He is not old or withered, yet his heart has failed him three times. A stroke suffered a few months back stutters his speech. His system is so ravaged by sugar diabetes that he must inject himself with insulin twice a day and check his blood sugar regularly. A fingernail had to be removed because it was gangrenous. He labors to walk, often going only from chair to chair. He is 61.
And yet Jerry Cosentino can handle-painfully, with a grimace and grunt-the woes of his bones. It is the blot on his name, however, the STAIN, that is killing him. ”This mess,” he calls it. And a man who never asked for a break, who bulled his way to remarkable stations in life, begs for compassion, for one last whisper of understanding.
”Please, Bill, man to man, don`t write anything that`s gonna aggravate these federal guys,” he says. ”I have enough on my plate right now, I don`t deserve any more. You guys have worked me over a thousand times. I had a good image, and they destroyed it.”
On an early summer night, he and Charlotte sit in the back yard of a little house in south suburban Orland Park and watch the agitations of the lawn sprinkler. Thirty-nine years they`ve been married. Five kids. When he started the trucking outfit-actually it was a single used truck bought for $700-in 1959, Charlotte was his dispatcher. ”I`m sitting here on a Saturday night watering the lawn,” he says, ”when a couple years ago I`d be in a hall with 4,000 people.”
That was Jerry Cosentino, the politician. Pumping hands, slapping backs, nodding, winking, he stumped for votes like an old-time ward heeler, like one of George Halas` leather-helmeted fullbacks, head down, chewing up turf in the trenches, telling anybody to his face that he was Jerry Cosentino and what you see is what you get. ”He had a fire in his belly,” said a fellow pol.
”He wanted it; you could see it in his eyes.”
Wanted the governor`s office, many figured. And who could discount him?
He had come from nowhere to win two terms as state treasurer. He was a remarkably popular candidate, a big vote-getter in Chicago and Downstate. At one time in the 1990 race for Illinois secretary of state, he was leading the polls by 20 percentage points.
And then it all collapsed: the campaign, the election, his reputation, his health.
Now he talks to you in the office of his defense attorney. A defense attorney, for crying out loud! A criminal-courts sharpshooter who bargains on behalf of felons and now sits across the desk like a proctor making sure no careless word is uttered. Cosentino is on this guy`s leash now, and he will sit or heel or speak on command. He hesitates, his hands tremble, he chafes and swallows.
This is what it has come to because, at some point, Cosentino made a deal with the devil. The devil appeared in the form of an obese, beguiling, totally amoral hustler named Jimmy Wells. Cosentino was desperate. His family business was mired in a slough of debt. Wells owned a bank and a head full of layered financial schemes.
Mouthing the pathetic words of tempted men throughout time, Cosentino reportedly said to Wells, ”I`ll do anything, as long as it`s legal.” ”But of course,” replied the devil, knowing that it would not be. From that moment, as the juice of the forbidden apple leaked down his prominent chin, Jerry Cosentino was a doomed man.
Go back to trucks for a moment. Forget Jerry Cosentino, former state treasurer, former Metropolitan Sanitary District trustee, former Democratic committeeman. Forget the manicured guy with the perfect haircut, the natty shirt and tie, the custom-tailored suit. For Cosentino was a trucker. A hauler. Trucks made him. Trucks broke him.
He was a guy who personally worked the rigs, then drove them on the open road. He dealt with the Teamsters when the Teamsters were a force to be dealt with, sometimes negotiating contracts with his bare hands. Big hands. The kind that lock onto cyclone fences and take on billy clubs until the knuckles are bloody. All his life he`d done it all with his two hands.
The 11th of 12 kids born to Italian immigrants, Cosentino grew up during the Depression on Parnell and 32nd in Bridgeport. His father was an Old World artisan who crafted some of the original frescoes in the Chicago Theater. Young Jerome went to Robert Healy Elementary and delivered the Bridgeport News in the neighborhood. Among his customers was the Daley family on South Lowe. Stocky and athletic, Cosentino played sports at Tilden Technical High School with Johnny Kerr, one of his pals. While Kerr went on to the University of Illinois and professional basketball, Cosentino dropped out of Tilden after two years to go to work. He had been working odd jobs almost full-time since he was 13. At 15 he got a chauffeur`s license and drove a delivery truck for Goldblatt`s. On weekends he painted restaurants with his brothers. At 21 he married Charlotte Hassman, started a family and tried to make it as a painter and interior decorator.
But it was a conversation in 1959 with an old friend that rid him of his painter`s hat and changed his life.
”I had been working for Al Schwartz of D&H Cartage off and on since I was a kid, and I stopped in to see him one afternoon,” he says. ”We were shootin` the breeze, and he said, `Why don`t you go into the trucking business for yourself?` My interior decorating work was slow, and I said, `Ah, I`ll try it.` He pointed out a truck and said, `I`ll sell you that truck for 700 bucks and get ya the first two weeks work.` That`s what I did. I bought the truck and drove it myself.”
His company was Fast Motor Service, and from the start, with him and his wife working endless hours running the business out of their house in southwest suburban Summit, it made money. He loaded and unloaded trailers, drove short hauls, courted prospective clients and then stayed up all night doing his own mechanical work. A year later he bought the assets of another line, expanding his fleet to 20 trucks. And that was just the start. Through the decade of the 1960s, Fast Motor grew rapidly, acquiring new fleets and adding lucrative interstate contracts to the point where it was a significant hauler in the Midwest.
These were regulated times in the trucking industry, and to get through the bureaucratic maze of permits and licenses, you had to work the ropes of the Illinois Commerce Commission. ”You either fought or you knew people,”
says a fellow trucking firm owner, ”and Jerry knew people. He made friends with everybody.”
He had no identifiable clout, no godfather. ”I got good attorneys and built from scratch. I did it the hard way,” Cosentino says.
Regulation also meant dealing with Teamsters. There was one contract with the same rates for everybody. That meant high fees and high driver salaries. It was impossible for an independent or upstart operator to jump in and negotiate special rates or steal contracts. Cosentino and Fast Motor Service thrived in this environment. ”I made more money with those high salaries and regulation than anytime else,” he once boasted.
His lifestyle displayed as much. Though Cosentino consistently plowed profits back into the firm, in 1965 he and Charlotte built a large new home in the posh Palos Pines subdivision of Palos Heights. His five children-Carrie, Carla, Claudia, Carolyn and Colette-frolicked in an indoor pool and an adjoining recreation room.
By 1970 Fast Motor Service had a fleet of 150 trucks and grossed more than $10 million a year.
”We were bigger than ever. We kept buying more trucks and kept getting bigger. And I was bored,” Cosentino says. ”That`s when I decided to get involved in politics. It looked kind of exciting. (Richard J.) Daley was in his heyday. I figured I could get involved. I liked people. I was always a decent salesman, and I figured this wasn`t any different.”
In a whirlwind 35 days, he made a run for U.S. Representative, entering the Democratic primary against the organization`s slated candidate in Stickney Township`s 4th Congressional District. John Walsh, a veteran south suburban politician, ran his campaign. ”I wondered why a guy so successful in business was interested in politics,” Walsh says. ”But he was all determination and go.”
Cosentino walked every street, knocked on doors and lost by only 120 votes. In the process, he impressed a lot of people, particularly suburban politicians who liked his trucker`s hustle and drive. He also raised the eyebrows of Richard J. Daley, whom Cosentino still refers to as ”the old man” and who was the undisputed boss of the Cook County politics. ”You`re a good Democrat from Bridgeport,” Daley told him. ”Why do you want to run against us?”
Two years later, Cosentino changed tactics. He lobbied the support of almost two dozen suburban committeemen and labor leaders, along with Chicago Ald. Vito Marzullo, and literally laid his case at Daley`s feet. A week before the party`s slatemaking sessions, he and his supporters visited the mayor in his office.
”He sat us all around his desk, and he let each committeeman have his say,” Cosentino says. ”He told me later nobody (before me) had ever made such a presentation in front of him.”
According to Cosentino, Marzullo said to Daley: ”You kill two birds with one stone. You can put a good Italian on the ticket and you can put a suburban guy on the ticket.”
Daley responded by slating Cosentino for Metropolitan Sanitary District Commissioner, an election Cosentino carried by 400,000 votes. His political life had begun.
Once on the Sanitary District, he was anything but a slug.
”He was a quixotic character,” says Joanne Alter, a fellow MSD commissioner and somewhat of a maverick with her strong environmental concerns. ”He liked doing things for other people. I never sensed that he had another agenda. He supported me on environmental issues. He was a strong environmentalist.”
Alter, one of the first female Sanitary District commissioners, soon grew to admire Cosentino not only as an official but as a person. ”I liked him not just because he was a champion of those things I believed in, but he was easy to work with. He was nice. He could work with women. The other commissioners treated women terribly.”
And she sensed his political aspirations. ”We all thought he was running for governor,” she says.
In 1978 Cosentino made a bid for the Democratic slot as state treasurer. Richard J. Daley was no longer around to give him the nod, and many party leaders thought they needed a Downstater or a woman as a candidate. Adlai Stevenson, then a U.S. Senator, did not want Cosentino because Stevenson thought he could not win. Yet Cosentino, accompanied by John Walsh, had driven around the state that summer securing the support of Democratic committeemen, and he was ultimately slated. While Republicans behind James Thompson swept top state offices, Cosentino won his race by 164,639 votes over James Skelton, a Republican from Champaign.
It was a quite a coup for the high school dropout, the former painter, the trucker. He was the first Italian-American to hold a major state office in Illinois. And he dug in at the job. He ran the office without pomp or pretense but with plenty of shout, pushing programs that he would publicize as beneficial to the little guy. He created state loans for first-time home buyers. He created low-interest farm loans. He pushed for a law that mandated local treasurers to park public funds in interest-bearing accounts.
”He came across as a working-class guy, the kind of guy you could have a beer with,” says Joe Novak, a political consultant who would later manage a Cosentino campaign. ”He had a commitment to working class people, and people appreciated that.”
He also had a flair for the grand gesture, the crowd-pleasing move. In 1979, when the Chicago Board of Education went bankrupt and did not issue teacher paychecks in the week before Christmas, Cosentino agreed to accelerate state payments to the Board as a sort of bridge loan. Gov. Thompson objected, but Cosentino prevailed.
Cosentino generally got positive coverage and high marks from the media. His ideas were innovative, and he was deemed a decent, accessible, hard-working official. Among Democrats in Republican-dominated Illinois, he was a winner. In 1979 he was named President Jimmy Carter`s state campaign chairman.
Back in Palos Heights, Charlotte objected to his political career because it kept him away from home. Yet she knew politics was his new life. His sister Diane was running Fast Motor, and it still thrived.
But a wrenching change was about to overtake the trucking industry, a change that Jimmy Carter supported and Ronald Reagan, upon his election, brought to fruition. That was deregulation, and when it hit, the bottom fell out of the business. Ironclad contracts were shucked. High-paid union drivers were dropped like lepers. In the Chicago area alone, an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 drivers lost their jobs. Business for the big fleets was anything but usual and mostly bad.
”It changed everything,” one trucking executive says. ”It busted the unions more effectively than anything else, and it killed the owners. Anybody could get a permit. Anybody could go into business. And if you were locked into the old system with a lot of trucks and a lot of drivers, you got killed by the overhead.”
Fast Motor, a business Cosentino always considered to be family, suffered almost immediately. Instead of laying off drivers and scaling back operations, the company tried to buck the trend and maintain its business. ”It was a hard thing for Jerry to do,” a fellow trucker says. ”He was a big guy in the associations. He was a big politician. How do you scale back? How do you come down after you`re a big mover and shaker?”
But the firm`s problems were mostly a private matter. Publicly, Cosentino decided in 1982 to run for secretary of state. His opponent was Jim Edgar, a popular incumbent and Downstate Republican. This time, however, Cosentino lost.
He returned home to mind the store and proceeded a short time later to make the biggest mistake of his business life. Federal regulations regarding the size of trucks had been changed to allow for longer trailers. To compete, you had to have the big rigs, and Cosentino wanted Fast Motor to compete.
”You gotta understand, in my business, I had guys working for me who started with me,” he says. ”I seen their kids grow up, I put some of their kids through college. Went to their weddings. It was like family. I said: `The hell with it. We`re gonna try it.` ”
He made the decision to trade in his fleet of more than 300 trailers-all of them paid for-for new, bigger units. And he borrowed millions to do it.
”It was the worst thing he could have done,” a fellow trucker says.
