For Michael Fusco, it all began with a side job in the summer of 1989. He managed Nite Life, a bar on the northwest side, and moonlighted as a construction worker. People would come into the bar and ask him to build their decks or do electrical work. Fusco, a lifelong Chicagoan, grew up in the Belmont-Central area. His father abandoned his family when he was five years old, and his mother, a Polish immigrant, had to take a job in a sweatshop. A smart kid with dreams of being a doctor, Fusco dropped out of high school to work in construction but ended up enlisting in the army and serving in Korea. When he returned home in 1971, he went back to the construction trade and also started working in bars. Through his job at Nite Life, Fusco came to know Michael Coffey, a regular customer who asked him to build some electrical paneling in his house in northwest suburban Inverness.
“I really didn’t know too much about it,” says Fusco. “I really didn’t care. I figured, you know with him, there could be something kinky, you know what I mean? But who knew it was gonna be this? Who’d think about growing marijuana in today’s world?”
“I just told him flat out, “I don’t want no part of this,”‘ Fusco says.
“From what I heard, they surrounded the house at six in the morning with guns drawn,” says Carol Fusco. “The neighbors freaked out. One of my neighbors asks, “What’s going on?’ This guy opens his coat and says, “FBI.’ They went to the neighbors, asked if they knew my husband. We had just moved in. It was embarrassing. Six in the morning they come in here with guns. Everybody has kids around here. It’s a nice community.”
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Coffey, in an agreement worked out with federal authorities, pleaded guilty to one charge of opening and maintaining a place to grow marijuana. Michael Fusco turned himself in and was charged with four counts: conspiracy to manufacture and distribute marijuana, manufacture of a controlled substance, and two counts of maintaining a place for the purpose of manufacturing a controlled substance. While out on bond–despite his assertion that his role in the scheme was merely that of electrician–Fusco began to get pressured by federal authorities to rat on other individuals and to tell what he knew about organized crime in Elmwood Park. They refused to believe that Fusco didn’t know more than he was telling, especially since Coffey made him out to be a mastermind in the operation and Fusco’s cousin and good friend, Richard Lantini, was one of the alleged conspirators.
On February 10, 1995, in a hearing before Judge Paul Plunkett in the northern district of Illinois in the U.S. District Court, Michael Fusco received the mandatory minimum sentence: ten years in prison with no chance for parole.
In his study Prison Blues: How America’s Foolish Sentencing Policies Endanger Public Safety, David B. Kopel, a former assistant attorney general for Colorado, writes that “mandatory minimums . . . require grotesquely disproportionate sentences.” Kopel points to the cases of Brenda Valencia, a 19-year-old with no previous criminal record, who drove her aunt from Miami to the home of a drug dealer in Palm Beach and received a sentence of 12 and a half years in prison; 44-year-old carpenter Michael Irish, also with no prior convictions, who tried to sell a boatload of hashish to pay for his wife’s cancer treatment and got 12 years in prison; and Gary Fannon, again with no prior record, who “worked to set up, but then became too fearful to complete, a sale of a large quantity of cocaine to an undercover Michigan police officer” and is now serving a mandatory life sentence without hope of parole.
