Former Ald. Ambrosio Medrano lasted five years on the infamously corrupt Chicago City Council before going to prison for taking bribes.
But he made one thing clear about his circumstances: He was not going to snitch on anyone — least of all his council colleagues.
“I grew up in a neighborhood where people respect certain things, and one of the things that they respect is that, if you get in trouble, you don’t squeal,” Medrano said upon his guilty plea in Operation Silver Shovel, a far-reaching federal probe in the mid-1990s. “You take it like a man.”
More than two decades later, his successor as 25th Ward alderman, Danny Solis, also found himself on the wrong side of federal law enforcement, ensnared in a sordid mix of city business, campaign contributions, bribery, sex, prostitutes and Viagra pills Solis referred to as “blue medicine.”
But unlike Medrano, Solis agreed to become a government mole to avoid prison time, wearing a wire to assist corruption investigations into a pair of powerful Chicago Democrats: former Ald. Edward Burke, found guilty in December of racketeering, bribery and attempted extortion, and longtime Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, who prosecutors say ran his political and government offices like a criminal enterprise. Madigan has denied wrongdoing.
The tale of the two 25th Ward aldermen illustrates how intractable graft is in Chicago’s City Council, a legislative body always competing for the title of most corrupt in America. But the reaction to Solis’ cooperation with the feds is even more telling, showing how the moral compass of the council is so broken that many members seem to prioritize loyalty over integrity.
His fellow aldermen might have applauded Solis for helping clean up government. Instead, they shunned him as a turncoat.
“What is the world coming to?” said an incredulous George Cardenas, then a fellow alderman who has since moved into an elected post in Cook County government.
Ald. Carrie Austin, who was later indicted in her own corruption case, said she wanted to cry over the revelations. “You don’t do that,” Austin said. “You just don’t.”
Asked recently about Solis wearing a wire, former Ald. William Beavers — an ex-cop who went to prison for tax evasion — said with disgust: “Solis is a stool pigeon.”
In the half-century since Mayor Richard J. Daley presided over Chicago’s notorious Democratic machine at the height of its power, nearly 40 aldermen from across the city have ended up behind bars.
The roll call of aldermen convicted of corruption includes a father and son charged nearly 30 years apart, the two most powerful aldermen over the last five decades and a self-styled good government champion who was known to some as the “conscience of the council.”
From 1976 through 2021, the Chicago metropolitan area saw more than 1,800 federal corruption convictions, the most in the nation, according to a 2023 University of Illinois Chicago report based on federal Department of Justice data.
Given Chicago’s strong influence over all things Illinois, from sports to the economy, it’s not surprising the city’s culture of corruption has seeped into governments across the state. The UIC study placed Illinois third for corruption convictions per capita, behind the District of Columbia and Louisiana.
Even former Democratic U.S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, who had the ear of mayors and presidents, was accused of taking kickbacks and diverting taxpayer dollars for personal use, reflecting a style rooted in old-school Chicago ward clout. He ultimately pleaded guilty to mail fraud.
The deep-seated corruption in Illinois — which the Tribune is exploring this year in the ongoing series “Culture of Corruption” — has complex causes.
But in Chicago, it comes down to two main factors: a deeply ingrained culture where the ruling attitude toward corrupt actions is “you didn’t see nothin’,” and an unwritten power-sharing agreement between the city’s mayor and the council that has neutered the usual checks and balances on government actions at City Hall.
Under this system, aldermen allow the mayor to make the most important citywide decisions, and the mayor allows aldermen near-total control over matters in their own wards. That means aldermen — officially the legislative branch of city government — effectively function as mini-mayors with power over even the smallest decisions in neighborhoods, offering an opportunity for graft that has proved irresistible to many.
Any criticism of ward decisions, even for defensible reasons, is met with furious blowback. For instance, one Northwest Side alderman referred to a colleague as a “coward” for lobbying members of the Zoning Committee to favor an affordable housing project the alderman opposed.
Political tribes that emerge victorious from Chicago’s bare-knuckled election process thus enjoy the spoils of power without much interference from their colleagues or from the mayor, as long as they stay out of his or her way.
“Chicago has a government built for a king,” said the city’s inspector general, Deborah Witzburg, who has the near-impossible mission of rooting out corruption at City Hall.
“As a practical matter, the mayor’s office acts as a legislative gatekeeper,” she said, “with City Council only able to legislate with the approval or at the behest of the mayor. There are no meaningful checks, and certainly no effective balances.”
Checks and balances are only part of what needs to be addressed in a city where power politics has ruled for so long, said Dick Simpson, a retired political science professor and former North Side alderman who headed a small band of City Council reformers against the elder Daley.
“It would be nice to see us change entirely, but that’s a cultural change as well as the elimination of all forms of machine politics,” he said.
Doing that would mean bucking traditions established from the city’s first years.
Greed, graft and the rise of the machine
Chicago’s legacy of political greed is generations in the making, likely originating as early land swindlers, gamblers, merchants and miscreants settled in by the lake.
The city’s 1837 charter limited the mayor’s executive powers, giving Chicago’s early aldermen wide leeway to make important decisions — and to enrich themselves along the way. It laid the foundation for an era in which political corruption tended to be tolerated, with businessmen wantonly bribing public officials and elections tainted by rampant fraud and vote buying.
Only seven years after the city charter was established, a mayoral election in 1844 was declared invalid following claims of fraud, bribery and ineligible voters casting ballots. One allegation questioned whether election judges were “incompetent from ignorance to the discharge of their duty, or even willfully corrupt and partial,” according to a Tribune review of 19th century records from Chicago’s Common Council, the forerunner of the City Council. The city later held a new election.
A classic early scandal occurred in 1869 when, as Simpson has written, “fourteen aldermen, county commissioners and ex-aldermen were indicted for accepting bribes to rig a $128,500 contract to paint city hall” and then slapping on the building a “useless mixture of chalk and water.”
One of the city’s earliest political bosses was Michael Cassius McDonald, a gambling maven in the years after the Civil War who was party to several scandals, including controversies over bribes and sweetheart deals for his companies. The Chicago News said McDonald helped elect aldermen “who lorded it in the city council and county commissioners who stole everything in sight, and for providing contracts for public works that had thievery written between the lines.”
A particularly notorious group of aldermen that included John “Bathhouse John” Coughlin, Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna, and John “Johnny de Pow” Powers came to be known as the “gray wolves,” dividing the spoils of city government from the 1890s well into the 20th century.
The city was so wide open at the height of their turn-of-the century reign that Coughlin and Kenna presided over the incredibly popular, booze-infused annual First Ward Ball, where pimps, prostitutes, businessmen and politicians would lock arms and sashay by the thousands through the old Chicago Coliseum on South Wabash. “It’s a lollapalooza!” Kenna said of the 1908 event, held just blocks from the site of the modern-day music fest of the same name.
One of the strongest rebukes of the freewheeling council members came from the second Mayor Carter Harrison, whose father of the same name was assassinated as mayor in 1893. The younger Harrison, who led the city from 1897 to 1905 and also 1911 to 1915, once criticized aldermen as “a low-browed, dull-witted, base-minded gang of plug uglies with no outstanding characteristic beyond an unquenchable lust for money, with but a single virtue, and that not possessed by all, a certain physical courage which enabled each to dominate his individual barnyard.”
City politics have evolved over the ensuing decades, but the patterns set during these early years persist, with ward bosses exerting significant influence — and similar swagger — to this day.
Austin, a powerful ally of Mayors Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel before her 2021 indictment, once declared, according to the Chicago Reader, “You ain’t seen no gangsters like this city’s aldermen.”
She’s facing charges she corruptly shepherded a new real estate development through the City Hall approval process beginning in 2016 and was given home improvement perks from a developer seeking to influence her. Austin, who has denied wrongdoing, retired in 2023 and has contended she is too sick to face trial.
What Chicago didn’t have in the city’s early days was a classic machine headed by a powerful mayor who also served as a political boss.
Charles Merriam, a University of Chicago professor and City Council member who later became an adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt, wrote in 1929 that “Chicago has never had an effective boss of the New York or Philadelphia type, with a well-organized machine capable of holding out against public opinion for any length of time.”
Instead, Merriam added, “a series of petty feudal chieftains of spoils have wrought havoc with economy, order, justice.”
Every community in America has political organizations and community groups that advocate for issues and candidates. But when these groups start to blend personal financial interests with public money, and individuals start to look at government as a money-making enterprise to enrich their friends and family — then you have the beginnings of a machine.
New York’s Tammany Hall controlled patronage and politics for 100 years in the country’s biggest city. Tom Pendergast ruled Kansas City with an iron fist from 1925 to 1939.
Chicago did have one unquestionably notorious mayor during this period: William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson, a bombastic character with an ego as outsized as his 6-foot, 240-pound body, and the last Republican to hold the position. Goaded by repeated charges that he was on the take, Thompson sued the Tribune for libel — and lost. Al Capone helped him win his final term as mayor in 1927.
When Thompson was finally ousted for good by Democrat Anton Cermak, the Tribune concluded: “For Chicago Thompson has meant filth, corruption, obscenity, idiocy and bankruptcy. … He has given the city an international reputation for moronic buffoonery, barbaric crime, triumphant hoodlumism, unchecked graft, and a dejected citizenship. He nearly ruined the property and completely destroyed the pride of the city. He made Chicago a byword for the collapse of American civilization.”
Cermak was fatally shot in 1933 by a gunman aiming for president-elect Roosevelt. But Cermak, having harnessed patronage and an ethnic coalition to seize the mayor’s office, laid the groundwork for the team of Ald. Patrick Nash and Mayor Edward Kelly to build Chicago’s first classic Democratic political machine.
During the Great Depression, the New Deal helped keep Chicago afloat and provided jobs that the machine could dole out. The Irish duo of Nash and Kelly built an alliance with powerful Jewish Ald. Jacob Arvey of the 24th Ward, with Kelly and Arvey co-opting Republican aldermen by awarding them City Council committee chairmanships.
Arvey recruited Kelly’s successor, Martin H. Kennelly, who won two terms as mayor. But Kennelly viewed himself as a reformer, turning government jobs ripe for patronage into civil service positions. He also declared: “I don’t think it’s a function of the mayor to boss the aldermen.”
The conditions were ripe for a takeover, and Richard J. Daley — who had taken control of the Cook County Democratic Party — defeated Kennelly in a rancorous three-way primary in 1955. Daley went on to win the first of his six mayoral victories.
And Daley didn’t see the machine as a problem.
While campaigning against Kennelly, Daley ridiculed his opponent for trying to take politics out of government. The Tribune described a boisterous rally of precinct captains packed into the Civic Opera House in February 1955 where Daley declared there is “nothing wrong with politics — good politics — the type you and I are interested in.”
Daley won, of course, and for years repeatedly said: “Good politics is good government.”
‘There has to be bosses’
Daley perfected the modern Democratic machine and held state and national influence that has never been duplicated in the U.S. Yet it was Daley’s grip on local politics that set the standard for doing what political bosses do: He took care of his friends and those around him.
One member of Daley’s 11th Ward political operation based in the Bridgeport neighborhood told the Tribune recently that in the late 1950s it was common to find patronage workers operating the elevators at City Hall — even though they were automatic elevators. They worked shifts, one hour on, one hour off, throughout the day.
At one point, Daley appointed Thomas Keane Jr. to the Zoning Board of Appeals. Keane was a vice president at a big real estate firm, but he was also the son of Daley’s City Council floor leader. When the appointment raised patronage questions — particularly from Ald. Simpson, an academic by profession, Daley got angry.
“I made this appointment because I have known Tommy Keane, the boy I appointed, since he’s been a baby. And I know his mother, Adeline Keane, one of the greatest women I know, not only in this city but in any city in the United States … a fine Polish-American woman, who raised a fine boy. And should that boy be told by any professor or faker that he shouldn’t hold office because his name is Keane and she’s his mother?”
The son kept the appointment. A jury later found the father, Ald. Thomas Keane, guilty in 1974 on mail fraud and conspiracy charges tied to council votes on the city’s purchase of real estate in which he had an interest. Despite some counts being overturned, Keane became the most notable of Daley’s close political pals sent to prison.
Over time, Chicago’s machine has faced numerous setbacks. But through it all, the machine continued to exist and perpetuated a political culture of self-dealing.
“Obviously, the vaunted machine of the Richard J. Daley era doesn’t exist anymore,” Mayor Lori Lightfoot told the Tribune in a interview. “But the muscle memory of that time still, I think, is very much prevalent in and outside of government.”
One reason for that is Daley’s mentorship of countless machine politicians, two of whom remained powerful for decades until corruption allegations pushed them out of office.
Madigan, the son of a ward superintendent who worked alongside Daley in county government early in their careers, rose as a young Democratic ward committeeman under Daley and soon won a seat in the House in 1970 with Daley’s support. In 1983, Madigan became the state House speaker and held that post for all but two years until forced out by colleagues in 2021 amid a federal corruption probe. He later gave up his role as state Democratic Party chairman, a post he had held for two decades.
Over his time in office, Madigan exerted influence in Chicago as well as Springfield, living an example he learned from Daley, which Madigan summarized as: “Everywhere in life, everywhere in the world, there has to be bosses.”
The other political heavyweight who remained in power long after Daley’s death was Burke. First elected in the 1960s, Burke long chaired the council’s Finance Committee — as Keane did before him — and shepherded several mayors’ financial agendas through the City Council while doling out favors.
Burke and Madigan’s continued power for decades after Daley’s death distinguishes Chicago’s political machine from places such as New York and Kansas City.
Daley served as mayor until his death in 1976 and was replaced by a political ally who subsequently lost a bid for his own full term to Jane Byrne. The first woman elected mayor of Chicago, Byrne ran against the political machine, which she called a “cabal of evil men,” but then joined their side. She was defeated by Harold Washington, the city’s first Black mayor, who spent years in the 1980s battling Burke, Ald. Ed Vrdolyak and other aldermen aligned with the traditional machine — most of them white — in what became known as “Council Wars.”
By then, the machine had been substantially weakened. Attorney Michael Shakman sued over political hiring in the late 1960s, setting off a decadeslong process of change aimed at limiting politicians’ ability to award jobs to friends and family.
But when Daley’s son Richard M. Daley became mayor in 1989, he found a way to build a new version of the machine. High-ranking officials under the younger Daley got around patronage restrictions through sham job interviews and falsified applicant-rating forms. Top intergovernmental affairs advisers, most notably Robert Sorich, later went to prison.
Longtime Ald. Anthony Laurino, who bragged of learning politics at the knees of “Bathhouse John” and “Hinky Dink,” was indicted in December 1995 on charges he hired dozens of friends, relatives and cronies for no-work city jobs — at a cost to the taxpayers of nearly $1.5 million in pay and health benefits.
A month later, he was further accused of forcing the wife of a close friend to kick back about $77,000 — or half of her pay — from a ghost-payrolling job. Laurino’s trial was indefinitely postponed in December 1996 because of his ill health.
Daley reigned over Chicago for a record 22 years, longer than his father. During that time, the Hired Truck scandal saw the city pay millions to lease private trucks that sat idle, with trucking firms offering bribes to get city business and making contributions to Daley’s campaign fund. The resulting federal investigation ensnared Daley’s patronage chief, Sorich, as well as the city’s Streets and Sanitation boss, derailing the rise of the Daley-aligned Hispanic Democratic Organization and taking down a rigged hiring system that benefited pro-Daley workers.
His City Council floor leader, Ald. Pat Huels from Daley’s traditional 11th Ward power center in Bridgeport, resigned abruptly upon revelations he took a generous loan from a firm that he helped land major city deals.
Few in Chicago politics will talk openly about their own role in the city’s political machine or their own corrupt activities. One exception is James Laski, who wrote a book called “My Fall From Grace: City Hall to Prison Walls.” A former Chicago city clerk who previously served as an alderman on the Southwest Side and rose through the organization run by former U.S. Rep. Bill Lipinski, Laski went to prison for taking bribes.
In his book, Laski wrote the culture of Chicago’s machine “held that I should do anything necessary to acquire more money and power.”
Loyalty was amply rewarded. Laski recounted obtaining what was essentially a do-nothing job for his father on the taxpayer’s dime, an example of what he described as typical “old-time Chicago politics, in which officials were expected to take care of their organization’s family members.”
“His basic job duties were surveying the 23rd Ward and listing the various locations of any traffic signs that needed to be repaired or replaced,” Laski wrote in the book. “In reality, though, my father’s only real obligation (and this wasn’t even mandatory) was to donate to the 23rd Ward Democratic organization.”
Laski is now a registered lobbyist. When reporters visited his home, Laski said he was leaving on an errand but would speak later. He later left a voicemail saying he did not want to comment, adding, “I just don’t want to read about myself anymore.”
Former federal prosecutor Joel Bertocchi, who worked on the Silver Shovel case, said in an interview that Chicago’s machine differs from other political organizations in that political victory isn’t the only payoff.
“There’s something about Chicago where they got the notion, it wasn’t just, ‘Let’s get like-minded people elected.’ It was, ‘Let’s get elected so we can give jobs to people we know. Maybe they’ll do the job but … the soldier’s gotta get paid. That’s what they’re there for.’”
‘Unspoken agreement’
Neither of the two Daleys was ever accused of directly profiting from holding the office. Instead, they worked to pile up power.
On paper, Chicago is still a “strong council, weak mayor” form of government. But in practice, ever since the elder Daley took over in 1955, mayors have controlled the city.
In one of his first acts as mayor, the elder Daley persuaded political allies in Springfield to transfer authority for presenting the budget from the aldermen to the mayor. In exchange, Daley made a simple deal that has affected how Chicago operates ever since.
“They had this unspoken agreement that the aldermen could control what happens in their ward,” said Simpson, who served in the City Council in the 1970s.
The deal helped cement a practice known as aldermanic prerogative, which is essentially the Chicago political principle that aldermen have a veto over nearly anything that happens in their ward.
Abusing this power has been a recurring theme for aldermen who have gone to prison.
In 2009, Ald. Arenda Troutman was sentenced to prison after admitting that for several years she solicited cash from developers to back their projects in her South Side ward.
In one FBI recording, Troutman promised to smooth the way for a development but then asked, “What do I get out of it?” In another, she said, “Most aldermen, most politicians are hos.” Asked to be interviewed for this story, Troutman responded, “I think I will decline that invitation.”
Troutman followed Ald. Clifford Kelley to prison, and Ald. Willie Cochran followed Troutman, forming a trifecta of convicted aldermen from the 20th Ward.
For more than two decades, Ald. Fred Roti of the 1st Ward had a reputation as organized crime’s man in City Hall. Federal jurors found him guilty in 1993 of taking thousands of dollars in bribes to fix a civil court case and a zoning matter. During post-trial visits to City Hall, he proudly noted he was acquitted of fixing a 1981 Chinatown murder trial.
Former Ald. Wallace Davis Jr. went to prison in the 1980s after he was found guilty of accepting a $5,000 bribe from an FBI informant. He also was convicted of forcing his niece to pay $11,000 in kickbacks from her salary as his ward secretary as a condition of her keeping the job and extorting $3,000 from the owners of a restaurant in his ward.
During a interview at his West Side home, Davis said the reason so many aldermen go to prison is simple: Greed. But also: “They get into a position where they feel, ‘Hey, I can do what I want. I don’t have to give an account.’”
The culture runs so deep that sons have had a chance to follow their fathers down the path of corruption.
In 2010, West Side Ald. Isaac Carothers pleaded guilty to bribery charges and admitted more misconduct as part of his plea agreement with federal prosecutors, which noted he took $10,000 to allow carnival events in his ward to use city park facilities. He also received $40,000 in home improvements from a developer in exchange for backing the developer’s controversial project in Carothers’ ward.
His guilty plea came 27 years after his father, William Carothers, also an alderman, was sentenced to three years in prison for strikingly similar behavior — trying to extort as much as $32,500 worth of remodeling work at his ward office in exchange for granting permits for a hospital expansion.
For some, no ward matter was too small to leverage for gain.
Former Ald. Jesse Evans was convicted in the 1990s of obtaining a new tile floor in the basement of his home from a grocer seeking backing for a liquor license. Even the dean of the council, Burke, wasn’t above shaking down a businessman who needed city permits to fix up a rundown Burger King.
Aldermen can appear puzzled as to what they did wrong, even after being found guilty and serving time.
Ald. Louis Farina was convicted in 1983 of conspiring to extort $7,000 in payoffs from building contractors in exchange for help in obtaining city permits to rehabilitate an apartment building.
“I didn’t think I was breaking the law, but the law I broke,” he said after being released from prison.
One alderman, Stanley Zydlo, pleaded guilty in 1980 not to taking a bribe but to paying one to help two relatives pass a Fire Department entrance exam.
One of the most shocking Chicago corruption cases involved Lawrence “Larry” Bloom, a Hyde Park liberal who built a reputation as a champion of clean government in the 1990s and was once known as “the conscience of the council.”
Bloom became ensnared in the Silver Shovel corruption probe after he admitted taking a $4,000 bribe from an undercover FBI informant posing as a businessman to help him locate a rock-crushing operation in the 5th Ward. He also encouraged the federal mole to attribute political contributions to dead people. “The more dead, the better,” Bloom declared on a wiretap.
Standing by his front door in Hyde Park, Bloom declined to be interviewed for this story.
‘Just a unique city’
The most recent alderman to go to prison is Ricardo Muñoz, who represented Little Village for two decades and was once the youngest member of the City Council.
Muñoz pleaded guilty in 2021 to stealing money from a political fund. Among his purchases, according to court records: $169 on tickets to a Los Angeles Kings hockey game, $265 for a room at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles and another $160 spent on items at Lover’s Lane in West Dundee. He also transferred $16,000 to pay college tuition for an unidentified person, according to the indictment.
To Muñoz, Chicago isn’t any more corrupt than other places.
“It’s neither true nor fair,” he said of the perception. Muñoz said he was involved with a national elected officials organization and always heard about corruption in other towns as well. “In Chicago, you don’t see the four indicted county commissioners from Miami, Florida,” Muñoz told the Tribune.
Indeed, some other cities do have significant corruption, and sometimes it mirrors Chicago in terms of aldermen abusing their power.
For instance, a 2015 Pew report on councilmanic prerogative in Philadelphia — the equivalent of Chicago’s aldermanic prerogative — stated that the practice “played a role in the cases of all six council members convicted of wrongdoing since 1981.”
Last summer in Dallas, the inspector general there faced strong pushback for trying to make it easier to prove ethics violations by city officials. The Dallas Observer newspaper referred to the city’s “historic reputation for corruption,” which amounted to five council members going to prison in 16 years.
“Everybody believes their area is the most corrupt,” Muñoz said.
In Houston, a similar-sized city as Chicago, the aldermanic crime totals have been much smaller over the years.
Richard Murray, senior research associate at the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs, told the Tribune one difference is there is no general zoning, “so the opportunities for local politicos to intervene for or against specific land use decisions are greatly constrained.”
“The city does operate the local airport system, and one of the real plums mayor/council hands out are the very valuable concessions at the two big airports,” Murray said in an email. “Council has to approve these when they come up, but given the great power of the mayor … the CEO usually gets his/her way.”
The political cultures in New York and Chicago are different in a variety of ways, including that city government in Chicago is much more of a focal point for average people than it is in New York, said Bradley Tusk, a political strategist well-versed in government and politics in both cities.
Tusk, who served as deputy governor for Illinois Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich and ran former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s successful 2009 campaign for a third term, noted New York also has seen its share of scandals. But Tusk — who testified against Blagojevich at the governor’s corruption trial and was not accused of wrongdoing — told the Tribune the “Daley patronage machine” helped create an underlying culture that “government is there to benefit the insiders and it exists for people to get patronage jobs and contracts and grants.”
Tusk recalled being shocked by the “level of expectation and pressure” to take advantage of the system when he got to Illinois, saying people seeking jobs in state government would say: “I just want a hundred-thousand-dollar job and a car and a phone, and I don’t care what I’m doing.”
A second reason is Chicago aldermen have their hands in more issues, ranging from contracts to patronage and grants, that give them more opportunities to get in trouble, Tusk said.
“In a lot of ways, because of the aldermanic system and the ward system, the councilmen in Chicago are more powerful and more involved in those types of things, which means that the likelihood that some of them will try to abuse it is a lot higher,” Tusk said.
Beavers, an influential South Side politician who once infamously declared himself “the hog with the big nuts,” was unapologetic despite going to prison for misusing campaign funds. Beavers denies wrongdoing and has long maintained the feds prosecuted him in an unsuccessful bid to get him to wear a wire on a colleague.
Asked how Chicago differs from other cities politically — more greed? more “where’s mine?” — Beavers demurred.
“There’s not too much greed,” Beavers said. “Chicago’s just a unique city because people work together in Chicago — or they used to.”
‘Reform is here’
Ald. Mathias “Paddy” Bauler, a saloonkeeper who controlled the 43rd Ward from 1933 to 1967, delivered one of the legendary lines in Chicago politics when he crowed: “Chicago ain’t ready for reform.”
Chicago still has a long way to go before anyone will be holding up this city as a model for good government.
In 2019, Lightfoot succeeded Rahm Emanuel as the city’s mayor after campaigning on her record as a former federal prosecutor, including sending Ald. Virgil Jones to prison as part of Silver Shovel. She owed her mayoral win in large part to a populist clamor for reform after Burke was charged with corruption.
In her inaugural address, Lightfoot declared: “For years they said, ‘Chicago ain’t ready for reform.’ Well, get ready, because reform is here.”
On her first day, Lightfoot signed an executive order that sought to prevent aldermen from interfering with routine decisions by her administration. It was a largely symbolic step but one that signaled her intent to limit aldermanic power.
“Aldermanic advice, aldermanic input, incredibly important, incredibly valuable,” Lightfoot said in a interview. “But an automatic, unilateral veto? No. Absolutely not.”
She later successfully pushed a law forbidding aldermen from holding jobs that conflict with the city’s interests — such as Burke’s job as a property tax attorney — and increased fines for ethics violations.
Lightfoot also had vowed to curb aldermen’s unlimited powers over zoning decisions in their wards — powers that had tempted so many aldermen into corrupt actions over the decades. Limiting aldermanic prerogative on zoning would take away the temptation to base decisions on bribes or favors and reduce the pressure on citizens to “kiss the ring,” she said.
By the end of her time in office, however, Lightfoot had largely left aldermanic zoning powers untouched, highlighting how difficult it is for mayors to go against the entrenched interests of council members, even those who otherwise see themselves as reformers.
Ald. Michele Smith, a former federal prosecutor, was the inaugural chairwoman of the council’s first-ever, stand-alone ethics committee, which Lightfoot created to underscore her support for reform. In a Tribune interview, Smith touted several reforms under Lightfoot, including the move to limit outside employment options for aldermen to remove conflicts of interest and expanded power for the inspector general.
But Smith opposed taking away aldermanic prerogative on zoning, telling the Tribune local officials were best positioned to make those decisions. “Our wards are bigger than almost every city (in Illinois),” she said. “58,000 people, how many cities are bigger than 58,000 people?”
Lightfoot told the Tribune she tried “as best I could, but some of it really required will from the City Council, and it would have meant frankly curtailing some of the powers that they had enjoyed.”
“Once people get power, they don’t want to ever give it up — no matter what,” she later added.
Lightfoot’s willingness to criticize aldermen who got in trouble — such as Burke — and her attacks on aldermanic prerogative made her unusual among recent mayors. Her successor, Brandon Johnson, has dropped ethics reform as a serious talking point and has emphasized the need to respect aldermanic prerogative.
Johnson has also made sure aldermen upheld the other end of Richard J. Daley’s grand bargain, maintaining the extraordinary control that Chicago mayors have enjoyed over the council’s legislative work.
Before the 2023 mayoral election, members of the City Council led by Finance Committee Chairman Scott Waguespack worked behind the scenes for a measure of independence: the ability to elect their own leadership and create their own committees. That’s how it works elsewhere, but in Chicago the mayor has made those decisions for decades.
The process blurs the lines between branches of government and leaves aldermen beholden to the fifth floor in City Hall, where mayors have ruled for decades.
The system also makes it easy for mayors to try to influence an alderman’s position by “pressuring you that you could lose your chairmanship,” Waguespack said.
The aldermen briefly succeeded during the transition period between Lightfoot and Johnson, passing a plan after weeks of painstaking negotiations.
Johnson undid the work with just a few phone calls exhorting aldermen to let him make his own choices. The attempt to create an “independent council” was snuffed out quickly, like so many other reform efforts.
Chicago Tribune’s Rick Pearson contributed.
