And the Man of the Year goes to...

There was merriment in the air, straight up martinis in the stemware and spicy pork chops in their bellies. It was a normal Tuesday afternoon at Gibsons steakhouse in Rosemont.

It was the kind of festive atmosphere you would expect from someone being feted as a future Man of the Year.

Suddenly though, the levity was rudely interrupted. Like a hog call at the opera came a guttural yelp from somewhere along the bar rail.

“I don’t know if he was trying to prove a point to somebody else or if he felt the testosterone going, but it was horrible, it was bad,” said Jim Richards, who was having lunch with some friends.

The patron appeared drunk, according to Richards, threatened them, wanted to fight and was spitting on the floor of the ritzy steakhouse — behavior normally reserved for parking lots and alleys outside of lesser establishments.

The management called Rosemont police, who slapped a pair of handcuffs on the customer.

“The gentleman who shouted the profanity and was spitting on the floors was then arrested and put into custody,” said Richards.

At the time, on June 2, 2009, Rosemont officers had no way to know that they had such a well-connected guy secured in their squad car... in the blood line of state and municipal power brokers and himself a future appointee to a powerful state board. They only knew his name was Mike Joyce.

And they certainly couldn’t have predicted what was going to happen next.

According to the Rosemont Police Department arrest report, when Mr. Joyce, who is white, arrived at headquarters, he repeatedly called one officer the “N-word” and then stated, “Why am I chained to this bench, I’m not a (N-word).” Then, according to police, he continued the racially insensitive remarks.

Mr. Joyce, an attorney, posted bond on the disorderly conduct charge and was released.

Such barroom etiquette would not normally be news, except when the alleged perpetrator is subsequently appointed to a $90,000 a year job on the Illinois Labor Relations Board, which Gov. Pat Quinn did earlier this year. Gov. Quinn was stupefied that the vetting process by his office didn’t reveal his appointee’s dust-up with suburban lawmen.

When the case went to court, the manager of Gibsons, who was the complainant on the disorderly charge, didn’t show up. The case had to be dropped. When we did the story on ABC 7 in February, a Rosemont police official told us of their dismay that Joyce wasn’t prosecuted because of the verbal and racial abuse the officers say they endured during Joyce’s captivity.

At the time, Mr. Joyce’s attorney said that his client had been “overserved that day” and admitted being “three sheets to the wind...,” but said Joyce didn’t remember shouting any racial slurs. Joyce had recently married Muhammad Ali’s daughter, Jamillah, and the attorney observed that with a black wife, and with Joyce having trained numerous black boxers, racial slurs would have been out of character.

Gibsons did not return calls for comment.

Nevertheless, in March, Mr. Joyce withdrew his acceptance of the governor’s big board appointment, saying in a letter that he was too busy with lawyering. It all played out on TV, in the papers and in the political blogs over the past few months.

Apparently though, it wasn’t on the radar of the “Man of the Year” committee at Leo High School, a remarkably historic, private, Catholic institution on the South Side.

Friday night at Leo’s annual alumni awards dinner, Joyce was honored as Man of the Year. He joins past Leo luminaries who were named Man of the Year including the late GM CEO Thomas Murphy and ex-Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, who saved President Ronald Reagan’s life.

Indeed, Joyce is a 1986 Leo graduate, on Leo High School’s advisory board and serves as the Leo boxing team coach.

His father, Jeremiah Joyce, is a former state senator, one of Mayor Richard Daley’s most trusted allies and a renown South Side political force.

None of that explains why Joyce was entitled to Man of the Year honors. So I asked top officials at Leo that question. I also asked who was behind the selection, whether they factored in his arrest, considered what the police reported about racial rantings, Joyce’s embarrassment of the governor and if there was any opposition to him receiving such a prestigious award.

Neither the principal, president of the alumni association nor anyone else got back to me, including Joyce.

Perhaps they were too busy preparing for the Man of the Year award ritual, rehearsing the school’s motto: “Deeds not Words.”

Ÿ Chuck Goudie, whose column appears each Monday, is the chief investigative reporter at ABC 7 News in Chicago. The views in this column are his own and not those of WLS-TV. He can be reached by email at chuckgoudie@gmail.com and followed at twitter.com/ChuckGoudie.