By Kim Janssen
Chicago Sun-Times
CHICAGO — Investigator Franco Domma’s office is the Art Institute of Chicago’s meanest streets.
Instead of Picassos, Van Goghs and Monets, Domma’s walls at Cook County Jail are covered in graffiti, gang charts, gang clothes and hundreds of homemade prison weapons.
But the gang-bangers shackled to a concrete-filled bucket in the corner aren’t admiring the papier mache crown seized from a leading Latin King’s home, the hard-as-steel “shank” improvised in a cell from melted polystyrene coffee-cups, or the strange, funny photo of Bill Cosby throwing gang signs.
They’re here to rat on their friends.
“Opportunity comes one time,” Domma tells them. He and his colleagues in the Cook County Sheriff’s Office’s Criminal Intelligence Unit are the stars of “The Squeeze,” a new MSNBC show that premieres Friday.
“I’m in the passenger seat; you’re in the driver’s seat,” Domma tells the gang-bangers.
For the price of a cigarette, a Pepsi and, they hope, a shorter sentence, gang members awaiting trial give the CIU officers information on unsolved cases and detail the gang connections between the 10,000 Cook County Jail inmates and Chicago’s estimated 100,000 gang members.
A camera crew followed the unit in the jail and on the streets for months as it used informants to make more than 100 arrests and seize more than $100,000 in drugs and guns.
Though the show’s name apes the critically acclaimed HBO series “The Wire,” its simplified moral universe owes more to the long running Fox hit “Cops.”
In “The Squeeze,” you always know who the bad guys are. The officers hope the series shines light on a reality many would rather ignore.
“There’s no loyalty in the dope game,” says Sgt. Jason O’Malley, who raids drug houses in the south suburbs based on the jailhouse tips. “Once someone gets locked up, they’ll even give up their own mother to get out of jail.”
The job could get depressing if you took it home with you. “It’s never ending -- as soon as you lock one guy up, there’s another to replace him,” says Lt. John Blair, who works with O’Malley, pointing out a family home that drug dealers torched after a police raid.
“You can try talking to them, but if a kid has more money in his pocket than I do, he’s not going to listen to me if I tell him he should go get a job at McDonald’s.”
Like most cops, Blair says he sees too much misery during the day to watch cop shows at night, though he grew up watching “CHiPs.”
“Those guys fell into all the good stuff,” he says with a sigh.
Copyright 2009 Chicago Sun-Times