CHICAGO — The long-awaited corruption trial of Chicago’s longest-serving City Council member is underway just as the city is blowing past another notorious milestone.
Chicago is the country’s most corrupt city for the fourth year in a row, according to the latest report from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s political science department.
The report uses public corruption statistics published by the U.S. Department of Justice from 1976 through 2021. In those 45 years, Chicago’s elected officials and public servants weaseled their way to a record 1,824 corruption convictions, according to the report.
In 2021, there were 32 public corruption convictions in the Northern District of Illinois, which includes Chicago and its suburbs. That’s up from 22 convictions the year prior, a “modest — though noteworthy — increase,” wrote the report’s authors, Marco Rosaire Rossi and Thomas J. Gradel.
Illinois ranked as the nation’s third-most corrupt state or district, behind the District of Columbia and Louisiana, according to the report’s analysis of corruption convictions that adjusts for population size.
“Illinoisans are used to being suspicious of their elected representatives, and surely, that suspicion is often justified,” the authors wrote.
UIC published the report just ahead of the federal trial of former Ald. Ed Burke, who is charged with racketeering, extortion and bribery. Jury selection for Burke’s trial began Monday.
Burke pressured developers to hire his private law firm and leveraged his political clout to secure jobs and favors for allies, prosecutors alleged in a sweeping 59-page indictment.
If convicted, Burke will join more than three dozen alderpeople convicted of crimes since the early ’70s, and he’d become the fourth current or former member convicted in the past five years, according to the Sun-Times.
Burke did not seek a new term representing the 14th Ward after 54 years in office.
The report also cites the state’s Commonwealth Edison bribery scandal facilitated by associates of Michael Madigan, former speaker of the Illinois House; the indictment of former Ald. Carrie Austin for conspiring to take bribes from construction contractors in her South Side ward; and the fraud conviction of former Ald. Patrick Daley Thompson, among others.
In many recent Illinois corruption cases, “elected representatives either accepted or facilitated the bribery to ensure favored legislation at the behest of a powerful business,” according to the report.
But a bitter end to Burke’s once-iron-clad political career, as well as the ousting of Madigan, are “an indication that a new page is turned in the state,” according to the report.
Madigan’s trial is set for April.
“The state’s most well-known political machine, concentrated in the Cook County Democratic Party, has experienced precipitous decline both in popularity and political impact,” according to the report.
The report noted another silver lining: Public corruption convictions in the Northern District of Illinois have been steadily declining in every decade since the ’90s. The peak year for corruption in Chicago was 1988, according to the report.
“However, just because corruption is becoming less frequent does not mean it is still not shamefully prevalent, nor that its impact on the state is less pernicious in terms of tax dollars wasted and lost in public trust,” according to the report.
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