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CHICAGO As the summer travel season gets underway, high gas prices are not keeping the family cars, minivans and sport-utility vehicles from taking off. I think it is about the betrayal of normal prosecutive procedures to embarrass if not perhaps unseat with the help of the Chicago Tribune a very popular sitting mayor," attorney Thomas Anthony Durkin said in an opening statement on behalf of former Daley aide Robert Sorich. "I believe that we'll get a far better trial in the courtroom than we've gotten in the media," Durkin said outside of the courtroom. "You can't cross-examine anybody in the media, the media gets to print whatever it wants. Maybe, some newspapers in this town have an agenda. I don't know, that remains to be seen." Outside the courtroom, Tribune columnist John Kass, who was targeted by Durkin in his opening statement, defended the newspaper. "We're going to continue to write stories that we think are important," Kass said. "Sometimes, politicians don't like what we write, and that's too bad." Lead prosecutor Patrick M. Collins objected sharply to Durkin's surprising claim, but U.S. District Judge David H. Coar allowed Durkin to continue. But after the jury was led out for lunch, Coar told Durkin that his remark was improper. Sorich, 42, and three other former city officials are charged in an eight-count indictment with faking job interview scores and hiding lists of patronage employees and their sponsors in an effort to cover up political patronage in city hiring in defiance of a court order. The case strikes at the heart of the mayor's campaign organization, which fields thousands of precinct workers to knock on doors and get out the vote. Federal prosecutors say the century-old patronage system has secretly survived in Chicago despite a 1983 court order that allows officials to fill only 1,000 of the 37,000 city jobs on the basis of political affiliation rather than objective qualifications. Collins, who was also the lead prosecutor in the recent racketeering and fraud trial of former Illinois Gov. George Ryan, told jurors in his opening statement that Sorich and his co-defendants schemed "by dark of night" to conceal the continued use of the patronage system. "We're not here to make politics a dirty word," Collins said. "What makes it dirty is when it is used a motive to hand out jobs -- taxpayer subsidized jobs." "If the mayor's political organization wants people to knock on doors they should go out and hire them," Collins said. Durkin claimed that the trial represented an attempt by "the federal government to impose its will on Chicago." He also led jurors through the history of patronage over the last 50 years and capped it with the remark that "Richard J. Daley is on trial here." Richard J. Daley was the current mayor's father. Coar said after the jury was taken to lunch that the remark about the elder Daley was also improper. He did not elaborate on his reference to the newspaper other than to point to Tribune columnist John Kass, who was sitting in the courtroom, and say that he and other journalists had been critical. He said that Sorich had been "taking a bath in the newspapers." The case is an outgrowth of a two-year federal investigation of payoffs to city officials from trucking companies in exchange for city hauling jobs in the scandal-plagued Hired Truck Program. The investigation expanded to include alleged patronage hiring violations. A 1983 court order known as the Shakman Decree bars basing hiring based on political affiliation in filling all but about 1,000 of the 37,000 city jobs. Sewer workers, building inspectors, street sweepers and other people who perform basic city services are supposed to be hired based on qualifications only. Critics such as patronage-hating Chicago attorney Michael Shakman who went to court to get the decree say violations began almost as soon as the ink was dry on the court order. |
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