Federal fraud trial in Chicago targets patronage hiring

CHICAGO -- Hiring records were shredded to keep federal investigators from learning which employees on the city payroll landed their jobs through political connections, prosecutors say.

Officials allegedly laughed among themselves about the idea of throwing the storage drive of a city computer into Lake Michigan.

And a former personnel director at the city sewer department told prosecutors that her predecessor gave her some advice as he went out the door: ''Deny everything. Deny, deny, deny."

It's not a pretty picture prosecutors plan to paint at the fraud trial of Mayor Richard M. Daley's former patronage director, Robert Sorich, and three other former officials. They are accused of illegally scheming to dole out city jobs to applicants based on political connections.

The four men have denied any wrongdoing. Their attorneys are expected to argue that what the defendants did was standard procedure.

''This city works, and Robert Sorich helped to make it work," said an attorney for Sorich, Thomas Anthony Durkin, after the indictment was returned in September. ''To make it seem as if it works based on fraud is preposterous."

Jury selection is set to begin today.

Despite efforts by reformers, the rewarding of political loyalists with jobs on the city payroll has a long history in The City That Works.

Ward leaders, union bosses, and other political bigwigs dispense jobs to political foot soldiers who ring doorbells and get out the vote. Democratic precinct workers still ride the city's powder-blue sanitation trucks and hold down hundreds of other jobs, from the sewer system to O'Hare.

A federal court in 1972 barred city officials from firing their employees for political reasons and in 1983 extended that to include hiring. The so-called Shakman Decree, named for Michael L. Shakman, a Chicago lawyer who sued over the city's patronage practices, applies to all but a small number of policy-making jobs.

''You should not have to have a political sponsor and political connections to work in the public sector," said Cindi Canary, executive director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform. ''Getting a job as a landscape engineer or garbage man should not depend on your ability to pass petitions or work in a precinct."

The charges follow a two-year federal investigation of a scheme in which trucking companies paid bribes to win city business. So far, 44 former officials, truckers, and others have been charged. Thirty-seven have been convicted; the rest are awaiting trial.

Sorich was the number two man in the mayor's office of intergovernmental affairs, which was responsible for coordinating a wide array of government bodies. Prosecutors say it was also the center of the city's patronage operations.

The mayor has not been accused of wrongdoing.

Among other things, the defendants in the patronage case are accused of faking applicants' job interview scores. In one instance, investigators found that an applicant who scored high on his interview was in Iraq the day the interview supposedly took place. Prosecutors also say that lists of people who got patronage jobs were shredded and computer files were erased.

The trial comes less than a month after the racketeering conviction of George Ryan, former governor of Illinois. That case, and this one, were brought by US Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who also heads the CIA leak investigation in Washington.

''There are a lot of nervous people around City Hall right now -- there's no other way to say it," said political scientist Paul Green of Roosevelt University.