I used to "work" for a living. Truth be told, I was a Chicago developer and contractor for 30 years. During that time I met with Ed Burke on two occasions...to get advice. I never hired his firm, and never was asked to pay him a dime. I was gracious, helpful, and in my dealings "honest".
I have no idea if he treated others differently but I do know that he didn't have nearly the clout, power or destructive impact of the current Boss Tony Preckwinkle. Tony along with Madigan have been the architects of the city's destruction.
I had the opportunity to meet Preckwinkle as well. She wasn't quite as friendly. After meeting me in her ward office (I was introduced by a mutual friend) to discuss developing housing in her ward she at least had the decency to be truthful with me. "Why should let some Jewish kid from Highland Park build in my ward?".
FORMER CHICAGO ALDERMAN EDWARD M. BURKE
Ed Burke Knows How This Will End
By John Kass
November 8, 2023
As his federal corruption trial gets underway this week in downtown Chicago, consider the photograph of the Chicago Democrat who is the personification of The Chicago Way ™:
I was born in his neighborhood, in Visitation Parish on the South Side, near the Union Stockyards, the smell of tens of thousands livestock to be slaughtered hanging in the air. Those who remember the slaughterhouses remember the smell. We can’t forget it. It’s in our skin. I suppose the smell was of the unspoken fear of the livestock that hung all about us, the wet wool and hides that permeated everything, from the gray painted stoops in the backs of the two-flats, the way the smell of ash and molten steel hung in the air over South Chicago.
Out on 52nd and Peoria Streets, whether you had lace curtains on your windows in the two-flat, whether your grandma sipped her whiskey in the pantry, or drank her beer from a bottle on the front porch for all to see, we were all brutalized. We were brutal to each other. And so, you see him there in that photograph, Burke standing alone, standing out, Mr. City Hall gleaming in a blue pin-striped suit, sharp pocket square, like a Kelly-green Cadillac with a white vinyl top.
Burke came up in a Chicago that was politically corrupt and politically brutal, in the city of tribes, fighting it out with the other tribes, the Irish and the Italians, the blacks and the Poles, and the Appalachians, Lithuanians, Greeks and many other tribes and now Latinos. As his story ends, as he leaves it, Chicago is still corrupt. It is still brutal. Although the Democratic Machine provided order and the line against street crime, there is no order now. Chaos rolls the streets of Chicago.
If there is one thing that you should know about Burke, it’s this:
He is a realist. There is no room in the world he hammered out for himself for fairy tales. He doesn’t believe in fairy tales. He believes in the law as a tool, the way a butcher believes in the boning knife, as the farmer believes in the plow, as the firefighter believes in the axe and the hose. Burke believed in the precision of words in the law and the exercise of governmental power as the political hammer that offered order. He believed in leverage. And so, he knows how this will end.
It will end badly.
In the fairy tale, a long one-way walk in the woods or in the park is offered. A last smoke. But Burke hates smoking. And all that is offered to Burke is a public flaying.
And he’s expected to stand witness to that flaying. Burke, 75, and another elderly Democratic Machine boss, former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan–who has been indicted in a different case–must have known this day would come. Their friends told them to retire, that they already had all the money they’d ever need, that they should step down and remove the target from their chests and save themselves.
But they loved the action and they loved the power. They just couldn’t let it go. If they’d stepped down what would they be? Just two old Irish guys with money. And they wanted the action.
And the phrase Burke is alleged to have spoken into the government weasel wire worn by sniveling, former Ald. Dan “Happy Endings” Solis (25th) will lead all of Burke’s obituaries:
“Did we, uh, land the tuna?”
Solis is not expected to appear in federal court as a witness. The federal prosecutor can’t afford that in court, because Danny Solis had an appetite sated by sex traffickers and Roberto Caldero, the former close political aide to another weasel, former Chicago U.S. Rep. Luis “the Heroic Taxpayer” Gutierrez. Federal authorities recorded this exchange between Solis and Caldero that should explain Solis’ absence from court:
“I want to get a good massage, with a nice ending,” says Solis on the federal wire. “Do you know any good places?”
Caldero said knew of such a place. “What kind of women do they got there?” Solis asked.
“Asian,” Caldero says.
“Oh good. Good, good, good,” says Solis. “I like Asian.”
He likes Asian? That’s why federal prosecutors don’t want him in the courtroom. But Burke’s old friend Solis will be remembered, particularly by former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot who doesn’t like the fact that Solis gets to stay out of jail and keep his fat city pension.
“This is a man who exploited his position,… to enrich himself, attempting to enrich others,” Lightfoot was quoted as saying by the Chicago Sun Times. “There’s got to be consequences and accountability for that. It’s not enough for him to simply walk away. Sail off into the sunset. That sends the wrong message.”
Maybe, but Lightfoot would not have been mayor it it wasn’t for Burke. He’d held a fundraiser for her opponent Boss Toni Preckwinkle, president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners and chair of the Cook County Democrats. Lightfoot and the Chicago media I was a part of took Burke and we tied him around Lightfoot’s neck like an albatross. Lightfoot won election and Boss Toni had to wait years for her revenge. She got some revenge when Lightfoot was forced to endorse Boss Toni’s protege, Kim Foxx for Cook County State’s Attorney. But that didn’t satisfy Boss Toni. She sent her Bolshevik meat puppet Brandon Johnson to take Lightfoot out as mayor. The vaunted Chicago press corps helped him.
I covered Burke for years as a political and City Hall writer. I was not a friend, but I did appreciate his wit and attention to detail. Burke would have smiled a withering smile at Lightfoot’s naivete. He would have known that Lightfoot’s endorsement of Kim Foxx was like a neon sign advertising her weakness. When Burke was young, his father died, and in a succession battle, Democrat precinct captains lined up against him to take him out. He fought them off. He could never afford to be naive.
Those who don’t know him will look at that photo and perhaps see him as arrogant. He is not a back slapper. But I know him. He came up through corruption, and so I don’t see him as arrogant, even with all the howling jackals in the media who were afraid of him when he was in his full power. They snarl like tough guys but they’re not tough. He’s no longer in his full power. He is no longer the man who picks judges, a maestro who conducts government the way Sir Georg Solti conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Think of Georg Solti with a hammer.
A man precise in his use of the law and government to make and burnish his fortune. A man who looked at political hacks grabbing for envelopes of cash and wrinkling his nose in disdain. He didn’t have a magical last name that opened doors. His daddy wasn’t mayor. The law and government were the instruments he learned how to play. It was his meticulous attention to detail that helped him build his fortune, not his genes. And unlike the barbarians and the political baboons, he worked the law and government to leverage power.
Was the Chicago in Burke’s day corrupt? Of course it was. It still is. At least there was order under the old Richard J. Daley machine, and in the pursuit of votes, the machine was attentive to the needs of the people and the neighborhoods. It was attentive, of course to the Chicago Outfit, yes, but it was also attentive to order and to commerce so they could all make money. And forcing Democrat communities to accept tens of thousands of illegal migrants and house them in tents at taxpayer expense would have been unthinkable.
This new machine–the one that is stiffened by Chicago Teachers’ Union muscle on behalf of Democratic boss Toni Preckwinkle–enjoys the unthinkable. It excuses random street crime as a way of balancing racial equity. It congratulates itself on shrinking the size of the county jail, not because criminals are any less violent against taxpayers, but because of their skin color and the Democrat Socialists curry their favor.
When Burke was a boy, the alderman of the 14th ward was Clarence Wagner, chairman of the powerful Utilities Committee. The 14th Ward boss was Judge John McDermott. Wagner was in line to become mayor of Chicago who handled the 50 year Commonwealth Edison franchise agreement and is said to have made a fortune on that deal, enough to fill untold dozens of safety deposit boxes. The Outfit and the machine were tired of so-called “reformer” Mayor Martin Kennelly. Mayor Kennelly made trouble for the Black Policy racket (illegal lottery) with police raids and public pressure, perhaps unaware that while blacks may have been policy front men, but the Chicago Outfit had overtaken the policy racket and ran it.
So Kennelly, who was either naive or stupid, had to go. The machine sent black political leader U.S. Rep. William Levi Dawson to send the message. Kennelly was out. Clarence Wagner was to be made mayor. And Judge McDermott would be made Democratic ward committeeman. That was 1953, before I was born.
Out on the corner of 55th and Halsted was a white tablecloth steakhouse called LeMec’s with one of those great and classic neon signs. It was my Uncle John Djikas’ place. It was a hangout for the 14th ward big shots. There was a big card game every Saturday night.
Uncle John Djikas was a Greek immigrant from Bulgaria who escaped the murdering Turks as a 15-year-old kid, and came to Chicago for work and to live the American dream. One thing Uncle John learned surviving the Turks: Keep your mouth shut, which was also the unofficial motto of Chicago.
One Sunday morning Uncle John stayed at the restaurant after the card game and made coffee for customers going to and coming from mass at Visitation, which we called Viz. And there on Sunday morning, who does he see?
Judge McDermott.
“John, I’ve got some business at the bank,” my Uncle John recalled years ago. He did not say it was Sunday and the banks were supposed to be closed. He did not say, “Isn’t that Clarence Wagner’s bank?”
All he did was keep his mouth shut and serve McDermott some coffee. Soon the whole neighborhood learned the news. Wagner, who was set to be mayor of Chicago, had literally lost his head in a spectacular car crash that killed him while coming home from a fishing trip outside International Falls, MN.
In an amazing coincidence, who became mayor of Chicago ?
Richard J. Daley, who ruled for decades.
McDermott made Burke’s father, Joe Burke, the alderman of the 14th Ward. It was the Chicago Way. When Joe died the captains tried to take it and Ed fought them off.
And Ed Burke?
They made him a cop and he went to law school. The law was his hammer. And now the law wants to put him in prison, an old man alone. This is not an excuse. He signed up for this, not a contract, but an agreement written in blood all the same. And now, as he waits for it, sitting in that chair next to his lawyers in federal court, the only thing left to him really, is how he faces what’s coming.
Like I said, Ed Burke didn’t believe in fairy tales. He was a realist. And he knows how this will end.
(Copyright 2023 John Kass)
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