GREGG
OWEN

Gregg Owen was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on December 25, 1948. He spent part of his childhood in Gemmell, Minnesota, a small town near the Canadian border, where his mother lived in the back of his grandparents’ tavern while his father served as a United States Air Force pilot in Korea. 

At age ten, his family moved to the Chicago suburbs. By fifteen, Gregg was playing keyboards professionally while still in high school.

Music took him on the road. Law took him somewhere very different.

Gregg toured and recorded with bands including the Shady Daze, the American Breed, and Jerico while earning his law degree. In 1975, he entered the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office as a legal intern. Within a year, he became an Assistant State’s Attorney.

He went on to prosecute murder cases at 26th and California during one of the most corrupt periods in Chicago courthouse history. Before leaving the office in 1984, he had tried 64 felony jury trials — 61 of them murder cases — and later became the first Chief of Gang Prosecutions in Cook County history.

In February of 1975, I was a touring musician. Within days, I walked away from the road, interviewed with the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, and found myself standing in a Chicago courtroom as a legal intern.

A year later, I was a full Assistant State’s Attorney. Ten months after that, I was assigned to 26th and California, where almost every murder case in Chicago eventually came across a prosecutor’s desk.

By age 30, I had tried 41 murder jury trials. By the time I left the office in 1984, I had tried 64 felony jury trials — 61 of them murder cases.

In early 1981, Richard M. Daley, then Cook County State’s Attorney, appointed me to become the first Chief of Gang Prosecutions in Cook County history.

But those numbers are not the story.

The story is what it was like to try murder cases inside a courthouse culture that was later exposed by Operation Greylord as one of the largest judicial corruption investigations in American history. Before the public knew how deep it went, we were already trying serious cases in a system where evidence could disappear, witnesses could be pressured, and the wrong people could make the wrong cases go away.

One of those cases — a double murder I later prosecuted with Mike Goggin — was solved within days but took four years to reach trial.