Joseph Pecora, a former Chicago police officer who served federal time in 2006 for taking 50 pounds of pot from a drug supplier, has been sentenced to probation after DNA evidence allegedly tied him to a $350,000 burglary on the city’s Northwest Side.
Shortly before 8 a.m. on May 6, 2023, someone entered a 79-year-old woman’s home in the 5700 block of West School by breaking a basement window while she was away. The burglar stole about $350,000 in cash from a safe and slipped out, according to Chicago police records. But investigators also found blood on a basement curtain and sent it for DNA testing.
Prosecutors said the sample matched Pecora.
Pecora pleaded guilty to residential burglary last week and received a two-year probation sentence from Judge Peggy Chiampas, according to court records. He had been on electronic monitoring since his arrest in February 2024.
He was in his fifth year with the Chicago Police Department in 2005 when he became entangled in a federal drug investigation on the Near North Side. Federal authorities said he took about 50 pounds of marijuana worth roughly $150,000 from a supplier with the intention of selling it and paying later. What Pecora did not know was that the supplier’s supplier was working with the Drug Enforcement Administration.
When the informant confronted him about the unpaid $150,000, Pecora claimed the marijuana had been seized by law enforcement and that he narrowly avoided arrest, according to the federal complaint. He later suggested he could provide a false police report to help the informant explain the loss, the complaint stated.
Pecora, who resigned from the police department shortly before heading to prison, has apparently continued his service to the city post-conviction. Municipal payroll records list him as a $51.41-per-hour “asphalt laborer” for the Chicago Department of Transportation.
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