After that I buckled down at my computer, researching court cases, trying to find Veronica Fassler. It’s a needle–in–a–haystack job: there’s no index of cases by defendant. I tried to guess the year she’d been convicted, since she said she’d been at Coolis longer than Nicola Aguinaldo, and finally, with some luck, found her case, dating back four years. Fassler had been caught with five grams of crack on the corner of Winona and Broadway, and justice had followed its inexorable course of three to five years. A year for every gram. It seems odd that the U.S. is so reluctant to go metric, except in measuring the minute amount of crack it takes to send someone to prison.

I also did a search for information on Coolis. I had ignored stories when it was under construction, since I wasn’t with the public defender any longer. I started with Carnifice gets contract for new facility. The Corrections Courier said it was a novel idea, combining jail and prison in northwest Illinois, typical of the innovative approach to vertical integration that is Carnifice Security’s hallmark. Because of overcrowding in Cook and Du Page County jails, women arrested and unable to post bond would be housed in a special wing of Coolis. That way they could just move down the hall to the prison once they were convicted—since being in jail for a year or more while awaiting trial greatly increased your chance of conviction. If you couldn’t afford bond you must be guilty, I guess.

Because you go from jail to trial, jails are supposed to be close to the courts—a condition obviously not being met at Coolis. An article in the Herald–Star described how House Speaker Poilevy overcame that little obstacle. The year Coolis opened, he held a special legislative session on crime. Fifteen of sixteen bills zipped through the state legislature that session. One designated a particular courtroom to be part of Cook County on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, part of Du Page on Thursdays, and split between Lake and McHenry on Fridays. A couple of public defenders from each county could carpool with the State’s Attorney, spend a few nights in Coolis, and save the state the cost of busing large numbers of women from the jail to their local county court.

I could see why Baladine was so tight with Poilevy—the House Speaker worked Springfield as if it were legerdemain, not legislation he was engineering. What I couldn’t figure out was where Teddy Trant and Global Entertainment came into the picture. The financial papers didn’t shed any light on the problem.

The only story the Wall Street Journal ran had questioned whether Carnifice was making the right kind of investment in a women’s multipurpose correctional facility. The REIT Bulletin, in contrast, praised the move highly and gave the project a triple–A rating for investors.