Chicago, you’ll be surprised to hear, is pretty corrupt. Perhaps the best true story concerning corruption in the Windy City – if not anywhere – is the hilariously brilliant story of the 1970s “Mirage Sting”. In 1977, The Chicago newspaper The Sun-Times OK-ed the plans of a couple of their investigative reporters to set up a bar (The Mirage) in the north side of Chicago, pose as simple bar owners and see what came out of the woodwork. The results were incredible. The undercover journalists had purposely left unfixed around the bar multiple health and safety breaches, or as they put it: “more health violations than barstools”. They then watched with amusement as the building inspector came in, spent a few minutes looking round, then slipped a proffered $10 bill into his inspection papers while exclaiming “Beautiful day!”. There then followed an almost sitcom-esque parade of inspectors willing to ignore any violations providing a few dollars were slipped into their folders. Fire, plumbing, ventilation : all were bribed to look the other way. The journalists were even taken under the wing of a “Mr. Fixit” named Philip Barasch. Barasch was a big Chicago landlord who taught them the tricks of the pay-off trade: what hour the inspectors would show up and how much to give them. Barasch’s best tip? Don’t pay off the cops, because if you do “they keep coming around every month, like flies, looking for a payoff” . Since that marvellous Sun-Times scoop, Chicago politics hasn’t exactly cleaned itself up: out of the last five governors of Illinois, four (including Blagojevich) were indicted in office.
Fast forward to the present and following the events of the past few days, it now looks like Roland Burris – the man chosen by disgraced former Governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich to replace Barack Obama as the state’s junior senator in the United States Senate – is just as corrupt as the man who selected him. Burris, it turns out – following his fourth explanation of the events- sought to raise money for Blagojevich at the exact same time that the Governor was planning to appoint him to the Senate. Despite his strenuous denials of any wrongdoing, it looks like the fourth explanation is one too many, as the Chicago Tribune is now calling for his resignation. Thus the squeaky clean Senator chosen by the dirty- as-hell governor turns out to be… just another Chicago politician.
The selection of Burris is an odd story in itself…
