Excerpt
Cook County Board of Review Commissioner Larry Rogers Jr., a self-proclaimed reformer, until recently had employed his half-brother for years at the agency that rules on property-tax appeals, records show.
Rogers’ half-brother, Frederic Everly, resigned a month ago from his $61,139.52-a-year job as an administrative assistant with the Board of Review.
That was after the county ethics board accused Cook County Assessor Joe Berrios of violating the county’s ethics ordinance by hiring two family members — his son and sister — soon after winning election in 2010. The ethics board ordered Berrios to pay a $10,000 fine and to remove his relatives from the assessor’s office payroll — penalties Berrios has ignored, saying the ordinance doesn’t apply to him.
The ordinance says county officials who hold any supervisory position can’t “employ or advocate for employment” a relative. The rules specifically say half-brothers and half-sisters are covered by that restriction.
Rogers, 44, and Everly, 27, have different fathers but the same mother, records show.
Everly started as a full-time employee at the Board of Review in January 2008 with a starting salary of $46,076.16 a year and worked under Rogers, according to county payroll records.
MaryNic Foster, executive director of the county Board of Ethics, says she was unaware that Rogers employed his half-brother. Foster says the county’s ethics rules apply to the Board of Review, as well as to the assessor’s office and other county agencies headed by elected officials in addition to the Cook County Board president.
“The Board of Ethics is clear that Cook County government is not supposed to be a family business,” says Foster. “These may be good employees, but the law, as it stands, prohibits them from working for their relatives.”
After the ethics board issued a “finding of violation” June 20 against Berrios, he shrugged that off, saying the ethics ordinance doesn’t apply to his office. Berrios, who also is the county Democratic Party’s chairman, cited an opinion from Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez’s office that the ethics panel doesn’t have authority over him or other independently elected county leaders.
Foster disagrees, saying, “The state’s attorney’s opinion is just an opinion. Unless the ordinance is changed or I am told otherwise by a court, we have to vigorously enforce it.”
"Volleyball standout from Wheaton killed in St. Louis" by JON SEIDEL AND PHIL BROZYNSKI, Chicago Sun-Times 8/20/2012
Excerpt
Megan Boken didn’t show up for warm-ups. And then the 23-year-old volleyball standout from Wheaton was missing the alumni game Saturday at Saint Louis University.
That’s when friends became worried — and questions led to phone calls.
A SLU school athletic director called the players over to explain why Boken never arrived: The St. Francis High School graduate was found shot in the neck and chest inside her car at 2:20 p.m., according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
It happened 25 minutes before she was expected at the gym where she spent her collegiate career and outside an apartment where records suggest she once lived. She was pronounced dead at a St. Louis hospital.
"Editorial: Former morgue chief failed as manager" Chicago Sun-Times 8/19/2012
We believe every word she said, including the part where she said she had been “stupid.”
With one exception.
It’s a bit much for Nancy Jones, former head of the Cook County morgue, to call her former boss, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, “evil.”
Emotionally cool? Yeah, sure.
Humorless? Some would say so.
But evil?
Jones knows better. She ran the county morgue, after all, where the victims of real evil lie on slabs all around.
Dumping on Preckwinkle doesn’t get Jones off the hook anyway. When conditions at the morgue fell apart late last year and early this year, she was the chief medical examiner, so the failure was hers. The buck stops there.
All the same, in an interview in Friday’s Chicago Sun-Times with columnist Neil Steinberg, Jones offered a terrific insider’s view of how a government agency can go down the tubes when budget cuts and patronage collide.
Jones told Steinberg that her problems began with the quality of her work force. The morgue, she said, was “an 8th Ward dumping ground” where for decades she and her predecessors couldn’t even fire drug addicts.
Payroll with bad attitudes, some of whom went through the pockets of the dead and stole whatever they could, were protected by the powerful Stroger family.
Sounds about right, don’t you think?
If Jones tried to fire or discipline a black employee, she said, she often was called racist. It was the sort of easy charge to make against a boss when you knew that your real boss — the politician who clouted you the job — will protect you.
That can happen.
Budget cuts added to the morgue’s problems. Suppliers sued to get paid. Medical waste began to build up because the company contracted to take it away wasn’t getting paid.
No doubt.
In July of last year, the state — hard-pressed for money itself — stopped paying for public aid burials.
So funeral directors started sending bodies back to the morgue, where they began to pile up.
We’ve written about that one.
And employees who felt zero loyalty to Jones, who wasn’t being a Stroger or a Stroger toady, manufactured a scene of horror while she was on vacation, stacking bodies haphazardly on the floor. Then they tipped off reporters.
We wouldn’t put it past them.
Jones, who was forced into retirement at the end of July by Preckwinkle, defended herself to Steinberg as a “talented forensic pathologist” who was unsophisticated in politics.
In retrospect, she said, she would have been more forceful in insisting that her deputy “do more of her job.”
Not to be unkind to Jones, who really was up against it, but we’d say she failed as a manager, not as a politician.
Her job was to make sure the morgue ran right. When it did not — when it could not because of budget cuts and patronage — her job was to push back and take a stand.
Every workplace has its politics. Good managers deal with it.
"Editorial: Putin vs. the punk band" Chicago Sun-Times 8/18/2012
From the YouTube video, the Russian feminist punk band members appeared to be guilty of little other than poor production values and putting a fright into a few elderly church parishioners when they did a guerrilla performance in Moscow’s main cathedral to protest Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this year.
But a Moscow judge on Friday viewed their actions much more seriously, sentencing three members of the band called Pussy Riot to two years in a prison colony. The judge found the women guilty of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.
The treatment of the women has sparked protests around the world, even in Chicago, and prompted artists such as Madonna, Paul McCartney and Bjork to call for leniency.
Putin talks frequently about modernizing his country, but he can’t even tolerate dissent from an obscure punk rock band — at least obscure before he had the hammer brought down on them.
Putin has a particular, twisted talent at turning situations into cause celebres. He managed to gin up much sympathy for a Russian billionaire, not a usual focus of sympathy.
In 2005, Putin-controlled courts railroaded oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky into prison on trumped-up charges. Khodorkovsky had the temerity to believe he could challenge Putin politically and learned otherwise. When he became eligible for parole, he faced a second trial with more bogus allegations and was sentenced to prison again in 2010.
From prison, Khodorkovsky wrote that “a dependent court is in no way better than a bandit’s club. Both tools are equally unacceptable for settling grievances in a civilized society.”
He is expected to be released in 2017.
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