He’s no lawyer, but Wallace “Gator” Bradley was doing his best impression of one.
Bradley, a former Gangster Disciples enforcer who now calls himself an “urban translator,” was grilling murder exoneree Mark Maxson in a deposition in August over this $345,000 question:
Is Bradley owed a cut of Maxson’s $8.75 million wrongful conviction settlement?
Bradley says he is.
Maxson disagrees. And he wasn’t a friendly witness.
“Mark, were we considered like a team?” Bradley asked.
“No,” Maxson replied.
“I wasn’t a part of a team that helped you?”
“No, not getting my freedom, no,” Maxson said. “My lawyers did.”
Bradley then pointed to a contract Maxson signed while serving a life sentence.
“What was the contract for?” Bradley asked.
“The contract was for you to be an urban translator,” Maxson answered.
Bradley pressed on: “When you signed the contract, you were really intending on paying me?”
“Yes,” Maxson said.
That exchange is now at the center of Bradley’s legal claim seeking payment for work he says he performed helping Maxson win his freedom.
Bradley says he logged 4,607 hours at $75 an hour — more than $345,000 — and has submitted about 70 pages describing the work he says he did between 2013 and 2025.
He listed dozens of City Council and Rainbow/PUSH Coalition meetings he says he attended, along with his preparation for those meetings.
He says there was outreach to the media and “community/political leadership”; a handful of meetings, emails and conversations with Maxson’s lawyers; and appearances at several events, including a 2023 Christmas party where Bradley says Maxson and Mayor Brandon Johnson also showed up.
Last month, a judge allowed the case to move forward on Bradley’s breach of contract claim, but denied two other counts — one for the value of his services outside the contract and another claiming Maxson’s attorneys violated an agreement to settle Bradley’s claims.
A trial is scheduled in December.
“It’s his obligation to prove his case — and I don’t think he can do it,” Maxson’s lawyer, Jeffery Beck, said in an interview.
It’s not the first time Bradley has sought to get paid as an “urban translator.”
Bradley, who ran unsuccessfully for Chicago alderman in the 1990s and has remained a fixture at political events, began using the urban translator title after a federal judge allowed him to sit in court in 2006 and explain legal terminology to former death row inmate Aaron Patterson during his own wrongful conviction lawsuit against the city.
Bradley later sued Patterson for payment. Court records show they eventually settled the case for $75,000.
The dispute with Maxson stems from a 2013 contract with Bradley that Maxson signed while serving a prison sentence for the fatal stabbing and sexual assault of a 6-year-old boy.
Under the deal, Bradley was hired to provide “services [such] as media, community and political liaison to assist Maxson in gaining his freedom.”
Maxson, now 65, was freed in 2016 after DNA evidence tied the boy’s killing to another man. In tossing out Maxson’s conviction, a Cook County judge said he’d seen “no greater tragedy” in his time on the bench.
Maxson sued the city for his wrongful conviction and in January 2025, the City Council voted to pay him $8.75 million for the more than 24 years he spent behind bars.
Bradley then attempted to get paid. Settlement negotiations with Maxson and his attorneys failed, leading to his current legal claims against Maxson in Cook County Circuit Court.
Maxson’s wrongful conviction saga began in 1992. He drew the attention of the Chicago police because he told a TV reporter he bought chips for Lindsey Murdock and told the first-grader to go home a day before he was found dead under debris in an abandoned garage near 107th Place and State Street.
Detectives said Maxson’s story kept changing. They accused him of beating, sexually assaulting and choking Lindsey, who also was stabbed with broken glass.
At his sentencing in 1994, Maxson told the court that detectives coerced his confession and that he was represented by incompetent public defenders. He also said the jury misunderstood the evidence.
“All of the evidence belonged to someone else,” he said at the time. “I am charged with a crime I did not commit.”
The judge, though, said Maxson, who had previously served prison time, was “malignant” and gave him a life sentence.
Then in 2015, Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez agreed to perform DNA tests on the evidence in Maxson’s case. The DNA linked convicted killer Osborne Wade to the sexual assault and stabbing. Wade’s DNA was on Lindsey’s clothes.
Wade confessed and wrote letters to the boy’s family and Maxson apologizing, prosecutors said. Wade, now 52, pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of attempted murder in Lindsey’s killing and was sentenced to 50 years in prison.