CHICAGO POLS BEHAVING BADLY: THUS IT IS, HAS BEEN, IS, AND EVER SHALL BE?

1/31/19

These are troubling, disturbing, interesting…and not unusual… times in Chicago politics. 

·         Alderman Ed Burke (14^th), the dean of the Chicago City Council, is facing federal charges involving the alleged shakedown of a Burger King franchisee who operates a BK in his ward.   (See my 1/3/19 post  No Doubt Ed Burke's in Trouble, and..)

·         Alderman Danny Solis (25^th) has been wearing a wire for months now, taping conversations with his fellow aldermen, including Mr. Burke, and various other denizens of the sordid politics of our town.   While Mr. Solis currently faces no specific charges, people, and especially Chicago aldermen, don’t wear wires out of a surfeit of public-spiritedness.   Further, the Chicago Sun-Times somehow got its hands on the affidavit federal prosecutors used to petition a judge for wire taps and the like.   The affidavit contained allegations of Mr. Solis’s using ward funds and funds obtained by shaking down people with city business for expenses ranging from clothes for his children to visits to massage parlors that feature “happy endings” along with drugs that facilitate achievement of such endings.   Ironically, Mr. Solis’s 25^th Ward is the former bailiwick of the late Alderman Vito Marzullo, whose alleged, but never proven, corruption looks positively quaint compared to the types of activity Mr. Solis has been cooperating in trying to prove.   But I digress.

·         While the gruel is quite thin in this story as of now, House Speaker, 13^th Ward Committeeman, and chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party Mike Madigan has been caught on tape soliciting legal business from a developer interested in building a hotel in Chinatown in Alderman Solis’s 25^th Ward.   Did Alderman Solis set up Mr. Madigan in this case?   No one is saying so, but one could be forgiven for suspecting so; though he wasn’t the guy wearing the wire in this case, Alderman Solis set up the meeting and was present for much of it.

·         Alderman Willie Cochran (20^th) is scheduled to go to trial in June on charges of shaking down real estate developers who wanted to build homes in his ward, a ward that sorely needs new housing, and stealing from charitable foundations he set up to benefit poor children in his ward.

·         Alderman Ricardo Munoz (22^nd) is facing domestic abuse charges.   And the things his wife, and accuser, is saying about him in connection with the charges will not be conducive to a fruitful political future should he escape doing time.

Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of these developments, though, is that, other than their concentration in a particular period in time, they are not the least bit unusual in the annals of Chicago politics.  Chicago aldermen, and other public servants in our great city, have for years shaken down people who need or want to get things done in their wards and beyond and have used the thin veneer of side employment as the channel for such payoffs.   In the old days, aldermen were often tavern owners so that the pay-offs, which were trivial by today’s standards, could be passed as tips over the bar.   Later, aldermen and other connected types became lawyers, insurance agents, real estate agents and the like so that pay-offs could come in the form of fees and commissions for services that could just as easily, and less expensively, have been done by virtually any lawyer or insurance agent.   While the legal and related professions are still the most popular mechanisms for legitimizing the spoils of holding office, some modern era pols have dispensed with the effort and hard work necessary to obtain a law degree or an insurance license and simply have had a close relative, friend, or associate hang out a shingle as a “facilitator.” 

These current allegations against our city’s public servants are clearly cases of life imitating art imitating life.   I wrote my first book, The Chairman, ten years ago and its sequel The Chairman’s Challenge, the following year.   The similarities of the tales told in those novels to what is going on right now are stunning.   As a side note, the near eeriness of the similarities is compounded by the books’ protagonist, Chairman Eamon DeValera Collins, deriving his title from his being the chairman of the city council’s Zoning Committee, the office that Alderman Solis held until resigning from it in the wake of these charges.   And, while the parlor games continue regarding who is who in my books, be assured that Alderman Collins is not Alderman Solis.  Alderman Collins, like Don Vito Corleone, incorporates aspects of a lot of people in his world but is none of them specifically.

Carol Marin, who has been one of Chicago’s premier political reporters for decades, said on last night’s edition of Chicago Tonight that maybe the upcoming elections will show that Chicagoans are “sick and tired” of the nefarious behavior that has so long characterized the politics of the Second City.   Maybe Ms. Marin is right; yours truly hopes she is.  But I’m beyond leery.  The first chapter of The Chairman explains why this culture of corruption and chicanery has been allowed to continue and thrive through several metamorphoses designed to adapt to a changing political and legal environment.   People were happy with corruption as long as they somehow benefitted from it and the corruption became a source of great entertainment, even hair-shirt pride, for many.   But perhaps the cost of this entertainment, which is imprecise but doubtless huge, is getting sufficiently large that the people will say “Enough.”   Even if that is indeed the case, one wonders how one could register such disgust in the upcoming election given the choices in this mayoral race, all of whom are related, to varying degrees, to the city’s power structure, the most salient feature of which is corruption.

Yes, I’m shamelessly hawking my books here, but those books are especially pertinent to the times and would be helpful, indeed essential, for those who want to understand what is going on right now.  The books also help explain why, at least on a relative basis, these latest developments might not turn out to be the big deal that some observers think.  While we can always hope, I’ve been watching the politics of our town long enough that, when reports of such felonious flagitiousness arise, my first thought is that thus it was, is, and ever shall ever be.   The people of Chicago, and much of Illinois, keep voting for those whose self-interest not only comes first but also usually collides with the interests of the people.   I don’t know why; maybe we just like to complain, or brag, about the rogue’s gallery that constitutes much of the political leadership in our city and state.  Or maybe we don’t pay attention. 

See my two books, The Chairman, A Novel of Big City Politics and The Chairman’s Challenge, A Continuing Novel of Big City Politics, for further illumination on how things work in Chicago and Illinois politics. 

THE INIMITABLE DICK QUINN: MY BROTHER AND MY BEST FRIEND

1/23/19

I lost my brother and my best friend when Dick died last Tuesday.

There is a term that, while having been around for a long time, seems to have regained prominence in the last ten years or so.    That term is “larger than life.”  While it’s been around for a long time, I am confident that it did not pre-date Dick because the coiners of that term had to have known Dick.

Dick was a talker.   Years ago, we were sitting in my sister’s backyard with, among others, my dad and my Uncle Tony.   Uncle Tony, after listening to the banter that never failed to spontaneously arise when Dick and I were together, said to my Dad “Dick (my brother was a junior), I’ve known you 55, 60 years and I think I’ve heard you say maybe five sentences.   But then you produced these two boys and neither one of them ever shuts up!   What happened?   Even my sister doesn’t talk like these two!”   Dad just shook his head in his usual bemused manner; one of us probably started talking before he could say anything.   The endless back and forth never seemed to stop, and I was clearly the junior partner.

Sometimes, maybe usually, when we describe somebody as a “talker” it is far more of an insult than a compliment, but not in the case of Dick.  Nobody minded that Dick was a talker; they just loved listening to him.   At Dick’s wake, I told a family friend, Chris McFarland (and I hope I’m not butchering the spelling of Chris’s last name), who is beyond entertaining, that at the moment Dick died, Chris became the funniest man on earth.  There was nobody who could find the humor in any situation more effectively than my brother.   Chris said that Dick and I were perhaps the best comedy team he had ever heard and that it was a shame that we never went on the road, or at least on a podcast; we would have been the greatest.   If that is true, and humility stops me from completely agreeing with Chris, I was the straight man, ironically the Dick Smothers to my brother’s Tommy Smothers.   Note that, once off stage, Tommy was the smart one, so that analogy is deeper than you might think.  Dick could opine, knowledgeably, on just about any topic, on NASCAR, pro wrestling, the condition of the economy as reflected in truck traffic, the market for vintage ‘60s muscle cars, or the utter inanity of the latest tenet of political correctness.   And, like an old boss of mine, Dick always managed to think of that one thing, or sometimes many things, that nobody else thought about.   He was way ahead of everybody.  Dick used to say “Mark and I are a lot alike, only I’m better looking and he’s smarter.”   The first is undoubtedly true, the second not at all true.

Dick didn’t just talk; he held court.   In any venue in which he found himself, be it his beloved family room, his backyard, my backyard, my sisters’ backyards, or the neighborhood taverns he and I often found ourselves in on Friday evenings when we were younger men, he was the man.   The whole crowd would listen with near rapt attention, and everybody came away smarter and happier.  Everywhere he was, Dick was the center of attention; he was larger than life.  I don’t know what we’ll do when a bunch of us get together without him; it’s going to be awfully quiet.

For the last thirty or so years, Dick and I got together nearly every Friday night.  In the old days, we frequented neighborhood joints on the south side and in the south suburbs.   As we got older and slowed down (Thank God or we wouldn’t have lasted this long!), we generally hung out in his family room.   But my history with Dick goes back every one of my nearly 62 years.  

Dick and Elvis shared a birthday (a month and a date, not a year; he wasn’t that old!).  His oldest daughter Julie was born on the same date Elvis disappeared.  Neither is surprising given Dick’s affinity for the King of Rock & Roll.  He came along eleven years before I did, before we moved to the house on Campbell Avenue in St. Walter Parish where I was born.   Given that this was before the time when every kid got his or her own room, we shared the same room from the time I was about five until he moved out when I was thirteen.   No 16-year-old wants to share a room with his five-year-old little brother, especially an increasingly annoying and precocious little brother, but the times when Dick seemed angry about his sleeping situation on Campbell were few.  Dick didn’t seem to mind sharing a room with me and I loved sharing a room with my big brother despite his then being a smoker and my dad feeling compelled to open our door every ten minutes to warn Dick not to fall asleep smoking.   We even had a TV, a “portable” Zenith black and white, in our room, so we had it made, especially with the budding new technology of UHF that brought us Channel 26 with Bob Luce wrestling, Amos ‘n’ Andy (Understand that this was a different time.), and “Red Hot and Blue” featuring Otis Rush live from Don’s Cedar Club at Milwaukee and Division  (“We don’t care if you’re white, black, or brown.   We just ask that you be a gentleman, be a lady, and be 21 and able to prove it.”) and sponsored by Dell’s Furniture Mart (“We have furniture literally hanging out the windows, so hurry on down to Dell’s.”)   We’d talk about everything, from the aforementioned pro wrestling to World War II fighter and bomber aircraft to trains to the local and national political scenes to the pomposity of some local pol who had incurred Dick’s ire.

Dick and I went to the Bear game with Dad on that cold December Sunday in 1965 when then rookie Gale Sayers scored six touchdowns.  Dick still had the program a few years ago and I took it to Anderson’s Book Store in downtown Naperville so Gale, who was autographing his book that day, could autograph it.   Gale, after admiring the perfectly preserved program, asked me if I had really been there and I told him that, yes, my brother Dick, my dad, and I had been there.   He autographed it to Dick, as I asked him.   I hope Sonia and the kids still have that program so they can hand it down to Dick’s grandchildren.   

There were two live “sporting” events that Dick liked above all others:  pro wrestling at the Amphitheater and short track stock car racing at Raceway Park in Calumet Park.   Given that Dad had a pal who was  Wrestling Commissioner of the State of Illinois, a job that, in those halcyon days of Chicago politics at its best, or worst, involved little more than collecting a pay check and getting tickets for one’s friends, Dick and I would often find ourselves ring side for the likes of Johnny Valentine, Mad Dog Vachon, Wilbur Snyder, Verne Gagne, Big Cat Ernie Ladd, Bobo Brazil, the Crusher, and, our all-time favorites, Moose Cholak and Dick the Bruiser.   We were close enough to get hit by the flying blood and sweat and to see the grapplers brawling on the ring’s apron within feet of us.   My dad was alternately bemused and amused, but Dick and I couldn’t contain our excitement as the Bruiser or the Moose took care of the latest “bum” to challenge their dominance of wrestling in Chicago that they, and we, saw as their birth rights.   

We also spent many a summer evening at Raceway Park, a “short quarter” in Calumet Park watching, as announcer Wayne L. Adams put it, “the gasoline gladiators, the champions of chance,” including the likes of Bud Koehler, Bob Pronger, Ray Young, Jerry Kemperman, Ted Janiscek, and Stash Kuhlman (Number 4U) battle it out in a program that usually included qualifying, a trophy dash, three heat races, a sub-feature, and a feature race…a lot of racing for the money.   The enjoyment of these evenings was greatly enhanced by frequent trips to, as Dick would call him, the “Meister man,” with whom Dick was on a first name basis, even though I was, er, slightly underage.  And nearly every one of those evenings, be they at the Amphitheater or at Raceway Park, ended with a visit to White Castle, as did many of those Friday evenings many years later.

Dick taught me a lot of things in life.  He taught me specific things, like how to shoot a beer decades before doing so became popular.  He taught me how to strategically fold a bill into the compartment of one’s wallet that held one’s driver’s license back in the day when such positioning could somehow ease the trauma of one’s encounter with law enforcement.  He taught me how to get from just about anywhere to just about anywhere via maybe the quickest but always the most obscure and circuitous route imaginable.  He taught me how to cook liver sausage and scrambled eggs (Hey, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.), a skill that I have lost due to the departure of my taste for eggs.   He taught me that the British Invasion was composed of a bunch of no-talents playing poorly warmed-over Buddy Holly and R&B tunes, and to think otherwise would call one’s manhood into serious question.

More importantly, Dick taught me general lessons, lessons that have proven to be useful for a lifetime.  He taught me not to be overly impressed with people’s titles.  He taught me not to trust politicians or supposed political ideologies; the former were all phonies and the latter were just manifestations of their phoniness and self-absorption.  He taught me never to jump on whatever silly bandwagon the denizens of political correctness were currently piloting.   He taught me that a man’s first obligation was to his wife and kids.   He taught me, by example, the joy of fatherhood and the elation of grandfatherhood, the first of which I have experienced with an intensity that I could never have imagined and the second of which I will hopefully experience one day.   No one loved his kids and his grandkids like my brother, except maybe his star pupil.

Many of my other passions of life, from history to politics to doo-wop to Motown to R&B to cars to pro wrestling to White Castle to simply just driving were acquired from my brother.   They will always be there, but Dick won’t be there anymore.   I won’t get the calls at 6:30 A.M., when Dick had been up for a few hours matching loads and drivers and finally found time to read the paper, informing me of the passing of a favorite wrestler or stock car driver; news of Moose Cholak’s passing was especially memorable and rough. I won’t get the calls on December 30 informing me that it was Ellas McDaniel’s birthday.  (Look it up; Dick always thought he could get me on that one but he never did.)   I won’t get the annual “Happy Broderick Crawford Day” call on the morning of October 4.   Speaking of, I won’t be spending Friday afternoons or evenings watching episodes of Highway Patrol, made before I was born, complete with a running commentary on the obvious ulterior motives of Officer Dan Matthews and the exact year and model of every car that appeared on screen.  I won’t be watching with my brother documentaries on some arcane aspect of World War II or some long forgotten plane crash, train wreck, ship sinking.  I don’t think I’ll ever be able to watch the Mecum Auto Auction again without crying.  I do think, though, that I will be able to hold up when my wife points out while we are watching The Blues Brothers, one of Dick’s favorite films, that Elwood, the young, thin Dan Aykroyd, really looks like my brother.  I won’t hear “Who do I look like?  King Farouk?” when someone suggests he buy or invest in something expensive…or maybe even not all that expensive.

Nor will I be spending Friday evenings watching The Sopranos or Boardwalk Empire over at Dick’s house, which I did because I’m too cheap to buy HBO and because there was nothing like watching those shows with my big brother.   When I hear a tune by James Brown, I won’t, other than in my mind, hear, again, about how Dick saw The Godfather of Soul live in the ‘60s at some little, and long since forgotten, bar in a strip mall on 123^rd and Pulaski.   “There he was…big as life, as close to me as you are now.   I don’t know why he was there; maybe he was hiding from the law or laying low because of the leg breakers?   How the hell am I supposed to know?  But what a show!   They don’t call him the Hardest Working Man in Show Business for nothin’!”  We won’t be cruising around in a component of Dick’s fleet of cars on a hot July night listening to the oldies.   His favorite, I think, was either “When a Man Loves a Woman” by Percy Sledge or “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted,” by Jimmy Ruffin, but during those rare instances when a Chicago station would play Dave Dudley’s “Six Days on the Road,” that really got the car rockin’.   

After a long illness, Dick is happy and at peace now.   I have nearly 62 years of memories, lessons, and laughs, and a huge portion of my material, that will stay with me forever.   All those who knew and loved this man have a substantial collection of stories by which to remember Dick and to dredge up a smile when smiles are hard to come by.  

Thanks, God, for sending us Dick Quinn.

No Doubt Ed Burke's in Trouble, and...

The federal charges announced today are bad for Ed Burke on so many fronts it's hard to keep up.  First, this a federal charge that the feds deemed so urgent, at least politically, that they had to break the unofficial rule against indicting a politician within two months of an election.   Second, politicians who for years had professed friendship or at least an ability to work with Alderman Burke now are treating him like something they'd like to scrape off the bottom of their shoes.   Third, even the symbolism is awful; the restaurant the owners of which the Alderman was allegedly trying to shake down was the Burger King featured prominently in the Laquan McDonald story.

This whole affair is also bad news for Toni Preckwinkle; if the reporting is correct, she was the politician for whom Mr. Burke was allegedly demanding a political contribution from the owners of the Burger King.   This doesn't look good for a politician in hot competition for the "progressive" vote that supposedly eschews "old style politics."   The charges against Mr. Burke also are not good for Gery Chico, who has been close to Mr. Burke for years and whom Mr. Burke supported in Mr. Chico's 2011 run for mayor against Rahm Emanuel.   But don't assume this is good news for Susana Mendoza; she, too, has been close to Ed Burke for years, to the point at which she has been described, and not without justification, as a Burke protege.

Speaking of Ms. Mendoza, the conspiracy theories started flying minutes, if not seconds, after the charges against Mr. Burke were reported.  One of those theories is that Ms. Mendoza was somehow behind this.  This is ludicrous; while one suspects that Ms. Mendoza, like every other politician around this town, would have no compunction whatsoever about biting the hand that has fed her for years if there were something in it for her, she is neither sufficiently clever nor connected to the feds to have pulled off something like this.  Perhaps as  importantly, as yours truly noted in the last paragraph, Mr. Burke's problems aren't necessarily good news for Ms. Mendoza.

Seemingly lost in all this hubbub is the admonition of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley that an indictment is not a conviction.  Mr. Burke remains an innocent man unless and until he is proven guilty.   Note that buried in the articles on l'affaire Burke is the news that the "victims" of this alleged extortion plot wound up not giving Mr. Burke's firm any legal business.   This, of course, does not exonerate Mr. Burke; Rod Blagojevich was also unsuccessful in achieving his nefarious ends, but that didn't keep him out of jail.

One of the seemingly inconsequential items to emerge from this story that caught your's truly's eye is that Mr. Burke, a long time champion of gun control, owns 23 firearms.   I suppose gun ownership isn't good for YOU, but it's fine for the likes of Alderman Burke.   But hypocrisy and politics are so intertwined that they have become virtually indistinguishable.

As always, I like to add a historical perspective to any commentary I produce on Chicago politics.   I can't help but draw an analogy between the relationship of Alderman Tom Keane to Mayor Richard J. Daley and the relationship of Alderman Burke to the mayors he served as a senior member of the council...Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel.   Both Messrs. Burke and Keane were old time pols, aldermen and committeemen with power bases in wards changing in ethnic composition in directions not favorable to their maintaining their power.  Both headed the City Council Finance Committee and both, if yours truly is not mistaken, were at one time floor leaders for their respective mayors.   Both got into legal trouble.   Both managed to outrun the feds for years.   But the feds finally caught up with Alderman Keane and he went away for several years.  Has Mr. Burke finally lost the fight against the feds as did Mr. Keane?  Time will tell. But I am also reminded of a quote of Mr. Keane, which I can only paraphrase here but I am sufficiently certain of its accuracy that I will still use quotation marks:

"Dick (Mayor Richard J. Daley) wanted power; I wanted money.   We both got what we wanted."

The quote doesn't fit Mr. Burke and the mayors he served perfectly.   For example, neither Richard II nor Rahm Emanuel shied away from cashing in on the political offices they held.  Though both waited until they were out of office or, in the case of Mr. Emanuel, was between offices, to ring the cash register, both managed to turn their political clout into big time spondulicks.   Power was their main objective, but it wasn't their sole objective, as it seemed to be with Richard I.  But even though the above quote, and what it says about the motivations behind big time political players in Chicago, or any town, doesn't fit the Burke situation perfectly, one can easily see Mr. Burke summing up his life in a way similar to the above summation Mr. Keane gave to his political career.


See my two books, The Chairman, A Novel of Big City Politics and The Chairman’s Challenge, A Continuing Novel of Big City Politics, for further illumination on how things work, or used to work, in Chicago and Illinois politics.