Annie Sweeney

CHICAGO -- It was the bank heist version of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

A Chicago woman held up a TCF Bank over the Memorial Day weekend -- in part to repay the $20,000 she had been caught embezzling from a Chase Bank where she worked, federal authorities alleged.

CHICAGO -- As the man who bilked him and hundreds of others out of millions of dollars stood before a federal judge Monday to plead guilty, Nadeem Sharafi turned to another victim who had come to the court hearing.

Sharafi shook the man's hand forcefully, a smile spreading over his face.

But with two co-defendants still on the run and so much money gone, Amjed Mahmood's guilty plea provided limited relief for Sharafi and other victims.

"When you've lost your life savings and you see him walking around, that doesn't feel really right," said Gazi Alam, who said he lost $260,000 in a scam allegedly organized by Mahmood, who remains free on bail.

The Ponzi scheme stunned Chicago's Islamic community. Prosecutors say Mahmood, Salman Ibrahim and Mohammad Zahid preyed on Muslims by telling them their investments followed Islamic law that puts restrictions on certain investments.

CHICAGO -- Nearly 60 years after he says he was forced by police to confess to a rape he never committed, Oscar Walden Jr. stood in a federal courtroom Tuesday as curious jurors gathered around him so he could show them scars from when a police officer bent his hand back, causing excruciating pain.

"Those two scars are still there," said Walden, 79, who buttoned his olive suit before drawing jurors over to study his middle and index fingers. "That's half a century old."

In a remarkable trial playing out in the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse in Chicago, Walden recounted on Tuesday how he says he was beaten and threatened into confessing that he raped a woman on Nov. 24, 1951, on the South Side.

Walden is one of many men who have been pardoned by former Gov. George Ryan. But unlike others, his allegations go back so long ago that he is the only remaining witness to them. The seven officers who are alleged to have abused him are dead. So too is the rape victim. The police station where the abuse allegedly took place in part doesn't even exist any longer.