I’ve spent my life covering Chicago politics and Chicago political corruption.
So, I guess you could say that I’ve seen some things:
Many years ago, when I was first starting out in the newspapering business, the vaunted Chicago press corps—the corporate legacy media–was bowing and sniveling before a black “reform” mayor (not named Johnson) for fear of being branded as racists. This was just as the mayor’s top aide wearing a bad wig, collected rent in a city limousine from impoverished women living in his slum buildings full of rats.
Or later, when Chicago politicians were terrified into silence when Bill Hanhardt, the Chicago mob’s top jewel thief—who was insulated for years because he was also Chief of Detectives for the CPD as Hollywood made TV shows about him—was finally indicted for running the Outfit’s national jewel theft crew. As he was being sentenced in federal court he lifted a glass to me in a toast.
I don’t think I can print what was on his mind. And I don’t worry about the silence of the lambs. It was the silence of the politicians that screamed out a warning, from the mayor on down when the feds dropped the case of the Outfit’s top cop.
Chicago has always been a corrupt town, perhaps worse than Mogadishu Minnesota. Same media and Democrats frightened by the slightest suggestion they might be blasted as racists by black demogoguges.
But what happened to a 97-year-old Tuskegee Airman takes the grand prize.
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