CHICAGO — Mayor Brandon Johnson is proposing an historic $90 million taxpayer-funded “global settlement” to resolve almost 200 lawsuits tied to a single disgraced Chicago police sergeant in what’s shaping up to be one of the costliest scandals in the department’s history.

The first-of-its-kind deal, first uncovered by the Tribune in federal court records, would settle all outstanding wrongful conviction cases involving Sgt. Ronald Watts, according to Corporation Counsel Mary Richardson-Lowry.

The top Johnson attorney said the massive payout is “the responsible thing to do,” arguing it could save the city as much as $400 million compared to the cost of settling the cases individually or taking them to court.

“We spent a lot of years kicking cans down the road,” Richardson-Lowry said. “We cannot carry that burden further. We have to solve for these cases… We have to close that chapter.”

But it remains to be seen whether Johnson, who has struggled to get restive aldermen to go along with several relatively modest police misconduct settlements in the past few years, can convince them to sign off on the massive Watts agreement.

The mountain of Watts cases has loomed over City Hall for years, an avalanche of staggeringly costly settlements or verdicts bearing down on the cash-strapped city. The former Chicago Police Department sergeant, who for years was in charge of a tactical crew that patrolled the Ida B. Wells public housing complex on the South Side, is alleged by 180 plaintiffs in 176 pending federal court cases to have made phony drug arrests that landed many in prison.

More than 180 people had their convictions overturned in recent years, followed by a flood of certificates of innocence and lawsuits alleging Watts framed them while acting on the city’s behalf.

Johnson’s administration believes the dark facts of the cases give Chicago attorneys little chance to win in court.

“The liability issues for the city are clear,” Richardson-Lowry said in an exclusive interview. “We have two officers that were investigated by the FBI, pled guilty, served time, lost their pension. The probability of a favorable outcome here is de minimis at best.”

Lawyers for the plaintiffs declined to comment on the deal pending City Council approval.

A troubling omen of the toll ahead came last September when the city reached its first Watts settlement for $500,000, followed by a $7.5 million deal in January with Ben Baker, who was first to sue the sergeant and city in 2016.

Baker, who alleged Watts pinned bogus drug cases on him for refusing to pay him $1,000 in protection money, spent 10 years in prison before his conviction was thrown out. City attorneys have already settled nine Watts cases, Richardson-Lowry said. Those deals total more than $11 million, court records show.

The city has also paid more than $20 million since 2016 to outside law firms to defend the cases in court, bringing the total cost of the Watts scandal to at least $121 million, if the “global settlement” gets approved.

The Law Department leader called the far-reaching deal “novel” to Chicago and cities across the country. Johnson gave her the green light to work toward the settlement in his first months in office, she said.

“We both understood it to be aspirational, because it had not been done, and he said, ‘pursue it, see what we can achieve,’” she said.

Richardson-Lowry first met with now-retired U.S. Magistrate Judge Sheila Finnegan, then continued the long negotiations with U.S. Magistrate Judge Maria Valdez in at least 15 settlement conferences. Richardson-Lowry hired a risk manager and recruited attorney Victoria Benson to come back to the city to handle the cases, she added.

The price was at first “a lot more than what we agreed to in the end,” Richardson-Lowry said.

The Johnson appointee said the city would have “conservatively” paid $350 million to $500 million if it handled the Watts litigation on a case-by-case, settlement-by-settlement basis. That price tag would have likely risen in the years it would have taken to handle the cases, and could have been further inflated if a court verdict set an expensive precedent, she added.

Richardson-Lowry said the city’s payout includes attorney fees and plaintiff compensation, but she and Benson did not give specifics when asked how the money would be split. Plaintiff payouts range from $150,000 for some to $3.9 million for a man who spent nearly 10 years in custody, according to Benson.

The deal is sure to draw suspicion, if not hostility from some aldermen who routinely vote against police misconduct settlements. They argue often that the city is setting an unnecessary and costly precedent with the deals and could be giving bad actors an undeserved check, though a City Council majority approves the vast majority of proposed deals.

The City Council’s Finance Committee is expected to vote on the settlement agreement Monday. If it passes, the deal could come up for a final full City Council vote at a Sept. 25 meeting.

The cost of police-related settlements has skyrocketed this year, smashing past records to become a bona fide financial crisis. Aldermen have approved $223.2 million in such settlements since January, a sum sure to rise in the coming months that trounces the previous record of $110.6 million in 2022. Johnson and the City Council budgeted just $82.6 million for settlements and legal costs this year.

Not included in that sum is a $120 million jury verdict in another wrongful conviction case that went to trial earlier this year. City attorneys have said they plan to appeal the jury’s decision.

Richardson-Lowry cited that number when asked why the city did not try to win in court to avoid the nearly nine-figure payout Johnson now seeks. None of the Watts lawsuits ever went to trial.

“You can imagine the impact on the city if we continue to have those kinds of judgments,” she said. “The judges have spoken… The risk for the taxpayer, the risk for the city is just too high. We think this is a responsible approach. And if we’re going to gamble, we’d rather not do it with this particular set of cases.”

The deal also allows the city to stop spending money on costly outside attorneys and redirect its own overstretched staff, she said.

Records obtained by the Tribune through freedom of information requests show the city paid eight separate firms to handle various aspects of the Watts litigation over the years, with more invoices still coming.

Though the Johnson administration sold the settlement as a deal for the city, it also reflects the lasting damage that a single corrupt cop can inflict, on both the lives of the people in the communities they were supposed to serve and the taxpayers who now have to foot the bill for their misconduct.

Unlike the Jon Burge scandal, Watts was never accused of torturing suspects or fixing murder cases. Instead, he and an underling, Officer Kallat Mohammed, went to prison in 2013 for the relatively low-level crime of shaking down a drug courier who turned out to be a federal informant.

Watts and Mohammed were first arrested in 2012. Watts was sentenced to 22 months in prison. Mohammed received an 18-month term on the same charges.

In the aftermath, dozens upon dozens of residents arrested by Watts’ crew over the years accused him of framing them, with many of the convictions leading to significant prison time.

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If approved, the deal tied to alleged actions stretching from 2002 to 2011 will place the Watts cases easily among the most-expensive police scandals in the city and country’s history.

But Richardson-Lowry does not expect any more Watts cases to follow. “There is nothing else in the pipeline,” she said, citing conversations with the opposing attorneys and Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke, plus statutes of limitations.

The deal comes as Johnson and the City Council prepare to close a daunting $1.15 billion budget gap this fall. And it could very well add to that hole: If the deal is approved, the city will pay the settlement in 2026 in two installments, making it a part of next year’s budget, Richardson-Lowry said. The global settlement is not currently included in the city’s budget gap estimate. The deal is not covered by the city’s liability insurance, which applies only when a single case costs over $20 million.

Johnson has labeled the ever-higher cost of police misconduct settlements a top cause of the city’s budget woes, even recently placing it alongside Chicago’s infamous pension debt. Last November, he called the costs “astronomical,” pinning “wicked policing” as the cause while arguing the city must improve CPD’s practices.

The global settlement was quietly first described in buried court records attached to the cases detected by the Tribune last month,though the amount of the deal was not made public until Thursday.

The unique model is likely to soon be used in other cities, Richardson-Lowry said. Chicago will also look to use global settlements in other instances of widespread alleged police misconduct, she added, noting that the dozens of pending lawsuits involving disgraced CPD Det. Reynaldo Guevara.

But no other police scandal has anywhere close to as many lawsuits as what the Law Department refers to as “the Watts matters.” The suits make up two-thirds of the city’s pending wrongful conviction cases, Richardson-Lowry said.

“We will now be able to take it and start thinking about same or similar applications across other, shall we say, well known individuals,“ she said. “This is simply the largest of all them. No one else comes near the sheer number of cases.”

—Chicago Tribune reporter Joe Mahr contributed.

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