In 2003, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s son Patrick and nephew Robert Vanecko became original investors in Municipal Sewer Services, a sewer cleaning and inspection company which had bought out a bankrupt firm. The company quickly had the old firm’s contracts with the city of Chicago extended without competitive bidding, at a value of $3 million to the company.
MSS did not disclose the Daley family members as investors in its official filings, as required by city ordinance, and it remains unclear how much money Daley’s family members made when they cashed out of the firm in late 2004. MSS would go on to acquire other city contracts and receive $7.9 million from Chicago before Tim Novak of the Chicago Sun-Times reported the conflict of interest late last year. The company was forced to walk away from a live contract and close its doors earlier this year.
On Friday, that same sewer contract was awarded to another company on a non-“friends and family” basis. It was one more story of dirty Chicago politics that went unnoticed in the national media.
This story of Patrick Daley feeding from the trough — or more properly, from the sewer — exemplifies the sweetheart deals that are typical of the political environment in which Senator Barack Obama rose. It rounds out the story of how each member of the family of Obama’s Illinois Senate mentor,
Emil Jones, somehow manages to make big money from government salaries and contracts. It may evoke memories of the illegal pension-fund manipulation that landed Obama’s fundraiser, Tony Rezko, in federal prison — or of the millions in corporate welfare that Obama, as a state senator,
showered upon Rezko and his other major donors in Chicago’s slum development business.
But Friday’s story also serves as a reminder of what sort of governance Obama has willingly and knowingly backed with his good name. Despite his personal popularity, and the resulting capacity he had for political independence — despite having many opportunities to change Chicago in a positive way — Obama always chose to back a corrupt status quo.
This amazingly unexplored part of Obama’s career falsifies the media image he has paid millions of dollars to project, as an agent of positive change.
In January 2007, when Barack Obama endorsed Mayor Daley for re-election, City Hall was still reeling from two major corruption scandals and a handful of minor ones, which had resulted in indictments, convictions, and further investigations throughout 2005 and 2006. One of these was the Hired Truck Scandal.
Chicago was paying $40 million annually to trucking companies for their services, but a reporter for the
Sun-Times noticed that many of these hired trucks would stand idly for days on end. The subsequent news stories and federal investigation found that contracts went to companies owned by family members of top city officials and to those who were either paying bribes or donating to politicians — most of them gave money to Daley’s campaign or to his political machine organizations. Five of the trucking firms let into the program, including its largest beneficiary, had bought their automobile insurance through the mayor’s brother, Cook County Commissioner John Daley.
John Daley’s brother-in-law, John Briatta, was one of the small players
found guilty of collecting bribes. The ringleader of the operation was Mayor Daley’s appointee as First Deputy Water Commissioner, Donald Tomczak, a chief in one of Daley’s most loyal ward organizations. Tomczak pleaded guilty to racketeering and tax fraud.
Mark Gyrion, the mayor’s cousin, was also a top official in the city Water Department. He signed the papers to sell off a city dump truck for scrap to a dealer, who in turn sold it to Gyrion’s mother-in-law, who in turn
made $1 million in the truck program, leasing the “scrap” truck back to the city.
Angelo Torres was a former gang member who had been placing boots on cars for the city in 1996, but by 1998 he was running the entire Hired Truck Program. Torres’s career might have taken off because he was a member of the “Hispanic Democratic Organization,” a then-powerful part of Daley’s political machine (known in Chicago as the “Hispanic Daley Organization”). Torres, who also pleaded guilty to shaking down the trucking firms, cut his father-in-law’s truck company into the program.
