In the end, former Chicago lawman and federal prison inmate Steven Mandell died in a more civilized way than he had hoped for his victim.
Mandell, who was convicted of plotting the 2012 kidnapping and torture of a west suburban businessman in a chamber of horrors, died Saturday in a federal prison hospital, the NBC Chicago investigative team has learned.
“We can confirm Steven Mandell passed away on Sept. 13, 2025, at the Federal Medical Center (FMC) Butner in Butner, North Carolina,” said U.S. Bureau of Prisons spokesperson Donald Murphy.
Inmates who die in a BOP medical facility are typically being treated for a serious illness. Prior to Mandell’s admission at the Butner prison hospital, he was serving time at America’s Supermax prison in Colorado, the highest security institution in the U.S.
Mandell was a Chicago police officer for a decade until 1983, but then his life turned from enforcing the law to breaking it. He was on death row in Illinois for 10 years and the next up for execution, when then-Gov. George Ryan emptied the state’s condemned unit. In that case, Mandell was convicted of the drug-related 1990 slaying of a trucking firm owner. However, the case that landed Mandell on death row was later overturned on questions of evidence admissibility — and not because he was innocent, prosecutors said.
Mandell was released, but freedom didn’t last long.
A fresh case that would later send Mandell back behind bars, and in federal prison, was a bizarre extortion/kidnap/murder plot.
Mandell was convicted of working to kidnap a suburban businessman, extort his money and property, and then kill him in a torture chamber dubbed “Club Med.”
The makeshift torture cell was stocked with tools to exact pain, and Mandell and his co-defendant were going to dress as police officers to pull off the caper that federal prosecutors called a “truly barbaric crime” that was “exceptionally sadistic and depraved.”
They said he was an “evil psychopath” who achieved sexual gratification from planning the kidnap torture murder during which investigators said Mandell planned to cut up the victim with a meat cleaver and buzz saw, then watch his blood empty down a sink drain.
Mandell maintained it was also bluster, that he was just a big talker out to make money and that suggestions he would actually torture and kill the businessman were “absurd,” according to one of his attorneys.
But a federal jury didn’t buy his story, and in 2014 Mandell was sentenced to life in prison. His incarceration at the nation’s most secure prison — the Supermax in Florence, Colorado, where the world’s top drug kingpins, terrorists and mobsters are housed on 23-hour-a-day lockdown — was a signal that authorities considered the ex-CPD officer a threat that needed to be contained.
Bureau of Prisons officials would not reveal Mandell’s cause of death. The attorney who handled many of his criminal cases did not respond to questions from NBC Chicago.