By Jason Meisner
February 19, 2014
There were squads of FBI agents watching Steven Mandell around the clock in the days before he allegedly intended to kidnap and murder a suburban businessman.
Working in eight-hour shifts, surveillance teams staked out Mandell’s home in Buffalo Grove and a realty office on the Northwest Side where the kidnapping was supposed to take place.
They also kept a watch on the storefront dubbed “Club Med,” where prosecutors say Mandell and an accomplice were going to torture Riverside businessman Steve Campbell, extort him of his cash and real estate, murder him and then dismember the body.
The enormous resources that were brought to bear indicate how dangerous investigators considered Mandell – and how determined the feds were to not let him slip through their hands. A decade earlier, Mandell had been freed from death row and sued the FBI for framing him in the 1990 murder of a truck driver. A jury had returned a landmark, $6.5 million judgment in his favor, but that decision was later overturned by a judge.
In a scene seemingly straight out of a Tom Clancy novel, FBI agents spied on Mandell from a Cessna plane circling high above Chicago, shooting video of his movements through powerful infrared cameras.
Jurors in Mandell’s trial today watched a 30-minute clip of footage from the plane as it followed Mandell from Buffalo Grove to a mall parking lot in Arlington Heights on Oct. 24, 2012, the day before the alleged kidnapping.
With agents calling out instructions from the ground, the Cessna circled undetected as it shot high-definition, black-and-white footage of Mandell pulling his Lexus beside another vehicle parked in a Trader Joe’s lot, getting out and appearing to crouch down behind the other vehicle.