Trauma Queen

Trouble keeps finding Betty Loren Maltese, the imprisoned former town president of Cicero. Her adopted daughter has learned the harsh truth about her mother. Rancor has boiled up with Ed Vrdolyak, her financial protector. And her hopes for an early release have largely vanished. But even stripped of power, freedom, and big hair, Betty is still full of brass

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In Chicago for her resentencing hearing, Betty refused to apologize for her role in the fraud scheme.

Cicero legend holds that Betty Loren met Frank Maltese in 1970, while working as a cocktail waitress at a mobbed-up topless bar and brothel. "I never stepped foot in that place," she insists. "Even then, I didn't have a good figure. I would never even wear shorts. I can't even stand to see myself naked."

In fact, she says, she met Frank at a bingo game with her mother. When he heard she was getting a divorce, he started coming to a restaurant in Berwyn where she was working as a waitress. Frank kept asking her out, but she refused. "I was 22 at the time, and I thought he was too old," she says. "I didn't find him sexy, and I was kind of fed up with men." Frank was 19 years older, short and rotund, and nicknamed "Baldy." He had been married twice, and he had two children.

Finally she agreed to a date. In the beginning the courtship was G-rated, she says. Frank took her to Las Vegas with friends to see Frank Sinatra perform. Because of a booking snafu, the couple were forced to share a hotel room. "I was so nervous," Betty recalls. "I went to bed in my evening gown and full makeup. When I woke up the next morning, Frank was still sitting on the couch, staring at me."

Eventually they moved in together, living in a bungalow on Austin Boulevard. Betty got her GED and real-estate agent's license. She held a variety of jobs, including running a small newspaper and a deli. She says that Frank sold cheese for a pizza company. He had grown up in Cicero with Rocky Infelise and other outfit guys, but Betty says he had stayed friends with them while choosing a different life. "I'm friends with a lot of priests, but that doesn't make me a nun," she says. To this day she insists Frank was no mobster or bookie.

By the time they married in 1988, both were working for the Town of Cicero. Over the years Betty had a number of jobs at town hall. She ran the traffic violations department, worked for the liquor commissioner, and served as an aide to the town president. Though Frank served as the town assessor, federal prosecutors claimed that his most important job was to act as a link between the mob and town hall. He also ran a gambling ring for Infelise.

Frank was a popular figure in Cicero, outgoing and friendly. He wasn't violent, and he never became a "made man" in the outfit, according to Jim Wagner, president of the Chicago Crime Commission. But he had influence behind the scenes as a political operator for Infelise and his successor, Michael Spano. Betty still speaks highly of her late husband. "If he had five dollars, he would give you five dollars. He cheated on me and I wasn't in love with him. But he had a good heart."

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In 1990 the feds charged Infelise and 19 of his crew, including Frank. A year later, Infelise was convicted of racketeering and sentenced to 63 years in prison. (He died in prison in 2005.) Already sick with cancer, Frank pleaded guilty, but died before going to prison. Before his death, prosecutors say he made two big moves. In July 1992, he and the then town president, Henry Klosak, arranged for the town's insurance business to be transferred to a company called Specialty Risk Consultants, controlled by Michael Spano, Cicero's new acting mob boss. Five months later, Klosak died suddenly. In January 1993, Frank helped persuade the town board to name Betty as Cicero's interim president. Betty says she was chosen because they thought she was the only Republican who could get elected in Cicero. But one of Spano's associates later testified that the mob boss thought Frank could control her. In the spring, she was elected outright. Frank died that fall.

From the start, Betty vowed to shake things up. She cleaned the town up physically. She appointed a youth commission to improve sports and play facilities, and she provided bus rides, outings, and snow clearance for seniors.

Although a source close to Vrdolyak says he complained of having a hard time getting in touch with Betty when she first took office, she says she consulted with him about everything. With a population around 80,000, Cicero was becoming increasingly Hispanic, but Betty and Vrdolyak were able to bring Hispanics into town government and keep Cicero under Republican control. With Vrdolyak's guidance, she built a strong political organization and had a huge political war chest. Her wisecracking, tough-gal persona, flashy clothes, and big hair played well in the bungalow belt and captivated the media.

Betty said she wanted Cicero to shed its reputation as a home to the mob. Nonetheless, she acknowledges she spent time with Spano, though she claims they didn't talk much about town business. He often took Betty and her mother for gambling excursions on the riverboats.

Around the mid-nineties, town employees started to complain about their insurance—high costs, bills not being paid. (Prosecutors say she fired Cicero officials who brought up the problem—something she denies.) She says that by the time she got her hands on the matter, she was already at odds with Spano. "I shut down the strip clubs, the 6 a.m. taverns, the poker machines," she says. "Everything I did was anti-mob."

She says Vrdolyak warned her there would be trouble and he was right. Neighbors say they saw Spano pull up in his car to Betty's house with some other town officials. "He told me it would be good for my health if I didn't run again. If I had had Ashleigh at the time, I would have done what he wanted, but I was angry. I had worked my ass off for the town and I wasn't going to let him push me out."

A slate of candidates led by a former town employee, Robert Balsitis, challenged her in the 1997 GOP primary, but she won that and the general election by a landslide. There was a price to pay. The two sides hurled accusations at each other, especially about the insurance problems, and the accusations attracted the attention of federal prosecutors. Even with a federal probe in full throttle, Betty was elected to a third term in April 2001. But two months later, she was indicted, along with Spano, former police chief Emil Schullo, former town treasurer Joseph DeChicio, and six others. They were charged with siphoning off $12 million in phony insurance claims and laundering the money into a Wisconsin golf course they hoped to turn into a casino resort.

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During her trial, Betty's lawyer, Terry Gillespie, described her as someone who was in over her head. But that was hard for many to accept, including the jury. On August 23, 2002, after deliberating for 11 days, it found Betty guilty of racketeering conspiracy and fraud. "If you are so powerful and in control that you can run a town down to the street corners, how can you say you had no idea what was going on with the finances?" asked Tom Kilpatrick, who was the president of the Chicago Crime Commission at the time. "Betty wasn't the stereotypical mob wife who went to church and stayed out of the business. She was a powerful and shrewd person."

Still, some people who worked with her say Betty was unsophisticated about financial matters. "She relied on her auditing firm, and they didn't pick up on it," says Ed Setlick, an accountant who helped on the Cicero budget for ten years. "The insurance fraud was well disguised and not easy to see."

Shortly after he went to prison, Emil Schullo, one of her coconspirators, told me, "I think [Spano and the mob] probably saw her as—excuse the expression—a dumb broad." Schullo said Betty was easily manipulated and listened to the wrong people. And she was her own worst enemy. "She's the type that would throw you out of a moving car and then drive around the block and give you a crutch." 

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Photograph: Courtesy of Fox News Chicago

This article appears in the March 2008 issue of Chicago Magazine.

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