The cavernous, aluminium-thin serving pans of mostaccioli with meat sauce were being sent to the banquet hall when state Rep. E.J. ”Zeke” Giorgi, the Rockford Democrat who was acting as both host and beneficiary of the biennial fundraising dinner, made a traumatic discovery.
It was a Lenten Friday, and for the Roman Catholic legislator whose political history has spanned and survived the changes of three decades in public office, Giorgi knew he had committed a religiously grievous error.
Quickly, Giorgi reached for the nearest telephone and told a legislative aide to speak to-and beg reverential apologies from-Bishop Arthur J. O`Neill, the spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rockford.
Shortly, Giorgi`s Catholic conscience was cleared. O`Neill gave Giorgi and the hundreds of people attending his fundraiser a special dispensation to eat the mostaccioli containing the forbidden meat.
”It just goes to show you,” Giorgi said after that fiasco four years ago, ”that I represent everyone from popes to pimps.”
For a quarter of a century in the Illinois House, Edolo Joseph Giorgi`s legislative constituency has grown accustomed to such statements.
While his political support has actually ranged from the solidly blue-collar Italian-Americans who once dominated Rockford`s South and West Sides to the black and Hispanic community that has gradually blended his district into an ethnic mix, Giorgi has an unofficial statewide constituency: anyone who has played bingo at a church hall, attended a casino-style fundraiser, played the lottery, or picked a horse at an off-track betting parlor.
Giorgi, 68, the ”Dean of the House” and the ”Father of the Lottery,”
is the General Assembly`s reigning gambling czar. Under his sponsorship and promotion, the state has gradually approved various forms of gambling to the point that legislators may soon even consider legalized betting on sports events.
A lawmaker who keeps his private life just that, but whose public life is filled with the color, verbosity and philosophy that are a timely reminder of how politicians operated in the past, Giorgi has so far outlasted the complaints that state-sanctioned gambling contributes to the ills of society. But Giorgi`s interest in legalizing wagering, on everything from floating crap games on riverboats that will ply the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers next year to ill-fated attempts to allow betting on greyhounds and jai alai, is at odds with his own beliefs: He doesn`t gamble.
”I enjoy the personal incongruity of talking about things like gambling that, while I don`t do it, other people consider it to be taboo. I don`t mind taking these things on,” Giorgi said.
In reality, though, the political elevation of Giorgi to the Illinois House was the result of a gamble.
A product of the city`s West Side, where Italian immigrants settled at the end of the Illinois Central Railroad tracks, Giorgi developed a strong work ethic, waiting tables, shining shoes and working as a pin boy in a bowling alley. It was behind the lanes that he earned the nickname ”Zeke,”
after the sidekick to cowboy-actor-singer Gene Autry.
During World War II he attended the Army`s propaganda school, learning the subtle art of persuasion and the overt art of bombast that would serve him well in his later years. He returned home and voted Republican to keep a job as township deputy assessor.
But soon Giorgi went public with his political philosophy, winning election to the conservative-dominated City Council as a Populist Progressive in 1955.
”It was basically Republican in the City Council when Zeke was there, but Zeke being a Democratic alderman, a minority alderman, he learned how to swim upriver, and I don`t think he`s ever stopped swimming,” said Gloria Lind, the Winnebago County clerk and a former legislative aide to Giorgi.
In 1964, after the legislature had failed to agree on a redistricting map, Giorgi, on a lark, agreed to have his name submitted as a candidate for the House in the famed at-large ”bedsheet ballot” election (the ballots were oversized), in which voters across the state elected the chamber`s 177 members. Riding the coattails of Lyndon Johnson`s landslide presidential victory over Republican Barry Goldwater, he joined an overwhelming Democratic majority that won seats in the House.
For two years, Giorgi held his aldermanic post while serving in the House, giving him a valuable footing in both arenas. While it didn`t help an ill-fated bid for mayor in 1969, it did cultivate a belief in patronage, of working up through the ranks, and the ”you scratch my back, I scratch yours” vote trading that is part of the legislative process.
Through the years, though, Giorgi also learned that part of the legislative process is patience.
While not known generally outside Rockford or northwestern Illinois, Giorgi has been able to steer millions of dollars in pork projects back into his district and the city.
Last year, Gov. James Thompson formally opened the State of Illinois regional office building in Rockford, a $10 million, five-story, glass-and-stone structure along the west bank of the downtown Rock River, culminating a project that Giorgi introduced in the legislature in 1975.
Even when the public objected to a project, Giorgi pushed ahead, sensing a longer-term need. After voters in a referendum rejected plans for a civic center, Giorgi helped deliver $20 million for construction of the 10,000-seat downtown MetroCentre, which has played host to such diverse attractions as the Rolling Stones and tractor-pull competitions.
Damage control
But time has taken its toll on the old-style politics Giorgi practices. He feuded frequently with a previous mayor who wouldn`t give him any patronage jobs, and his old-guard faction in the local Democratic Party organization is gradually being eased out by a younger group.
Yet time, and the power of legislative seniority in a majority party, has earned Giorgi the title of assistant House Democratic leader and the compliment of having his district drawn conveniently for him, making him immune to any serious Republican challenge.
As a result, Giorgi, a major spokesman for organized labor, has been given the task of sponsoring controversial bills that could be potentially damaging for others to carry, such as the bill that resulted in the new White Sox stadium.
Part of Giorgi`s success is the way he talks. Sometimes injecting the wrong multisyllabic word in a sentence in a misguided attempt to sound grandiloquent, he is also known to mumble through his explanation of noncontroversial bills, and occasionally controversial bills, to steer them quickly through the House.
That was the case in 1980 with a bill to aid then-struggling Chrysler Corp. It was a major piece of legislation, but Giorgi quietly gave the impression the state was merely putting up $20 million in case Chrysler needed it. Not until the day after the bill passed did everyone realize it was an outright loan to the company, which has an auto plant in Belvidere that employs thousands of workers from the Rockford area.
No `thanks`
Giorgi is sometimes known to boast about his personal popularity in Rockford, and once his seatmate in the House, Rep. John Matijevich (D-North Chicago), put his braggadocio to a test. Matijevich glued a picture of Giorgi`s face onto an envelope, wrote ”Rockford, Ill.” beneath it, and stuck it in the mail.
The letter arrived at Giorgi`s district office without delay and is now one of his most prized possessions.
Still, for all his notoriety inside the chambers of the General Assembly and in his district, if Giorgi is known elsewhere in the state it is as the Father of the Lottery, the title Giorgi was awarded by then-Gov. Daniel Walker after Walker (who vowed that a lottery would be legalized only over his dead body) came to Rockford in 1973 to sign the state lottery act.
”Of the over 600 millionaires that have been made in Illinois through the lottery bill that I introduced, not a one has ever sent me a contribution or a thank-you letter. Not a one. They don`t even know I exist,” Giorgi said. The compulsiveness to which Giorgi attaches his name to gambling legislation stems, ironically, from a card game in the basement of the Capitol.
In 1973, during an attempt to legalize the lottery, Giorgi found himself in need of several votes. Traveling from the third-floor House chamber to a basement room in search of lawmakers to vote for the measure, he found six legislators playing gin rummy.
”Here`s these guys playing gin rummy, and I need some votes to pass the lottery bill, so I get them to come up to the floor with me, and what do they do? They vote against it,” Giorgi said.
That legislative ”hypocrisy,” as Giorgi calls it, prompted a vigorous effort on his behalf to work to legalize raffles and chances for non-profit groups, ”Las Vegas” nights for charities, jar and pull-tab games, riverboat gambling and-the next item on his agenda-wagering on sports events.
”We know people play betting pools in bars daily, they bet on sports daily, and they`d like to do it without the fear of being arrested,” Giorgi said.
His proposal would allow sports betting in taverns as a way to make up for the revenue lost by retail liquor establishments through the state`s stricter enforcement of drunken driving and the higher dramshop insurance costs that bar owners are facing.
But even if he isn`t successful with that plan, which has been linked to the controversial funding of an expanded McCormick Place and a domed stadium for the Chicago Bears, Giorgi has an idea of what will come next.
”If you think that after riverboat gambling boats ply the rivers that there isn`t going to be a move to legalize casinos in Illinois, then you`re not with it,” Giorgi said. ”But I don`t know if it will be my bill; I don`t plan to do it all, you know.”
