Illinois Political Chief at Center of ‘Sex-for-Jobs’ Furor

One of Illinois’ most powerful Democrats, Cook County Board President George W. Dunne, was at the center of a furor Friday after a private investigative group and a television station alleged that four women were hired by public agencies after they had group sex with the 75-year-old political leader.

However, it was unclear whether any laws were broken or whether the women or Dunne initiated the exchange of jobs for sex.

“If the question is, ‘Did Mr. Dunne ever make having sex with him a condition precedent to hiring?’ as far as we know, no,” said J. Terrence Brunner, executive director of the Better Government Assn., which joined with WMAQ-TV in making the allegations public.

Job Rich in Patronage

But Brunner called for Dunne, a widower since 1980, to resign his position as county board president, possibly the most patronage-rich job in Illinois. The board president controls an estimated 22,000 jobs, from janitors to hospital X-ray technicians to county secretaries.

Dunne also is chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party and boss of a political ward that includes the city’s posh north Michigan Avenue shopping district, the Rush Street nightclub district, well-to-do neighborhoods along the Lake Michigan shore and Cabrini-Green, one of the poorest black neighborhoods in the city.

“This is unacceptable, it’s corrupt and it’s wrong,” Brunner said. “Dunne sits at the pinnacle of power in Cook County, the king of a patronage system that not only permits but ultimately encourages this kind of behavior.”

Dunne, according to WMAQ-TV, admitted in an off-camera interview that he had intimate relations with the four women between 1980 and 1986. But, the station said, he denied that there was any exchange of sex for jobs. Dunne was not in his county office Friday and did not answer messages left with his personal secretary.

Helped in Uniting Party

The furor, while not the first in Dunne’s decades-long political career, comes as the political leader was successfully uniting the city’s fractured Democratic Party, long divided by philosophical and racial differences.

If he is forced to resign, it could trigger more of the unseemly political infighting that followed Mayor Harold Washington’s death last November.

According to the Better Government Assn., an established private agency that investigates alleged corruption in Chicago and Illinois public agencies, Dunne’s alleged liaisons were uncovered during an investigation of alleged union busting and sexual harassment of workers employed by the county’s forest preserve district.

As outlined by the BGA, Dunne first obtained a job for a woman who was his lover in 1980. Subsequently, that woman became involved with another woman who, after engaging in group sex with Dunne and the first woman, was offered a job with the county. Eventually, the second woman became involved with a third woman and after they engaged in group sex with Dunne, she too was offered a job, this one with a City of Chicago agency. The same thing happened when the second woman became romantically linked with the fourth woman.

Worked Weekends on His Farm

In addition to jobs, two of the women also have told the BGA and WMAQ-TV in interviews broadcast Thursday night and Friday that Dunne often paid them up to $500 for helping work weekends on his northern Illinois farm and sometimes gave them up to $200 for gas money. One woman also said that Dunne paid $2,500 in parking tickets she had accumulated and bailed her out of jail when she was arrested with open liquor in her car while driving to visit him one weekend.

Politicians, for the most part, rallied around Dunne or refused to comment. But one, City Council member Anna Langford, told a local television station: “He’s a man, he’s healthy, he’s single and I think he represents manhood. That’s the way men are.”

Although Brunner, a veteran lawyer, could not say which, if any, laws were allegedly broken, he compared the relationships as being similar to those between “a master and his slaves.”

Brunner said the disclosures show how “inherently unjust and abusive” the patronage system is and, echoing a BGA cry for more than 20 years, called for reform of the system.

“Patronage is an inherently degrading system founded on powerful human beings using others for their own political ends,” Brunner said.