Suburban attorney Alan Masters, who once offered a $10,000 reward for information about his wife`s mysterious disappearance, was convicted in federal court Monday along with two former police officers of conspiring to kill his wife in 1982.
After a monthlong trial that focused as much on rampant corruption in the Cook County sheriff`s office as on the killing itself, a jury took only 3 1/2 hours to convict Masters on charges of conspiracy, bribery and racketeering.
The jury also found former Cook County Sheriff`s Lt. James Keating and former Willow Springs Police Chief Michael Corbitt guilty of aiding Masters in the conspiracy. Corbitt, 45, and Keating, 52, are already serving prison terms as a result of convictions in federal corruption cases.
Masters, 54, characterized in court as a fixer who plied police and judges with bribes and who once greeted a state`s attorney with a handshake that passed a $50 payoff, was acquitted of two other counts of mail fraud.
He had been charged with defrauding an insurance company of $100,000 paid to him on a life insurance policy through Moraine Valley Community College in Palos Hills where his wife, Dianne Masters, was a member of the board of trustees.
Although Corbitt and Keating were convicted of the murder conspiracy and on racketeering charges related to the acceptance of payoffs to help fix criminal cases, they were acquitted of charges they concealed a killing that Keating once bragged to an undercover FBI agent would never be solved.
Masters, an influential attorney in the southwest suburbs, sat impassively as the verdict was read. He was led out of the courtroom by U.S. marshals after U.S. District Court Judge James Zagel revoked his $200,000 bond. He is facing a maximum of 40 years in prison when he returns to Zagel`s courtroom for sentencing Aug. 14.
Keating is already serving a 15-year sentence after his conviction in 1986 for taking payoffs to protect suburban vice operations while he was head of the sheriff`s vice unit. He also faces an additional prison sentence of up to 40 years.
Corbitt, who pleaded guilty to extortion and racketeering charges last year and is serving a 4-year sentence, could receive another 20 years.
The jury Monday also ordered a $42,000 forfeiture against the defendants. Prosecutors said the sum was an estimate of the bribes collected by the defendants from operations that included inflated legal fees Masters used to pay off judges in the 5th Municipal District in the southwest suburbs and payoffs Masters and Keating collected to protect Cicero bookmakers from vice raids by sheriff`s police.
Dianne Masters, 35, who had aspired to political positions beyond her post at the community college, was found dead in the trunk of her Cadillac on Dec. 11, 1982.
The car was discovered by chance in the Sanitary and Ship Canal in Willow Springs during a police operation to recover vehicles that had been reported stolen by their owners, then sunk in the waterway to collect insurance.
The charges against the three were almost as accidental. Federal investigators began learning of the conspiracy to kill the woman during the undercover Operation Safebet investigation of suburban vice opeations.
No murder charges have ever been filed in connection with the killing. Zagel said in court Monday that legal technicalities may bar the Cook County state`s attorney`s office from filing murder charges against Masters, Keating or Corbitt.
Zagel did not elaborate but Assistant U.S. Atty. Thomas Scorza said prosecutors may be hampered by laws that restrict them from trying people more than once in connection with the same crime.
Patrick Tuite, Masters` attorney, claimed the verdict represented a partial victory because the jury convicted his client on charges of planning the killing rather than on the charges related to carrying out the killing. He also criticized prosecutors for using federal racketeering laws to gain the cat 26th and California (Cook County Criminal Courts) as it should have been, this would have never gotten past a directed verdict,” Tuite said.
Scorza, who prosecuted the case with Assistant U.S. Atty. Thomas Foley, said ”problems with the evidence”-principally the lack of proof of who actually killed Dianne Masters-was the reason the three were prosecuted under federal statutes.
”Also we are dealing with fixers and we wanted them in a forum where nothing could be fixed,” Scorza said.
”What the verdict shows is you can`t get away with murder even when the people are highly placed and powerful and they have connections with police or political officials,” he added.
Scorza credited Cook County Sheriff`s Police Sgt. John Reed, sheriff`s investigator Robert Colby and former sheriff`s investigator Paul Sabin with aiding federal agents in an investigation that for four years had gone nowhere until the federal government began looking into the disappearance and death of Dianne Masters.
