Obviously, any discussion of Richard M. Daley begs for a comparison to Richard J. But, let’s start with the facts and let you draw your own conclusions.
Clearly, these are different times. No one back in the 70’s would have believed the newly-ensconced suburbanites would have moved back downtown.
Richard J. was a builder with big ideas: The Circle campus, O’Hare, the expressways, and public housing.
And it wasn’t easy. He had to contend with a city council led by the wily Tom Keane – a master dealer. In this first ever press conference over allegations of his financial interest in the O’Hare parking garage, Keane said he was whiter than white, like the soap – cleaner than clean. He said it’s not a Keane deal, “it’s a Daley deal.”
The city council then was filled with unusual outstanding and independent thinkers, Leon Despres, John Hoellen a Republican, and Ralph Metcalf. Ed Burke, Cliff Kelley and Ed Vrdolyak were young Turks who started the “Coffee rebellion.”
Bill Singer and Dick Simpson were “independents” who drove the old m,yor crazy, on TV Channel 11 over allegations of city insurance business going to his kid John. Sound familiar?
“If you don’t like it you can kiss my mistletoe”, he said.
Then there were independent war lords with their own fiefdoms. George Dunne at the Cook county board was raking in millions with his Near North Insurance.
Ed Kelly, pugilistic king of the Chicago Park District had his own political army – “The fighting 47th”.
There were also Powerful congressmen, Dan Rostenkowski and Sid Yates.
But, they’re all gone now. There’s no opposition. John Daley runs the county. And the leaders of the other power centers have either been purged, ala the old USSR in the 30s. Ted Lechowitz, Eddie Kelly (who backed Nancy Kazak), dead or compromised. These days, Carole Brown at the CTA and Maria Saldana at the Park District are technocrats who are on the Mayor’s payroll, as minority contractors on bond deals.
How did Richard M. accomplish this? Through brute force, much of it not only illegal but blatantly criminal. U.S, Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has branded his Water department a “criminal enterprise.” Don Tomczak, as #2 at Water, not only ignored the Shakman decree, He mounted an army of 250 mobile troops, all based on political participation,—“a massive personnel conspiracy” Fitzgerald called it—and threw it into battle to defeat Nancy Kazak and Eddie Kelly.
Tomczak extorted over $300,000 from Hired Truck contractors and put thousands of dollars into the race on behalf of Rahm Emanuel for Congress. . And the old West Side bloc-sters, Republican Skip Saviano, Democrat Jim DeLeo, and Republican Pete Silvestri were there too. The whole war was run by the crooks in the Mayor’s office of intergovernmental affairs.
So Richard M. cleared the field. There’s no opposition. He is the King on his own little island dreaming big – Olympics in Chicago.
Unchecked power- What’s he done with it? Whereas the old man rode the post war building boom, politics have changed. You not only need an army of precinct workers on the payroll but “jobs and contracts.” People not only content to make a buck personally, but who issue big contracts to friends who then give back huge campaign contributions – $5,000 from Saviano to the mayor by way of mob chief John DiFronzo.
The big jobs and contracts deals have been Millennium Park and Soldier Field. . History will be the judge, but we’ll need a second stadium for the Olympics? Some great bone-headed ideas never made it off the drawing board—and we were lucky they didn’t. Such as 12 city blocks of Las Vegas-style entertainment with five casinos downtown proposed by mobbed up Ed Hanley of the Hotel Workers union with family friend Rich Daley and the three wise men from Las Vegas. We all got lucky that one died. .
And then there’s the scheme of taking care of your family and friends financially, something the Father never did. John Daley insuring O’Hare contractors at $500,000 per year and Mike Daley, a bond consultant at O’Hare at $180,000, per year. Maggie (Rich’s wife, the First Lady of Chicago)’s newsstand ladies sharing 38 million as minority contractors at O’Hare. We told the inside story of close buddy Oscar D’Angelo’s contract maneuvering and mayoral manipulating at O’Hare. It was “all written down.” When the Sun-Times article came out, Rich went into the hospital with an anxiety attack. But, as one inside source told me, they’ll deny it until the day they die.
Unchecked power, running wild over his island.
Martin Luther King left town after the Mayor promised reform. But, Richard J. never came through. To get George Ryan to go along with O’Hare expansion Rich M. promised to keep Meigs open. We all know what happened. The mayor of a major American city destroyed a key airport in the middle of the night. People who live in other towns still don’t believe it happened.
And why? He said he didn’t want to be bothered by lawyers and law suits. So he had to go at night when no one was around. It sounds like Bogart in “They Drive By Night.” Do we see a pattern? Lack of respect for the rule of law!
Lying to federal judges for over ten years, keeping two sets of personnel records, screwing over thousands of city workers and their families all the while telling the courts the Shakman decree was no longer needed, since they didn’t do politics any more in Chicago, and new runways at O’Hare – right through the cemeteries. And let’s destroy Bensenville now and worry about expansion later. Where will he get $20 billion to increase O’Hare flights by 12%? And all the business guys standing around “slack jawed” as Royko called it, watching all this and wondering whether “he’s out of control,” motivated by crazy ideas based on observations of other cities on his latest trip abroad.
The Old Man wanted to flood Solider Field for “Venetian Nights” – maybe Rich wants to turn Chicago into Venice. Maybe the recent floods came not from a flawed multi-billion dollar deep tunnel boondoggle, but were the opening act of a new great big picture public works project. Not Steve Wynn’s Bellagio, Rich Daley’s Venetian Chicago.
But, meanwhile everyone’s happy because we have flower pots and a garden on the roof of City Hall – He’s not Mayor pothole, he’s Mayor flower pot. Carefully staying on top of every detail in his great city. Cataloging every problem on his hand-kept list as he rides through the city in his limo. But, when the nasty, head hunting U.S. Attorney comes around to ask embarrassing questions of what goes on in city government, he quickly lawyers up and joins and echoes the standard refrain of mafia chieftains in the grand jury “Mr. Brunner, I know nothing – why am I here? Surely, this is a mistake.”
Has anyone asked to see the two-and-a-half hour transcript of Richard M. Daley’s
interrogation by U.S. prosecutors? No? Why not? It’d make some interesting reading.
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Terry Brunner was executive director of the Better Government Association and was a special assistant U. S. attorney general under Robert F. Kennedy. His and the BGA’s investigations made volumes of Chicago history.