ALVAREZ NAMED CHICAGO LAWYER MAGAZINE’S PERSON OF THE YEAR

No one is more American than Anita M. Alvarez. A blend of nationalities and cultures, Alvarez succeeds by diligence and hard work. She is a self-made person who seeks justice, serves her community, values her family and works for justice for all.
Her father was a Mexican immigrant who waited tables to provide for his family. He died during Alvarez’s childhood. Her mother was a first-generation American whose parents came from Hungary.
Reared in Pilsen, Alvarez graduated in 1982 from Loyola University Chicago and in 1986 from Chicago-Kent College of Law. Now she manages both career and family. She and her husband, Dr. James J. Gomez, have four children: James, 12; twins Alicia and Monica, 4; and Luis, 2.
Alvarez worked hard to get where she is. There was no road map, no Ivy League connection, no clout, no college-grad relatives to guide her through the “system” and tell her how to succeed.
Devine attributes Alvarez’s success to her upbringing.
“She comes from a background where she knows what it is like to struggle a little bit,” Devine said. “She brings the perspective of someone who has grown up not with a silver spoon in her mouth but from a good family and with a good education.
“There is some special value to what Anita has gone through.”
Since 1986, Alvarez has been rising within the ranks of the State’s Attorney’s Office. Beginning with handling misdemeanors in the 1st Municipal District, Alvarez went on to hold such positions as first chair of Felony Review, supervisor of the Public Integrity Unit, and deputy supervisor of the Narcotics Bureau. She has tried 55 felony jury trials.
“She is unique among all the people I have met because she embodies the intersection of a terrific work ethic and professionalism with a really down- to-earth, fundamental decency as a human being,” said Thomas P. Needham, her former trial partner, now chief of staff for Police Supt. Terry Hillard.
All those qualities showed earlier this year in the “Girl X” case, when she and William T. O’Brien prosecuted Patrick Sykes, convicted in the beating and rape of a nine-year-old girl in a public housing apartment. The young victim survived the 1997 attack but was left crippled, blind and mute.
Alvarez not only gained the girl’s trust but also learned a special system of communicating and worked with her so she could testify.
Alvarez conducted the direct examination of Girl X, cross-examined the defendant, and presented the closing argument.
This fall the Council for Disability Rights honored Alvarez, O’Brien and Girl X for “precedent-setting advocacy.” Alvarez also received an achievement award from the Hispanic Illinois State Law Enforcement Association.
Robert L. Byman of Jenner & Block, lead defense counsel in the Girl X case, said Alvarez was “incredibly competent” and “incredibly intense” throughout the trial.
“There is nothing subtle about her approach,” he said. “She seems to have two speeds: on and off. And ‘on’ is formidable.”
“She is basically a superwoman. She can do everything,” said assistant state’s attorney Judy D. Martinez.
Martinez was among those traveling to Philadelphia in October to see Alvarez take over as president of the National Hispanic Prosecutors Association, an organization Alvarez helped found in 1997.
Elizabeth Granados-Perez of Earl L. Neal & Associates, a member of the Latina Lawyer’s Committee of the Hispanic Lawyer’s Association of Illinois, views Alvarez as a role model.
“It’s important for us as Latina women to have a role model,” she said. “Even within the Hispanic attorney community, there’s plenty of male role models, but we don’t have too many female role models.”
Assistant State’s Attorney Mercedes Luque-Rosales, supervisor of preliminary hearings in Branch Court 48, 51st Street and Wentworth Avenue, joined the office shortly after Alvarez.
“She has the magic touch,” said Luque-Rosales.
And it is because of that “magic touch” in many areas of her life that Alvarez is Chicago Lawyer’s 2001 Person of the Year.
Girl X
A yellow card between two framed photos of her children rests on the counter behind Alvarez’s desk. The handmade card has a blue tissue flower on the front and a photo and note in red ink inside.
” ‘Thanks for believing in me. Your friend for life,’ ” the card reads.
The card is from Girl X; the photo is from her 8th grade graduation.
When she met Girl X, “The first thing I noticed was her smile,” Alvarez said. And now, “Despite everything that she’s been through, she still has this radiant smile.”
When Girl X was 9, she often noticed the man in her public housing complex who liked to draw cartoons with felt-tip markers and colored pencils. In 1997, that man, Patrick Sykes, a convicted sex offender, lured her into a Cabrini Green apartment, where he raped, beat and strangled her. He stepped on her neck and poured roach killer down her throat. A janitor found her unconscious in a stairwell; “Gangster Disciple” insignia were drawn on her stomach with a felt-tip marker.
She suffered massive brain damage; but her frontal lobe - the region of the mind that controls memory - escaped serious harm.
Girl X identified Sykes as her attacker.
William O’Brien had been on the case since its inception in 1997. Alvarez joined him in January 2001, replacing Joan Margaret O’Brien, who had been elected a full circuit judge. Alvarez had three months to get up to speed on the case, but the first real challenge was getting the young victim to trust her. She arrived early for their first meeting.
“We hit it off,” Alvarez said. “I started telling her about my kids.”
Alvarez, Girl X, and O’Brien became a team, communicating through the coding system developed by speech pathologists.
Since Girl X could hear, Alvarez and O’Brien could verbally ask questions.
Giving an answer was more complex.
To answer yes, Girl X leaned her head back. To answer no, she blinked her eyes.
For detailed answers, words had to be spelled out. Under the system, the alphabet was divided into three sections. Girl X was asked to nod to indicate which part of the alphabet the letter was in: beginning, middle or end.
Then the letters of that section were recited until she nodded again. The process was repeated for each word, every sentence.
“It’s intimidating for the interviewer,” O’Brien said of the coding system. “You’re carrying on a conversation, seemingly by yourself.”
It took Alvarez “a couple of weeks” to become comfortable with the system, she said. “I would run through the letters too fast, or I would skip a letter and she would laugh. I kept promising, come trial, I would go slow.”
O’Brien said as they prepared for trial, the girl would spell out more details about the attack.
“This was truly historic,” he said. “Every time we met with her there was more, and she gave us more, and it was from her spelling it out, which was just really, really chilling: What she remembered, What she went through, and then how she could express it.”
Prior to her direct of Girl X and again before giving the closing argument, Alvarez returned to Pilsen to St. Pius Catholic Church, 1919 S. Ashland Ave., finding a quiet moment while gazing at a shrine dedicated to La Virgen De Guadelupe.
She stopped at the church then - and still does, on occasion - “because it’s always open, and it’s just a nice place to sit and reflect and say a prayer.”
Girl X testified March 23, the first day of trial. Flanked by deputy sheriffs, she was wheeled into the packed courtroom through the front door after the lunch break.
Criminal Judge Joseph J. Urso stepped down from the bench to get a better view of her responses.
The girl was on the stand for about an hour and a half, most of it direct examination. Alvarez started with simple questions before diving into the details of the attack, just like questioning any other witness.
“The hardest part for me was phrasing questions the correct way in order to either let her spell or give a yes-no answer,” Alvarez said. “I had to focus on open-ended questions.”
In a pretrial ruling, Urso permitted Alvarez some leeway to ask “a higher than usual” number of leading questions, she said.
Byman’s cross was fewer than 20 minutes. He also used the coding system.
“I thought [she and O’Brien] may have gone over the top, but the jury didn’t think so, obviously,” he said. The jury found Sykes guilty of four counts of predatory criminal sexual assault, one count of kidnapping and one count of attempted murder. Urso sentenced him to 120 years in prison. An appeal is pending.
After the verdict was read, Alvarez and O’Brien kept a promise: They snuck out a side door and went to tell the girl the news before meeting with reporters.
Devine sat in the crowded courtroom during Alvarez’s direct examination of the girl and during her closing arguments.
“Anita was professional and direct, and yet her warmth as a person came out,” he said. “Her personality came across.
“She was right there in the arena and in the limelight; and just like a pro athlete, she came through with grace and composure.”
Devine promoted Alvarez on May 10, a few weeks after the trial ended. She replaced Paula M. Daleo, who moved to Devine’s executive staff.
O’Brien returned to his regular duties as chief of the Narcotics Bureau. Girl X went back to school.
When Girl X graduated from eighth grade in June, Alvarez and O’Brien were in the audience, cheering.
“This is why we do what we do,” Alvarez said, holding the yellow card open. The photo inside shows a smiling adolescent in a shiny gold cap and gown.
The old neighborhood
Named for a Czech town famous for its pilsner beer, Pilsen in the late 1960s was a community awash in scents and sounds, where the smell of dinner cooking on the stove wafted seductively from open kitchen windows.
A cultural shift was well underway. Native Americans, Germans and Irish settled the area on the Near Southwest Side in the 1860s; Poles and Czechs arrived next. By the 1960s, the descendants of the Eastern Europeans were moving out and Mexican immigrants were moving in.
“By the time I got to the fourth grade, it started to become predominantly Mexican,” Alvarez said.
Alvarez’s family mirrored the changes taking place around them.
Her maternal grandparents emigrated to Pilsen from Hungary. Her mother, Justine, grew up in Pilsen and was working as a seamstress when she met and fell in love with Alfonso Alvarez, a broad-shouldered young waiter at the Pick Congress Hotel.
Soon after they married, Justine quit her job to start a family - first Rosemary, then Daniel. After Anita was born Jan. 16, 1960, in St. Anthony Hospital, 19th Street and California Avenue, the family moved into the first-floor apartment of a three-flat near Bell Avenue and Cermak Road.
Justine Alvarez “was as American as apple pie,” Anita Alvarez said. “She was really the one who would encourage my father to speak to us in Spanish. ‘They should know it,’ she would say. She saw the benefit of it.”
Justine taught herself how to cook traditional Mexican dishes “because that’s what my father wanted.” Together, mother and daughter would trek several blocks to the nearest grocery store that stocked tortillas and other items that were hard to find in a community where kolachkies outnumbered tamales.
A self-described tomboy, Alvarez tagged along after her older brother, Daniel, to baseball games in Harrison Park.
“They didn’t want you to play; but if they were short a person, then it was like, ‘Oh, OK, we’ll let your sister play,’ ” Alvarez said. Her position: “shortstop.”
Harrison Park became a refuge from the alleys and asphalt-paved streets the kids played ball on. The swimming pool provided relief in the summer, while the field house provided free recreation in the winter - including tumbling.
“Actually, I just did a head stand the other day to prove to my son that I could still do it,” she said. “He didn’t believe me. He was in awe.”
She attended grade school and church at St. Paul’s Catholic Church, 2127 W. 22nd Place.
The children lined up for mass according to height and gender - boys on one side, girls on the other. One by one, the nuns handed out white chapel veils with blue lace trim to the restless little girls.
Among those reluctantly fastening the tiny veils on their hair with bobby pins were Alvarez and Michelle Cappetta, now a Downers Grove homemaker.
Cappetta was Michelle Sawyer from down the block when the two met in kindergarten. Cappetta said she and Alvarez were usually well-behaved once inside the ornate church. Usually.
“There were a couple of times when we went into the altar boys’ room, and we were not supposed to. But we wanted to see what was there,” Cappetta said. “All we really saw was just their robes and the things they had to wear. We were really disappointed: ‘This is it?’ ”
Outside of church, the two were rarely in trouble, she added. Rarely.
“We had a sixth grade teacher who over the summer grew a beard and kind of looked liked a werewolf, and there was a group of us that went to his house at night and started howling,” she said. “When we went to school the next day, he made a comment that he couldn’t get much sleep last night because of the group of girls who were howling outside his house.”
Growing up, Alvarez herself was sometimes targeted for teasing. Her straight, dark hair and small “chinito” eyes made her ripe for razzing in an neighborhood near Chinatown.
“When we would be walking down the street, the guys would say ‘Oh, the Oriental look must be in,’ ” Cappetta said.
It was in kindergarten that her exotic features were first brought to her attention. A girl asked her if she was Chinese. No. Japanese? No. Hawaiian? No.
“Finally she goes, ‘What are you?’ ” Alvarez said. “And I remember blurting out, ‘I am Spanish!’ Which, of course, isn’t right, either.”
Childhood games included playing “steal the bacon.”
Cappetta said one person would stand in the middle of the street and protect the bacon - a coffee can - and the other kids would line up on both sides of the street and take turns trying to “steal the bacon.”
Cappetta and Alvarez also sat on the front stoops of their houses, listening to Motown 45s on a portable turntable.
“That was a safe place where our parents could watch us, ” said Cappetta.
Alvarez said her parents were not very strict. “Well, my father was the strict one. My mom was much more lenient. And he died when I was 12,” she said.
Alvarez says she still has not gotten over the death of her father. When she was 12, her father, a diabetic, was admitted to the hospital on Halloween. He never came home.
“I remember going to school the day my mother took him to the hospital,” she said. “I said goodbye to him, and that was the last time I saw him because they wouldn’t let me see him at the hospital.”
Because her family did not have a telephone, the hospital was given the number of a neighbor to call.
“He died in the middle of the night,” she said. “My neighbor had to come to my house to tell my mother what had happened. I remember that vividly. It was 10 days before Christmas.”
The cause of death was listed as kidney failure.
Alvarez was lying in bed awake when the neighbor came knocking.
“I heard my mom crying,” she said. “I was very close to my father; and you may think this sounds weird, but when I went to bed that night, I just felt his presence, and I heard him calling me. To this day I think it really was him, and basically he was telling me goodbye.
“I’d never fallen to sleep. I was just lying there when I heard her crying. I just knew that that’s what it was.”
Alvarez said the unexpected death of her father followed by her mother’s struggle to keep the family fed and clothed have been the greatest motivating factors for her to succeed.
“It wasn’t like we were dirt poor or anything like that …… I always had some kind of part-time job,” Alvarez said.
Her mother, a diabetic like Alfonso Alvarez, died in April 2000.
High school
At Maria High School in the late 1970s, Alvarez met Patricia Mendoza, now general counsel to the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
“We were both on the straight and narrow, but she’s always been focused and beyond her years; always studying and doing very well,” Mendoza said.
Mendoza said the all-girls school had few Hispanics.
“All five of us just kind of gravitated toward each other,” Mendoza joked. But, she was serious in criticism of the school, saying that the nuns did not encourage Hispanics to succeed. Alvarez was more diplomatic, saying only that she would have liked more support from her guidance counselor in choosing a college.
“I was the first in my family to go to school,” she said. “I could have probably gotten into Northwestern or the University of Illinois if I had the proper guidance. I would have applied for scholarships.”
Mendoza and Alvarez recently attended a Maria High School reunion - but didn’t gossip.
“She’s a good egg,” Mendoza said. “That’s probably why I wouldn’t engage in gossipy gossip with Anita. She’s not going to talk about people in a bad way. She’s a straight arrow.”
Summer jobs during high school included retail sales on State Street and city jobs ranging from clerical work to helping paint a mural at Our Lady of Angels Community Center. The center of the mural was a huge bald eagle, surrounded by neighborhood images reflecting diversity.
The project fascinated Alvarez - both from an artistic and organizational standpoint, and in terms of her own self-image.
“I was the only girl who would climb the scaffolding,” she said.
When off work, Alvarez would walk around the neighborhood with her friends. Sometimes other girls would try to pick fights with her.
“If somebody wanted to pick a fight, it always seemed to be with me,” Alvarez said. “I remember one time my friend Antoinette, who was physically bigger than us, she came to my rescue. I think they thought twice after seeing her.”
To this day Alvarez wonders why those girls singled her out.
College days
When Alvarez began college at Southern Illinois University, she took a part of Pilsen with her: roommate Patricia Blasco, whom she had known since fourth grade.
Unlike the football players living above them who would blare their music at 3 a.m., “We did a lot of quiet studying,” Blasco said. “We weren’t really a wild group.”
Their own “group” included another Chicagoan living in Schneider Hall: Alvarez’s future husband, James J. Gomez of Rogers Park.
“As two young women raised Catholic - not like the wild bunch - it was nice to have a group of guys we knew who we could go out to parties with,” said Blasco, who, like Cappetta, is now a Downers Grove homemaker. “They kept us safe, in a way.”
Alvarez and Gomez did not begin dating until they ran into each other several years later, when Alvarez was in law school and Gomez in medical school. They married Jan. 21, 1989, in St. Paul’s.
Looking for a more academic atmosphere, Alvarez transferred to Loyola University Chicago after her freshman year.
“After one semester, I knew [SIU] wasn’t for me,” she said. “I shouldn’t have gone down there in the first place.”
Among her Loyola chums were Domingo F. Vargas and Jaime Contreras. The three were active in the Latin American Students Organization.
Vargas and Contreras remember Alvarez as studious and religious - but definitely not boring.
A die-hard Sox fan, Alvarez never missed opening day at Comiskey Park, said Vargas, now a solo criminal defense attorney and an alderman in Blue Island.
On weekends, Alvarez and friends danced “to new wave rock and some disco” at clubs along Rush and Division streets, said Vargas.
“Her dance escapades are legendary,” said Contreras, now the director of college counseling and testing at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Chicago. “She used to pride herself that she could dance for four or five hours straight.”
Alvarez was the only girl in their group of friends, Contreras said. She had one hairstyle - long - and during winter, the jeans-clad Alvarez would don large mittens but only “a flimsy little jacket that wouldn’t warm the rear end of an ant.”
“Unfortunately for her, almost everyone in the group developed a crush for her - except me,” Contreras said. “I had two girlfriends, so I didn’t have time. They were always asking me, ‘Do you think she’ll go out with me?’ She was the one beauty among a group of guys.”
Alvarez, Contreras and Vargas dreamed of becoming Chicago power brokers.
“We said, ‘[Anita,] you run for judge; and I’ll run for mayor. You take care of the county, and I’ll take care of the city.’ One of these days, I think the three of us will be like that,” Contreras said.
Armed with an undergraduate degree in social work, Alvarez applied to become a Chicago Police officer but was turned down because she had uncorrectable 20/40 vision in her right eye.
“Of course, my mother was happy,” Alvarez said. “She didn’t want me running around with a gun.” A boyfriend encouraged her to take the Law School Admissions Test.
“If it wasn’t for him, I probably wouldn’t have taken it,” she said. She took the test with no preparation.
“I didn’t score very well on it, but I had a good GPA from Loyola,” she added.
Alvarez applied to two schools: Loyola University Chicago School of Law and Chicago-Kent College of Law. She chose Kent because she could start sooner: It had a January entering class.
Law school
The sons and daughters of the Pilsen working class that had accompanied her to high school and college did not follow her to law school.
“Law school to me was a culture shock,” she said. “When I got to law school …… it was people from the North Shore and people who had such totally different upbringings from mine.”
Alvarez said she was one of only two Hispanics in her entering class; M. Alma Alvarado was the other. Alvarado is now an immigration attorney in Berwyn.
“She did have a very serious personality,” Alvarado said. “At first, it wasn’t very easy to make Anita laugh.”
Alvarez and Alvarado were in the same course - and the professor kept calling them by each other’s names.
Alvarez still wonders whether the professor was trying to humiliate or intimidate them.
“Alma was married and pregnant at the time. I would always sit [in the corner] and try not to get called on, and Alma would always sit up front,” Alvarez said. “It bothered me so much. How can you keep doing this on a weekly basis? There’s only two of us here.”
Alvarez took out loans to cover her tuition. For spending money, she worked data entry for an office supply company.
One hot summer night she was sitting in her criminal procedure class and wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Another first-year entered, wearing a stylish skirt and carrying a box of live lobsters.
“I hear her telling the girl next to her that she’s having this dinner party tonight,” Alvarez said.
Alvarez turned to the guy sitting next to her. They look at the fancy clothes. They look at the lobster box. They look at each other.
“Larry grew up in Canaryville. So, Larry is kind of like me,” Alvarez said. “He looks at me and I said, ‘I’m going to Wendy’s tonight on my way home from the El. What are you doing?’
“That was the kind of stuff I saw in law school, and that’s why I think it was harder to make real friends in law school as opposed to college.”
Alvarez also was a product of Catholic schools in an urban, secular law school.
“I’m getting all these Jewish holidays off, and I’m in school on Good Friday. I remember that first Good Friday being in class, thinking, ‘Oh, my God. I’m supposed to be kissing the cross right now.’ ”
With all the change in her life, Pilsen remained a constant - but the two worlds soon clashed.
Alvarez was living with her mother in an apartment on 24th Street. Her mother, who worked as a seamstress after Alvarez’s father died, had a hard time understanding why her pretty, young daughter would waste so much time typing up assignments.
“I go to sleep, you’re here. I get up, you’re still here. What’s the matter with you?” her mother once told Alvarez as she walked into the kitchen to make breakfast. “You’re supposed to marry a lawyer, not be a lawyer.”
Academically, Alvarez was in the middle of the pack at Kent with a solid B average, she says.
“I was never law review nor was I at the bottom of the class,” she said. “I never got a C in my life until I went to law school. You had to struggle to maintain a B average.”
She had talent, however. Enough talent to make two veterans of the State’s Attorney’s Office take notice. One was her second-year trial advocacy instructor, Michael Angarola, now deceased. The other was Kenneth A. Malatesta, who took the judge’s role in a mock trial at Kent. Angarola and Malatesta, then chief of the Criminal Division, both encouraged her to apply to the State’s Attorney’s Office.
“I always felt she had a special thing about her, the way she carried herself,” said Malatesta, now managing attorney with the Chicago Department of Administrative Hearings. “There was nothing boisterous or loud, but there was a dignity about her …… low key but in charge. If I could put it into words, it would be that she was not overly aggressive but she was strong. I thought that she was a good woman.”
State’s Attorney’s Office
Alvarez has had two jobs since graduating from law school in January 1986: assistant state appellate defender and assistant state’s attorney.
She began working for the Office of the State Appellate Defender parttime while in law school and briefly after law school, resigning to join the State’s Attorney’s Office in spring of 1986.
Cook County Circuit Judge Thomas V. Gainer was supervisor of the Criminal Appeals Division and her first boss.
“She was tapped early on in her career for duties far and beyond the call of a new assistant state’s attorney,” he said. “I identified her as someone I could trust. She stood out, early on.”
Alvarez was a young prosecutor on the verge of a big promotion - to Felony Review - when she became pregnant with her oldest child, James.
“I was told, ‘Don’t tell anyone you’re pregnant because if they find out you’re pregnant, they’re not going to transfer you,’ ” she said. “I didn’t tell anybody till I was showing. Finally, my partner said, ‘When are you going to tell us you’re pregnant?’ ”
She said attitudes toward child rearing have changed dramatically in the office, which now boasts a female majority.
At Felony Review and later with the Gang Crimes Unit, Alvarez developed a reputation as a no-nonsense prosecutor.
“I would give her a 99.99 out of 100,” said Judge Themis N. Karnezis. “Nobody gets a 100. She is just an excellent lawyer, and I put her through hell.”
In the early 1990s, Alvarez was often assigned to Karnezis’ courtroom at 26th Street. He is now presiding judge of the 4th Municipal District.
He added, “Anita was tough when she had to be tough and was a lady when she had to be ladylike.”
In 1996, Alvarez was named supervisor of the Public Integrity Unit. Three years later, she became deputy chief of the Narcotics Bureau under O’Brien.
One of her most difficult cases was the 1996 prosecution of Anthony Brown and four other men.
Criminal Court Judge Vincent M. Gaughan sentenced Brown to death for his part in the abduction of Reginald Wilson, a former Illinois State University basketball player, and his girlfriend, Felicia Lewis, from a South Side gas station early one January morning in 1994.

Initially, they just wanted to steal Wilson’s car “because they liked his wheels,” Alvarez said. But, when they got into the car and got a closer look at Lewis, things took a turn for the worse. Lewis was raped, sodomized, forced to perform oral sex and then tossed into a dumpster along with Wilson. As they pleaded for their lives, the men shot them multiple times at close range. When they were found the next morning, “She still had her bra in her hand. Her arms were up. The bullet went through her arm and into her head,” Alvarez said. “It was so brutal. These two young people had such a life in front of them. She was in the Army; he had just graduated and was working for the CTA. They had such potential.”

Alvarez says it is the contact with victims and family members that has kept her on 26th Street instead of LaSalle Street “Fighting for money? To me, I don’t care about the money,” she said. “Justice is more important …… Seeing that justice is served is much more important than insurance defense.” She considers herself more of a defender of victims’ rights than a prosecutor of criminals.

“It’s a pleasure to get to know those families and to know that when you are in there arguing, it’s not a ‘I want a win in my column’ kind of thing,” she said. “You are in there because you want the right thing to be done; and you want justice to be done; and you want the family to have some kind of closure to this horrible, devastating thing that they have been through.”

Many people interviewed said one of Alvarez’s greatest strengths in the courtroom is her ability to cultivate trusting relationships with victims, family members and jurors. Needham, her former trial partner, said Alvarez continues to exchange Christmas cards with victims’ family members long after the trials have ended.

Chicago Lawyer
Volume 24, Number 12