Published on Patch Dec. 10, 2016
CHICAGO, IL — A suburban man who made a fortune off the Chicago Police Department and claims he’s now broke will be headed back to prison, having gone from national poster child for the wrongfully convicted to violent gang leader and wanton criminal. Once flush with $25 million of the city’s cash, Thaddeus “T.J.” Jimenez’s claims of poverty come as a judge on Friday ordered him to give $6 million to a man he shot in the legs last year.
Jimenez — who pleaded guilty this summer to possessing the handgun used to cripple that man — could be sent back to prison for seven years when he’s sentenced next month. When he goes to trial for the shooting itself, he could see even more years behind bars. Known to mock judges and justice in his frequent court appearances, smiling smugly for the news cameras as his misdeeds churn through the court system, Jimenez’s life story is as unique as it is sad and vulgar.
At the age 13, he was arrested, hauled out of his grandmother’s apartment, put on trial and convicted in a fatal 1992 shooting on the Northwest Side of Chicago. That year, like this one, was a record-setting year for gun violence and killing in Chicago. This was not his first arrest either. Or second. Or fifth. By then, he’d been arrested 22 times. Tried as an adult, Jimenez spent 16 years behind bars, 14 of them at Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, but his 45-year sentence was cut short in 2009 thanks to the work of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University. Jimenez had never met his co-defendant, and another man confessed to the crime on a secretly obtained recording.
The city of Chicago in 2012 was compelled by a jury to give Jimenez $25 million as compensation for being framed by a Chicago detective, who was accused of strong-arming a witness, a fellow gang member, into identifying the 13-year-old Jimenez as the shooter. Jimenez said he was home playing video games when the shooting took place.
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TJ Jimenez at the age of 13. Court file photo |
At the time, he was also a “punk” and “pee wee” member of the Simon City Royals — Chicago street gang that traces its lineage back to the 1950s and ’60s “greaser” gangs. Two of his uncles were Royals. While locked up, Jimenez wrote poetry in prison, according to a Chicago Sun-Times account, and fantasized about having the witness murdered.
His exoneration drew national attention. After getting out of prison, the state gave him $200,000 to set up his new life, and Jimenez toiled at a Sonic fast food restaurant. For a while, he also served subpoenas for the investigators who worked to free him from prison, according to a feature in The People’s News blog. He sued the city of Chicago. And two years later, $12.5 million would land in his bank account. (His lawyers kept the rest.) He married and started a family. A father of two, and now reportedly owner of a towing company, the 37-year-old Jimenez has lived in northwest suburban Des Plaines and Park Ridge.
Rolling in more dough than 99 percent of all hard-working Chicagoans could ever hope to see, Jimenez rewarded society at large and those who sought justice on his behalf by purchasing 14 fancy automobiles, including a Lamborghini Gallardo, as well as properties in the city and suburbs — and pursuing a life of crime.
After growing up in prison and becoming multimillionaire, Jimenez also assumed control of the Simon City Royals and began doling out cash to new gang recruits, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois.
Jimenez, called “Batman” by his followers, was with one of those young gangbangers, 23-year-old Jose Roman, on a Monday morning, Aug. 17, 2015, when they rolled up in Jimenez’s Mercedes 500 series convertible in the Irving Park neighborhood and confronted a man who broke away from the gang years ago and refused to rejoin.
With the top down, they were driving around with a .22-caliber rifle and an “electric blue” .380 semi-automatic Kimber Sapphire handgun as Roman recorded the two on cell-phone video, according to federal prosecutors, who described the tape in court this summer.
The video shows Roman pat his rifle as they look for their wayward prey. “Yes, I had got that bitch ready, one in the chamber, where they at?” he asks Jimenez.
When they find him, prosecutors say, the video shows Jimenez jumping out of the Mercedes.
“Why shouldn’t I blast you right now?” Jimenez shouts, holding the gun he bought because the color resembled his gang colors.
Jimenez aims the gun at the man’s head, reappraises his target, then shoots his legs out from under him, shattering the man’s femur bones.
TJ Jimenez used a gun like this one to shoot a man who refused to rejoin his gang.
They sped away, according to Chicago Police, but an undercover officer on the street working another case witnessed the speeding Mercedes and gave chase, eventually capturing Jimenez on foot as he tossed the handgun into a yard on the 3800 block of North Elston. Roman was arrested nearby, prosecutors said at his arraignment, having tossed the loaded rifle into an alleyway. Both were held without bail after their arrests. Jimenez spends night and day in isolation in the Kankakee County Jail.
Brought up on both state and federal charges, Jimenez and Roman pleaded guilty to possession of a firearm by a convicted felon in June. Jimenez also admitted in court that he fired the shots. Sentencing on the federal weapons charges, delayed a few times, is now set for January. Jimenez still faces charges of attempted murder and aggravated battery in Cook County.
The man Jimenez shot — now publicly identified as Earl Casteel — sued Jimenez. Cook County Judge Gregory Wojkowski ruled in Casteel’s favor on Friday, awarding him $6.3 million of the fortune Jimenez claims he no longer has.
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TJ Jimenez’s Lamborghini. Photo: U.S. Attorney’s Office |
In his first arrest a year after getting out of prison, before he was given his millions, an undercover officer found drugs and weapons in his Park Ridge home, according to court documents. Two of those weapons were reportedly stolen from a police officer who had his home broken into. “This here is a damn silencer, baby. I had to pay six hundred to get this bitch,” Jimenez told the undercover cop, according to court files. Then he showed off a fanny pack with six black semi-automatic pistols. “These missiles are from a cop’s crib.”
Later, Park Ridge police raided the home and found marijuana, psychedelic mushrooms, and a cache of weapons.
When Jimenez went before the judge for sentencing in 2012, however, he sounded nothing like the hard and proud Simon City Royal the undercover cop encountered that day. He sounded like a lost boy, and he pleaded with the judge for mercy, for community service.
“I beg you to understand my situation when I first got out. I had no idea how this world worked, no idea at all,” he begged, according to news accounts of the hearing. “Have mercy on me, and give me one more chance.”
Judge Rosemary Higgins did just that, and offered Jimenez advice for how to put his newly secured riches to use serving the downtrodden. Perhaps he could be “creative,” she suggested, and find ways to help “other young men who may find themselves in a similar traumatic experience.”
“I think you’re going to be a flagship example, a success,” she said, “and change someone else’s life.”
Immediately, as he racked up more arrests for DUI, drugs and weapons violations, Jimenez began changing the lives of other young men, doling out $50,000 payments to rank-and-file members of the Simon City Royals who tattooed the gang logo onto their faces and necks, according to federal prosecutors. He even bought them cars, too. His co-defendant, Roman, got a Range Rover from Jimenez, according to prosecutors.
And yet, as recently as spring of 2015, before the femur-bone shooting, Jimenez’s attorney Scott Frankel told Chicago-Sun-Times crime reporter Frank Main he believed his client was pursuing life on the straight and narrow: “I think he is making every effort to be a law-abiding person. … He cares about people. He is a father. He knows he’s been blessed with a great privilege in receiving this civil-rights award. He does not take that lightly.”
Chicago Police believe the Simon City Royals have been involved in as many as 10 murders in recent years.
By crippling Earl Casteel and then making him a millionaire, Jimenez changed his life, too.
If Casteel gets his hands on that money, will those millions finally be put to good use? Any skepticism is probably justified.
Casteel is the younger brother of Luther Casteel, a man who was kicked out of an Elgin pub in 2001 only to return with four guns to fatally shoot the bartender and wound 15 others. He was sentenced to death. When the jury handed down its desired punishment, an angry Earl Casteel called that pub two dozen times and threatened to kill everyone inside.