The Chicago Sun-Times reports:
The federal appellate court in Chicago Tuesday upheld the conviction of four men charged with running the patronage hiring system in Mayor Daley's City Hall.
The ruling sent waves of angst through City Hall, Gov. Blagojevich's office and other government offices where some had hoped the court would find the age-old practice of giving plum government jobs to cronies was legal.
The four men, led by Daley's patronage chief Robert Sorich, argued that since the men did not personally profit from the scheme, it wasn't "mail fraud." The court unanimously ruled that it was -- even if the men thought it a fine Chicago tradition to falsify documents to give city jobs to clouted candidates over qualified candidates.
"Robin Hood may be a noble criminal, but he is still a criminal," Judge Ann Claire Williams wrote.
The ruling appears to give a green light to ongoing federal investigations of city, state and county government.
"It is hard to take too seriously the contention that the defendants did not know that by creating a false hiring scheme that provided thousands of lucrative city jobs to political cronies, falsifying documents and lying repeatedly about what they were doing, they were perpetrating a fraud," Williams wrote.
John Kass has
more on the subject:
Daley's hunger for illegal patronage cost taxpayers $12 million to settle federal complaints against his administration, not $75 million as I mistakenly reported the other day. But $12 million is bad enough. Though Daley was the direct beneficiary of the scheme, it didn't come out of his pocket. It was all paid for by taxpayers.
Does the mayor know how to spell RICO?
City Hall argued that Sorich and the others did not personally gain by their crimes. But the jury didn't buy it, and neither did the appellate court, which on Tuesday upheld a vital concept:
Americans have a right to expect honest service from elected officials, and that just because a politician doesn't put cash in his pocket, it doesn't mean he or she isn't part of a corrupt scheme to defraud the people.
"The beating heart of this fraudulent scheme was the mayor's office of Intergovernmental Affairs … informally, the office coordinated a sizable portion of the city's civil service hiring, ferreting out jobs to foot soldiers in the mayor's campaign organization and to other cronies," Judge Ann Williams wrote in her opinion.
You really have to wonder about a town that can elect a "made member" of The Chicago Mob to
City Council.
