The Mystery of Mayor Daley

After 15 years in office, his popularity and his power have never been greater. Insiders say Richard M. Daley could crack down on the cronyism and ethically questionable deals that threaten to undermine his legacy. Why doesn't he? A special report

By Shane Tritsch

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Slick dealing has always run in Chicago's blood. The city, after all, began its life as a real estate boom in a swamp.

"Buying and selling land, cutting sharp deals, was the first thing Chicagoans did," says James Merriner, a former political editor for the Chicago Sun-Times and the author of the new Grafters and Goo Goos, a history of corruption and reform in Chicago. In the course of writing the book, what "shocked" Merriner, he says, was "how pervasive corruption always was, throughout the city's history."

"This was a city of speculators and sharpies—that's part of its mystique," explains Paul Green, a political science professor at Roosevelt University. By not getting bogged down in fussbudget rules of "process and procedure," Green argues, the city has reaped tremendous benefits: "There's a notion that goes back a long time, that a successful city needs a tolerable level of corruption—that in order to cook you need a little grease. Chicago was not ordained to become the strongest city in the Midwest. It got there by scratching and clawing and not always playing by the Marquis of Queensbury rules."

After Richard J. Daley, the current mayor's father, took office in 1955, no one ever seriously argued that he benefited financially from the corruption that was rife in city government—he relished power, not money. But Daley père never felt compelled to end it. Leon Despres, the former Hyde Park reform alderman, recalls a time when the elder Daley was asked about the rampant corruption in the City Council. "I let them take so much, but no more," the mayor replied, according to Despres.

The world has changed since then. For one thing, the 1979 Shakman decree, which set strict limits on government hiring and firing for political reasons, dealt a heavy blow to the kind of patronage-fueled political machine that Richard J. Daley had commanded. But it did not necessarily end the machine-style practice of "pay to play"—of trading economic favors for political support. "The assumption is that if you give political support, you ought to receive rewards," says Dick Simpson, a political science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who served two terms as alderman under Daley I. Today, though, the goodies most often come in the form of lucrative government contracts rather than patronage jobs. "Businessmen who give contributions to the mayor expect to . . . deliver goods and services to City Hall at inflated prices," Simpson says.

The result is a form of "legalized bribery," as Crain's Chicago Business put it in a recent editorial—a system in which juicy deals are steered to insiders who have made political contributions. To be sure, pinstripe patronage is not limited to Chicago. And Daley's supporters point out that many contributors to the mayor have not received favors from the city. But the pay-to-play ethos flourishes here in part because Illinois, despite some tightening of campaign finance and ethics laws in recent years, places so few restrictions on how political donations can be collected and used. Unlike most other states, there are no limits on how much a contributor can give. (Chicago actually does place some restrictions on registered lobbyists and companies doing or seeking city business, though employees and officers of those companies are free to make unlimited personal contributions; insiders say these limits have done little to curb Chicago's pay-to-play ways.) Combine that easy money with the easy virtue of Chicago's political culture, and merit seems to take a back seat to influence. Between 1996 and this year, for example, Mayor Daley received at least $108,575 from companies in the Hired Truck Program, the Sun-Times reported.

"Scandals in public life are almost always the result of the intersection of power and money," says Cindi Canary, director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that works on campaign finance, ethics, and government accountability issues. "When you don't have contribution limits, it's like you don't have a red light at that intersection. It makes it a lot easier for things to come together that people may say are wrong, but that are not necessarily illegal." The resulting level of corruption may be "tolerable" to some, but a lot of people—and not just good-government types—say the price is too high.

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The most obvious peril in a system tilted by clout is that it distorts the efficiencies of a free market and dents taxpayers' pocketbooks. An example: In 1993, a Skokie company called Bella Bagno was quietly awarded a no-bid contract to provide the disposable plastic sheathing that keeps the toilet seats sanitary at O'Hare International Airport, which is run by Daley's Department of Aviation. The deal provoked allegations of insider dealing when it was revealed that Bella Bagno had hired a consulting firm owned in part by a close friend of Mayor Daley's; Bella Bagno's owners also were generous contributors to Daley's campaign fund. Over the course of five years, the city paid Bella Bagno about $15 million—as much as seven cents a flush for the toilet seat material. When the contract was finally put out for competitive bid, in 1998, another company wound up providing the plastic for less than half that price.

Such waste alone would be awful enough. But there are other costs. Last year a company owned by the clout-heavy contractor Richard Crandall, who has made millions of dollars from City Hall installing ornamental fencing in Chicago, received a $10.9-million contract to repair and replace doors at O'Hare and Midway airports. But he won the contract by default after the other three bidders looked at the specifications and dropped out. One contractor told the Sun-Times it would have been "impossible" for anyone other than Crandall to prevail. "Seeking public contracts at City Hall is so onerous for small business people that some don't even bother," says Merriner. "They feel they won't get a fair shot at bidding because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that the contracts are greased."

Terry Brunner, head of the Aviation Integrity Project, a group funded by suburbs opposing expansion at O'Hare, argues in a draft of a report on corruption at the airport that "the most damaging and long-lasting" effect of Chicago's clout-based system "is the corruption of the public policy process." From the much-maligned renovation of Soldier Field to the grossly overbudget Millennium Park to the estimated $15-billion expansion of O'Hare, citizens are deprived of input or debate over the best allocation of their tax dollars, he contends.

The psychology that such a system breeds is yet another cost. "The public has a right to expect honesty and integrity and faithful service at all levels of government," says Jay Stewart, executive director of the Better Government Association, a watchdog group (and Brunner's former base). "When that bond is broken, it damages civic life, because it erodes public trust in government." Says Rogers Park alderman Joe Moore, one of the few members of the City Council who have been willing to speak out: "When you see people close to the mayor leaving government and making megabucks, it contributes to the already large amount of public cynicism that exists."

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