The Ambassador East on the Gold Coast along North State Parkway was Swank Chicago. You might run into celebrity guests downstairs in the hotel’s lobby or in the deluxe dining spot The Pump Room. So what if they were B-Listers like Charo, or Joey Bishop? A stone’s throw away was Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. A few blocks up State Parkway at Lincoln Park was the palatial red brick home of the Cardinal of the Archdiocese of Chicago, built in 1885.
The Pump Room was the kind of place where cheesy items were hatched for the daily newspaper gossip columns. Hold the presses: so-and-so and so-and-so-seen last night “at the Pump Room canoodling over truffle gnocchi, chateaubriand, and Armagnac.”
At the Ambassador East you might not have been been confounded to see an Irish politician from Bridgeport. But probably not one found dead in his rented room with drugs on the bedside table. Yet this was how the one-time Golden Boy of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley was discovered. Fewer than two weeks before Christmas, 1974.
Matthew Danaher, Jr. had started out as Daley’s driver. When Daley was the first Revenue Director of Illinois from 1949 to 1950 he brought his Bridgeport childhood pal Matt Danaher to join his staff in Springfield. Their dads too had been Bridgeport buddies. Danaher was 23 years old.
Danaher followed Daley to his new job as Cook County Clerk. After Daley became Chicago Mayor in 1955, Danaher was his patronage chief for nine years. He became 11th Ward Alderman in 1964, serving Bridgeport.
Soon Danaher was City Council President pro-tem, running council meetings reliably to form whenever Daley stepped away or was absent. Then Danaher became Clerk of the Cook County Circuit Court in 1968. A patronage post appointed by Daley, who smartly had also become Cook County Democratic Party Chairman. Danaher earned laurels for automating court records.
But it appeared Matt Danaher may have gotten bent, too. He’d been set to face trial just a few short months after he apparently took his own life. He’d been charged by federal prosecutors with conspiracy to defraud, tax evasion, and making false statements to the federal government.
The feds alleged that from 1961 to 1969, a time when he served as a top Daley staffer and then as alderman, Danaher and two cohorts used a dummy firm to take bribes disguised as commissions from home sales at a development on Chicago’s South Side. The total alleged to have been siphoned was $400,000.
Danaher had also reportedly been distraught at a pending divorce. As a devout Catholic it hit him especially hard. He and Daley had vacationed together in Florida with their wives but had fallen out over Danaher’s looming break-up with his wife and his drinking with younger politicians.
Danaher was an exemplar of a durable archetype: the Daley political pal gone bad. Through two generations of Daleys running Chicago there would be quite a parade of them. It would include Danaher’s immediate successor.
Feed Me Stone Crab, And I’m Yours
Morgan M. Finley lived on the same Bridgeport block as Richard J. Daley. On South Lowe Street. As a kid he was a Daley gofer, earning spare change. He rose through the Bridgeport 11th ward political hierarchy one step at a time.
By the time of Danaher’s sad demise he was the logical choice by Daley to fill that same post of Cook County Circuit Court Clerk. He held it from 1974 to 1988. And finally Morgan M. Finley played to type.
Dining on stone crab in a luxurious Lake Point Tower condo, he was captured on audio tape accepting a big payoff from what appeared to be a company trying to win a contract for Chicago parking fee collection services. The same federal sting ensnared a number of aldermen as well. In 1989 Finley was convicted and sentenced to ten years for charges including racketeering and attempted extortion.
In Chicago this sort of thing passed for benign corruption. That’s why it persists to this day. The city’s troubles mount to a breaking point, but still these mooks in charge are more concerned with stuffing their pockets.
The malignancy of Chicago’s political corruption tends to become evident only over time.
But it could also manifest in a sudden and deadly manner.
One Day Her Life Was Forever Changed. And Then Ended.
For Earceen Alexander, it was just another day on the job for the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation. May, 2003. Riding the garbage truck, hopping off, loading and dumping, hopping back on. It was good work. Good pay. Plenty of exercise. She was in good shape.
Alexander was in an alley. And then all of a sudden she found herself pinned hard by the garbage truck against a telephone pole. A state arbitrator later ruled that because of the driver’s accident Alexander suffered “devastating permanent traumatic injuries.” She died in 2008 of heart failure.
Her daughter said Alexander had been healthy before the brutal mishap. Afterward, confined to a wheelchair and relying on an oxygen tank, her condition worsened greatly. Of the city garbage truck driver who’d pinned her to the pole, Alexander’s daughter said, “My feeling is that woman had no business driving a truck. How she got hired, it was illegal.”
That was in fact true. But there had been ways approved at the highest levels of Chicago city government to circumvent the law.
And so at the wheel of the garbage truck operated under the supervision of the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation when Earceen Alexander’s life was forever changed and then ended, was a rookie driver connected to the Hispanic Democratic Organization, or HDO. It was an important political operation engineered by City Hall insiders during the reign of Mayor Richard M. Daley. Son of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley.
The city hire responsible for Earceen Alexander’s “devastating permanent traumatic injuries,” which hastened her death, had no prior truck driving experience.
But her application for the job had been pre-selected as a winner, according to the Streets and San Department’s then-director of personnel Jack Drumgold. A Tenth Ward political operative named Al Sanchez had helped form HDO. He’d also risen to the top post of Commissioner at Streets and San.
In 2003 the job interview scoring form for the HDO-affiliated garbage truck driver with no truck driving experience had not been filled out by the interviewer. It was to be marked up later. This was at the direction of Sanchez, Drumgold testified in federal court. And when this unqualified job applicant’s interview scoring form was filled out, it was all aces.
Earceen Alexander would pay the price when that driver pinned her against the telephone pole with a garbage truck and disabled her for life. A life which then ended not long afterward.
For fixing the results of city hiring decisions to award jobs to HDO members, Sanchez would in 2011 be sentenced to two-and-half- years in prison. After the sentencing his attorney was asked, how far up the City Hall food chain did the scheme really go? “That’s the elephant in the room,” Sanchez’ attorney answered. Sanchez said he believed it went to Daley.
Daley by that year had finally decided not to run for another term as mayor. He’d outlasted his father in the office by one year and a lot of stuff had piled up. As always, there was no smoking gun implicating Daley. He was always buffered.
HDO had disbanded by 2008, the stench of a widespread city hiring scam just too great.
HDO was just one arm of a bigger beast. It turned out the point man for bogus hiring was Robert Sorich, Mayor Richard M. Daley’s Director of Intergovernmental Affairs. He was from – wait for it – Bridgeport.
Robert Sorich’s father had been the official photographer for Mayor Richard J. Daley. Before ascending to patronage chief for Daley II, Sorich Jr. was a personal driver and secretary for another son of Richard J. Daley, John. This Daley son served as Bridgeport’s Democratic ward organization chief and sold insurance.
As Daley Sr. had said: “Never take a penny. Just give them your insurance card.” If you were a Chicago politician, it was good to have a professional services practice. Client payments weren’t political contributions. Not that anyone could ever prove.
“A Pervasive Fraud For a Long Period Of Time”
When Sorich was sentenced in 2006 to forty-six months in federal prison for mail fraud, he’d been revealed by prosecutors as the top overseer of a ten-year rigged hiring scheme in Chicago City Hall under Daley II to circumvent civil service protections and direct to political foot soldiers unearned city jobs, promotions, and generous overtime pay.
As evident in the prosecution of Al Sanchez, to ensure political payback with city jobs there were pre-picked job winners, sham interviews and falsified forms. Some of the beneficiaries who did the required campaign work to win city employment and promotions called the process “getting made.”
And when the so-called “blessed list” of recommended hires or transfers was handed down from on high to a department head or personnel chief, they did what was suggested. There was even a color-coded spreadsheet seized in evidence, detailing the names of some of the lucky job winners, and their affiliations with political organizations or labor union sponsors.
“It was a pervasive fraud for a long period of time,” said U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald.
Today in September 2021 as I write this, there are three Chicago aldermen under federal indictment. And one more who was levered into wearing a wire in return for a deferred prosecution agreement.
Experts say only about one in ten bureaucratic crimes are detected. So let’s see. With 50 aldermen….Nah. Thirty of them couldn’t be bent. Right? But there’s more going on than meets the eye. And then: the state legislature, county government, suburban governments, Congress, City Colleges. That’s another book. The rot runs far and wide.
If federal prosecutors are to be believed – and past verdicts indicate that they are, rather often – Chicago aldermen and their aides can be had any manner of ways.
Such as, lately, with Viagra and a date with a very special masseuse. The weekend use of a luxury farm. Loans made but paid back very, very slowly, partially, or not at all. A promise of business directed to an alderman’s law firm. Granite countertops, kitchen cabinets and a fancy sump pump. A new installed humidifier, and partial costs of new residential HVAC system.
This Is How a City Dies
Meanwhile, the schools fail. No, don’t look at the phonied-up graduation rate. Small fractions of Black and Latino students clear the bar on key performance measures like the SAT, or “The Nation’s Report Card,” the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). No better than a third or a quarter, sometimes just one-fifth, or even less than that. It’s scandalous. So then, the tests need to be labelled “racist.”
Or they try out this nice line. Nothing to see here: we’re running even compared to Cleveland and Milwaukee, and Detroit and St. Louis. So how bad could things be? And, we’re up maybe eight or 10 or 17 percentage points from student proficiency – running, yes, in the single-digits – a few short decades ago.
The schools fail. The courts fail. The streets are a hunting ground. It’s been that way on the South and West Sides forever. Now finally White Chicago is getting nervous. Pedestrians, motorists and transit passengers take their lives in their hands each time they venture out, as carjackers, expressway shooters, and armed robbery crews increasingly run the streets.
Police whom the Mayor’s Chief ought to dispatch on regular foot patrols through high-crime neighborhoods, stay largely in their cars. Riding from one 911 call to the next. Putting those yellow markers next to the bodies.
A greater police presence in Chicago on the pavement would trigger protests of “over-policing” and “systemic racism.” Cops tell me they wouldn’t feel safe unless they were in very large foot patrol squads.
Meanwhile the inside game persists, as it always has.
At least these guys aren’t killing anybody, we mutter.
Except, they are.
Killing us softly with their song.