Gay-Hating Rapist Wants to Help Drew Peterson Beat Murder-For-Hire Case, According to Prison Letters

A rapist who sodomized a gay man with a broomstick has been corresponding with a Chicago lawyer in hopes of helping wife-killer Drew Peterson beat a murder-for-hire case, according to letters obtained by Patch.

Two letters from prisoner Adrian Gabriel to attorney Joel Brodsky detail how another inmate worked with the FBI to entrap Peterson, who has been locked up in Downstate Menard Correctional Center since February 2013. Peterson, 61, was charged two weeks ago with trying to put a hit on Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow.

But Gabriel, 27, claimed Peterson was merely “taken advantage of because of his kindness” by another prisoner who set him up for the feds, according to his letters to Brodsky.

Brodsky’s pen pal was sent to prison for a 2002 “horrifying anti-homosexual hate crime,” according to a story in the Northwest Indiana Times. At the age of 15, Gabriel and three others held a gay man and a gay teen at gunpoint and forced them to perform a variety of sexual acts, the story said.

According to a story in the Chicago Tribune, Gabriel and his accomplices also made the man perform sex acts on them. The man was then sodomized with a broomstick.

Brodsky failed to return calls for comment on his relationship with Gabriel.

In one letter to Brodsky, Gabriel said his cellmate, a man named Antonio Smith, spoke to him about Peterson while the two were sharing an emotional moment at Pontiac Correctional Center in August 2014.

Smith developed a close friendship with Peterson about six months earlier while they were both at Menard, the letter said.

“Mr. Smith stated that it all began when someone began mistreating Mr. Peterson and he stood up to defend him,” the letter said. ‘Smith said after that they became ‘really good friends.’ Mr. Peterson would confide in Smith, he would help Smith whenever he needed something (because Mr. Smith had no family support). In fact, Mr. Peterson would purchase items from the inmate commissary and then give them to Mr. Smith so that Smith would prepare the meal for the both of them to eat.”

Peterson trusted Smith so much that he even let him know how he disposed of the body of his missing fourth wife, Stacy Peterson, who vanished in October 2007, telling him, “I dumped her in Lake Michigan,” the letter said.

Smith repaid this trust and generosity by helping the FBI to charge Peterson with trying to arrange Glasgow’s murder.

“The evidence that will come out against Mr. Peterson will mainly be recorded conversations obtained by recording devices provided by the FBI,” Gabriel said in a letter.

There are two Antonio Smiths doing time in state prison and a third is on probation. Department of Corrections spokeswoman Nicole Wilson did not immediately respond when asked if any of the three had shared a cell with Gabriel.

In his letters, Gabriel claimed he tried to alert Peterson attorney Steve Greenberg to the federal investigation. Greenberg ignored his letters, Gabriel said. When he finally got through to Greenberg’s cell phone, the lawyer only spoke to him for a few minutes before blowing him off,” the letter said.

“Do not be an idiot like Mr. Steven A. Greenberg,” Gabriel warned Brodsky. “He could have prevented this whole thing from happening.”

Greenberg, who still represents Peterson, failed to return calls for comment. One of Peterson’s former attorneys, Joseph “Shark” Lopez, said if Greenberg did in fact know of the investigation, he should have at least told Peterson.

“I would have told everybody,” Lopez said, calling the letters “very explosive.”

Lopez also said he was willing to defend Peterson against the murder-for-hire charges.

“If Drew wants me back on, I’d be more than happy to come back on,” he said. “I love a jailhouse snitch case. You can really beat up the witnesses.”

Brodsky was Peterson’s lead attorney when he was found guilty of murdering his third wife, Kathleen Savio. After the 2012 trial, Greenberg blamed Brodsky for losing the case, calling him a “stumbling,” “dithering” liar.

Peterson’s slain third wife turned up drowned in a dry bathtub in March 2004. Savio, 40, and Peterson, a Bolingbrook police sergeant, were in the midst of a contentious divorce when she mysteriously happened to die, but investigators from the Illinois State Police found nothing suspicious about the matter and quickly decided she was merely the unlucky victim of a freak bathtub accident.

Savio’s death was quickly forgotten but leapt into the national consciousness when Stacy Peterson vanished. The state police named Drew Peterson a suspect in Stacy’s “potential homicide” but never got around to charging him with harming her.

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Adrian Gabriel Letter (Dated 2-16-2015)

Adrian Gabriel Letter (Dated 1-16-2015)