Politics and corruption the Chicago way

CHICAGO

A joke that made its way around Illinois in the 1970s was that if Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi wanted to give a local politician $1 million, funneled through a foreign bank, it would be a perfectly legal campaign contribution as long as it was disclosed.

Nowhere else in the country could a politician accept such a large donation from a non-American through a foreign corporation - let alone from such a controversial public figure.

“But that’s how things work here,” said David Morrison, deputy director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform.

Not much has changed in Illinois politics since 1969, when Mr. Gadhafi took power thousands of miles away.

Political corruption has a long history here, and it isn’t likely to go away anytime soon, locals say. Democratic Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich’s recent arrest by the FBI on suspicion of trying to sell President-elect Barack Obama’s Senate seat threatens to keep the stain alive.

Since 1971, more than 1,000 people in the Land of Lincoln have been convicted on public corruption charges. A handful were businesspeople, but most were elected officials.

There have been Chicago aldermen, county judges, city clerks, bailiffs and three governors, according to a tally kept by Dick W. Simpson, a former Chicago alderman and head of the political science department at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Corruption dates to at least 1869, when three county commissioners were charged with signing fraudulent contracts to paint Chicago’s City Hall. Three painters used whitewash and skimmed the difference.

In a city and state whose best-known resident worldwide could be Al Capone, that bit of thievery certainly wasn’t the last. Politicians, police officers and even the 1919 Chicago White Sox have been accused of corruption.

Capone, for instance, was able to get away with gambling and peddling Prohibition-era booze largely because of his tight grip on City Hall. He contributed “substantially” - some said $260,000 - to Mayor William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson’s 1927 campaign, according to Douglas Bukowski, author of “Big Bill Thompson, Chicago, and the Politics of Image.”

Capone kept an office one block from the mayor’s office, and he and his men were known to walk around City Hill, asking for favors.

Business expense?

Some Illinois business owners accept bribes as a typical business expense.

In the 1970s, the owner of the Arlington Park and Washington Park racetracks wrote off bribes to former Gov. Otto Kerner on her taxes, thinking they were a legitimate business expense. Her tax statement prompted an investigation into Kerner, who in 1973 was found guilty of accepting the bribes to build expressway exit ramps near the tracks.

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