Despite Host of Corruption Convictions, Chicago Is Proud of Its Crooks

Anton Valukas, the corruption-busting U.S. attorney here, tells the one about the devil promising endless fortune, guaranteed success and perpetual reelection to a prominent local officeholder.

“The only thing is that you must give your immortal soul for all time,” the devil adds.

“What’s the catch?” asks the politician, nonplussed.

With the stockyards gone and the steel mills shuttered, Chicago may no longer be the world’s broad-shouldered hog butcher. But the toddlin’ town that once embraced Al Capone is still a city of greased palms and big payoffs.

In the last three years alone, federal grand juries have charged nearly 250 local officials in the Chicago area with corruption, including judges, court workers, city officials and council members, state legislators, policemen and sheriff’s deputies.

The last decade has seen the indictments and convictions of half the city’s corps of electrical inspectors, half of the consumer inspectors and three-quarters of the sewer inspectors. The FBI devotes 12% of its entire national anti-corruption resources to Chicago, second only to the 13% committed to New York, which has three times the number of public workers and 2.5 times the population.

Shrug and Wink

Crime fighters say corruption here is so pervasive because many Chicagoans greet it with a shrug and a wink rather than outrage.

“There’s a perverse pride in the bravado of the crook,” Leon Despres, a former alderman, laments.

That attitude was underscored recently with the disclosure that George Dunne, the Democratic boss of Cook County, had arranged county jobs for several women after participating in group sex with them. Only days after that revelation, the grandfatherly, 75-year-old widower presided over a County Board meeting and was given a standing ovation by his fellow commissioners.

“In the city of Chicago, corruption is a spectator sport,” said University of Illinois political scientist Dick Simpson, who is a one-time City Council member. “There’s a tolerance and acceptance. What’s allowed to get by here, in another town in the United States would get a whole government tumbled and in Europe would cause a parliamentary crisis.”

Today’s politicians on the take are descended from a long, proud and brazen line of public boodlers that stretches back to the awarding of contracts to rebuild the city after the Chicago Fire of 1871.

Corruption was intensified in the 1880s, when officials took huge payoffs to award exclusive franchises to utilities and street car companies.

Through the ‘20s and early ‘30s, Prohibition brought wholesale subversion of law enforcement by bootleggers and gangsters like Capone and Bugs Moran.

And the post-war period saw an already imposing Democratic machine assume monolithic control over city government, with the help of an ever-growing and extremely grateful army of patronage workers.

That swaggering civic spirit was probably best summed up in a toast by Paddy Bauler, a crusty old Democratic ward boss and saloon keeper. On the night in 1955 when the late Richard J. Daley was first elected mayor, Bauler--a mug of beer in his hand and a top hat on his head--stood on a table at his bar and declared: “Chicago ain’t ready for reform yet.”

Damaged Goods

Not that reformers--or those claiming to be reformers--have been shut out of office, but even some with the most impeccable credentials have proved to be damaged goods. Among the ranks of the high and mighty sent to jail are two recent Illinois governors, Otto Kerner and Daniel Walker, who, coincidentally, were the authors of the watershed federal studies of civil and racial unrest in the 1960s. Kerner was involved in a race track bribery scandal and Walker in bank fraud that occurred after he left office.

Questions of ethics have been raised even about Illinois’ current chief executive, James R. Thompson, who rose to prominence as the uncompromising U.S. attorney who put Kerner behind bars and who is often mentioned as a possible Republican running mate for Vice President George Bush.

In past gubernatorial campaigns, Thompson has been accused in newspaper reports of steering millions of dollars in no-bid state contracts to his campaign contributors and of accepting special discounts, gifts and campaign funds from a Chicago art gallery. Years earlier, the owner of that gallery had pleaded guilty to federal theft charges brought by the prosecutor’s office when Thompson ran it.

Despite these recent embarrassments, Thompson’s tenure as U.S. attorney in the early 1970s set a standard for the Chicago area office that has turned it into a champion malfeasance sniffer of the federal prosecutorial system. By contrast, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, run by one of Daley’s sons and closely linked to the Democratic hierarchy, shies away from corruption cases.

Sting Operations

A series of federal sting operations with fanciful names like Greylord, Incubator, Phocus and Lantern has reaped a rich harvest of miscreants. Greylord, for example, involved wholesale case-fixing and bribery in the county court system and so far has resulted in 87 indictments, including 15 judges, most of whom have been convicted. In the last 15 years, 15 Chicago aldermen have been indicted on various federal charges--an average of one a year. Thirteen have been convicted so far and two cases are still pending. Last year, four of the 50 Chicago council members were under indictment.

“Corruption has become a norm within our community,” Valukas warned recently. “It has become an acceptable way of doing business. And it is a function, in large part, of the belief held by too many people in government that the governmental office belongs to the officeholder . . . to use for his own or her own aggrandizement.”

In fact, investigators say their job has been made easier by the brazenness of their quarry. In Operation Lantern, which dealt with kickbacks paid to purchasing departments of several governmental agencies, suppliers allegedly paid bribes to obtain contracts and then padded invoices to the agencies to cover the costs of the payoffs. In Phocus, undercover surveillance equipment recorded city consumer inspectors allegedly taking bribes even as they discussed among themselves the then ongoing trials of sewer inspectors charged with the same thing.

Ethics Ordinance

The late Mayor Harold Washington curried a reputation as a reformer for forcing Chicago’s first-ever ethics ordinance through a reluctant City Council last year and for trying to do away with some of the more flagrant activities of public officials. But even Washington showed he was capable of turning a blind eye to abuses when it suited his cause.

Last year, Alderman Wallace Davis, under indictment for extortion, fraud and racketeering, was ushered from a federal lockup by four U.S. marshals and taken to a City Council meeting where it was thought his vote might be crucial to passing a Washington spending program. A few weeks later, Davis lost a reelection bid by only a few hundred votes. He was subsequently convicted.

Last October, the Chicago Tribune, in a series which recently was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, detailed how aldermen routinely used funds earmarked for council committees to line their own pockets and pay for personal travel, gifts and other items. Washington condemned the activities outlined by the newspaper and then, only days later, proposed a 12.5% increase in spending for those same panels.

Reformers credit aggressive federal prosecutors with helping to clean up much of the police department and even the courts. But they say corruption has become so ingrained in the fabric of public activity here that even citizens who profess abhorrence have come to accept it, expect it and often delight in it.

“We have some very highly visible crooks, some very colorful characters going back to the Prohibition era and even before that who have put Chicago on the map,” said Malcolm Rich, coordinator of The Chicago Ethics Project, an amalgam of civic groups trying to promote clean government. “They provide fodder for the press. The public in many instances was rooting for Dillinger, not the FBI. That’s the tradition we’re fighting against.”

‘Big, Bad City’

Agreed Simpson, the one-time anti-machine alderman: “I think there’s sort of a perverse pleasure that Chicagoans get from knowing its a big, bad city.”

Indeed, many influential Chicagoans ridicule reformers as self-righteous and often hypocritical do-gooders. Chicago Sun-Times Managing Editor Ray Coffey openly derides them as “goo-goo, ga-gas.”

“In the Chicago experience, in fact, it seems to me what reformers generally have amounted to is just another pack of boodlers and deceivers--minus the the charm and humor and entertainment value of our out-and-out undisguised rogues,” Coffey told a gathering of local journalists recently.