Chicago Magazine reports:
Push open the heavy door to Mart Anthony’s Italian Restaurant and Steakhouse, on the corner of Hubbard and Racine in the West Loop, and you feel you’ve stepped back in time. This is the kind of cozy place where the tablecloths are white linen, the walls are wood paneled, and, according to the restaurant’s website, the customers “are well-fed and have their cocktail of choice at hand.”
If you can afford it:
On any given week, chances are good that one of those customers—perhaps washing down the $32 steak Vesuvio with a $75 Napa cabernet—will be Joe Berrios. In the first nine months of 2012, Berrios ate lunch or dinner at Mart Anthony’s 58 times, ringing up a tab of $8,747. How do we know this? Because Berrios—who is not only the Cook County assessor (salary: $125,000) but also the county’s Democratic Party chairman and the committeeman for the 31st Ward on the Northwest Side—used political campaign funds to pay the bills.
He's not your normal parasite:
Those Mart Anthony’s meals were actually “meetings,” according to his quarterly mandatory disclosure filings with the State of Illinois. Turns out Berrios, 60, has held “meetings” at lots of restaurants since the beginning of 2007: 989 of them, totaling $186,080. That’s right: On average, the veteran pol dined out on the campaign dime at least every other workday at $188 a pop.
You'll never guess who helped pass a "reform" bill in the Illinois state legislature which doesn't stop this nonsense? Barack Obama.
