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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Ashleigh (below, with Betty's mother, Kitty) learned on the Internet that she had been adopted.

Betty says she acted on vrdolyak's recommendation in hiring Terry Gillespie, one of Chicago's most highly regarded defense attorneys, to represent her at her trial. In practice, though, Gillespie's courtly and genial style was never aggressive enough for Betty's liking. She thought he was too pessimistic, and she wondered whether he was more interested in keeping Vrdolyak off the stand than in defending her. (Gillespie is now on Vrdolyak's defense team in his criminal case.)

Today, Gillespie says he still thinks Betty is innocent. As for how they got along, he says only, "She wasn't a shrinking violet."

Betty says she hired Alan Dershowitz for the appeal because she wanted someone with no ties to Vrdolyak. Dershowitz disappointed her, too. She never met with him in person, and when he argued her case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, he continually mispronounced her name, calling her "Loren Mal-TEE-zee." The court denied the appeal in 2005.

Her new lawyer, Leonard Goodman, serves on the advisory board of Northwestern University law school's Center on Wrongful Convictions and on the board of DePaul University College of Law's Center for Justice in Capital Cases. Out of money and desperate to continue her legal fight, Betty asked Vrdolyak to pay Goodman a fee to look at the case. "I was pleasantly surprised to see how slim the evidence was against her," Goodman says. In the beginning Vrdolyak paid Goodman's fees, but Betty soon worried about Vrdolyak's involvement in her case. "He never does something for nothing," she said at the time. Goodman then canceled the fee agreement with Vrdolyak but continued to represent her.

Last summer, Goodman filed a motion for a new trial with Judge Grady, arguing that Gillespie had provided ineffective counsel. The heart of the argument is that at a town board meeting in October 1996, Betty ordered the town treasurer, Joseph DeChicio, to stop sending payments to Specialty Risk Consultants, the insurance company—an indication that she was fighting the scam, not participating in it. But the board minutes that would corroborate her action were never admitted in court because of questions about their authenticity. Goodman argues that Gillespie didn't try hard enough to substantiate them. Goodman says he has affidavits from four people, including two town board members who state that Betty did order a halt to the payments. (DeChicio was the only defendant acquitted at the trial.)

In November, Judge Grady rejected the motion, saying he still didn't believe the minutes were legitimate. Goodman filed a motion asking the judge to reconsider. He included a statement from DeChicio's former assistant who says DeChicio handstamped Betty's signature on the wire transfers to the insurance company without her knowledge, even after he had been told to stop, according to some board members. The judge remained unconvinced.

"We could have had Jesus Christ come into the courtroom and say Betty was innocent, and Judge Grady wouldn't have changed his mind," says Goodman. He insists he's not giving up, but shortly before Christmas, Judge Grady ruled that Betty could not appeal anymore. Goodman is appealing that ruling too, but if he loses, Betty's legal fight is over.

"Her chances are slim," says Leonard Cavise, a professor at the DePaul University School of Law. "Ineffective counsel is one of the toughest legal arguments [to make]," he adds, especially when lawyers have kept this case alive in the courts years after her conviction. "She was convicted by inference—the well-connected mayor of a mobbed-up town knows what's going on and is probably in the middle of it. That was a short inferential jump for the jury to make."

* * *

The Victorville prison camp sits in the middle of the Southern California desert. Betty has few visitors. E-mail is her lifeline to the outside world. Many of the other prisoners are young and Hispanic, serving time for drugs. Betty works as a mentor and says she has made friends. They call her "the Mayor." But the prospect of two more years there is something she tries not to think about. Recently she was reassigned to kitchen duty—"the worst job in the prison," she said in a recent e-mail. "I spend eight hours a day standing up scrubbing pots and pans." In another e-mail she wrote, "I can see why there are so many suicides in prison."

Some of her coconspirators have had their sentences reduced and are already out of prison. She lost her chance for that at her resentencing hearing in 2006 when she refused to apologize to Judge Grady for her role in the fraud. "I am sorry it happened on my watch, but I will not apologize for something I did not do," she told me. "The government knows I didn't get anything from the scam."

If she serves her full sentence, she will be 60 when she gets out. In Cicero, where the mob has been entrenched for decades, some people remember that the town was cleaner and safer when she was in charge. At Christmas, Betty gets so many cards from Cicero residents that the prison guards tell her she needs her own ZIP Code. Some law enforcement officials worry that she could make a political comeback and be more powerful than ever.

But she says no. "There are two things I know for sure: I will never be a virgin again, and I will never get involved in Cicero politics again. There are a lot of good people there, but I will never go back. It would be too dangerous." She has always said she's afraid of the street gangs, not the mob. But many people wonder.

Her relationship with Ashleigh is improving. They talk on the phone each night and e-mail each other. The ten-year-old has made friends in the new town and is working with a school counselor. She recently made the honor roll at school. Betty sent an e-mail to friends: "I am sooooooooooooooooooooooooo proud!"

In a phone call, Ashleigh told me that she has forgiven Betty and no longer talks so much about finding her birth mother. "I love my mom. I know she didn't want me to think badly of her. I think she was double-crossed; she should have had a video camera in her office." Ashleigh knows Betty lost her appeal in December and may not be home for another two years. "It's been so long since I have seen her," Ashleigh said. "I miss her so much."

Friends took Kitty to visit Betty in mid-December, and they celebrated Betty's 58th birthday in the prison visiting room. Kitty left with six boxes of Pokémon cups, plates, and bowls Betty made for Ashleigh for Christmas in ceramics class. But family and friends later became alarmed when Betty turned incommunicado during the holidays. For almost two weeks, no e-mails or phone calls, not even to Ashleigh on Christmas. They didn't know whether she was ill, depressed, or upset because their birthday cards to her had been delivered late. It turned out she had run out of cash in her monthly account and didn't have money to call or e-mail.

Although Pat and Betty still don't talk, Pat hopes she can take Ashleigh to Victorville soon. Money is tight. Pat is retired from the phone company and lives on a fixed income. Vrdolyak has called several times to check on Ashleigh and has talked to her. He continues to send Kitty a monthly check and is paying the mortgage for now. "Ashleigh is doing much better," he says. "I'll always help Betty and the family. When Betty gets out I'll buy her a new house, set up a fund for Ashleigh's education, whatever is needed."

Betty says she's not counting on it. She figures she's on her own and doesn't know what she'll do. "It will be almost impossible to start over at age 60," she says. "The damage done to my mother and Ashleigh can never be reversed. The nightmares of prison will never go away." Maybe she'll stay in Vegas, maybe move to Indiana, where she and Ashleigh had a weekend house years ago. But Ashleigh is happy now in the South, so maybe she'll go there.

It's hard to imagine Cicero's Betty Loren Maltese in a Southern town, but that's where she started out, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Betty says that around the time of her birth, her father tried to unionize the restaurant workers there. It created an uproar, and she says her parents were run out of town, escaping in the middle of the night with nothing but their two daughters and their car.

Fifty-eight years later, the drama continues for Betty. Maybe writing a book is her best bet. As she says, she has a lot more story to tell.

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

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