When Richard J. Daley was elected Chicago mayor in 1955, one of his first acts was to hire a police officer who worked on his campaign to run the mayoral security detail.
His new security chief was James P. Daley, a cousin of the mayor’s.
Fast forward to the 1980 election of Richard M. Daley as Cook County state’s attorney and history appeared to repeat. One of his first acts was to hire James P. Daley’s son John as a top administrative aide.
Throughout his climb up the ladder of politics, from legislator to prosecutor to mayor, Richard M. Daley has worked overtime to airbrush away less flattering comparisons to his famous father, the last of the old-time big-city bosses, whose political machine thrived on clout and favoritism.
But when it comes to family, the son has inherited at least one aspect of his late father’s legacy. Despite reforms that have virtually outlawed political patronage, public payrolls in the Chicago area are seeded with dozens of relatives and in-laws of the mayor and his high-powered siblings, according to a Tribune review of public records.
At least 68 workers linked by blood or marriage to the Daley clan have drawn paychecks from the city, county and other public bodies since Richard M. Daley was first elected mayor and became the preeminent political force in Cook County. At least two dozen have been hired since Daley took office.
All but 15 of the 68 remain today. Last year, their combined salaries alone totaled more than $3 million.
If the current mayor strolled through the cubicles of his municipal empire, it could be like a trip across his family tree.
At the Transportation Department, Richard M. Daley might bump into first cousin G. Patrick Green, an $81,468-a-year special assistant. Over at General Services is Green’s wife, a $76,068-a-year projects administrator.
Also at General Services is Cosmo Briatta, paid $82,620 to oversee the politically sensitive sale of city-owned land. Briatta is an in-law of one of Daley’s brothers as well as the husband of one of the mayor’s cousins, who holds her own top-level government job. Mary Daley Briatta is the $82,000-a-year director of Cook County Traffic Court.
Over at the Department on Aging is Karen Zboril, another Daley first cousin added to the payroll as a staff assistant in February 1996 under terms that skirted civil service hiring rules.
At the Water Department, Daley could find enough kin to stage a family reunion. The group includes Richard M. Green–a Daley first cousin promoted during the mayor’s tenure from plumbing inspector to a superintendent in the agency’s largest wing–and Robert Green, another first cousin, who made the leap from caulker to assistant superintendent.
Daley’s muscle extends well beyond city government. He holds de facto control over the parks and schools, handpicked the current president of the Cook County Board and possesses the leverage to sway slatings for judgeships. So it’s hardly surprising that Daley would see familiar faces if he ventured through other public agencies as well.
First cousin Thomas Green can be found at the Park District, where he was recently promoted from area supervisor to special projects manager, a bump that came with a $17,000 raise.
John J. Daley, the cousin who served under Richard Daley at the prosecutor’s office, now is the $74,483-a-year deputy administrator at the county-run Oak Forest Hospital.
“It’s an honor being a Daley,” declared John J. Daley, one of the few members of the Daley family who agreed to talk about their government jobs or family connections.
More typical was the response from Karen Zboril. “I don’t discuss my family with anyone,” she said, slamming down the phone.
Mayor Daley did not respond to several requests for interviews about his relatives.
Since Daley became mayor, at least nine of his first cousins have drawn paychecks from the city or county, and many of them have children and spouses on public payrolls as well.
Many Daley relations began their government careers before he took over City Hall in 1989, but at least a dozen of that group have won promotions since. And at least 24 Daley kin have been hired for public work after he became mayor, 13 of them at City Hall.
The Daley relatives have taken various routes to the public payroll. Some had to pass tests in order to qualify for consideration, and others had to have professional degrees. As in any large family, ties between some relatives were undoubtedly close and others fleeting–if that.
Jobs held by Daley relations run a wide gamut from crossing guard and stenographer to Circuit Court judge. They include top posts in the Water and Transportation Departments, the Park District, the courts and the assessor’s office.
Daley kin are also sprinkled through the Police and Fire Departments, Aviation, Streets and Sanitation, Sewers, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, and the sheriff’s and state’s attorney’s offices.
Inheriting the legacy
The Daley family is one of the nation’s most enduring political dynasties, and as its leader, the mayor is a fixture in the public eye. To lesser degrees, the spotlight has also focused on his three highly successful brothers: William, the U.S. secretary of commerce; John, an insurance broker and member of the Cook County Board; and Michael, a name partner in a Chicago law firm that handles zoning cases for prominent developers.
Like their father before them, the Daley brothers have jealously guarded family privacy–even in an era when the private lives of public figures are increasingly an open book.
But blending an array of both high- and low-tech tools–from computerized databases of government workers to census reports dating back a century and even inscriptions on graveyard headstones–the Tribune analysis highlights a little explored side of Chicago’s most influential family of the 20th Century.
Richard J. Daley, the family’s political patriarch, was an only child, but his parents came from large families, as did Daley’s wife, the former Eleanor Guilfoyle. Still, shortly before the mayor-to-be landed his first City Hall job as a gofer in the 1920s, only two members of the Daley or Guilfoyle families held government jobs, census records show. One was a postal clerk, the other a cop.
Those numbers mushroomed as the elder Daley’s influence grew.
“He wanted somebody he could trust,” recalled George Curry, a cousin of the late mayor’s and deputy budget director. “That was a key factor in all of his (job) selections.”
In Richard J. Daley’s day, the hiring ritual was as subtle as a palm card. You worked a precinct, you qualified for a job. You knew someone important or shared their bloodline, and you were on a management track.
The tradition of hiring and promoting relatives, like the mantle of power, has transferred from father to sons–even though the Daley brothers came to prominence in a very different political and legal environment than Richard J. Daley knew as mayor.
Freedom of information laws now require public agencies to disclose an array of information about employees. Lawsuits filed by public workers who claimed to have been fired or disciplined because of politics have led to consent decrees in which the city, county and other agencies agreed to ban patronage.
Under those decrees, commonly referred to as Shakman decisions after a lawyer involved in the cases, it became illegal to hire, fire or discipline workers based on their political ties–though the rules are easy to evade and often are.
On the city payroll, for example, all but a fraction of the 40,000 workers are now covered by civil service rules dictating procedures for their hiring or discipline. The decree exempts fewer than 1,000 slots from civil service under the theory that administrators need more flexibility in picking top managers and their immediate aides, including secretaries.
But nepotism remains embedded in the DNA of local government. “It’s illegal to say, `Hire this person because they work the 23rd Precinct,’ ” explained Roger Fross, one of the attorneys who won the landmark Shakman rulings. “But it’s still legal to say, `Hire him because he’s my son-in-law.’ “
And so municipal payrolls remain cluttered with relatives of the politically powerful–and not just Daley’s.
More than a decade ago, after it was revealed that several aldermen had placed their spouses on City Council committee payrolls, Ald. Bernard Stone (50th) gave a tongue-in-cheek defense, declaring he made so little “my wife has to take a job.” Over the last three years alone, six members of the family of North Side political operative Richard Bradley, a state lawmaker, have held at least 11 different government jobs, a recent Tribune investigation showed.
The current Mayor Daley has been known to dangle jobs as bait to gain political leverage. “He gets an alderman’s kid a menial job and the kid works his way up the department and Daley gets control,” explained one ward committeeman, who did not want his name revealed. “The alderman is not going to cross him.”
All in the family
Thanks to marriages over the decades, the Daley diaspora now takes in a plethora of surnames unfamiliar to even the most politically savvy–Kilroe, Butler, Mintle, Gyrion, Aukstik, Houlihan, Ginsburg, La Pointe and Grapsas, to name but a few.
And as such, the number of Daley relatives on public payrolls who are actually named Daley is far outnumbered by those who aren’t.
Christopher Butler, the son of Daley’s first cousin Daniel Butler, was hired as an electrical mechanic for the Department of Streets and Sanitation just three months after Daley became mayor. Less than a year later, his brother, Thomas, was hired by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, where he now works as a pipe-fitter foreman and is paid more than $67,000 a year.
Karen Zboril, another first cousin of the mayor’s, was hired on Feb. 6, 1996, as a staff assistant in the Department on Aging. City work records show Zboril was hired as an “exempt” employee under the Shakman decree, making her part of that small sliver of city workers whose hiring bypassed civil service rules.
Until recently, Karen Zboril’s husband also worked for the city.
Most relatives of the mayor with government jobs are discrete and rarely mention their pedigrees to co-workers, the ward committeeman explained. Still, he said, such connections are inevitably whispered about, lending a special aura around the office to Daley kin.
“I don’t know if they have Daley’s ear,” he said. “But there is a perception that they do.”
The mayor’s brothers and their in-laws have also been successful in public life.
More than two decades ago, William Daley started out in the insurance business with his brother John, but then went on to become a partner in a Loop law firm, a bank president and then President Clinton’s point man in the drive to win approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Two years ago, William Daley was named commerce secretary. His son also landed federal work in Washington with the office of the U.S. trade representative, but has since left that position.
William Daley married Loretta Aukstik, whose brother, William, became a lawyer for the Cook County Sheriff’s Department and Circuit Court clerk. Four months after Richard M. Daley was first elected mayor, William Aukstik became his deputy aviation commissioner. Two years later, Aukstik was appointed a Circuit Court judge.
John Daley still runs the insurance business, but he also served a stint as a member of the Illinois Senate before leaving in 1992 to take a seat on the County Board.
In 1975, when his father was still mayor, John Daley married Mary Lou Briatta. She was the daughter of reputed crime syndicate gambler Louis Briatta, who for years drew a city paycheck as a paving gang foreman despite published reports that he rarely showed up for work.
After the marriage, Louis Briatta, who died in 1996 at age 87, went to work for the Circuit Court as a clerk, as did his wife. Their son Cosmo was hired at age 19 as a city cement mixer the same year his sister married John Daley. The following year, another son, John, became a city asphalt worker.
Both Briatta brothers now hold management positions in the administration of John Daley’s brother Richard M. Daley. In 1992, another of the Briatta brothers was hired as a stationary fireman in the Aviation Department.
Greening of government
But does a family tie automatically mean that clout was involved?
G. Patrick Green, the official with the Transportation Department, says no. Green, who has spent nearly four decades in various capacities with the city, said neither Mayor Daley–his powerful uncle or his powerful cousin–ever interceded for him.
After a stint in the Army, Green was hired in 1960 as a cashier for the Chicago Skyway. He later passed a civil service exam to become an accountant at the Board of Health and then became assistant to the head of the Chicago Public Library.
Green said he never spoke to Richard J. Daley during the years he was mayor. “He was a busy man,” said Green, now 60. “We never got together. I knew him as an uncle when I was younger, but that’s all.”
The Greens, related to the mayor through two different aunts on his mother’s side of the family, provide a vivid example of how one wing of the Daley family has branched into a variety of government jobs.
The wife of G. Patrick Green is an administrator in the General Services Department, in charge of coordinating the use of sophisticated new fiber-optic communication cables now being installed beneath city streets.
Richard Green, a brother of G. Patrick Green, was a Building Department plumbing inspector when his cousin became mayor.
Today, Richard Green is a general superintendent of the water distribution bureau, which maintains buried water mains and pipes and is staffed by an army of more than 900 workers.
Another Daley cousin, Robert J. Green, is an assistant superintendent of water distribution. City records show that he was a Water Department caulker when the current mayor came to power.
City records show that Richard Green was awarded his supervisory post in February 1992, when the water commissioner was Samuel W. Hurley, a holdover from the administration of the late Mayor Harold Washington.
Hurley, who was bounced from the Daley administration in a management reshuffle later that year, said he knew Richard Green but didn’t recall his promotion. But he said most bureau heads and deputies were political operatives chosen by Daley. They served “at the pleasure of the mayor,” Hurley recalled.
Sometimes, when the department did suggest a person to be hired or promoted, the mayor’s office would come up with a different choice, Hurley said.
“I tried my best to keep the department non-political, but it couldn’t be avoided,” Hurley said.
Neither Richard nor Robert Green responded to interview requests. But payroll records show that their respective families could commute to city jobs by carpool.
Richard Green’s wife holds a $63,749-a-year administrative post with the county assessor’s office, while Robert Green’s spouse works for the city Aviation Department. Both have children with city jobs. Payroll records show that one son of Richard Green makes $23.35 per hour as a laborer for the Water Department, where he was hired in 1993. His boss? His father, Richard Green.
Robert Green’s sister was a stenographer hired by her cousin Richard M. Daley when he ran the state’s attorney’s office. Another sister is the mother of three boys who hold city jobs. One runs the garage at the Water Department.
Meanwhile, Thomas Green, another brother of Richard and G. Patrick Green, is a Park District administrator. A fourth brother, Charles Green, was a Chicago police sergeant for four decades before retiring recently. His wife is a crossing guard for the Police Department, while a son–hired less than a year after Richard M. Daley became mayor–works as a laborer for the Department of Sewers.
In his inaugural address in 1989, Richard M. Daley declared he would be no carbon copy of his father as mayor. “You don’t hand down policies from generation to generation,” Daley said, “but you do hand down values.”
And jobs.
