For 25 years, stuck in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, Larry Callanan tried to clear his name.
Now that he’s been free for a year, and recently compensated more than $6 million by St. Louis County for the unjust prosecution a quarter century ago, Callanan has a new goal: He wants to clear the names of his father and grandfather.
“He was an extremely tough man,†Callanan says of his father, Tom, whose legs were blown off in a car bombing in 1973 in Spanish Lake. “My dad was absolutely fearless, but he was not a criminal. He was the opposite of how he was portrayed.â€
The elder Callanan was the business representative of the Pipefitter’s union, Local 562, following his father, Lawrence Callanan, in the job. That was a different time in St. Louis.
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Mob hits were not unusual, nor were car bombings. There were fairly regular federal indictments for corruption involving union and mob officials. But Tom Callanan had no record. In fact, Larry says of his father, he was blown up specifically because he was trying to protect his union from mob influence.
Callanan himself was accused of killing John M. Schuh at a party they both attended. Callanan believes that the prosecuting attorney at the time, Robert McCulloch, and his assistant who handled the murder case filed against Callanan, Dan Diemer, improperly used the allegations of a family mob connection to color the jury’s views of him.
But don’t take his word for it. One of the St. Louis police detectives who investigated car bombings during that violent era, said in an affidavit that the family’s ties to the mob — the “organized crime fairy tale,†as Callanan calls it — were exaggerated.
“The truth is, I never heard Mr. Callanan’s name being mentioned as being associated with organized crime, nor did I ever see his name in any intelligence file memorandum to that effect, nor was he being investigated for connections to organized crime,†wrote retired St. Louis police Sgt. Stephen Sorocko in 2016.
For Callanan, returning to life in St. Louis is a bit of a back to the future moment. He’s working as a pipefitter again, like he did as a teenager, before a wrongful conviction changed his life forever. It’s a wrongful conviction that shouldn’t have taken so long to overturn. More than 19 years ago, Diemer signed an affidavit admitting that he told a witness to withhold evidence that she might have seen a different vehicle leaving the crime scene.
“It shouldn’t have taken 25 seconds, let alone 25 years,†Callanan says. “I never gave up. It took a lot longer than I thought it would. It’s a little overwhelming being 46 years old and starting over, but the feel of St. Louis is very similar†to the place he left as a 19-year-old, he says. It’s still a city with a small-town feel, he says, and that’s one reason why it’s important for him to help people understand a different narrative about his family than the one they might have read in headlines years ago.
Callanan is free, thanks to the efforts of his attorneys Cheryl Pilate and Lindsay Runnels, and he has a nest egg, thanks to the efforts of his civil attorneys, Javad Khazaeli, Jim Wyrsch and the St. Louis University legal clinics. The settlement is a bit unusual, in that it didn’t come after a protracted court battle, but in negotiation with the county in an attempt to avoid reliving the murder case, and the botched prosecution, and costing taxpayers potentially millions of more dollars. No amount of money can replace the years Callanan lost to prison, but that bit of swift justice in contrast to his innocence case offers some solace.
Meanwhile, others who have similar claims of innocence wait for that moment when the Missouri Supreme Court finally decides they have suffered enough. Callanan met some of them in prison, often while working in the law library — men like Lamar Johnson, Kevin Strickland and Christopher Dunn who slog through the legal system.
“The system is built to protect the system,†Khazaeli says, “not the people.â€