.id AA26793; Sun, 27 Aug 95 17:24:57 CDT
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 1995 17:24:56 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 5 Num. 91



              Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 5  Num. 91
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                    ("Quid coniuratio est?")


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STATE'S HALL OF SHAME IS OVERFLOWING
Reynolds Joins Club of Political Pariahs
By John Kass and Andrew Fegelman
[*Chicago Tribune*, 08/27/95]

This is the town that sends crooked judges and aldermen to prison 
by the busload.

It's where a City Hall ghost payroller was jailed on tax charges 
before being reborn as a reform mayor, where the school board 
president admits she's a tax cheat, where the safe-deposit boxes 
of freshly deceased aldermen are opened on Sundays before the 
widows can get there.

This is the state that has seen two former governors imprisoned 
since the 1970s, where a secretary of state was found to have 
more than $750,000 stuffed in shoe boxes in his Springfield hotel 
room, where an attorney general was convicted of tax fraud, where 
a former state treasurer pleaded guilty to a check-kiting scheme.

The list includes former ghost city payroller and Mayor Harold 
Washington, who did jail time for failing to file income tax 
returns before his 1983 mayoral election, and former Governors 
Dan Walker and Otto Kerner.

[Also, don't forget Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (a.k.a. "Rosty"), 
currently under indictment.]

So where on this list should the name of Democratic U.S. Rep. Mel 
Reynolds be entered? Is he up there with crooked former zoning 
scam artist Alderman Thomas Keane or the late Secretary of State 
Paul Powell? [a.k.a. Paul "Shoeboxes" Powell, see above] Or is 
Reynolds merely the Pee-wee Herman of Illinois political 
scandals?

His conviction last week on felony sex charges for seducing a 16- 
year-old campaign worker will likely provide a tawdry television 
movie of the Joey Buttafuoco and the Long Island Lolita variety.

But among the colorful fraternity of our wheeler-dealer pols, 
those who've been convicted and those who haven't, Reynolds is 
viewed as less than zero.

There is a hierarchy of crooks. In the prison yard as well as the 
legislative chambers, bank robbers and multimillion dollar zoning 
artists sit on the top rocks in the sun. But 40-year-old men who 
drive around schoolyards in their Cadillacs, looking for high- 
school girls are dismissed with contempt.

"This has little to do with the great political corruption 
scandals that have made this town somewhat interesting," said 
former 20th Ward alderman, prison inmate, [co-host of Skolnick's 
TV show] and current radio talk show host Clifford Kelley.

He maintains he was wrongfully accused of federal corruption 
charges stemming from an FBI sting known as Operation Incubator, 
which involved infamous undercover mole Michael Raymond.

"He might have used his position as a way of influencing some 
young women, but it's not on the same scale. The feds sent a 
wired mole into City Hall who was a murderer, and a lot of us 
were compromised," Kelley said. "This is about seducing young 
women. This is about being a pervert. But it doesn't speak to the 
politics of the city or the state."

[...]

The connection between gangsters like [Al] Capone and City Hall 
is based in fact and legend. When former Mayor Big Bill Thompson 
[not to be confused with former Governor Big Jim Thompson] lost 
his mayoral election to Pushcart Tony Cermak, Capone moved his 
operations to Cicero. It offers a chance to tell a little-known 
story that circulates around City Hall whenever public corruption 
becomes news.

In 1933, shortly after Cermak was elected mayor, he made a 
pilgrimage to Miami Beach to meet with then President-elect 
Franklin Roosevelt. Shots were fired, and the bullets hit Cermak, 
who later died.

An aide to 45th Ward Boss Charlie Weber made a breathless call 
back to Chicago to tell his boss that Cermak had been shot.

"Is he dead?" Weber asked. "I dunno," the aide answered.

"Well, put a hunnert [$100] next to the body," Weber said. "If it 
doesn't twitch, then you know he's gone."

Weber died a millionaire. But even he had his penny ante scams in 
the tradition of crooked pols. He established a not-for-profit 
group that brought 30,000 children and their families each year 
to the old Riverview amusement park for free. Weber got a 
kickback of 15 cents for each kid who passed through the gates.

Weber's City Council colleague, Southwest Side Alderman Clarence 
P. Wagner, chairman of the Finance Committee, was killed in an 
auto accident on a Saturday night on the way back from a 
Minnesota fishing trip in 1963 [1968(?)]. As City Hall 
politicians tell the story, his safe-deposit boxes were opened 
Sunday morning by his political patron, Judge James McDermott, 
before Wagner's widow was notified of his death.

That laissez-faire tradition continued to the present day, with 
the jailing of aldermen and the Greylord corruption cases in the 
Cook County judiciary...

[...]

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  pauperem.                    -- Liber Proverbiorum  XXXI: 8-9 

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O what fine thought we had because we thought    | bigred@shout.net
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.  | Illinois,
  -- W.B. Yeats, "Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen" | I'm your boy.

