When he stepped down as commissioner of the city’s notoriously corrupt Buildings Department in the mid-1990s, Daniel W. Weil was asked how the agency had managed to avoid scandal during his tenure.
The longtime political insider, who counted Mayor Richard Daley and at least one former governor among his allies, claimed some credit before making an admission that could only come from an intimate acquaintance of Chicago government.
“I was lucky,” he said.
Mr. Weil’s life was full of luck, friends and family said, but more importantly, was shaped by the lifelong Chicagoan’s ability to make friends and seize opportunity.
Born into a financially comfortable Hyde Park family, Mr. Weil had a career that included turns as a prosecutor in the Cook County state’s attorney’s office and U.S. Department of Justice; an aide to former Gov. James Thompson; and a Cook County jail warden. He counted among his friends actresses Liza Minnelli and Kathleen Turner and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick.
Many of the friendships were launched from chance or unorthodox encounters. For instance, Mr. Weil befriended Turner after meeting her husband on a flight, said his sister Mary Weil Ilic.
“They started chatting, and the rest was history,” she said. “I was always in awe of his life, but it never surprised me. His zest for life, you couldn’t fill it, or his love of humanity.”
One of the city’s most in-demand socialites, Mr. Weil, 65, died Tuesday, May 30, at his home on the Near North Side. Autopsy results are pending toxicological results, a spokesman for the Cook County medical examiner’s office said.
Mr.Weil was the middle of three siblings. His mother was a homemaker and his father was president of Royal Crown Bottling Co. of Chicago. He graduated from Hyde Park High School, the University of Wisconsin and Northwestern University Law School.
As a boy, Mr. Weil developed a lifelong curiosity that staved off boredom for the rest of his life, his sister said. He was well-known among his friends as an avid memorabilia collector, particularly items involving President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
“One of the more painful things I’ve had to do is go through every piece of memorabilia in this three-story house of his and hear the story behind every piece,” said friend and former colleague Dan Webb. “And after every story I’d say, `Can we go eat now?'”
A beloved uncle to five nieces and nephews, Mr. Weil never married or had children, in part, because of his own contentment, his sister said.
“I don’t know if he ever had the need to have a permanent partner in life,” she said. “He loved other people. But he liked his alone time also.”
Without a family of his own, Mr. Weil was able to plunge himself into work. After landing at the Cook County state’s attorney’s office out of law school, he was picked by Sheriff Joseph Woods to be warden of the Cook County House of Corrections, the county’s second largest penal institution.
Mr. Weil was portrayed in a 1972 Tribune article as well-liked among inmates, many of whom knew him by first name. He called his relationship with the prisoners “a kind of insurance policy against riots.”
By the mid-1970s, Mr. Weil went to the U.S. attorney’s office, where he made several lifelong friends among the young prosecutors who worked under then-future (and now former) Gov. James Thompson. Every Christmas for close to 30 years, he would bring gifts to the homes of many of those friends, usually winding up at the home of former colleague Webb.
“Then we would stay up until 5 or 6 in the morning talking politics and public issues, drinking more scotch than men should drink and he would never run out of opinions,” Webb said.
Mr. Weil’s opinions continued as Webb defended former Gov.George Ryan during his recent six-month trial.
“He was constantly trying to give me advice,” Webb said. “He insisted once a week on letting me know everything I was doing wrong. Most it was done in a jocular way.”
In the early 1990s, Mr. Weil was picked by Daley to head the city’s Buildings Department, a job he held for four years.
Among his efforts was getting crane operators licensed. When a crane dropped a bucket of more than two tons of concrete 30 floors onto a passing cab, killing the driver, Mr. Weil learned that Chicago was one of the few major American cities without licensing for people who operate such machinery.
He joked that working in the Buildings Department was more difficult than working in the prison.
“At the jail, you knew which side of the line the good guys and the bad guys were on,” he said.
Mr. Weil is also survived by a brother, Frederick.
Services will be held at 10 a.m. Sunday in Congregation KAM Isaiah Israel, 1100 E. Hyde Park Blvd., Chicago.
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jbnoel@tribune.com
