Mayor Daley's Patronage Scam and Accountability

Carol Marin reports:

With surprising suddenness, Christopher Kozicki quit his $130,000-a-year job in the city's Planning Department this week.

The reason is unclear.

The good news -- for him, anyway -- is that he got to walk out under his own steam when he should have been flat-out fired more than a year ago.

But when you hail from the South Side enclave of Bridgeport, the bosom from which two mayors named Daley and an army of city workers have sprung, a certain lucky fairy dust more often than not attaches to your shoulder.

But let's dial back to 2004. And a story that was first reported in this column. It had to do with a 19-year-old kid named Andy Ryan, who -- by some miracle of city hiring -- got a phenomenal entry-level job as a city building inspector with a very handsome salary of $50,000 a year.

Wow.

It didn't matter that a porch had collapsed in this city and a nightclub had burned, with people dying terrible deaths in both. Nor did it matter that in each case there were serious questions about the quality of the building inspections preceding the disasters.

Nope. Somebody's kid needed a job and knew how to put the fix in to get it.

Chicago voters don't seem to mind this level of corruption.