This afternoon a federal jury found former Chicago Streets and Sanitation commissioner Al Sanchez guilty of four of seven mail fraud counts. Sanchez had been accused of circumventing hiring rules to reward political allies.
From AP:
"We had a job to do and we did it, and now I'm sitting up here convicted of crime and I don't know what the crime is," Sanchez told reporters afterward.
U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald brushed aside claims that City Hall higher-ups, not Sanchez, were responsible for patronage hiring in his department.
"When you are commissioner of streets and sanitation you can't duck responsibility for what happens on your watch," Fitzgerald said. "If jobs are going to be awarded to people with clout, if people are rigging the system, that is a crime, that is a felony."
Fitzgerald also scoffed at the suggestion by defense attorney Tom Breen that jurors might have been biased against Sanchez because of heightened concern about political corruption in the wake of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich's impeachment.
Is that the best Breen could come up with? Blago?
Here is something better, from Greg Hinz' blog in Crain's Chicago Business:
I didn't sit through the trial of Al Sanchez, who ran the city's Department of Streets and Sanitation for Mayor Richard M. Daley and who Monday was convicted of essentially running it as a big patronage mill to reward the mayor's political backers with city jobs and raises.
Nor do I know whether the Sanchez case will lead to any further criminal charges. U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald doesn't confide in me.
I do know this: As in the earlier conviction of mayoral "patronage chief" Robert Sorich on similar charges, only a complete naif would believe that Mr. Sanchez acted strictly on his own, that he got up one day and decided to start hiring and firing political favorites.
Sanchez helped build the secretive Hispanic Democratic Organization, which gives Mayor Daley a foothold in Chicago's growing Hispanic community.
The group is often mockingly referred to as the Hispanic Daley Organization.
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