When I was starting out as a Chicago City Hall reporter for that big metropolitan paper—when we could smoke in newsrooms on deadline, curse, tell jokes, laugh and wore jackets and ties to work—I had one rule.

I’d often discuss this rule with my political sources, elected officials, cops, city workers and others:

Lie to me just once, just once, and I’ll burn you to the ground.

It wasn’t an empty threat. Chicago politics wasn’t a cloistered convent. It was and remains a place of thieves protected by the laws and regulations that they themselves controlled. It is a Democrat Barter Town and like all such towns it is hell bent on strangling itself. And there was one top aide to the mayor who thought himself a master manipulator. Frank lied to me and I burned him.