Stings from the Windy City

Concerning the courts, Jane Byrne and Jim Thompson

Chicago bills itself as "the city that works," and anyone familiar with the way it works soon realizes that the secret to smooth functioning is regular nourishment--preferably of the green, folding variety. Examples of this approach--questionable and just plain illegal--regularly come to public attention. But last week even some jaded Chicagoans were shaking their heads over the current run of jinks, high as well as low, being aired.

Potentially the most far-reaching scandal involved the Cook County circuit court, the nation's largest such unified system. The court for the past three years has been the target of an undercover federal investigation conducted by about 200 members of the Justice Department and the FBI. Local judicial circles were speculating that indictments would eventually implicate individuals at every level, from judges who accept case-fixing bribes, to lawyers who offer them, to police officers and clerks who act as go-betweens.

The probe started when FBI agents opened a law office on La Salle Street and joined the knots of attorney "hustlers" who hang around many courtrooms drumming up business. One frequently offered service: asking clients for upfront money "to pay off the judge." The Feds evidently infiltrated judicial ranks with at least one visiting informer-judge: flamboyant downstate Circuit Judge Brocton Lockwood of Marion, who claims that he collected evidence of payoffs with a tape recorder stuffed into his cowboy boots. Lockwood found that the going rate to fix a drunken-driving charge is $500 to $700.

Meanwhile, former Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne, who knows something about purges, has popped into the headlines because of her splurges. Byrne, who was beaten after one term in office by Harold Washington in last February's Democratic primary, recently filed a campaign financial report with the state as required by law. It revealed that the then mayor paid her husband Jay McMullen, an ex-newspaperman, the extravagant sum of $166,000 for his work in the past year as a consultant to her campaign, while she paid out another $14,175 to her 25-year-old daughter Kathy for secretarial work. There is nothing illegal about such payments, and her campaign was not hurting for funds: Byrne had raised a record $10.6 million. But her campaign committee is currently $270,000 in debt, and Byrne still managed to find a loose $4,066 in its treasury to finance, with trade-in, a brand-new black Mustang. Byrne defended the purchase because it was a "political car." Does that mean that Chicagoans will get to see Jane run yet again? Said Byrne: "I lost, but I didn't die."

For his part, Illinois Republican Governor James Thompson did neither when he was up for re-election last November, but he came close enough to defeat: his margin of victory was a mere 5,074 votes. Last week the Washington Post reported that in the middle of Thompson's hard-fought race he altered the method by which Illinois' weekly unemployment statistics are reported to the U.S. Labor Department. The gambit, which is used by other states and met with no objection from the Labor Department, conveniently maintained Illinois' unemployment-insurance payment rate at precisely the level needed to keep residents who had been out of work for more than 26 weeks on the federal rolls. As a result, some 50,000 jobless continued to receive unemployment checks, when under the old method the state would have been ruled ineligible. Thompson was unfazed. "I fought to stay on the program," he said. "To have done less would have been the scandal." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.