“Not that there’s been any lack of honest men and women sweating out Jane Addams’ hopes here–but they get only two outs to the inning while the hustlers are taking four . . . Yet the Do-Gooders still go doggedly forward, making the hustlers struggle for their gold week in and week out, year after year, once or twice a decade tossing an unholy fright into the boys. And since it’s a ninth-inning town, the ball game never being over till the last man is out, it remains Jane Addams’ town as well as Big Bill’s. The ball game isn’t over yet. But it’s a rigged ball game.”
–Nelson Algren, “Chicago: City on the Make”
It’s that rare time for unholy fright in Chicago. At least, you’d like to think it is.
The mayor’s boys have been caught hustling. Ald. Patrick Huels has a company that’s been gobbling up contracts and loans from people that Huels helped at City Hall. Huels’ firm took a $1.25 million loan from a buddy of the mayor, a buddy who got a big subsidy from the city. Huels’ firm failed to pay a city business tax for two years, too–until it paid up last week, when the heat was on.
Huels is the mayor’s floor leader in the City Council. He is the alderman from the mayor’s political base, Bridgeport. This doesn’t look good for a mayor who fashions himself one of the Do-Gooders.
Mayor Daley will tell you that Mayor Daley is one of the Do-Gooders.
He’ll tell you how he cracked down on all the city workers who hadn’t paid their parking tickets. How just last week he made the City Hall higher-ups go to an ethics seminar under threat that they’d be fined if they didn’t. How he forced the City Council to clean up its act with a new ethics ordinance.
And he’ll tell you how truly, deeply disappointed he is at the dubious business dealings of Ald. Huels.
Come on, mayor, quit the act. Ethics seminars and parking-ticket crackdowns look silly when your closest allies and friends are caught in the hustle. Your protestation that you were in the dark about all that business sounds flimsy.
Do what you have to do. Get Huels out of the council. How can you ask Chicagoans to pay their taxes on time when your council leader doesn’t bother?
And take the overdue step of ousting Ald. Ed Burke as chairman of the Finance Committee–ghost payrolling at his committee was inexcusable.
Go back to that ethics ordinance. By and large, it’s a good law–its disclosure rules and subpoena power for the city ethics board will make it a little riskier for aldermen to scam the public. But its shortcomings already are apparent.
Get on it, mayor. Why should your friends get four outs an inning, while everybody else gets two?
