San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu and Port Executive Director Elaine Forbes announced at the end of May a suspension order against the owners (“and affiliated individuals and businesses”) of Nick’s Lighthouse restaurant. The order would stop them from bidding on or receiving new contracts with the city, and was a response to an alleged bribery scheme involving the owners, a city employee, and an undercover FBI agent.
San Francisco “has no interest in contracting with corrupt businesses attempting to circumvent our fair bidding processes,” said Chiu in a statement released by his office. “We hope this serves as a stark reminder to anyone who tries to bribe their way into a City contract that they will be investigated and held accountable.”
Not to pick on restaurateurs, but in March of this year, Senior U.S. District Judge William Orrick III sentenced Nick Bovis, the former owner of Lefty O’Douls, to nine months in prison and slapped him with a $100,000 fine for bribing former Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru. They were both caught up in a long-standing FBI probe into public corruption in the city. Nuru himself was sentenced to seven years in prison.
According to Courthouse News Service, “Assistant U.S. Attorney David Ward told Orrick that Bovis and Nuru’s conduct was not a ‘onetime thing,’ and that their ‘long-running scheme’ only stopped once they were caught by the FBI.”
Instruction manual for political corruption
As I’ve noted elsewhere, I split my time between San Francisco — which is still coming to terms with its corruption scandal — and Chicago, which is pretty much synonymous with corruption in the minds of many.
Some of you might remember an episode of the original Star Trek series, “A Piece of the Action,” in which Captain Kirk and his pals discover a planet that has reordered its entire society around a book that had been left by previous visitors. Unfortunately, the book was Chicago Mobs of the Twenties.
I only split my time between San Francisco and Chicago, not Sigma Iotia II, which is where Kirk went. But I recently read a book about Chicago’s political corruption that could be an instruction manual for cities that want to replicate it. The book is Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago, the 1971 masterwork of Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago journalist Mike Royko. It’s a slim, 200-page book that is filled with jaw-dropping examples of how an entire system was rigged to benefit the infamous “Machine” that ran Chicago for decades. (This isn’t a book review, but nonetheless I would urge everyone to read Boss.)
The Machine did everything it could to prevent the absolute worst thing from happening: the election of a reformist mayor or sheriff.
As the title suggests, the book tells the tale of the first mayor named Daley (his son would also be a long-serving mayor a couple decades later) and how he ran the city through an organization that controlled everything and benefited only those who played nice with the mayor.
The Machine was really something. It was really something you wanted to steer clear of, but likely had to deal with it one way or the other if you lived in the Windy City in the first three-quarters of the 20th century. Want to build a building? Here’s who you have to pay off. Want to run for office? Start at the bottom rungs of your ward and work up, never getting out of line. Motorists pulled over for speeding would just wrap a $10 bill around their license when they presented it to the officer, who pocketed the money and let them off with a warning. Permits and city contracts included a layer of bribes, and everyone up the ladder got their cut. (My own father once shocked my Wisconsin-bred mother when he presented her with a birthday gift: a driver’s license he had purchased.)
The city council was filled with aldermen and alderwomen who also profited, usually by running law firms or insurance companies on the side that people did business with to get help from the “aldercreatures” (as Royko once referred to them) on a driveway expansion or a kid who needed a summer job.
And, to keep the gravy train flowing, the Machine had to do everything it could to prevent the absolute worst thing from happening: the election of a reformist mayor or sheriff. Royko cites one former head of the Chicago Elections Board, Sidney Holzman, “who summed up its attitude toward the [candidate] aspirations of independents, Republicans, and other foreigners: ‘We throw their petitions up to the ceiling, and those that stick are good.’”
The Daley Machine disintegrated in the years and decades after he died in 1976. But we still hear echoes of it from time to time. Aldercreature Edward Burke, who served in office more than a half century, was found guilty by a federal jury in 2023 on 13 counts of racketeering, bribery, and extortion.
In 2012, Chicago magazine described Burke thus: “One of the last of the old-school Chicago Machine pols, this Hibernian grandee has bodyguards. … [h]e’s still finance committee chairman, still has $8 million in his campaign fund, still has a wife on the state Supreme Court, and still controls judicial slating in Cook County—which means his influence is felt on issues ranging from property taxes to elections.”
In Silicon Valley, we’d call that the “long tail” of the Machine.
No decent person likes hearing about corruption in their city government. It erodes trust in elected leaders and the bureaucracy. It raises costs. If everyone’s not treated equally, then what’s the point? But when it’s not addressed and dealt with harshly, it runs amok. I’ll explore the worst cost of political corruption in part 2 of this article.
