Feds charge Daley's clout chief

July 19, 2005  FBI Affidavit against Sorich , against Slattery  Other Stories and articles

BY STEVE WARMBIR, TIM NOVAK, FRAN SPIELMAN AND ABDON PALLASCH Staff Reporters

Daley administration loyalists are providing federal investigators ammunition in the most significant prosecution yet in the Hired Truck investigation -- one that aims to show that the mayor's people lied, forged, then covered up to defy a court order banning politics from most city hiring.

Criminal charges filed Monday described a city hiring system that's rigged in many instances from the get-go in at least five major city departments. It's one in which the application and interview process is often irrelevant because, officials allege, the mayor's administration decides what political workers will fill the most basic jobs, such as city truck drivers.

Roughly 37,000 jobs are supposed to be filled on merit under a 1972 court decree. Yet, hundreds of those city jobs are filled each year based mainly on a nod from an alderman, a recommendation from a Daley political coordinator or a request from one of the city's powerful unions, the feds charge.

Awarding those jobs and promotions was the grease that kept Daley's political machine running, they say, electing the mayor and his political allies, from the City Council to Congress. Providing details are more than 30 witnesses, including five former city commissioners and six current or former personnel directors.

Mayor: 'clearly very serious' case

The mayor's patronage system was run by Robert Sorich, a longtime Daley loyalist who was charged Monday with mail fraud. Sorich ran the mayor's Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and was arrested about 6 a.m. Monday at his Bridgeport home.

Also arrested were two men suspected of carrying out Sorich's bidding: his longtime friend, Streets and Sanitation official Patrick Slattery, and Sorich's right-hand man, Tim McCarthy, both of Bridgeport. In addition, Slattery was charged with mail fraud. No charges were announced against McCarthy.

The mayor's office fired all three men Monday. Slattery just married one of the mayor's personal secretaries two weeks ago.

The discovery of an allegedly rigged hiring system is an outgrowth of the Hired Truck investigation. So far, 30 people have been charged, 19 have pleaded guilty. The investigation started after the Sun-Times uncovered corruption and fraud in the program last year.

On Monday, Daley said little about the most serious allegations against his administration to date.

"I haven't yet had the opportunity to fully review the complaints issued by the U.S. attorney," Daley said in a statement. "However, these are clearly very serious accusations. As I have always said, if there are individuals who have violated the law, they should be prosecuted and held accountable for their actions."

The feds say the rigged hiring system infected at least five city agencies -- Transportation, Aviation, Streets and Sanitation, Water and Sewer, which has now merged with the Water Department.

Prosecutors described a few basic steps the mayor's staff are accused of taking to ensure their candidates got city jobs.

Last year, a soldier fighting in Iraq wanted a Streets and Sanitation truck driving job, but the city ceased taking applications two months earlier. The soldier, who had worked on political campaigns, ended up with the job anyway, after making an appeal to Sorich and McCarthy, according to charges.

Slattery is accused of signing a form giving the soldier a perfect score on his interview, even though the man was never spoken with, since he was serving abroad.

'A whole new area of law'?

Interviews for city jobs were often meaningless, the feds contend.

Sorich also allegedly issued orders where the city employees would go in political campaigns.

Donald Tomczak, a former top Water Department official charged in the case and now cooperating, told prosecutors he routinely gave Sorich a list of city workers in Tomczak's organization and how well they did on political campaigns. Sorich would often call Tomczak to tell him his political army did a good job. Tomczak's people, in turn, got raises, overtime and promotions.

''The hiring system was rigged,'' U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said Monday.

"Every resident of Chicago has the right to compete fairly for a job if he or she is qualified, without regard to political affiliation of whether they do campaign work,'' he said. ''Qualified persons sat for interviews for jobs that had already been doled out as a reward for political work."

Daley's longtime political consultant David Axelrod raised questions about the federal investigation's focus on the 1972 court order that banned political hiring, called the Shakman Decree.

"The mayor's been very clear that any violation of law should be dealt with as such, including shredding or test-rigging. On the other hand, the U.S. attorney implied . . . that he is now the overseer of the Shakman Decree, which is a civil matter and any time someone in public office recommends someone for a job, and they get hired, that that's somehow a criminal offense," Axelrod said.

"If that's his theory, he's creating a whole new area of law. Every single mayor -- from Byrne to Washington, Sawyer and Daley -- has been sued under the Shakman Decree. They've had court actions brought against their administrations. But they were civil actions. The Shakman Decree is not a criminal law. It's for the courts and lawyers to figure out [whether Fitzgerald's theory will hold up], but it sounds a little dubious."

2 men have Daley family ties

Prosecutors, though, don't seem to be criminalizing political hiring itself. They are going after the nuts-and-bolts fraud allegedly used to carry it out: sham interviews, falsified paperwork and a subsequent coverup.

The two men charged Monday have family ties to Daley's 11th Ward political organization, headed by his brother, Cook County Commissioner John Daley. Sorich, 42, has driven John Daley around and worked in his ward office. Sorich's father was a photographer for the late Mayor Richard J. Daley.

Slattery, also 42, lives just down the block from John Daley. Slattery's sister, Maura Slattery Boyle, was elected a Cook County judge with John Daley's help.

The Slatterys "were great friends of our family, very, very close," John Daley said Monday.

Contributing: Natasha Korecki

Criminal charges 'revolutionary'

BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter

In the Richard J. Daley years, Tom Donovan held forth in a sixth-floor office suite that rivaled the mayor's. Donovan made no bones about it. He was Daley's patronage chief.

Under Richard M. Daley, the name was changed to the Mayor's Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, with the purported purpose of promoting the mayor's legislative agenda in the City Council, Springfield and Washington.

Patronage had officially been driven underground, but it was not dead and buried as some had hoped.

On Monday, federal prosecutors who have spent months bearing down on city personnel practices and the role of the Daley-created Hispanic Democratic Organization struck a crushing blow to the new way of doing business.

Two veteran city officials with long-standing ties to the 11th Ward Regular Democratic Organization run by the mayor's brother were accused of engineering an illegal scheme to get around the decades-old federal decree that was supposed to put an end to political hiring.

Federal complaint a bombshell

"You're seeing the criminalization of things that were never criminal before," said one veteran political observer, echoing the refrain sounded after former Gov. George Ryan was indicted in the licenses-for-bribes scandal.

"If you buy that premise, everybody for a hundred years has been involved in a criminal enterprise. If every time a ward committemen says, 'I'd like you to put this guy on' and the guy gets on and that's a crime, that's revolutionary. I don't know who would want to be mayor under those circumstances," the source said.

The federal charges hit close to home for Mayor Daley.

Bridgeport native Patrick Slattery is a newlywed whose wife is the mayor's personal secretary. The mild-mannered Robert Sorich, whose father was Richard J. Daley's photographer, spent years as John Daley's personal driver and as the 11th Ward secretary. Sorich was the mayor's unofficial patronage chief, but everybody believes he was carrying out somebody else's orders.

The bombshell criminal complaint drives a stake through a Mayor's Office of Intergovernmental Affairs that has spawned some of the mayor's most powerful political operatives: Tim Degnan and his successor Victor Reyes; chief of staff Sheila O'Grady; Rosemarie Andolino, quarterback of the O'Hare modernization program; consultant Michael Broderick, and Maria Nino, who has close ties to ousted Streets and Sanitation Commissioner Al Sanchez.

Park District Supt. Tim Mitchell is another Victor Reyes protege who worked hand-in-glove with intergovernmental affairs during his years at City Hall.

Aldermen pointing fingers

For years, aldermen have griped that their control over hiring had been supplanted by HDO and other renegade organizations formed by Daley allies to get around the ward organizations that comprise the traditional Democratic party structure.

On Monday, aldermen were busy pointing fingers -- and breathing a sigh of relief that many of their patronage pleas had apparently gone unanswered.

"It's a disgrace. All these years we've been telling people there was no more political hiring -- [that] you've got to go to the Personnel Department and get hired according to a proscribed process. Now, we find out that has not been the case and that political hiring has been an integral part of the system," said Ald. Ed Smith (28th).

Ald. Joe Moore (49th) said the federal charges "could very well accomplish what the Shakman decree was unable to completely accomplish: to end political hiring, firing and promotions as we know it. It's one thing to run the risk of incurring civil fines as a result of violating a court decree. It's quite another to run the risk of going to jail.