An unprecedented federal campaign against municipal corruption has opened extensive criminal investigations in five of America`s largest cities that are expected to result in the most publicized prosecutions of political figures since Watergate.
Justice Department investigations in Chicago, New York and Washington already have implicated dozens of senior municipal politicians from politically influential aldermen in Chicago to some of New York`s most powerful Democratic leaders.
Along with those widely publicized inquiries, investigations are underway in Philadelphia and Boston, and a high-ranking Justice Department official said investigations in several other major cities will be unfolding soon.
One result of this unparalleled campaign is that big-city Democrats face the troubling prospect of seeing scores of current and former public officials under indictment or on trial for crimes ranging from bribery to racketeering as political parties move toward elections later this year or early in 1987.
While officials say the investigations are being run independently by local U.S. attorneys and FBI field offices, prosecutors and FBI agents consult and share information on a regular basis.
Some authorities believe the cooperation has uncovered evidence that may link corruption in some cities through a loose pattern of transactions and people, said a high-ranking law enforcement official in Washington.
The assault on municipal wrongdoing pits a Republican-dominated Justice Department against some of the nation`s most prominent Democratic regimes, such as the administrations of Mayors Edward Koch in New York, Marion Barry in Washington and Harold Washington in Chicago.
Not one of these well-known mayors has been accused personally of wrongdoing, but the inquiries threaten the reputations and images of all three. There have been complaints the investigations were politically motivated and, in the case of Chicago, racially inspired.
An aide to Mayor Washington visited Capitol Hill last week to convey to congressmen the mayor`s complaints about the federal undercover investigation of suspected City Hall corruption in Chicago, a source said.
”It is not unheard of for prosecutors to take a closer look at members of the other political party,” said John Gardiner, a political science professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago and an expert on municipal corruption.
But some other legal scholars contend the emphasis on public corruption was long overdue, and prosecutors involved in the investigations sharply deny political or racial motivations.
Stephen Trott, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department`s criminal division, said in an interview that politics played no role in any of the investigations.
”That is just the predictable type of backfire that you get sometimes on these things,” said Trott. ”There is no politics involved in any of it. There is no secondary consideration.”
Trott said rooting out public corruption has become a major priority in the department and that investigations in other cities will become known soon. He also hinted that links between public officials and organized-crime figures have been uncovered in some of the investigations.
One reason for the success of the campaign is that the Justice Department and FBI have devoted more resources to municipal corruption, using increasing amounts of electronic surveillance, better-trained agents and more undercover operations, said Trott.
The increase in undercover operations, however, has caused criticism from congressmen and civil liberties experts who worry that the very techniques employed to restore public trust in government may destroy it if safeguards are not maintained.
Part of this municipal campaign also is the result of a series of fortuitous coincidences that helped open the major investigations underway in Chicago and New York.
Charles Rogovin, a former Justice Department official who teaches law at Temple University in Philadelphia, said the concentrated effort was overdue.
”There is a recognition that we have reached a stage where corruption is significant and people have serious questions about confidence in government,” Rogovin said.
In Philadelphia, the FBI is in the early stages of an investigation of the city`s judiciary, and 31 police employees, including a former deputy commissioner, have been indicted in a separate probe.
In Boston, U.S. Atty. William Weld has obtained indictments against more than 40 local officials in recent months and is probing corruption among city inspectors and real estate developers.
But the stars of the corruption campaign are two federal investigations in New York City that officials say have uncovered evidence of pervasive bribery and patronage in city government and have blossomed into 15 state and federal probes. Officials say the widening investigations may take two years to complete.
So far, 11 people have been indicted in connection with the awarding of contracts from the city`s parking violations bureau alone, including such powerful local politicians as Bronx Democratic leader Stanley Friedman. Queens Democratic leader Donald Manes killed himself the day before he was to be interviewed by FBI agents.
”I had no sense before that corruption had been in place and in existence for so long in city government,” said Benito Romano, the prosecutor in charge of the corruption investigation for U.S. Atty. Rudolph Guiliani in Manhattan.
Another federal official had a more cynical view of why the New York investigation has expanded so quickly.
”There hadn`t been a major corruption investigation in New York for 15 years, and people had gotten fat and they were just sitting there waiting to be picked off,” said the official.
In fact, the current New York case got its start with help from prosecutors in Chicago.
Michael Raymond, a convicted swindler, turned FBI informant after a chance arrest on a gun charge in July, 1984. For 18 months, he worked on an undercover probe of suspected City Hall corruption in Chicago that also turned up evidence of bribery to obtain parking contracts in New York.
Federal prosecutors in Chicago passed the information to their counterparts in New York, who parlayed it into the major probes now going on. ”Corruption investigations in Chicago are not a new phenomenon,” said U.S. Atty. Anton Valukas. ”In the last 10 years, over 300 public officials in Chicago, the suburbs and around the state have been convicted.”
No indictments have been handed up in Chicago yet, but four aldermen have acknowledged accepting money from Raymond, three city employees have resigned and several businessmen have been implicated.
The disclosures have rocked the administration of Harold Washington in much the same way revelations here have damaged the political standing of Mayor Marion Barry.
Barry`s chief political strategist, Ivanhoe Donaldson, pleaded guilty last December to federal charges that he defrauded the city of $192,000, and several other officials either resigned or were fired.
Donaldson is serving a seven-year prison sentence, but a law enforcement official said the federal grand jury is continuing its investigation of his role in the awarding of city contracts as part of a broader probe of Washington, D.C., government.
One aspect of the continuing grand jury probe is Donaldson`s activities across the country after he left city government in 1984 to work for E.F. Hutton & Co., the big brokerage house, and Datacom Systems Corp., the nation`s largest collector of municipal fines and fees.
Datacom, in fact, forms one of the links between municipal investigations in Chicago, New York and Washington, where the company has contracts to collect overdue parking fines, said a federal law enforcement official.
In New York, a lawyer for Datacom was charged last month with using bribery to obtain a parking contract for Datacom and a vice president of the company was accused of extorting $150,000 from a towing company that worked with Datacom.
The company, however, has not been charged with wrongdoing in any investigation, and spokesman Manuel Valencia said the firm is cooperating with the probes in New York and Chicago and is unaware of any investigation in Washington.
The troubles for the Barry administration, however, don`t end with the Donaldson affair. A federal grand jury also is investigating whether Alphonse Hill, a former deputy mayor, received kickbacks or other financial considerations from James Hill Jr., the head of a Chicago-based auditing firm. Alphonse Hill resigned last month after disclosures that he accepted $3,000 from the auditing firm, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in city business since Hill came into city government here seven years ago.
Barry has accused the U.S. attorney here, Joseph diGenova, of being ”out to get me,” an accusation diGenova denies.
”These investigations are happening now because they are happening now, and that`s all there is to it,” diGenova said in an interview. He refused to comment further.
But Trott, with relish, told a story about diGenova that may hold the key to the Justice Department`s campaign against municipal corruption.
”I sat in a room with Joe a year and a half ago and we were talking about how to handle this stuff and Joe said, `This is one of my priorities,`
” said Trott. ”He put his fist on the table and he said, `By God, we`re going to find this stuff and rip it out.` ”
