moment — tragedy, loss and pain suffuse any conversation about the death penalty — but it was also triumphant.
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Leo Koretz enjoyed pretending he couldn’t fathom why women threw themselves at him. “I don’t see why these women won’t leave me alone,” the Chicago con artist told a friend while hiding in Canada from fraud victims he’d fleeced of millions of dollars.
Taken at face value, his disbelief was reasonable. Nobody ever mistook him for Rudolph Valentino, sex symbol of the 1920s silver screen. Koretz’s bald head and thick, round eyeglasses made him look like a bookkeeper or an insurance agent.
But Koretz projected himself as wealthy almost beyond imagination. When it came to romancing women, price tags didn’t matter. Learning that a European divorcée he fancied was on an ocean liner en route from London to New York, Koretz paid for the delivery of a bouquet as the ship passed Nova Scotia, where he had a palatial estate.
When a California woman who was vacationing with her husband in a provincial Nova Scotia fishing village encountered Koretz in his finely tailored attire, it was love at first sight. They spent a lot of time together. The woman later divorced her husband.
And on and on his charade went, until it came crashing down, and Koretz was exposed as a sham and a master swindler — Chicago’s very own Charles Ponzi, the famed scammer.
In 1924, the Cook County state’s attorney informed the Halifax County sheriff that Koretz was not who he pretended to be — Lou Keyte, wealthy, retired to Nova Scotia and a member of a distinguished literary circle — but rather a con man who had bilked naive investors to the tune of at least $2 million, or $30.6 million in today’s dollars.
His arrest didn’t surprise the former caretaker of Pinehurst Lodge in Nova Scotia, where Koretz lived like a squire. The ex-employee told the Tribune that Koretz “didn’t have the breeding a gentleman would have.”
Koretz’s in-laws were profoundly shocked when his schemes began to unravel and he fled to Canada. They had no idea their daughter’s comfortable lifestyle was the fruit of his crimes — and their own naiveté. Koretz “made a specialty for years of systematically robbing only his relatives and close friends,” the Tribune reported.
With Koretz behind bars in Canada, a reporter found a community in mourning at his mansion in Evanston overlooking Lake Michigan. Some had lost investments they made with Koretz but wanted to console his wife.
“Jewish folk from the north shores, others from Chicago, from Rogers Park to Hyde Park, are whispering a veritable ‘Elil, Elil’ (‘My God, my God’), of lamentation,” the Tribune wrote.
Born to Jewish parents in what is now the Czech Republic, Koretz was brought to Chicago as a 6-year-old. He excelled at debate at Lake View High School. He went to work as an office boy for a prestigious law firm and took night classes at Chicago-Kent College of Law, graduating in 1901.
A few years in practice, without his being admitted to the bar, left Koretz impatient with routine legal work, so he took a fast track to wealth. He came about it the hard way. He was part of an investors’ group that paid $10,000 for a piece of land in Panama. It proved to be worthless, and the seller didn’t own it.
Koretz then attached himself to a venture to turn Arkansas swampland into paddy fields for growing rice. That turned a nice profit and made Koretz the hero of a ragsto-riches story, as a 1923 Tribune headline announced: “Dreams of Wealth Come True for Attorney Who Played Solitaire While Waiting for Clients.”
Koretz resolved to monetize his newfound fame by taking a lesson from the Panama fiasco: The way to make really big money was to dupe investors on phony land deals.
In 1917, he began selling stock in the Bayano River Syndicate, also known as the Bayano Trust Co., which purportedly owned 5 million acres in Panama gushing with oil.
His mother, brothers and in-laws invested a total of $150,000. Others implored Koretz to let them buy into the project, and no wonder: Shareholders got annual dividends of 20%.
Chicago business owners, a group of 17, were so happy with Koretz that they threw him a lavish testimonial banquet at the Drake Hotel on June 22, 1922.
“In the center of the flower garlanded table deposed a large plaster cast replica of the Panama canal zone, symbolic of the scene of operations of the ‘Bayano bonanza,’ ” the Tribune wrote a year and a half later. Place cards noted the bash was given for Koretz by “the friends and relatives whom he has dragged from the gutter.”
Koretz himself entertained royally, belonged to tony private clubs, had a box at the opera and was chauffeured in a Rolls-Royce limousine. All of that Koretz sustained with a sleight-of-hand trick.
Because fictitious oil can’t be sold, he paid hefty dividends to stockholders by recruiting ever more investors. Koretz was robbing Peter to pay Paul — a classic Ponzi scheme.
And while investors were mesmerized, some had the financial expertise to worry lest the Bayano venture was too good to be true.
Current and retired corporate executives asked to see Koretz’s oil operations. He stalled them, but their request became a demand, so in 1923, they set out for Panama, trailed by a Tribune reporter.
Knowing what they would discover, Koretz announced at a family dinner that December that he was going to New York for a vacation. Explaining he’d made a killing on a stock deal, he gave his relatives sizable checks.
In Panama, the fact-finding group could find no evidence of Koretz’s company in court records or along the Bayano River. There were alligators and clouds of mosquitoes, but not a trace of oil or the infrastructure to extract and transport it.
“Residents here (in Panama) were astonished to learn that millions of dollars have been subscribed for the Bayano Trust company, and the investigators have returned feeling they have been stung,” the Tribune reporter observed.
As the stockholders’ team was boarding a ship to return, a cable was received asking one member to remain and investigate the Espinosa offer, another of Koretz’s scams. The rest of the team was interviewed at the state’s attorney’s office in Chicago, and a flock of indictments followed. Koretz was charged with felonies ranging from peddling worthless securities to running a confidence game.
Koretz moved on from New York to Nova Scotia and assumed the guise of Lou Keyte, a moneybags literary critic. His arrest in late November 1924 inspired a flurry of speculation about what tipped off authorities.
The reality does credit to the ingenuity of the Chicago detectives on his tail. They knew Koretz, being diabetic, needed insulin. So they contacted facilities where the drug, newly developed by Canadian scientists, was available. A Montreal sanitarium responded that its staff had treated a Nova Scotia man who matched Koretz’s description.
Brought back to Chicago, Koretz pleaded guilty. Still, he couldn’t resist putting a spin on his story. While being transported to Joliet Prison, he recalled having a sizable bankroll when fleeing to Canada.
“I intended to use this ($175,000) as a means of recovering every penny I owed, to invest this money, make it grow, and then someday come back to Chicago and pay back every nickel,” Koretz said.
In a prison cell, he somehow got his hands on a large box of chocolates, ate every piece, keeled over in a diabetic coma and died. His body was laid to rest at a suburban Chicago cemetery. There were few mourners, a rabbi said a brief prayer, and then he was lowered into a grave, as the Tribune’s Genevieve Forbes Herrick reported:
“And Leo Koretz, the man who loved superlatives, the man who bought things by the dozens, the score, the gross; Leo, the lavish host who had a hospitality complex, is left alone.”