By John Kass
June 26, 2024
Former Chicago Alderman Ed Burke should have hired himself a fiddler, an Irish fiddler to fiddle him gleefully out of federal court—Ald. Ed and Justice Anne doing a jig for the news cameras–after they got that big wet federal kiss from U.S. Judge Virginia Kendall.
Or a piano on wheels to meet Ed and Anne. Ed is a musical fellow and has been known to gather around a piano to sing show tunes and Irish classics.
Is there a song for Ed Burke getting a slight slap on the wrist with Boss Mike Madigan–the longtime Illinois House speaker–also facing corruption charges?
Boss Madigan is the last trophy Chicago Irish politician waiting to be mounted on that federal wall. The feds have been hunting him for years. So, Eddie gets a kiss and Mike Madigan waits to bear the brunt and feel the cracking weight of the federal sledge hammer right in the teeth if he’s found guilty. Will there be those who mourn Boss Madigan if he gets hammered? Perhaps.
Isn’t that how it works? Yeah, that’s how it works. They’ll tell you that the cases are not connected, but then, they’ll tell you a lot of things. The media think this is some kind of victory, and the idiotic Sun Times is telling you that the Burke case means the end of the “Chicago Way.” Who believes that? Only idiot chumbolones.
I admit that I could be completely wrong here. Could be, but I don’t think so. I’ve spent four decades covering corrupt Chicago politicians and federal corruption hunters have been hounding Madigan for years. I’ve heard angry judges lecturing the corrupt, then cut them a break. And a federal judge has just cut Burke a big break.
Ignore the media bleating all over itself that justice was served and their nonsense that this means the “Chicago Way” has been smashed. The media beclowns itself daily. Within minutes of the news U.S. District Court Judge Virginia Kendall showering the Burkes with mercy, political guys were calling each other comparing Burke’s sentence to that of Tim Mapes, Madigan’s chief of staff, who was convicted of lying under oath to protect his boss.
“So Burke only gets two years and Mapes gets 30 months?” a man who makes his living in politics said to me. “What does that tell you about Madigan?”
It tells me that Boss Madigan should have taken the advice of friends who told him decades ago, begged him actually to retire and slip away and count his millions in some castle in Ireland rather than play politics in Illinois, and play the Boss with a target on his back.
But Burke gets a measly two years for a whopping 13 corruption convictions? That’s all? He did get many letters of mercy sent to the judge.
Politico reporter Shia Kappos quoted Judge Kendall as saying: “I have never in all my career seen the letters I have received for Mr. Burke.” The letters detailed that Burke had helped them overcome their troubles. Burke’s attorney added to the emotional overkill.
“Ed is a priest without a collar because he has done some many good deeds that are priestly in nature” said Burke lawyer Charles Sklarsky. A priest without a collar. Really? Did that priest without a collar go fishing? Did he, uh, land the tuna Chuckie?
Just two years for Burke? The feds wanted 10. Even the federal judge’s own guidelines allowed from six to eight years. But Ed Burke, the Democrat Party longtime Southwest Side ward boss and picker of judges, gets only two years after all those convictions for all that corruption?
Well, fiddle-dee-dee.
I did find a photo of a sad Hungarian fiddler, but failed in my quest for a green fiddler leprechaun, like Burke’s famous green necktie.
I didn’t want Burke to die in prison—I’ve known him for years—and in all that time he treated me fairly. We’re from the same neighborhood. But when Judge Virginia Kendall offered her guideline of between 6 and 8 years I told a friend of Burke’s that three years seemed fair.
But only two?
That’s only two baseball seasons.Burke was prepared for the worst. Last year I wrote a column: Ed Burke Knows How This Will End.
But in federal court this week, Burke didn’t get a death sentence behind bars. He didn’t get the worst. He got ice cream and cake. Much of the Chicago media continued to beclown itself, prattling idiotically about how the Department of Justice had squashed the old Chicago corruption.
According to the Sun Times: “Ed Burke’s prison sentence is another blow to the old ‘Chicago way.’ Good.”
Two years isn’t a ‘blow.’ Reading such idiotic nonsense out loud is cruel and unusual punishment. Writing such nonsense means you should take a long walk in the woods, alone, and never come back. That idiocy in the Sun Times might as well have been written by the paper’s lead columnist, an odious, unctuous creature, fashioning himself as someone who speaks truth to power. Yet when he was criminally charged with domestic battery for slapping his wife around, he showed up in court with a public defender in the hopes of saving himself some money.
That’s cheap clout. The act of some cheap chisler. Even Burke had more respect for the courts.
I always liked Burke and his colleague Fast Eddie Vrdolyak. Were they corrupt? Yes. Were they hard workers in a ruthless game? Yes. Did they outwork everybody and take care of their neighborhoods? Yes. Were the Eddies consumed by revenge? Yes. And that’s why they were perfect subjects for writers.
I was born in Ed Burke’s his neighborhood, in Visitation Parish on the South Side, near the Union Stockyards, a neighborhood of lace curtains on the windows in the front-rooms, the smell of tens of thousands of livestock to be slaughtered hanging in the air.
Those who remember the slaughterhouses remember the smell. We can’t forget it. It’s in our skin even now.
I suppose the smell was of the unspoken fear of the livestock that hung all about us, the wet wool and hides that permeated everything, from the gray painted stoops in the backs of the two-flats, to the offices and white tablecloth restaurants on 55th Street, like my Uncle John’s place, LeMec’s, where Burke’s 14th Ward organization would hold high-stakes card games.
Would Burke want an Irish fiddler to help him dance out of federal court?
“And Madigan?” asked a friend John McCormick, a grand Irishman if there ever was one. Besides, he’s my former boss. And talking of Madigan and Burke we fell into our old patterns of dialogue, kicking around ideas before he’d write an editorial, and I’d write a column. “Will Madigan have his keeners?”
In the very old, forgotten days the keeners were lamenting women. The Greeks and Sicilians have such women in their now forgotten histories, and so do the Irish. The lamenting women of the Irish would show up for wakes, and lead the villagers in public displays of grief. The word keener comes from the Gaelic word “caoineadh, ” from which it derives signifies among other things, a highly articulate tradition of women’s oral poetry.
Boss Madigan is past 80. He didn’t retire. He doesn’t want keeners around him, demanding coin with their piteous cries.
But I don’t think he’d mind a judge like Virginia Kendall to cut him a break like the one she bestowed upon Ed Burke, with the media idiots prattling on about how political corruption in Chicago is over.
It isn’t over. But you knew that, didn’t you.
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About the author: John Kass spent decades as a political writer and news columnist in Chicago working at a major metropolitan newspaper. He is co-host of The Chicago Way podcast. And he just loves his “No Chumbolone” hat, because johnkassnews.com is a “No Chumbolone” Zone where you can always get a cup of common sense.
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