On the morning of April 11, 2007, David Lewis
appeared before a Vermilion County grand jury in response to a subpoena. As
a part-time police officer for the village of Belgium, Ill. (about five
miles south of Danville), Lewis was used to testifying in such proceedings.
But this time was disturbingly different: Instead of appearing as a
witness, he was the accused.
Exercising his Fifth Amendment right, Lewis declined
to answer any questions. A few hours later, his attorney notified him that
he’d been indicted on 49 felony counts. Lewis turned himself in that
afternoon.
It wasn’t until his arraignment, the next day,
that he discovered the gravity of the charges: one count of obstructing
justice, three counts of criminal sexual abuse, seven counts of criminal
sexual assault, seven counts of armed violence, 10 counts of aggravated
criminal sexual assault, and 21 counts of official misconduct. Lewis’
bond was set at $250,000, and he was placed in solitary confinement.
Seventeen of the charges were class X felonies with
special penalties, each carrying the possibility of a 60-year prison term
to be served consecutively with other terms. Calculating by the grimmest
formula, Lewis faced a potential sentence of 1,200 years behind bars.
The charges sprang from complaints made by seven
women, all of whom told authorities that Lewis had made sexual advances
toward them while wearing his police uniform. One woman said Lewis
approached her in a parking lot and showed her a picture of his penis next
to a beer bottle. Another woman said he lured her to the police station to
take a Breathalyzer test, then dropped his uniform trousers and had sex
with her on the bathroom sink. Another said Lewis pulled her over as though
making a traffic stop, then reached into her car and grabbed her crotch
while forcing his tongue into her mouth.
The details of the charges varied from victim to
victim, but the women had one thing in common: They all performed as
strippers at a Belgium tavern called the Playpen.
At trial a year later, a judge acquitted Lewis on two
counts involving a dancer called Mercedes — the woman who complained
of the traffic-stop encounter. Eventually the state dropped the remaining
counts in exchange for Lewis’s acceptance of two misdemeanor pleas.
The gaping disparity between 49 felonies worth 1,200
years in prison and two misdemeanors worth zero to 364 days in jail proves
that something about the Lewis case stinks. But what? Was Lewis — as
Mercedes says — a pervert who used his police powers to terrorize
vulnerable young women? Or was this case coldly concocted — as Lewis
insists — in retaliation for his sniffing around the Playpen for
information possibly linking the state’s attorney’s office with
gangs, prostitution, and cocaine?
When every party in a conflict is plagued by personal
demons, it’s difficult to determine who’s telling the truth
— or, in this case, a lower percentage of untruths. The one scenario
that makes certain sense casts Lewis as a bug who got caught in a much
bigger web.
The characters in this story occupy a pretty narrow
segment of the moral spectrum — gangsters, exotic dancers, strip-club
owners and patrons, power-happy part-time police, and several lawyers.
There are too few heroes and too many snakes to make this tale anything
other than a messy soap opera — complicated, convoluted, and not
entirely believable.
It’s set in Danville and a satellite village
called Belgium, where the meager population of 466 may double on Saturday
nights thanks to the village’s policy of permitting bars to stay open
until 3 a.m.
The Playpen, now closed, was one of the most popular.
Danielle Perry, who danced under the name Mercedes, remembers patrons
lining up outside the door when she first started working there in 2005,
about two years after the club opened. The queues included coal miners,
college basketball coaches, construction workers, farmers, gang members,
railroad workers, and traveling businessmen.
“You get all kinds . . . you would be
amazed,” she says. “I mean, it was a small podunk little town
out in nowhere, but everybody knew the Playpen was there.”
The club was known as far away as Chicago, where
producers with The Jerry Springer Show would occasionally call looking for “guests”
for pay-per-view episodes. The Playpen dancers got limousine rides and
overnight lodging in Chicago.
Thursdays and Saturdays were the boom nights —
Thursdays because of the weekly wet-T-shirt contest combined with dime
draft beer, Saturdays just because. As many as 15 dancers would work,
taking turns onstage doing three-song sets — scantily clad during the
first tune, disrobing during the second, and wearing nothing but stilettos
during the third. In the club’s VIP room, a customer willing to pay
$25 for a “private dance” could enjoy the girl of his choice,
grinding through an entire song just for him.
The club was owned by Scott Corrie and his uncle
Vince Corrie, who made only occasional appearances at the club, leaving his
nephew to run the club with the help of manager Tom “T.J.”
Leitzen.
Scott Corrie had his own table reserved near the
stage, encircled with velvet rope. He was frequently joined by an
assortment of powerful friends. Lewis and some dancers say they often saw
gang members at his table; another group of gang members sat at a table
near the back. Lewis kept notes of their names, nicknames and social
habits, but didn’t realize that Wille Thomas, Billy Hible, Fredell
Bryant, Zyrone Petty and Jo Jo Alvarez were “ranking” members
of the Gangster Disciples, Black P. Stones, and Renegade Vice Lords.
Frequently Corrie was joined by Clint Gray, owner of
a sandwich shop called Fat Boy Subs and, coincidentally, David Lewis’
brother. Corrie declined to be interviewed for this story, but Gray, who
calls him “a very dear friend,” confirms that Corrie’s
hard-partying ways earned him the nickname Belushi. Gray also describes
Corrie as a “weak” man, the adult incarnation of “the
little chubby kid” who made an easy target for middle-school bullies.
Gray says he hung out with Corrie to protect him from Lewis, whose bulging
biceps and cocksure attitude intimidated the club owner.
“Dave’s a very aggressive person,”
Gray says. “He used his job as a police officer like he was
controlling the Playpen, like it was his own little entity.”
Lewis has a different perspective. If he made his
presence known at the Playpen, he was just doing his job as a cop.
Lewis, 46, is an electrical engineer by trade.
Married at age 18, he and his first wife had five children, and Lewis took
pride in helping coach their various athletic teams. A weight-training
hobbyist, he acquired the nickname Gunner. He began making extra cash as a
doorman or bouncer when his oldest daughter entered college.
After his divorce, in 2000, Lewis stepped up this
avocation by becoming an auxiliary officer in the Belgium Police
Department, a seven-man part-time force where his long-time friend Dale
Ghibaudy serves as chief. In 2003, Lewis became a certified, sworn peace
officer. He says he did it not only to augment his income but also out of a
sense of civic duty. The fact that he literally knew everybody and his dog
helped him keep the job in perspective.
“I was always, in my opinion, one of the
better-liked cops, because I didn’t take a real hard-line approach. I
had reasonable common sense. I would try to defuse something before I took
someone to jail,” he says. “I’m that kind of
cop.”
His approach to the Playpen wasn’t quite so
laid-back. He developed a habit of pulling into the parking lot and running
every license plate number through his mobile data terminal, checking for
warrants. He never bothered the gangsters because they didn’t carry
product, but he would give underage patrons Breathalyzer tests. His brother
Gray says Lewis’ presence was bad for business.
“I’d say, ‘Dave, what are you
doing? You’re ruining Scott’s business. Nobody’s going to
come in and drink if there’s a cop car camped out in the parking
lot,’ ” Gray says.
Gray had a financial stake in the club’s
success:He loaned Corrie $7,000 to cover liquor taxes. A filing with the
Illinois secretary of state’s office shows that the debt was secured
by Corrie’s vending-machine operation, D-D Distributing.
Lewis worked two shifts per week, 8 p.m.-3 a.m., on
Thursdays and Saturdays, the Playpen’s busiest nights. Besides the
parking-lot patrol he would also conduct at least two
“walk-throughs” per night: Enter the club, chat with Corrie or
the manager, observe who was there, check the bathrooms for criminal
activity.
Each of these visits caused a commotion. As soon as
he walked in, girls would swarm him, rubbing his chest and grabbing his
crotch. Lewis would politely push them away.
In a recorded interview with an investigator hired by
Lewis’ attorney, former Playpen manager Leitzen said that this scene
played out every night with every cop and involved virtually every dancer
— except Mercedes.
“They would do it to a lot of cops and all the
cops would do the same thing, so I don’t know if . . . [Lewis] was,
you know, honoring the uniform or he just didn’t like it,”
Leitzen said. “I don’t know if it’s, like, policy that
you can’t touch a cop, but he didn’t seem to be letting them
enjoy themselves.”
Leitzen added that Lewis attracted more attention
than the other cops because he had previously worked at the Playpen as a
bouncer, so the dancers were more familiar with him.
How intimately and willingly familiar they were
became the crucial question of the criminal case. For example, Lewis admits
that he touched a dancer who went by the moniker Malibu Barbie by
“smacking her on the ass” one night as she exited the stage. In
her version, Lewis “reached up under my little tube dress” and
briefly touched her genitals (she wasn’t wearing panties).
Malibu has a more personal complaint about Lewis: In
2006, he married her now-22-year-old sister, Candace, who briefly worked at
the Playpen as a waitress. Candace and Lewis have a 2-year-old son,
Christian.
“He was a big flirt,” Malibu says, adding
that what he did was common “in that environment” and no
different from many customers’ actions — except that Lewis was
wearing a police uniform. Because he was on duty and wearing a gun, this
one-time occurrence resulted in three felony charges, including a class X
charge for aggravated criminal sexual assault by penetration.
All the charges against Lewis have this sameamplified tenor: The
allegation that he showed one dancer a picture of his penis is charged as
both a class 3 felony official misconduct and as a class X felony for armed
violence, because Lewis allegedly displayed the snapshot while in uniform.
Accusations that Lewis “talked about sex” and stated that he
would like to have sex with a dancer called Heaven were similarly charged
as two counts of official misconduct and two class X felonies of armed
violence.
Nancy Crowder, executive director of the Vermilion
County Rape Crisis Center, can’t recall another case being pursued so
vigorously. Normally the decision on whether to press charges hinges on the
“personal moral feelings” of the particular prosecutor assigned
to the case, Crowder says: “I think it just depends on the attorney
and how much his heart is in it.”
In this case, the charges were brought by Assistant
State’s Attorney Larry Mills, who, according to Crowder, didn’t
have a track record of aggressively pursuing sex crimes. In fact, Crowder
says, she has on more than one occasion complained to Mills’ boss,
State’s Attorney Frank Young, that Mills had failed to follow through
on promises made to victims to issue warrants for the arrest of their
attackers.
“I was happy to see that they had filed
charges, but it did surprise me,” she says. “We thought unless
the state had something, they wouldn’t have brought all those charges
against [Lewis], but I don’t know the whole deal.” She says
none of the women involved in the case sought services at her center.
Mark Christoff, Lewis’ attorney and a former
cop and former Indiana assistant state’s attorney, calls the 49
counts against Lewis “extraordinarily overcharged.” He
theorizes that Mills presented the case to the Vermilion County grand jury
to avoid the preliminary hearing process, which would have allowed the
defense to present evidence and cross-examine witnesses.
“The reason I think they took it to a grand
jury is because this evidence is so weak,” Christoff says. “The
grand jury only gets to hear what the prosecution wants them to hear, and
they clearly, with those witnesses, didn’t want anybody
cross-examining them.”
Two of the named complainants failed to appear at the
grand jury.
Illinois Times left
numerous phone messages with Young’s secretary, seeking an interview
with either Young or Mills, but received no response.
Lewis, who had 458 days in jail — about three
months of it in solitary confinement — to stew over these
allegations, scoffs that even a part-time podunk cop like himself knows
better than to expect a prosecutor to take a case with no physical
evidence, no witnesses, no precise dates or times.
“These are some bleepin’ strippers! What
are they thinking? I wear a badge; the credibility should swing my way.
Every one of these girls has a troubled background,” Lewis rails.
“It’s so bizarre, I couldn’t believe it went this far.
Being a cop, knowing the law, I could never have arrested me for
this.”
In the predawn hours of March 17, 2006, Danielle
Perry finished her shift as Mercedes and left the Playpen for home. She was
being followed by another dancer, showing her a back route to reduce her
odds of being nabbed for drunken driving.
Perry herself didn’t have any worries; she
never drank alcohol at the Playpen. In fact, she worked out a deal with
Leitzen, the manager, so that if a customer wanted to buy her a drink the
bartender would mix orange juice with cranberry juice. “It would look
like a mixed drink and they would pay for a mixed drink, so the bar would
make their money,” she says.
Being a teetotaler wasn’t the only trait that
set her apart from her co-workers. Perry, 25 and now working as a certified
nursing assistant, grew up in a religious home with a mother who owned a
flower shop and a father who owned a trucking company. Her mother died when
Perry was 16, and she found herself squabbling with her father. She left
home, got married, and had a baby, then realized that her marriage was
falling apart. She sought work at the Playpen during a difficult divorce.
The late-night schedule and easy money made it possible for her to attend
community college and take care of her young daughter during the day. She
says she never danced nude, though other dancers and customers dispute that
claim.
She rarely socialized with Playpen personnel.
“Never did I hang out with them outside the club. I didn’t
associate myself with that place,” she says.
She also didn’t flirt with Lewis as the other
girls did. Her first impression of him — “What a cocky
asshole!” — developed over time into disgust. “I thought
he was frickin’ weird,” she says.
She and Lewis have divergent accounts of the traffic
stop. Both say he flashed his lights at her near the railroad tracks on
Lyons Road and that she rolled down her window and asked,
“What’d I do, Gunner?” He says he hadn’t realized
it was Perry because she was driving an SUV loaned to her by a friend and
it had no license plates (an Indiana registration sticker was affixed
inside the back window). She says that’s “bullshit — he
knew it was me in the car.”
Lewis says that as he approached her window she
recognized him and yelled, “I don’t have time for this,”
and drove off.
Perry has a more sinister account. She says Lewis
approached her window, reached in and placed one hand behind her neck and
the other on her crotch, and began kissing her. She struggled free and sped
away, stopping in the next town to look for a cop and throw up. When she
got home, she woke her father up and told him, in tears, about the assault.
Lewis denies kissing or groping Perry. He says he
drove back to the Belgium police station and dialed Perry’s cell
phone, intending to tell her that he would arrest her for fleeing a traffic
stop if he saw her within the next 48 hours. She says she answered the
phone, heard him say, “Danielle?” and instantly hung up. When
he phoned her again — this time about an hour later, from his home
— the call went straight to her voice mail. He says the reason he
called a second time was to tell her he had calmed down and wouldn’t
arrest her.
Perry, who has never altered her account, says
Lewis’s version defies common sense. If she had truly committed a
violation, why didn’t he call another officer to stop her?
“He knew he was wrong,” she says.
“He turned around and went home, tried to call me and make it
right.”
Perry knew that her job as a stripper would dent her
credibility; she knew that the only people she could turn to for recourse
were other cops, who might even be pals with Lewis. But the next afternoon
she gathered her courage, took two friends with her for support, and filed
a formal complaint with the Vermilion County Sheriff’s Department.
Curiously, nothing came of the complaint until almost
a year later.
In December 2006, Lewis was contacted by an agent of
the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That agent and an Illinois State
Police agent met with Lewis and Chief Ghibaudy at the Belgium police
station. Lewis says the FBI agent was investigating allegations that
prosecutor Mills was trading favors at the courthouse for people who could
supply him with prostitutes or cocaine.
That allegation would be difficult to prove. Another
prosecutor interviewed for this story, who spoke on the condition of
anonymity, says there’s back-hallway curiosity about why Mills
chooses to “nolle prosequi” (or no longer pursue prosecution of) certain cases,
but no one has gathered enough examples to demonstrate a clear pattern.
Mills recently dropped a Class 1 felony firearms charge against Robert
Palmer, a gang member who had been named in a 2006 DPD safety bulletin,
when the Black P. Stones had ordered a hit on two officers (Mills had also
elected to drop a domestic battery charge against Palmer in 2006). The
other gang member listed in that bulletin was Playpen regular Fredell
Bryant, who is now in federal custody awaiting trial on narcotics charges.
Mills has never been charged with any drug-related
offenses. Aside from one DUI conviction, he has no blemishes on his record,
just an eccentric persona that has helped generate a cloud of suspicion. A
big man with a receding hairline and a 2-foot long ponytail, Mills is
rumored to essentially live at the courthouse — his car is there in
the wee hours, and his house is in such a state of disrepair that it
appears uninhabitable. Yet he is informally recognized as the first
assistant state’s attorney and respected for what Christoff calls
“his encyclopedic knowledge of Illinois compiled statutes” and
his workaholic tendencies.
No one other than Ghibaudy will confirm for the
record that the FBI has any interest in Mills. However, law-enforcement
officers from three other agencies, speaking on background, said they were
aware that a federal agency was collecting information on Mills, and at
least two dancers later told Christoff’s investigator (a retired
Danville police officer) that the same FBI agent had visited them, asking
similar questions. One dancer even produced the agent’s business
card.
A high-ranking gang member, whose identity was
verified through the legal system, spoke to Illinois
Times on the condition of anonymity and
said Mills has been known to dismiss a case in exchange for an ounce or two
of cocaine or a sexual favor. The gang member says he recently provided
this information to the FBI.
Lewis, on the other hand, says the only help he was
able to provide the FBI in December 2006 was to decode stripper names.
Hoping to be more useful, Lewis started an informal investigation, asking
dancers and bartenders whether they had seen Mills in the club, whether he
used cocaine or patronized prostitutes, and telling them he was asking
because the FBI needed to know. It was a stunningly stupid thing to do.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah — he was probably real
impressed that they even wanted to talk to him. That was not a good move on
his part,” Christoff says. “I told Dave: One of the mistakes he
made was becoming a cop at the age of 43. That’s something you do
when you’re 25, and then you learn by being in that environment that
there’s certain things you do and certain things you don’t to
cover your own ass.”
Later that same month, a young woman named Audrey
White filed a complaint against Lewis. She told authorities that she had
seen him at the Playpen and that he had stopped by her house, knocked on
her door, and taken her for a ride in his squad car and kissed her. Her
mother — alarmed that her daughter had left home in a police car
— had dialed 911.
[imag-5]
But White, who sometimes performed at Playpen’s
amateur nights, had known Lewis for years and had accepted rides from him
before. At the time she made her report, she was employed by Lewis’
brother Clint Gray. In fact, Gray had taken her to the Playpen the night
that Lewis picked her up.
Neither White nor her mother could be reached for
this story.
Records show that White’s complaint to the
sheriff’s department sparked a renewed interest in Perry’s
March 2006 complaint. Detectives reconnected with her, and she provided the
phone numbers of other dancers who, she believed, had had encounters with
Lewis. One of those was Trinity, who asked that her real name be kept
confidential. She confirmed that, yes, Lewis had shown her a picture of his
penis next to a beer bottle; she had laughed it off and walked away. She
describes him as hopelessly but harmlessly horny, a man who might ask but
knew how to take no for an answer. “I’ve known Gunner for
years; I know how he is,” she told Illinois
Times. “He’s a womanizer —
always has been, always will be.”
She doesn’t believe Perry’s allegation,
because Lewis has also stopped her several times and, she says,
“never touched me.” She would have never pursued any charges
against him if sheriff’s deputies hadn’t come knocking on her
front door. “I didn’t want any part of this crap,” she
says.
Nevertheless, in April 2007 she and six other women
were summoned before the grand jury.
In a story Lewis tells repeatedly and consistently,
he claims that on the morning he appeared before the grand jury Mills met
him in the corridor and asked what he had told the FBI. Caught off guard,
Lewis lied: “I don’t know what you’re talking about,
Larry.” The prosecutor responded, “Wrong answer!” spun on
his heel, and walked away.
The only public record supporting Lewis’s claim
was a hearing on his motion to have Mills removed from the case and
replaced with an attorney from the Office of the State’s Attorneys
Appellate Prosecutors. Judge Claudia Anderson, hesitant to set a precedent
in which defense attorneys could get staff prosecutors thrown off cases in
their own courthouse, hammered Christoff about the request, and he
explained gingerly that he had reason to believe that a federal agency was
investigating “a member of the state’s attorney’s
office.” Mills’ boss, State’s Attorney Frank Young, did
not object.
SAAP Michael Vujovich inherited the behemoth case.
Christoff prevailed on a motion to sever the seven complainants, and
Vujovich elected to try the state’s best case first: the traffic stop
involving Danielle Perry.
Even Christoff agrees that Perry made an impressive
witness. “She cried, she was emotive, she appeared to be a
good-looking, demure, sweet, quiet girl” — here he pauses
dramatically — “who dances naked on men for a living. Ya
know?”
Using Perry’s cell-phone records and her
testimony about being unable to call for help, Christoff implied that the
traffic stop never happened. Lewis chose not to take the stand in his own
defense. During deliberations, the jury sent out an obvious question:
“Why did Lewis call Perry at 3:23 a.m.?” The verdict: guilty.
After the trial, Christoff discovered that Perry
hadn’t disclosed her married name and that she hadn’t
given a straight answer about a felony conviction in another county for
deceptive practices. The conviction was the result of her sister’s
borrowing Perry’s checkbook and bouncing checks, but Christoff used
the information to move for a new trial.
That wasn’t all. The morning after Lewis was
found guilty, Christoff got a phone call from Heaven — the stripper
who was the complainant in 15 of the counts, including the
sex-on-the-bathroom-sink scene. She told Christoff that Scott Corrie and
Gray had asked the dancers to come up with complaints to get Lewis in
trouble because his presence was hurting business at the club.
Christoff took a tape recorder to Heaven’s home
and conducted a lengthy interview. The story she told varied only slightly
from her grand-jury testimony: She said she requested the Breathalyzer test
and happily had intercourse with Lewis. It was one of two sexual encounters
they had, and both were consensual, according to the dancer. “If
anything, maybe I raped him,” she said.
Corrie and other dancers have disputed Heaven’s
credibility, but Gray clearly believes that he had some personal influence
over the case, at one point meeting with State’s Attorney Young to
ask him to reduce the charges. “What happened was not the result that
I hoped for. I was hoping for him to get professional help,” Gray
says. “I thought it was absolutely horseshit and they’re trying
to crucify my brother for being a dumbshit, basically.”
Heaven has never backed off her recantation. Though
she now requests that her legal name not be published, she stuck by her
account in interviews with investigators from the sheriff’s
department, a civil attorney’s investigator, and, earlier this month,
with Illinois Times. In April, she repeated her story on the witness stand at
Lewis’ second trial, and he was found not guilty.
Vujovich acknowledges that Heaven’s change of
heart torpedoed all of the other charges.
“For her to piss backward on us like she did, I
think, just undermined our efforts to have a successful prosecution on the
remaining cases,” he says. He emphasizes that the plea bargain
prevents Lewis from seeking work in law enforcement ever again.
Freedom is about the only valuable Lewis has left.
During the 15 months he spent in jail he lost his job as an electrical
engineer, his condo, and his SUV — not to mention his deep tan, about
70 pounds of muscle, and quite nearly his sanity. He almost lost his
family. He is still mystified at the mountainous case against him and
figures that his amateurish snooping on Mills is the only logical
explanation.
“You know what happened? They thought I knew
more than I really knew, and they panicked. They really did,” he
says.
Contact Dusty Rhodes at drhodes@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Aug 7-13, 2008.
