More than 30 years after lawyer Michael Shakman successfully sued the city of Chicago to stop its rampant political hiring and firing, he expressed frustration that his lawsuit and a subsequent federal ban on patronage hiring essentially were ignored until this week, when federal criminal charges were announced.
“I’m frankly disappointed that people have been conniving to get around it the way the city apparently has been doing in recent years,” Shakman said. “It’s bad that you have to have federal prosecutions to persuade the city to honor an agreement that was made and designed years ago.”
The growing hiring scandal at City Hall led to Tuesday’s departure of John Doerrer, head of Mayor Richard Daley’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.
On Monday, the U.S. attorney’s office filed federal mail fraud charges against Robert Sorich, a deputy in IGA, and Patrick Slattery, director of staff services in the Department of Streets and Sanitation.
The men, both 42 and from the Bridgeport neighborhood in the Daley family’s 11th Ward political power base, were charged with helping to push politically connected candidates into city jobs, a violation of the 1983 federal consent decree that bears Shakman’s name.
Daley denied knowledge and called the allegations “sad.”
Shakman said he was disappointed in Daley because of “his unwillingness to accept responsibility in any way, shape or form.”
“It’s always somebody else or a few bad apples,” Shakman said. “You never hear the Harry Truman idea from this mayor that the buck stops here.”
While the 1969 suit and later consent decree limiting City Hall clout still strongly reverberate in the city, Shakman, now 62 and a partner at Miller Shakman & Hamilton LLP, seems far removed from the tumult of the case. Despite his comments and his last name, he is no more involved than the average Chicago resident.
He works in commercial litigation. His slight body and quiet manner underscore self-control born in law school and honed as an amateur glider pilot.
The last thing he appears to be, said longtime friend C. Richard Johnson, is a troublemaker.
“But his whole life is contrary to that,” Johnson added. “He’s tough as nails.”
Shakman, Johnson and Roger Fross–who all had been University of Chicago Law School classmates–worked together on Shakman’s bid as a political independent seeking election to the group that would rewrite the Illinois Constitution in 1970.
Faced with hardball patronage politics, all three suspected Shakman would lose. Shakman lost by 500 votes of 40,000 ballots cast. In the district where he was running, there were more than 500 city workers who owed their jobs to the political machine whose candidates Shakman was running against.
If they had just voted the way they were told, reasoned Shakman, it would have been enough to defeat him. But the patronage workers were also on the street pushing their employers’ candidates.
It was beyond immoral, he decided. It was probably illegal.
Huddled together after his loss in 1969, Shakman and his two friends talked strategy. Johnson said they ought to file a lawsuit. Shakman agreed. Fross was quick to help.
Shakman was a product of the idealistic, independent politics that swept the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Though Shakman went to the U. of C. thinking he wanted to become a professor, when he graduated in 1962, he was interested in political science. While pursuing a master’s degree in political science, he became fascinated with constitutional law. He graduated with honors from the U. of C. law school in 1966 and was managing editor of the school’s Law Review.
Law, said Shakman, gives you “tools for addressing how government should work and how relationships between individuals should work–what the rules were for almost anything you can imagine.”
In school, classmates said, he blended in–until he started talking. Outside of class, he supported political candidates such as Abner Mikva, the former congressman and federal judge. In class, his arguments were eloquent and well conceived. He spoke the same way he wrote.
“What stood out was his intellect, oral articulation and interest in pursuing things he believed in,” said Johnson, who joined Shakman’s political discourses at cocktail parties on the periphery of the law school.
After school, Shakman clerked for Illinois Supreme Court Justice Walter Schaefer, a colleague of former presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson and considered by many lawyers to be one of the era’s best state high court justices. A year later, he joined the law firm that became Miller Shakman & Hamilton.
Rarely entering the public eye outside of negotiating and revisiting the consent decree bearing his name, Shakman nonetheless has handled several high-profile cases.
He was attorney for the Habitat Co., the court-appointed overseer of replacement housing for Chicago Housing Authority tenants in the late 1990s. In 1996, he was an attorney for the Illinois Department of Transportation under former Gov. Jim Edgar as Edgar fought to keep Meigs Field open, even though he also decried Edgar’s efforts to restore political hiring in Illinois.
Shakman and his wife, Melissa, live in Hyde Park, in a restored 1870s farmhouse.
Shakman said he is surprised that the Shakman decree is still in the news 36 years after shared frustration with former law school classmates led to the lawsuit challenging how Illinois politics worked.
But “somebody had to do this so that it gets done,” he said, “and I’m glad to have a role in it.”
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jjanega@tribune.com
