If you think relations between police officers and their mayor are lousy in Chicago, you should know that it’s worse someplace else.
That someplace is Cicero, the near west suburban burg that movie director Quentin Tarantino would love.
It would be the perfect location for “Pulp Fiction II.” In fact, it’s got enough wise guys, federal agents, tough-guy politicians and strippers for 12 B movies. There’s also a dumpy racetrack and that old Al Capone flavor to excite the Hollywood crowd.
It is also where Cicero Town President Betty Loren-Maltese is in a stupid war with her own police department, especially the cops who didn’t support her in her last election.
She’s trying to fire over a third of her 100-person police force, many of them good cops who lived in other towns and raised their children in those towns because their police bosses told them it was OK to do so.
Loren-Maltese says it’s because they violated an old–but never-enforced–residency requirement. And she told me that some of her cops tried to blow up a two-flat she owned. She wouldn’t name names, but she cites it as another reason to clean up her police department. She says there’s no vendetta. But the police officers have a different story. And it won’t surprise you.
“It’s political and she’s driving us out,” said one of 15 Cicero officers on Betty’s hit list who met with me the other day. “It’s political. We didn’t support her election, we’re gone. We didn’t get down on our knees, we’re gone. We thought we were in America. But instead, we’re in Cicero.”
The 15 officers sat around a table at the Western Springs headquarters of the Illinois Fraternal Order of Police Labor Council, their union. Suspended without pay for not living in Cicero, they are waiting for hearings before a police board picked by Loren-Maltese.
They have children and, lately, they don’t have steady jobs. They scrounge for security guard work. What bothers them is that they know Loren-Maltese has been involved in Cicero politics for almost two decades, that she knows the residency laws were never enforced–until after her election in April.
Cicero taxpayers will have to come up with $7,000 a day to pay for the Cook County sheriff’s police to pick up the slack. The deputy sheriffs don’t know the town, they don’t know the street gangs, they don’t know the turf. And they don’t make arrests, because that would mean court time.
“Our guys are getting railroaded,” said Ray Bialek, their union representative. . “They’re good cops. And they’re getting pushed around. And who is getting hurt? Not only our people, but also the people of Cicero. Their police department is being torn apart.”
The people of Cicero, by and large, are hard-working blue-collar folks who come home tired from tough jobs–though some have less-admirable traits. A few years ago, some residents got extra tired from beating up African-Americans who wandered through, but now they’ve gone multicultural with a large Mexican population living with the Italians and the Lithuanians and the Poles.
While Cicero is changing, the politics stay the same. For some strange reason, perhaps known only to the creators of the “X-Files,” their politicians got stuck in a time warp in 1962, from which there is no escape.
Cicero’s political class reminds me of the characters in a detective novel. You know, long black Cadillacs. Hard guys who want to be Frank Sinatra driven by guys with bottle scars on their cheeks. Harder looking women with frosted eye shadow and the kind of sneer that can curdle milk .
“A few of them tried to blow up one of my two-flats,” Loren-Maltese said of cops. “They’re lucky it’s only the residency issues we’re looking at now. Otherwise, a few of them should be sweating. I’m trying to get rid of corruption.”
Loren-Maltese said that Cicero is changing, she’s cleaning it up, getting rid of the strip clubs. She says she’s closing the old bars that served thirsty clients from 4 a.m. through breakfast.
Of course the U.S. Justice Department is still crawling through the town, investigating her government in a corruption probe.
“They’re just doing their jobs,” she said. “Somebody brings something to you, you check it out. That’s what they’re doing. But when it’s all over, you’ll see that it was just politics.”
But some of her political advisers think that this fight with her police force is not only unnecessary, it’s bad politics.
“Perhaps I’m stubborn, but there’s no vendetta,” Loren-Maltese said. “They would like that spin, but people who know me know I’m fair. You can’t expect residents to follow the law if the police don’t follow the law. I’m not backing down. If I was gonna back down, I would have done it already.
“Maybe I’m just a stubborn Lithuanian.”
