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Tuite’s a prominent Chicago defense attorney. Double Deal was written by the late Michael Corbitt, a mobbed-up cop, and San Giancana, godson of the late Chicago don. According to the book, the 77-year-old mob boss Joe Aiuppa, sick and facing federal charges, sent Corbitt to Salt Lake City to pick up a couple duffel bags stuffed with a million dollars, and with that money Aiuppa hired Tuite to get him off. “All the guys were sort of semijubilant,” Corbitt wrote. “Everybody figured Tuite had it all handled. To Aiuppa and his codefendants, it was like it was a done deal, like they were all going to be acquitted. So you can imagine their reaction when they were all found guilty…. I’ve never understood why Pat Tuite didn’t get whacked.”
Tuite sued, arguing that no one had paid him a million dollars, that he’d done nothing criminal to get Aiuppa off, and that he hadn’t even represented Aiuppa. The trial judge and then a split appellate court ruled against him — on the grounds that an innocent construction of the book’s language would have it as no more than a tribute to Tuite’s legal skills. Tuite asked the court not merely to overturn these lower-court opinions but to abandon the innocent construction rule itself as an “anachronism” that had been rejected by almost all other states. The Reader, the Sun-Times, the Tribune, and other media outlets joined in a friend-of-the-court brief advising the supreme court that to dump the rule would be “profoundly ill-advised.”
In other words, to the question “Is there an innocent construction?” the judge can answer one of two ways: “yes” or “I don’t think so.” Only the jury can answer “no.”
