From the Chicago Sun-Times

Even in Cicero, reform could be signature issue
December 29, 2004
BY CAROL MARIN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Once again the gloves are off in Cicero. The Feb. 22 municipal election is right around the corner and if you want to make a mockery of democracy, this is the place to be.
Here's the playbook: Town President Ramiro Gonzalez, the handpicked successor to the federally incarcerated Betty Loren Maltese, is up for re-election along with a slate of candidates for clerk, collector, supervisor, assessor and trustees. The problem is three other candidates are running against Gonzalez, some with their own slates. What is Gonzalez supposed to do? Play by the rules? Campaign hard? Win on his record?
Oh, stop.
The upcoming election in Iraq offers more possibility of fair play than this one. That's because Cicero has always had a craftier caliber of insurgents. Like Ed Vrdolyak, who has made millions of dollars "advising" Betty Loren Maltese and now Gonzalez.
Vrdolyak, a former Chicago alderman and infamous, politically connected attorney, is the person who really runs Cicero. His righthand man is David Donahue, who operates the improbable "Cicero Good Government Group." Donahue is hard at work. He is formally contesting the nominating petitions of Gonzalez's three opponents and their slates.
How do you do that in Cicero?
You file your objections with the town's Electoral Board.
Who's on the board?
Ramiro Gonzalez.
And Marilyn Colpo. And Joe Virruso.
That is to say, the town president, clerk, and trustee. The Gonzalez slate!
But hey, they know a conflict of interest when they see one. So when they consider throwing out the petitions of the other candidates for town president, Gonzalez will recuse himself. When they consider throwing out the petitions for clerk, Colpo will recuse herself. And when they consider tossing out the petitions for town supervisor, for which Virruso is a candidate, he'll recuse himself. In each case, another town trustee will sit in for the recused. I don't know about you, but I still count at least two out of three votes going Gonzalez's way.
The game being played here is one of time and money. There is very little time until the election, just a little over seven weeks. And it will take money for candidates to hire lawyers who will inevitably have to march this whole mess into Cook County Circuit Court before it's over.
The other three candidates for town president are Louis "Gino" Di Crescenzo, Victor Armendariz and Larry Dominick, none of whom as far as I can see has an army of campaign workers or a lot of cash on hand. That's the point, to "bleed them of money, and worse than that, of time" says Richard Means, the attorney hired by Dominick.
Means is a battle-tested election lawyer who has danced this dance in Cicero over the years. "It's absolutely in the script that any time anyone is a serious challenger, he has to get thrown off the ballot and appeal it in Circuit Court."
Who cares? It's Cicero after all. The town that time forgot. The corruption capital of North America. Home of Al Capone and Betty Loren Maltese, the babe with big hair who was married to the mob.
For most of us, this is one of those amusing little tales of incorrigible corruption so commonplace in Illinois.
It's what exasperates people such as Cindi Canary, executive director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, who says, "There's the sense that the quest to open things up and clean things up is a Don Quixote excursion."
It's not. And when it comes to expensive, prolonged, often frivolous election challenges, Cicero isn't alone. Cook County Clerk David Orr says it happens in lots of municipalities and there are ways legislatively to fix it. That's something for another column.
But nothing is going happen unless we all, to use Cindi Canary's words, "get out of our easy chairs and conquer some of our considerable cynicism" that in politics in this state nothing really ever changes.