Prosecutor: Chicago jobs swapped for campaign work

A federal prosecutor began wrapping up the fraud case against the city's former streets and sanitation commissioner Wednesday, saying he helped elect Mayor Richard M. Daley and was rewarded with city jobs for campaign workers.

Al Sanchez created a powerful network of doorbell-ringing political workers, the Hispanic Democratic Organization, and in return got control of both a major city department and the power to fill its payroll with those workers, Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie B. Ruder told jurors in her closing argument at the two-week trial.

"Al Sanchez was the one with the juice," Ruder said, and he got the power to reward followers with city jobs "by supporting the campaigns of Mayor Daley and the candidates that Mayor Daley supported."

Ruder stopped short of saying Daley himself made any such deal. She said Sanchez worked through "people like Robert Sorich," the former so-called patronage chief at City Hall who is currently serving a 46-month sentence for hiring fraud.

Sanchez, 61, is charged with seven counts of fraud for violating a court order banning officials from considering the political backgrounds of job applicants and creating bogus documents to camouflage the use of jobs as patronage -- the practice of giving city jobs to those who deliver the vote.

Aaron Del Valle, 36, a former Sanchez aide who belonged to the Hispanic Democratic Organization, is charged with one count of lying to a grand jury.

The case is the latest chapter in this city's long-running controversy over patronage.

A 30-year-old consent decree -- the Shakman Decree -- bars the practice, but critics say it has been all but ignored in this city where the vestiges of old-fashioned political machine rule still linger. In recent years, city hiring has taken place under the watch of a court-appointed monitor.

Sanchez's attorneys claim their client had little to do with the hiring that the government complains about and says it was largely controlled by the mayor's office of intergovernmental affairs, where Sorich was a key executive.

They have portrayed Sanchez as a hardworking official who grew up in the shadow of the steel mills and overcame discrimination against hispanics to work his way to the top, making sure the streets were cleared of snow and so conscientious that he went personally into the back alleys on "rat patrol."

But Ruder told jurors the case wasn't about the quality of the streets and sanitation department's performance but its hiring practices.

"This case is about deep and abiding corruption -- corruption that grew and grew during the time Al Sanchez and his co-schemers participated in it," she said.

She said "the paperwork was phonied up and fixed to make it appear to the taxpayers of Chicago that everything was being done the right way."

She said merit was unimportant in filling city jobs.

"Whose political army were you part of?" was the key ingredient for success in landing a job, she said. "And did that person have the clout with the office of intergovernmental affairs?"