On Friday, Jan. 18th, a letter was dropped into a mailbox in Chicago’s southwest suburbs.
The envelope was addressed in childlike scrawl to Empire TV star Jussie Smollett at Cinespace Studios, a West Side production facility that the Fox program calls home. “MAGA”—the acronym for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign slogan “Make America Great Again”—was sloppily written in the return address space.
Four days later and about eleven miles away, the letter found its way to Smollett.
Something about the envelope must have raised concerns. Smollett would later tell police that he and Empire’s executive producer donned gloves before they opened it and exposed themselves to a threat letter covered in white powder. Police logged the time as 2:30 p.m.
The powder was later determined to be crushed Tylenol, according to reports. But the letter addressed to Smollett depicted a curly-haired stick figure being hanged by another stick figure with a noose.
Using individual letters and words that appear to be clipped from magazines, the sender threatened Smollett with an anti-black and anti-gay message:
“You will die black fag.”
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As Smollett reported the attack to police, a multi-agency federal investigation into the source of the threat letter was entering its seventh day.
Headed by the FBI’s Chicago Field Office, the terroristic threat investigation is being assisted by one of America’s oldest and most underestimated law enforcement agencies: The United States Postal Inspection Service.
Whoever sent the letter to Smollett may have considered the mail to be an untraceable way to deliver a message. They’d be mistaken.
“Those postal guys are the real deal,” said a North Side cop who worked with inspectors on a serial package theft case in Lincoln Park last November. “They can do amazing things and aren’t afraid of the work.”
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Two Lakeview brothers who were previously considered “persons of interest” in Smollett’s purported attack told police during interrogations last week that Smollett staged the hate crime because he was upset that the threat letter did not get enough attention, ABC7 Chicago reported Monday afternoon. Detectives are investigating their claim.
Meanwhile, the FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service has been quietly working on the origins of Smollett’s letter for nearly a month. Giving it far more “attention” than he knew.
Late Monday, CWBChicago received confirmation that the letter case has been before a federal grand jury and multiple subpoenas have been generated over the course of the investigation.
In a conversation on Feb. 8th, before police met with brothers Ola and Abel Osundairo, a leading source within the Smollett attack investigation called the hate crime a "false flag" and said “There is a direct line between (the letter) and (the purported attack)." In the same conversation, the source hinted at what was to come: "This is not a whodunit. It's a how-many-people-dunit."
Whoever mailed the letter "made an enormous mistake," we were told. Federal charges were "certain."
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A law firm partner who asked not to be identified by name spoke with us about the federal problems ahead for whoever mailed the letter: “If they have Smollett on the letter, he’ll be facing ’terroristic hoax’ charges, a felony. There may be federal obstruction charges as well.”
All in all, the federal legal options are numerous: “If they want to bury him, they can.”
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