What better place than Chicago to hold a political convention?Chicagoans in the past liked their politics so much that they stayedon the voter rolls even after their deaths.
This is the city where supporters of "Honest Abe" Lincoln forgedtickets to the 1860 convention. Where "thank you for your patronage"takes on a whole new meaning. Where bribe-taking by politiciansturned into an art form. Where even a baseball team was on the take.
One of the early pioneers of Chicago-style politics was"Bathhouse" John Coughlin, who believed that small bribes are betterthan large ones. "There's little risk," he said, "and in the longrun it pays a damned sight more."
Even today, Chicago politicians are following in his footsteps.Since 1973, 20 Chicago aldermen and 20 judges have been convicted ofvarious forms of graft. The latest are Aldermen Ambrosio Medrano(25th) and Allan Streeter (17th), who pleaded guilty this year inOperation Silver Shovel, in which politicians were caught takingbribes for allowing illegal dumping their neighborhoods.
So why do we put up with it?
Don Rose, a longtime independent political consultant, advanceswhat he calls "the cat box theory." We're like a cat owner whodoesn't notice that the kitty litter is soiled.
"I have become so inured to the smell of the cat box, I needsomeone to come in and say, `Hey, your cat box needs changing,' " hesaid. "It's in the air the way the smell of the mills hangs overGary."
But U.S. Attorney James Burns, who has helped put a couple ofdozen public officials and their cronies behind bars, thinks Chicagogets an unfair rap.
"You can look at other big cities - New York, the New Jerseyarea, Philadelphia, New Orleans - we have seen major corruption casescoming out of Miami," he said. "So it happens in other cities aswell."
Maybe. But few do it with the style of a Chicago pol.
Take Coughlin, a former "rubber" in a Clark Street bathhouse,and his saloonkeep crony, Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna.
Starting in about 1895, they were co-aldermen of the city'snotorious 1st Ward, cozying up to gamblers, prostitutes, opium denoperators and mobsters. They provided protection from the law inexchange for payoffs.
And every year they brought together the underworld, police andpoliticians for the annual 1st Ward Ball. It was a popular event.
"Riotous drunks had stripped off the costumes of unattendedyoung women, maudlin inebriates collapsed in the aisles, a madamnamed French Annie had stabbed her boyfriend with a hat pin," wroteLloyd Wendt and Herman Kogan in their book on the pair, Lords of theLevee.
Coughlin died in 1938 and Kenna in 1946, but the taint ofcorruption in the 1st Ward continued. Former Ald. Fred B. Roti isstill in federal prison for rigging a zoning case and a civil courtcase.
Like Kenna and Coughlin, Roti was a Democrat. But the portraitsof Republicans also hang in Chicago's rogues gallery.
The city's last Republican mayor, William "Big Bill" Thompson,was so tight with Al Capone that "Scarface" kept the mayor's pictureon his office wall. Some say Capone's 1927 campaign contributionstotaled $260,000. When Thompson died, he left assets worth $1.5million.
Other entrepreneurial mayors include Fred A. Busse, whose 1907campaign slogan was "Sunday Saloons and a Wide-Open City."
While Chicago voters often have tolerated such high jinks,occasionally the stench of the cat box just becomes too much. TakePolice Capt. Daniel "Tubbo" Gilbert, who was known as "the world'srichest cop" when the Democrats slated him for sheriff in 1950.
As head cop for the Cook County state's attorney and a formerunion official, Gilbert always had been a popular but somewhatshadowy figure. His annual salary never topped $9,500, but he toldreporters that lucky investments helped him amass a fortune of about$350,000.
"Nobody has anything on me," he liked to say.
But then the Chicago Sun-Times printed his secret testimonybefore a Senate hearing on organized crime weeks before an election."I have been a gambler at heart," Gilbert told senators as he tracedhis riches to illegal bets on sports and elections that he placedwith a LaSalle Street bookie.
"I haven't lost an election bet since 1921," he told thesenators.
But that year he took such a drubbing that he brought down mostof the ticket, all the way up to U.S. Sen. Scott Lucas, who was theSenate majority leader.
Gilbert was never charged with a crime.
A wealthy cop might raise a few eyebrows, but it's the aldermenwho have raised the money game to an art form. Few did it as well asformer Ald. Thomas Keane (31st), who was floor leader and head ofthe powerful Finance Committee under Mayor Richard J. Daley.
The scowling Keane was known as much for his arrogance as forhis parliamentary skills and legal smarts. He ran the City Councilfor Daley with an iron hand and amassed millions on the side in dealshe said were legitimate.
"I always wanted to be rich, and the mayor always wanted to bepowerful," Keane once said. "We both got our wishes."
Keane was finally caught in 1974 in an insider scheme to buytax-delinquent properties. "Nobody's going to dirty up a Keane," hevowed just months before his mail fraud conviction.
Some observers say that Chicago has lost its colorful figures.They point to the late Ald. William C. Henry (24th), with his fatpinky rings and old-fashioned ward heeler style, as the last of abreed.
Henry died of cancer in 1992, less than a year after ill healthspared him from a federal trial on bribery and extortion charges.
But guilty or not, Henry seemed to savor the deal. City Hallwags still chuckle over his failed plan to market a soft drink called"Soul Cola" and make it the official drink of Taste of Chicago.
But Arab grocers weren't laughing in 1988, when he charged thatthey ran "filthy stores" and he proposed English proficiencyrequirements for obtaining business licenses. When Hispanicsobjected, Henry said: "You have to know more than Mexican to dobusiness in Chicago."
He abandoned the proposal when informed that Mexican was not alanguage.
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