Free Republic

The city of Chicago is one of the few major metropolitan areas which runs away from its past at every opportunity. Yet, indeed, the very construction of the city led to the term "underworld." And with rampant corruption controlled by infamous individuals like "Big Jim" Colosimo, Al Capone, Paul "The Waiter" Ricca, Murray "The Camel" Humphrey and Tony "Joe Batters" Accardo, Chicago can hardly bury its past--no pun intended. Since the turn of the 20th century, what Carl Sandburg referred to as the "City of Big Shoulders" was perhaps the center of organized crime in the United States. Though New...

Politics produces a gap between words and deeds. Obama exaggerates the credit he deserves for a limited piece of ethics-reform legislation. He embellishes when he presents himslf as having a consistent record on the Iraq war when in fact he's done done a fair amount of zigzagging. He says it was the 1965 bloody attacks on civil rights protesters in Selma, Alabama, that inspired his parents to marry. They had been married for years already. He engages in doubletalk when, on free trade and Iraq, he tells the yokels one thing and the policy people another. He overstates when he...

CHICAGO - A federal jury found five aging men guilty Monday in a racketeering conspiracy that involved decades of extortion, loan sharking and murder aimed at rubbing out anyone who dared stand in the way of the ruthless Chicago mob. The verdicts capped an extraordinary 10-week trial that laid bare some of the inner workings of The Outfit. The prosecution's star witness was an admitted hit man who took the stand against his own brother to spell out the allegations, crime by crime. The jury heard about 18 unsolved killings, including the beating death and cornfield burial of Tony "The...

The judge in the San Diego City Hall corruption case ruled against the defendants yesterday on their most significant pretrial requests, including motions to throw out wiretap recordings and to split the case into separate trials. The defense had asked that the wiretaps be ruled inadmissible because an FBI agent failed to disclose on wiretap applications that defendant Lance Malone made statements showing his ignorance of a criminal conspiracy, in particular a comment that "nothing illegal" was going on. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey T. Miller dismissed that argument, concluding that the judge who approved the wiretap applications "had substantial basis...

One of Chicago's most powerful labor unions, once run by the son-in-law of a top mobster, "continues to be infiltrated by organized crime," a union hearing officer ruled this week in a move that could lead to a purge of the leadership. "This will hurt the mob big time," said former FBI agent Jack O'Rourke, an organized crime expert who investigated Laborers Local 1001, which represents hundreds of city employees, many Streets and Sanitation workers. It's "been influenced by the mob for 50 years." But alleged mob influence wasn't the only reason hearing officer Peter Vaira ordered the 2,800-member local...