By David Freddoso
National Review Online
http://www.nationalreview.com
September 10, 2008, 6:00 a.m.
Democratic Illinois Sen. Barack Obama speaks after endorsing Richard Daley, right, for a sixth term as Chicago mayor in this Jan. 22, 2007, file photo in Chicago. Obama praised Daley saying, "I don't think there's a city in America that has blossomed as much over the last couple of decades than Chicago, and a lot of that has to do with our mayor."In 2003, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s son Patrick and nephew Robert Vanecko became original investors in Municipal Sewer Services, a sewer cleaning and inspection company which had bought out a bankrupt firm. The company quickly had the old firm’s contracts with the city of Chicago extended without competitive bidding, at a value of $3 million to the company.
MSS did not disclose the Daley family members as investors in its official filings, as required by city ordinance, and it remains unclear how much money Daley’s family members made when they cashed out of the firm in late 2004. MSS would go on to acquire other city contracts and receive $7.9 million from Chicago before Tim Novak of the Chicago Sun-Times reported the conflict of interest late last year. The company was forced to walk away from a live contract and close its doors earlier this year.
On Friday, that same sewer contract was awarded to another company on a non-“friends and family” basis. It was one more story of dirty Chicago politics that went unnoticed in the national media.
This story of Patrick Daley feeding from the trough — or more properly, from the sewer — exemplifies the sweetheart deals that are typical of the political environment in which Senator Barack Obama rose. It rounds out the story of how each member of the family of Obama’s Illinois Senate mentor, Emil Jones, somehow manages to make big money from government salaries and contracts. It may evoke memories of the illegal pension-fund manipulation that landed Obama’s fundraiser, Tony Rezko, in federal prison — or of the millions in corporate welfare that Obama, as a state senator, showered upon Rezko and his other major donors in Chicago’s slum development business.
But Friday’s story also serves as a reminder of what sort of governance Obama has willingly and knowingly backed with his good name. Despite his personal popularity, and the resulting capacity he had for political independence — despite having many opportunities to change Chicago in a positive way — Obama always chose to back a corrupt status quo. This amazingly unexplored part of Obama’s career falsifies the media image he has paid millions of dollars to project, as an agent of positive change.
In January 2007, when Barack Obama endorsed Mayor Daley for re-election, City Hall was still reeling from two major corruption scandals and a handful of minor ones, which had resulted in indictments, convictions, and further investigations throughout 2005 and 2006. One of these was the Hired Truck Scandal.
Chicago was paying $40 million annually to trucking companies for their services, but a reporter for the Sun-Times noticed that many of these hired trucks would stand idly for days on end. The subsequent news stories and federal investigation found that contracts went to companies owned by family members of top city officials and to those who were either paying bribes or donating to politicians — most of them gave money to Daley’s campaign or to his political machine organizations. Five of the trucking firms let into the program, including its largest beneficiary, had bought their automobile insurance through the mayor’s brother, Cook County Commissioner John Daley.
John Daley’s brother-in-law, John Briatta, was one of the small players found guilty of collecting bribes. The ringleader of the operation was Mayor Daley’s appointee as First Deputy Water Commissioner, Donald Tomczak, a chief in one of Daley’s most loyal ward organizations. Tomczak pleaded guilty to racketeering and tax fraud.
Mark Gyrion, the mayor’s cousin, was also a top official in the city Water Department. He signed the papers to sell off a city dump truck for scrap to a dealer, who in turn sold it to Gyrion’s mother-in-law, who in turn made $1 million in the truck program, leasing the “scrap” truck back to the city.
Angelo Torres was a former gang member who had been placing boots on cars for the city in 1996, but by 1998 he was running the entire Hired Truck Program. Torres’s career might have taken off because he was a member of the “Hispanic Democratic Organization,” a then-powerful part of Daley’s political machine (known in Chicago as the “Hispanic Daley Organization”). Torres, who also pleaded guilty to shaking down the trucking firms, cut his father-in-law’s truck company into the program.
One of the more colorful bribe-takers in the Hired Truck Scandal was John “Quarters” Boyle. He earned his nickname in 1992 by embezzling $4 million in coins from Chicago-area toll booths — the Chicago version of “change we can believe in.” Fresh out of prison for that crime, Boyle joined and thrived in one of Daley’s political machine organizations, ironically named the “Coalition for Better Government.” Somehow, he was hired as a $33-an-hour engineer for Chicago’s Department of Transportation, from which position he and a colleague shook down the trucking contractors for $200,000.
One would be hard-pressed to find any licit aspect within the mayor’s truck program. City workers were even stealing the asphalt that these trucks carried to city projects, bribing the contracted drivers to divert it to other sites. Think of that the next time you hit a pothole on the Dan Ryan Expressway.
Even the scandals of 2005 offered an opportunity for new political favors. The Sun-Times reported that between early 2006 and mid-2007, Daley’s administration paid out $13 million in taxpayer funds to politically connected law firms in order to defend itself in the Hired Truck, City Hall patronage, and other corruption probes. Mayor Daley has not been charged with any crime. But if he knew nothing, it is rather amazing that his friends and family are stealing Chicago from under his nose, brick by brick.
Barack Obama, Chicago’s reformer, was so shaken by all of this corruption that he called for Mayor Daley to step down immediately.
Just kidding — he didn’t do anything like that. But in August 2005, at the very height of the scandals, Obama nearly said something mildly critical of the mayor. A Sun-Times reporter asked whether he would endorse Daley for re-election, and Obama replied, “What’s happened — some of the reports I’ve seen in your newspaper, I think, give me huge pause.” But Obama must have thought he’d been too harsh with that statement. Just one hour later, he called that reporter back, to “clarify” his comments:
Obama said the mayor was “obviously going through a rough patch right now.” But he also said Chicago has “never looked better” and that “significant progress has been made on a variety of fronts.” The senator said then it was “way premature” to talk about endorsements because the mayor had not yet announced his candidacy.
In January 2007, when Obama finally endorsed Daley for re-election, a reporter asked how his “concerns” from 2005 had figured into his endorsement. Again, Obama hedged: “There is no doubt that there remains progress to be made. . . . But ultimately you want to look at the whole record of this administration. . . . The city overall has moved in a positive direction.”
Ryan Lizza, then of The New Republic, quoted an Obama ally who framed the situation in the most sympathetic light possible:
That’s part of [Obama’s] political savvy. . . . He recognizes that Daley is a powerful man and to have him as an ally is important. While he was a state senator here and moving around in Chicago, he made sure to minimize the direct confrontational approach to people of influence and policymakers and civic leaders. These are the same people now who are very aggressively supporting his campaign.
The idea is that deep down, Obama is a reformer — he’s just undercover for now. He can advance and then show his true colors later, after getting the critical support of Daley and Chicago’s crooked politicians.
Here’s another way of putting it: If Barack Obama is a reformer, he may be the first one ever to become President of the United States without having done anything serious or difficult in the name of reform.
— David Freddoso is a staff reporter for National Review Online and author of the newly released The Case Against Barack Obama.
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