Biggest street-gang trial in recent Chicago history begins

Six purported leaders of Chicago's powerful Hobos street gangs went on trial in a case that could provide a rare look inside the kind of criminal activity fuelling gun violence in the nation's third-largest city.
A prosecutor displayed photos of killing scenes and held up assault rifles during opening statements yesterday, telling jurors the defendants murdered, maimed and tortured their way into controlling lucrative drug markets on Chicago's South Side. The trial is the biggest of its kind in recent city history and could take up to three months.
The six men charged with racketeering conspiracy were not "a group of misguided youth" but "an all-star team of the worst of the worst" who "terrorised the city," federal prosecutor Patrick Otlewski said.

He told jurors, "You will look into the eyes of murderers ... Every day."
The prosecutor began with a chilling account of how another defendant, purported Hobos hit man Paris Poe, allegedly killed government witness Keith Daniels in 2013, shooting him around 25 times at close range while his horrified stepchildren, a 4-year-old girl and 6-year-old boy, screamed in the back seat of a car.
The family had just pulled into a parking lot after returning from Sunday dinner at a grandparent's house, the kids still playing with toys in the back seat, when Poe emerged from behind shrubbery, Otlewski said.

Badly injured, Daniels stumbled out of the car. Poe walked up, stood over him and kept firing, Otlewski said.

As he described the slaying, the prosecutor walked toward Poe sitting behind a defence table, raising his voice.
"Who would do such a thing?" he asked and then pointed at Poe. "That man is in this courtroom ... In that blue shirt a cold-blooded murderer."
An attorney for alleged Hobos boss Gregory Chester told jurors the circumstances of the defendants' lives were relevant, saying his client struggled against all odds to survive in what he called the "caldron where these men grew up without opportunities."

"This case is about that place," Beau Brindley said.
Chester, he added, had occasionally sold drugs to acquaintances. But he told jurors that police fabricated evidence about Chester being a Hobos leader.
"At the centre of this case is police lies," Brindley said. Molly Armour, lawyer for defendant Arnold Council, echoed that, saying government witnesses had an incentive to lie in hopes of drastically reducing sentences for their crimes.
Poe, Chester and four other co-defendants have all pleaded not guilty. If convicted, they each face up to life in prison.
The onus is on government attorneys in a racketeering case to demonstrate a pattern of criminal behaviour by the defendants within a carefully organised structure.