A slice of chocolate mousse cake was tucked into a suburban freezer four years ago.
Steve Fanady bought the same cake for his daughter every year at Papagalino Bakery in Niles.
When she turned 11 in 2022, though, her father wasn’t there to share it with her. He was locked up in the Cook County Jail.
Hoping he’d be home soon, the girl saved him a piece, expecting her dad would eat it when he got out, according to Fanady’s lawyer,.
He never did. Four years later, Fanady, now 61, remains behind bars.
Unlike most of the people being held in the Cook County Jail, he’s not accused of any crime. Instead, he’s been locked up since June 28, 2022, as the result of a civil contempt finding that stems from a bitter divorce fight and a multimillion-dollar judgment he says he doesn’t have the money to pay.
The extraordinary case has made Fanady one of the longest-held civil contempt detainees in recent Cook County history. And he’s not the only one jailed in such circumstances. A recent Chicago Sun-Times investigation found that more than 2,500 people — overwhelmingly men — have been jailed in Cook County during the past decade for indirect civil contempt tied to unpaid spousal and child-support obligations.
Most are released after a week or so. But some spend months in jail. A few are held for years.
And then there’s Fanady. His confinement began when Cook County Circuit Judge Michael Forti ordered him jailed, finding that he failed to comply with court orders that required him to turn over valuable stock shares awarded to his first wife during their divorce.
Fanady and his lawyer, Laura Grochocki, say that’s left him stuck in a modern-day “debtors’ prison.”
“This is a very dangerous system that goes against every due process and constitutional principle that I know,” Grochocki says.
Fanady’s legal troubles and long jail stay stem from his divorce from Pamela Harnack. She filed for divorce in 2008. The couple had no children.
At the time, Fanady was a wealthy Chicago Board of Options Exchange trader whose fortune was tied to farm commodities and financial markets.
In 2011, a judge pegged his net worth at roughly $7.3 million and awarded Harnack 120,000 shares of CBOE stock along with the couple’s Northfield home, which she recently sold for about $1.5 million.
Years passed. The shares were never transferred.
As the stock soared in value, so did the amount Fanady was ordered to pay.
Fanady has testified that many of his expenses were paid by his Belize-based trust, but he says he had no control over its assets. He argued that the disputed shares had long since been sold and that any proceeds had been spent on living expenses, legal fees and other costs.
A judge didn’t buy that, ruling in 2020 that Fanady still owed the shares or their value — which was then estimated at more than $10 million.
Fanady maintained he had neither.
His ex-wife’s lawyers argued that he was deliberately defying the judge’s orders.
The judge agreed.
So Fanady went to jail.
He challenged his indefinite detention. But the Illinois Appeals Court upheld it, saying that his continued jailing is “coercive,” which is allowed under the law, rather than “punitive,” which is not.
Fanady says the life he once knew feels like it belongs to someone else. His trading career is over. His elderly parents died while he was in jail. His daughter from a second marriage has grown from a child into a teenager.
In an interview from jail via Zoom, Fanady goes from tears to laughter to anger as he talks about his years behind bars.
His parents, he says, came to Chicago from Turkey as persecuted Christians, believing America offered opportunity and justice.
After sitting in the Cook County Jail for four years over a civil court dispute, Fanady says any such faith he had has vanished.
“I think the promise of America is broken,” he says. “At least the way I see it.”
Before jail, he says his life revolved around his daughter. He shared custody of her with his second wife, from whom he’s also divorced.
He says he’d wake up in his Northbrook home, make a smoothie and coffee and get her ready for school.
“I’d give her a hug and a kiss, get a hug and a kiss, get that smile and ‘Daddy, I love you,’ ” Fanady says. His voice cracks. “And I would respond, ‘I love you to infinity.’ “
He says he used to make his daughter breakfast, help with her homework and cook dinner.
“I’m a pretty good cook,” Fanady says. “Salmon, steak, chicken, pasta.”
He says he also cared for his elderly parents.
Fanady’s second wife, Gina Fanady, disputes that self-portrayal of devoted dad and victim of circumstance.
“He was very mean during the marriage, during the divorce and after the divorce,” she says.
She says he used their daughter as leverage during their divorce proceedings, which he denies. And she says his actions forced repeated intervention by the courts and law enforcement.
Fanady’s first wife, Harnack, couldn’t be reached for comment. She’s now being sued by her former lawyer, who is seeking more than half a million dollars in attorney’s fees for his work on her divorce case.
These days, Fanady’s world is a room at Cermak Hospital on the Cook County Jail grounds near 26th Street and California Avenue. As a civil detainee, he’s isolated from people charged with crimes. He’s in the hospital unit because he’s had medical problems, in part due to complications from a double hip replacement.
He says he wakes up surrounded by detainees struggling with mental illness and addiction and that his nights are punctuated by shouting, banging and cries from neighboring cells.
“I’m in a room all by myself, and right below me, the floor is all the ‘psychs,’ ” he says. “You can hear the wailing, the pounding. It’s disconcerting.”
He says some guards have become friends with him despite his pending federal lawsuits against the Cook County sheriff’s office over jail conditions and an accusation that he was assaulted by correctional officers.
Sometimes, they ask about his old life, when he was an options trader.
“I tell them there are just a few rules to understand: bulls, bears and pigs,” Fanady says. “Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered.”
To pass time, he says he reads history books, debates politics with correctional officers and revisits old memories.
Allowed only three paperback books at a time. he says he’s rereading Edward Gibbon’s sprawling history of the Roman empire.
Meals, he says, are forgettable: “I’ve had enough peanut butter to last me a lifetime.”
Shaving is another challenge. Every few weeks, he says, detainees are allowed to use a shared electric clipper.
“I don’t have a mirror, so I do it by feel,” he says.
Fanady calls his continued detention cruel and unnecessary.
He points to Illinois’ sweeping criminal justice reforms, signed into law by Gov. JB Pritzker in 2021, which eliminated cash bail and expanded the use of home detention for many criminal defendants awaiting trial.
His lawyer says she’s trying to negotiate a deal that would let him work at home while on electronic monitoring so he could make payments toward his massive divorce judgment.
Until then, he says he dreams about the day he’ll go free.
“I’m going to get out of here,” Fanady says, then takes a beat.
“I have one desire when I get out of here, other than my daughter and my life — that this should never happen to anyone else ever again,” he says. “Not like this. This is wrong.”