Posted on 11/21/2009 11:01:03 PM PST by STARWISE
Grief and anger, like clouds of a coming storm, moved back and forth across the landscape of Mayor Daley's face in public appearances last week.
And why not?
Michael Scott, his longtime, loyal friend, was dead.
Suddenly. Violently. By his own hand, according to the Cook County medical examiner.
When we lose someone we love, particularly like that, don't we ask ourselves what it was we failed to see? Or failed to do?
Our own helplessness adds rage to sorrow.
It's understandable. It's human.
That's the best explanation I can come up with for what happened Wednesday at the mayor's news conference at City Hall.
First, Daley raged at the medical examiner who, hours after Scott's body was retrieved from the banks of the North Branch of the Chicago River, ruled Scott's death a suicide.
"Enough with the medical examiner, let's stop this," Daley said. "Fifteen minutes of fame -- they gave it to you. The Chicago Police Department has a responsibility to check everything. I'm sorry. They don't rush to conclusions. They cannot do that. You have to look at everything."
Dr. Nancy Lynne Jones, Cook County's medical examiner, is hardly a media hound.
Most residents don't even know her name. She is a veteran forensic expert. And the autopsy her office performed was witnessed and affirmed, she said, by two Chicago Police detectives.
The only reason I can see that Jones went public in a rare news conference was to defend the integrity of her office against suggestions her findings were hasty or wrong.
She did not deserve the mayor's ridicule.
In fact, had it been a murder and had she been slow in calling it that, there would have been an equal outcry that she was covering up the facts.
The mayor's second eruption was directed at WFLD-Channel 32 reporter Tera Williams, who asked if Scott's death would harm the mayor politically.
That assertion, she said, had just been expressed by a group of West Side ministers.
Could her question have been posed more artfully than it was? Sure.
But the mayor's reaction was painful to watch.
Daley unleashed the full force of his fury, not just at the reporter in question, but at the press corps in its entirety.
"What's wrong with you people?" he demanded. "Don't you have any respect for people anymore? I know you want to make a lot of money, you want to be on TV, you want to ask me a lot of questions . . . but do you have any respect for anyone? I guess you don't. It's kind of a sad comment. . . . You owe me an apology on that."
Grief and anger over the tragic death of a friend go only so far in explaining Daley's behavior.
As he stalked out of the press conference, it was back into what some veterans of his administration view as his increasing isolation. Daley's inner circle, they say, has shrunk to almost no one beyond his trusted press secretary, Jackie Heard, and his brother, Bill.
Scandals such as Hired Truck, federal convictions of former members of his administration and ongoing federal investigations of his son's sewer business and nephew's pension deal have only darkened Daley's disposition. The federal subpoena his late friend, Michael Scott, got in August -- looking into clouted admissions to elite public schools -- plus the public scrutiny of Scott's land acquisitions, cannot have helped.
All of those stories, of course, were delivered by a media the mayor regards as so heartless and unfair that he even holds it responsible for driving Oprah Winfrey to shut down her Chi-cago shop.
The mayor isn't looking for my opinion, I realize, but the fights he picked this week served absolutely no one.
Especially not him.
~~~~~~
Albeit it's implied above that it was almost certainly a suicide, CNN reporter was just on, having returned from a visit to Chicago. He said he was stunned by how many people approached him both ways in the airport and as he was out and about and told him point blank that Michael Scott did NOT commit suicide .. that it was political, the Machine, etc.
One unbelieving fellow interviewed stated that someone could've held Scott's armed hand with the gun to his head and forced the shot.
Doubt the truth of this newest Chicago Swamp scandal will ever really be known.
I still don't get how the gun could've been found under his body when he was in the river.
~~Chicago Way .... PING!
I would have committed suicide in a nicer area.
This is reminding me of vince foster.
It's going to be fun to see Zero's support from Chicago continue to implode over the next while. The Oprah announcement was another sinkhole opening up under his feet.
He was found in ONE FOOT of water, that’s how.
Daley’s comments about the M.E. were out of line, but what he had to say to that reporter was the sort of thing that more politicians should be saying to the media jackals.
Mike Scott, the Assistant U.S. Attorney who successfully persecuted the case that made Arizona property synonymous with land fraud, the defense attorney who successfully defended Richard Kliendienst against perjury charges, the guy who successfully defended Arizona Governor Even Mecham against criminal charges.
The guy whom I shared many an adult beverage with, since he was Mrs. Chandler's cousin. And whose pall bearer I was, since the assigned pall bearers stopped off for a drink on the way to the cemetary and I had to fill in.
Here is the great Michael Scott. A man's man. A cowboy.:
Oh ... ok .. I guess the gun
wouldn’t float somewhere else.
Still I think it’s quite “lucky”
that the gun was found under him.
You ?
Sounds pretty dingy ... as John Kass describes it.
~~~~~~~~~
“But no matter what investigators finally decide — whether Scott’s death by gunshot was suicide or something else (as at least one of Mayor Daley’s longtime advisers has wondered) — questions will remain.
Scott, 60, was found dead last week in the shallows of the Chicago River behind some pilings and under a broken railroad bridge.
A place off the grid, with apparently no security cameras focused there.
A lonely, weedy outcrop only a few feet from a bustling neighborhood.
It is a place public men like Scott would avoid, in daylight or at night.
As funeral plans were being finalized, investigators tried to figure his state of mind.
An impossibility, whether in heater cases like Scott’s, or the ones you never read about.
My column about Scott’s death prompted a retired Chicago homicide detective — who spent decades trying to figure the state of mind of the dead — to send me a haunting and heartbreaking letter.”
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-kass-22-bdognov22,0,5987011.column
~~~~
Isolated location no place for such a public man to die
###
Michael Scott made his living in Chicago politics as one of Mayor Richard Daley’s guys out front.
The mayor put him on a series of public boards, from the Park District to the Chicago Board of Education. He made a decent living in real estate, and for 30 years he did what all front guys do:
Talk to reporters, sit in front of news cameras and lend his face to the mayor’s policies and enterprise.
What’s strange is that this very public man found an extremely private place to die.
The place where Scott was found early Monday, with a single gunshot wound in the head, is on the maps as part of the vibrant and high-tech River North neighborhood.
But actually, the place where he fell is a no-man’s land along the North Branch of the Chicago River, a difficult place to reach, especially for a 60-year-old stumbling around in the pitch darkness, over uneven ground, with no light and no moon.
Visitors Monday to the spot where Scott died didn’t see any police or security cameras that might have recorded Scott’s last living seconds. With all the high-tech in Chicago, the spot where Scott died is seemingly off the grid.
It is not a place for public men like Scott. Rather, it is a place for homeless junkies and rats. It is a place to hide.
It’s certainly not a place for Daley’s 1983 deputy campaign manager and, until Monday, the mayor’s president of the Chicago Board of Education.
*snip*
“We know what the ME ruled,” said Police Superintendent Jody Weis. “But there are a lot of questions out there.”
Scott’s blue Cadillac was found in a parking lot next to the Apparel Center building at 350 N. Orleans St. It had been left near a blue trash bin.
From there to where his body was found, Scott would have walked about 20 yards to a fence near an old, deserted railroad bridge. Commuters can see that bridge, its black steel trestle permanently raised skyward, sticking out of the River North landscape like a broken arm.
And in Monday’s daylight, after the TV cameras had left, it seemed reasonable that Scott could have easily made his way there.
But the night before, in the dark, it would have been all but unnavigable. He would have had to walk right under the cement counterweight for that old drawbridge, then scramble underneath an iron fence, then down a little embankment overgrown with weeds and strewn with trash.
He’d have walked over broken bottles, old rags from some homeless wanderer. There was a syringe on the ground.
Scott would have walked out along part of the cement river wall running under the bridge. It is about 5 feet below street level, next to an old boarded-up bridge house. It’s quiet, even in the day. At night it would be all but silent.
And again, remember: There are no lights, apparently no security cameras to capture the pull of the trigger and the muzzle flash.
After the bullet entered his brain, Scott fell into the shallows along the riverbank, behind some wood pilings. Police found the gun underneath him.
Phil Krone, a longtime Daley adviser and a friend of Scott’s, openly questioned the medical examiner’s ruling in a short article on the Chicago Daily Observer, an Internet news and opinion site.
“While the news reports indicate it was a suicide I do hope that an appropriate investigation is done to make sure that it was not a murder masked to look like a suicide,” Krone wrote. “There are many angry people in this world. and you never know who might act out.”
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-kass-17-nov17,0,4978544.column
just how a anti gun guy and anti street violence guy shoots himself in the street
if we must live under this maifia dictatorship,one consolation is that he is pissing so many people off that ;his fellow mobsters are infighthing......I see no other reason for Daley to be so upset......I think he knows too much.....
As he continues to systemmatically bleed his city and state of billions, ruin peoples' lives with enforced dominance and adherence to the evils of liberalism.......
Truthfully? I'm glad he's 'hurting' over this (his friend's death and how it is perceived)....maybe he can get an inkling of how the rest of us feel about what he and his ilk are doing to this country.
~~~We Have A Winner!~~~
DIN!DING!DING
Righto.
Sure except when Conservatives do this they are immediately classified as "whiners". Liberals get their shorts in a massive know whenever a media they believe to be their soul mate turns on them. After all to b a liberal is to have the 100 cover of the press.
A gun would not float. It would sink because guns are much heavier than water.
. . ."found dead last week in the shallows of the Chicago River behind some pilings and under a broken railroad bridge".
The Mayor offers that guilt inescapable when a suicide occurs. . .and this is true. As true, of course; the greatest guilt when the victim is your friend; and you know there was 'NO CHOICE' for his suicide.
(When depressed; I think watching something like Ken Burn's Civil War series can be helpful. So. . .perhaps watching The God Father - all three per box videos - might help ease the Mayor's pain.)
/Murder aside. . .was wondering how Chicago was feeling about Oprah's comment - by insult - re her move: "Why would anybody live here?". Adding this to the list of reasons for Mayor's stress, gives a clue./
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