In Victor Hugo’s epic 19th century novel Les Miserables, Frenchman Jean Valjean is shadowed by his criminal past — hounded by police even as he tries to build a meaningful life.
Sent back to prison, he escapes, and longs to raise his adopted daughter. He finds peace only on his deathbed.
A tragic tale of injustice and the pursuit of redemption, it’s considered one of the classics.
It’s also reputed hit man Harry Aleman’s favorite book.
“Have you read it?” he asks. “I urge you to read it.”
As for the big screen, forget about the slasher films you might expect someone with a violent past to appreciate. Aleman prefers what’s on AMC — and raves about Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.”
He has a lot of time to contemplate great literature and film.
Aleman has been in prison for most of the last 27 years. He’s serving a 100- to 300-year sentence at Western Illinois Correctional Center in downstate Mount Sterling after being convicted in 1997 of shotgunning a union steward who once was married to Aleman’s cousin.
Aleman, 66, agreed to be interviewed recently — he says it was his first real talk with a reporter — and engaged in a wide-ranging discussion at the prison, about 250 miles from Chicago.
In the Sunday Sun-Times, Aleman spoke about the mob: its existence today, his claims of innocence — considered laughable by law enforcement — his refusal to become a rat and his take on fellow hoods.
Today, it’s Harry on Harry, speaking about his prison life and subjects you’d probably never expect to hear a reputed hit man discuss, including organized religion, brain atrophy, antioxidants in red wine, and art.
He also talks about his coming parole hearing and the criminal probe that emerged from his last parole attempt.
Authorities have long believed Aleman was one of the most prolific and savage hit men ever. He’s been convicted of one murder — the 1972 slaying of Teamsters Union official William Logan — but is suspected in 15 to 20 or more killings.
Strangely, he’s also been called smart, cultured and family-oriented.
“He is engaging,” acknowledges Scott Cassidy, who prosecuted Aleman in 1997. “He’s intelligent, too.”
In court, “we argued he has two sides.”
‘We’ve got principles’
Aleman’s earnest side surely will be out Dec. 7, the tentative date of his next parole hearing in this town east of downstate Quincy.
He wants out of jail, even though he doesn’t seem overly optimistic about his chances.
He was denied parole several years ago and still is steamed about it.
He not only believes the prisoner review board “rubber stamped” a denial, he thinks a book released in 2001 about the Logan case and a key witness to the murder helped sabotage his chances.
And he is outraged about what happened to a friend of the family who testified on his behalf at the 2002 parole hearing.
The man, Ronald Matrisciano, was a high-ranking official with the Illinois Department of Corrections, which oversees the prison system.
After gushing to the parole board that Aleman was “a model inmate” with an “exceptional disciplinary record,” Matrisciano was yanked out of his job and now is being investigated by a grand jury looking at whether there was misconduct in — or leading up to — the testimony.
“This guy’s a friend of my family: they should have never done that,” Aleman says. A relative or friend of Aleman had “asked him to come to the board and say anything, that I’m not a troublemaker.”
“What did he do wrong? . . . Did you break some law, or did you rub some people the wrong way?” Aleman says.
“They talk about the f—— mob; at least we’ve got principles!” Aleman says, his voice raising.
The Cook County state’s attorney’s office will be opposing parole for Aleman come December, Cassidy says.
‘I was out of the place’
Aleman doesn’t much like this prison, which is fairly modern and located just outside this town of around 2,000, down the road from a YMCA, the Irish House Hotel and a veterinary clinic with a sign asking, “Got Fleas?”
“It’s the mental torture that bothers me,” he says. “They don’t give beatings.”
He believes it’s a good place to instill lessons in younger guys, but for him, the rules and solitude — there typically are just a couple of hours of communal “yard” time each day, he says — are oppressive.
He prefers his last stay, at the state prison in Dixon. It was closer to family — since his wife, Ruth, has died, his immediate relatives consist of his four adopted children, six grandchildren and a great-granddaughter — and allowed him to pursue a longtime hobby.
“I’m an oil painter,” he says.
“There’s no art classes here or art room,” he says, adding he had an easel in his room at Dixon. “Out here you can’t do any of that,” saying he believes pencils are all that are sold along that line at the prison commissary.
“Painting is just like a guy playing an instrument; it’s something to look forward to the next day,” Aleman says. “When I was painting in Dixon, I was out of the place . . . and I made some money selling paintings.”
Some were displayed for a time at a West Side restaurant, going for $2,000 to $3,000 apiece.
Aleman still doesn’t know why he was transferred; nobody said and he didn’t ask.
But since entering the state prison system in 2000 — he came from the federal system, where he’d been held on racketeering-related offenses — he’s found even some old hobbies that he’s allowed to pursue are difficult to embrace.
Like reading.
Literary critic
He discusses Les Miserables with a mix of worship and disbelief.
“What a f—— tale,” he says. “How could a guy write something like that? . . . It’s impossible. . . . He covers the entire French Revolution!”
“You’re never going to regret reading this here book,” he adds. With a smile, he hints at some weighty drama with the character “Fantine.”
Another recommendation is The Count of Monte Cristo, a Napoleonic novel in which the protagonist is wrongly imprisoned but escapes to vanquish his enemies.
“You’re so happy after reading it,” he says. “But I couldn’t shake Les Miserables.”
He almost chides a reporter for not having read more classics.
What have you read? he asks.
Some of the Greek tragedies.
Like what?
The Illiad, The Odyssey.
“I’ve read that.”
But he says he doesn’t read too much anymore.
“I miss reading . . . how I’m situated, you can’t read, you just can’t, it’s not conducive to reading,” Aleman says.
Why?
“It’s got something to do with the two hours out and 22 in,” he says.
The setting sun
He worries about what such inactivity might do to his brain.
“Being in this place, I can see how your mind and body atrophies; it makes you stupid,” he says.
He says he’s still relatively healthy, aside from being arthritic and having high blood pressure.
But he once wrote a doctor asking what he could do to keep his brain from going stagnant.
“She said, ‘If you can’t read or write, I urge you to do something to keep your mind thinking, like crosswords,'” Aleman says.
So that’s what he does.
He doesn’t exercise much, because he finds it difficult to do so consistently. But he thinks about health, discussing the benefits of antioxidants in red wine, urging a reporter to drink a glass a day, particularly of French and Italian varieties, and wishing he was able to do the same.
And he watches television.
There’s a TV in the dayroom, shared by inmates, and he has one in his room.
He likes ESPN and AMC but says he doesn’t watch the news. On the weekends, movies are rented, but rarely are they good, he contends.
The younger population favors movies like “Halloween 2 — 400 people get killed, they like the blood all over.”
Aleman shakes his head at the gore.
He has a cellmate — a “good guy” — with whom he shares the TV and the tight quarters they call home.
Aleman has the top bunk, and the room is outfitted with family photographs, a sink, mirror, toilet and slit of a window with a view of a cornfield. He’s not sure which direction he’s facing but says he catches some of the colors of the setting sun, so maybe it’s west.
Praise the Lord?
One thing Aleman doesn’t do is attend religious services.
Raised along Taylor Street, he grew up at Holy Family Parish, going through the Catholic sacraments of first communion and confession but never becoming an altar boy.
He doesn’t have a high opinion of organized religion.
“Religion is a f—— racket,” says the admitted racketeer. “I can’t stand it; but I believe in Jesus.”
He smiles. “I got that from my mom.”
“What He did took a lot of balls, getting hung on the cross like that.”
Asked if he believes in heaven, Aleman says, “No, I only believe in what Jesus did, he was a monster — in a good way. This guy had more balls than a whole army.”
“I wish I could remain as strong as He was for the rest of my life; what they did to Him, didn’t blink an eye and didn’t cry out.”
He brings up “The Passion of the Christ,” a vivid though controversial portrayal of Jesus’ suffering and crucifixion.
Aleman relates to this.
“I’m impressed. I said to myself, ‘That’s the way to be, unwavering.’ It made me happy. . . . I feel He gave me the strength to go through what I went through, and it’s not over yet.”
Clarifying, he says the film portrayal reinforced the need to stay strong “to the very end.”
He appears to be at least partly referencing his refusal to turn into a “rat” for the government and flip on fellow hoodlums.
Aleman adds about Jesus: “He took worse than me. They’re just crucifying me mentally.”
Aleman denies ever killing anyone, despite his conviction. But he acknowledges being in the mob at one time, and long ago he pleaded guilty to racketeering. Whatever the case, he says, “I’m a f—— saint compared to what [the government] does on a daily basis. They let drugs in” the country.
Cassidy, the prosecutor, says it’s common for people doing long, hard time to view themselves as victims, “when all they’ve done is left victims behind.”
Old news?
Aleman may have been a terrifying figure while on the streets of Chicago, but he says he’s hardly noticed in prison.
He no longer gets hate — or fan — mail, like his early years in the joint. And he doesn’t get hassled by fellow inmates, either, who tend to show older guys respect.
“The younger guys, they hardly know me. I don’t have that problem at all; I’m old news,” he says.
His visitors tend to be family, he says, no mobsters.
In fact, one person on the outside is getting reacquainted with him on the inside: his godfather.
They haven’t seen each other in decades, and the godfather, now in his 80s, is planning a prison visit in coming weeks. Aleman remembers him fondly.
He remembers his childhood the same way, fondly, despite reported beatings by his father when the old man wasn’t in jail.
One youthful tragedy he shares, however, involves a long-ago pal named Mike.
A group of guys were on a boat, and one of them threw Mike’s keys into the water as a joke. Mike dived in to get them, got tangled in the weeds and drowned.
Aleman was at a family picnic, and believes if he’d been with Mike, he would have been saved, or never in the water at all.
“I didn’t like that f—— kid” who threw the keys, Aleman says. He probably wouldn’t have been there if Aleman was around that day, he says.
The dead boy’s mom took it hard, and seemed to blame Aleman for not, somehow, being there to save her son, Aleman says.
“I got to live with that,” he says, professing remorse for a death he wasn’t responsible for, while expressing no regret about anything he might have done in the mob.
Many years later, when Aleman was at Dixon, he saw Mike’s mom. She was visiting another son being held there. She finally, Aleman learned, had come to terms with the loss.
‘A short visit’
A recent visitor at Western Illinois was none other than Cassidy, the county prosecutor, Aleman says.
“Cassidy came here with a guy or two, but it was a short visit because I’ve got nothing to say,” he says. “Maybe a month ago. I don’t even know what it was about.”
“I said, ‘I’ve got nothing to say to you, Mr. Cassidy.’ I said, ‘You’re the guy who sent me away [from Dixon to here.]’ He said, ‘No, it wasn’t me.'”
“When he said that, I believed him, that he didn’t send me here,” Aleman says.
He says he respects the job law enforcement officials have.
“They’re just guys working; I’ve got no hard-on for anyone.”
Cassidy wouldn’t say why he visited Aleman.
But the trip hints at continuing government interest in Aleman, despite the likelihood — by his own estimation — that he’ll spend his remaining days in a cell.
Harry Aleman’s ‘rap sheet’
On priests and nuns:
“They’re human beings” who should be allowed to marry and be non-celibate.
On the government:
“I’m a f—— saint compared to what [the government] does on a daily basis.”
On another Harry, President Truman:
“He had balls . . . and he was a mob guy.”
On the media:
“The newspapers are the first to convict you.”
On his claims of innocence of murder:
“I’m not guilty of the murders they put on me, the newspapers put on me.”
On his health:
“Other than arthritis and high blood pressure, I’m all right.”
On his late father’s occupation:
“Not a big-time thief, just a regular thief in the neighborhood . . . trying to make a living.”
On wine:
“Drink a glass of red wine a day; red wine, especially from France or Italy. I wish I had a glass a day.”
On health care:
It’s good in the joint, both medical and dental.
On prison life:
“It’s the mental torture that bothers me. They don’t give beatings.”
On the 2001 book that details the murder that sent him away:
“He should have never written that book because all it did was keep me from getting parole.”
On a strong espresso he tasted in prison:
“I was like this all day long!” (Starts pacing rapidly.)