Disgraced & once imprisoned Chicago Police deputy police superintendent and chief of detectives William Hanhardt dead at 88 - The mobbed up police boss ran a jewelry theft ring for the Chicago Mafia

But overall he was still a great cop & boss to work for.....

William Hanhardt, a former high-ranking Chicago Police official who spent time in prison for running a mob-connected jewel-theft ring, has died at age 88, his family confirmed today.

Hanhardt, a former deputy police superintendent and chief of detectives, died at Highland Park Hospital around 3 a.m. from complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, according to his family.

He had been living in Deerfield and previously lived in the Far Northwest Side’s Edison Park neighborhood, where the funeral is tentatively scheduled for Tuesday.

Hanhardt has been described as one of the most crooked cops in Chicago history, with federal prosecutors saying he ran a mob-tied, highly sophisticated theft ring that stole tens of millions of dollars worth of jewelry from salesmen across the country. He worked for the Chicago Police for 33 years, and is the highest-ranking former Chicago Police officer ever to be convicted of a crime.

Federal prosecutors have said Hanhardt was long one of the Outfit’s men at the Chicago Police Department.

In the 1960s, Hanhardt allegedly took $1,000 in bribes a month and a new car every two years from Outfit boss Angelo Volpe, according to testimony in the historic Family Secrets mob case.

“His greed and loyalty was to the mob and to his mob-associated jewelry theft crew, which were more important to him than his family, the Chicago Police Department or the citizens that he was sworn to protect,” then Assistant U.S. Attorney John Scully said at Hanhardt’s sentencing hearing in May 2002. After an appeal, Hanhardt would be sentenced to 12 years behind bars and was released from prison in 2011.

In an unusual twist, given his mob ties, Hanhardt played a mob killer in a brief appearance in Michael Mann’s 1980s television show “Crime Story.”

On Friday, Hanhardt’s family said there was another side to him, with one of his seven children describing him as living “his whole life just helping other people … heaven gained an angel this morning.”