So it turns out that politically connected contractor James Duff pleaded guilty Monday to fraudulently getting $100 million in city contracts by portraying his companies as being owned by minorities and women–and still continued to rake in city money.
The Daley administration moved to cancel a winter salt contract Wednesday after it learned from news reports that a Duff-owned firm had a piece of the deal.
This of course was outrageous, preposterous–shocking, even–to the mayor. We know this because he suddenly launched into the second person. “You’re very upset,” he told reporters Wednesday at the Daley Denial Conference.
Until Mayor Richard Daley cut off its $4.9 million road salt contract, a Kansas City salt supplier had been paying the Duffs to handle things on the Chicago end. The Duff company, Curtis Storage and Trucking, would dispatch trucks to move the salt to wherever it was needed once it arrived by rail cars in Chicago.
By city ordinance, that supplier, Hutchinson Salt Co., should have revealed who it subcontracted work to, but officials there claimed the forms were too complicated. Apparently they get very complicated when you’re dealing with someone who supposedly has been declared persona non grata at City Hall.
City officials professed to be shocked and appalled at this, but innocent. They said they couldn’t have known this deal with Duff was going on because Hutchinson didn’t tell them.
But, in fact, the city has known for years the Duffs were in on salt contracts.
A city official talked about it at length in 1999 with Tribune investigative reporter Ray Gibson, who along with Laurie Cohen and Andrew Martin, broke the Duff story that year, which prompted a federal grand jury investigation and charges against several family members.
Gibson has three pages of detailed notes from an interview he conducted with former Streets and Sanitation spokesman Terry Levin, in which Levin spoke in detail about how Hutchinson Salt came to hire the Duff-owned company, Curtis.
So when the city’s deputy procurement officer, Phil Cobb, remarked Wednesday that since 1999 the city has “made it absolutely clear that it had no interest in doing business with any Duff-related companies,” it rang hollow.
Everybody suddenly forgot about the Duff-owned trucking firm mere months after the Tribune story broke in 1999?
Daley is a mayor who takes personal note of small things, such as flowers and trees and potholes. It’s hard to believe all matters related to the Holy Grail of Chicago elections–snow removal–aren’t kept under special high-powered microscopes up there in City Hall’s 5th-floor offices.
