Chicago Voters Reject Two Candidates Linked to Gangs : Elections: Mayor Daley wins third term. Incumbent aldermen beat two former Gangster Disciples in wards where police kept an eye out for harassment.

Voters Tuesday turned down bids by two gang-linked politicians to win City Council seats and reelected Mayor Richard M. Daley to a third term.

Chicagoans voted in paltry numbers as more than 1,000 police officers patrolled to keep a lid on Election Day harassment at polling places.

Police and election monitors said complaints of intimidation were kept to a minimum throughout the day as voters in two crime-racked Southside wards spurned the campaigns of two former members of the massive Gangster Disciples street gang and returned incumbent aldermen to office.

In the 3rd Ward, a district bisected by the Robert Taylor Homes, a looming high-rise housing project, self-avowed former gang enforcer Wallace (Gator) Bradley was losing to veteran reform candidate Dorothy Tillman, 70% to 30%, with 84% of the ward’s votes counted. The vote, Tillman said, represented a rebuff to gang-connected politics because residents “rejected everything my opponent stood for.”

Jaqueline Nash, an election judge at a Boys’ Club near the Taylor Homes, said she had seen little evidence of the intimidation tactics that frustrated project voters in a primary last February. Police moved through the projects on “vertical patrol” to ensure that gang members did not commandeer elevators.

The result was the same in the 16th Ward, another Southside community, where Alderman Shirley Coleman appeared to have beaten Hal Baskin, a former gang member and now a youth counselor. Coleman had won 67% to Baskin’s 33%, with 95% of precincts reporting.

In the citywide election, Daley, 52, proved able to amass a multiethnic coalition diverse enough to not only defeat independent candidate Roland Burris, but beat him in his own district. With 93% of the votes in, Daley’s 61% led Burris and Raymond Wardingley, a former professional clown who was this year’s inevitable Republican also-ran in the Democratic-dominated city.

Daley credited his victory to a “new spirit of community,” a nod to the breadth of his political outreach.

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Burris, a former Illinois attorney general and one of the black community’s most popular politicians, was continually frustrated by Daley’s ability to win endorsements from prominent African American leaders, among them U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Ill.) and more than 100 local ministers.

While Daley ignored Burris’ repeated charges of political coercion, the battle of words in the Southside’s two council races remained heated, even as the final votes were tallied.

Baskin was forced to apologize to Coleman recently after trying to make political hay from the fact that Coleman’s ex-husband was executed by the state for kidnaping, raping and murdering a hospital worker.

Claiming that the husband may have been driven to the crime because Coleman was lax in her “wifely duties,” Baskin later retreated, admitting he had made an “error in judgment.”

Bradley also scrambled to overcome a political gaffe he made when blurting out to a television interviewer that he was still a member of the Gangster Disciples.

Bradley later insisted that he was a former member, but his opponent, Tillman, used the remark to claim that Bradley was a stalking horse for Larry Hoover, a gang leader who is imprisoned for murder.