A federal grand jury tacked on a new charge against a fugitive Chicago police sergeant who was accused of robbing drug dealers and taken into custody earlier this year after 14 years on the lam.
Eddie Hicks had been due to stand trial in June 2003 for allegedly leading a rip-off crew in the 1990s that shook down drug dealers for cash, drugs and guns using fake badges and bogus search warrants supposedly signed by a Cook County judge.
Hicks skipped town instead, leaving his co-defendants to face stiff sentences. The 68-year-old was arrested in Detroit in September. A judge in Chicago revoked the bond of the 30-year CPD veteran in 2003.
In a superseding indictment filed Tuesday, a federal grand jury charged Hicks with failure to appear before the court.
Hicks worked for the Chicago Police Department from 1970 until 2000 and was assigned to the narcotics section between 1992 and 1997, records show. The feds say they caught him and others on tape plotting rip-offs in which they would steal drugs from certain drug dealers and then sell to others. They said Hicks gleaned information about their targets from dealers with nicknames like “Sugarbear.”
Hicks’ crew would use counterfeit CPD badges and take unmarked cars from the CPD motor pool during the rip-offs, sometimes even using license plates from out-of-service CPD vehicles. They would pose as DEA Task Force officers while pulling people over, and they would forge search warrants while raiding homes, apartments and hotel rooms.
The men would bust in carrying police radios, wearing what appeared to be bulletproof vests and equipment belts from the Chicago Police Department, records show.
Afterward, they would divvy up the money at a police station at 51st and Wentworth — they called it the “gym.”
The crew’s rip-offs included the recovery of marijuana from a home in the south suburbs in the fall of 1997. The drugs had been stolen earlier from a man who paid $100,000 for their return.
The crew also allegedly restrained the occupant of an Alsip apartment in April 1999 while conducting a raid with a bogus search warrant. Alsip police approached as the crew left the apartment, but Hicks and company allegedly claimed they belonged to a DEA task force.
