The day authorities raided Ald. Ed Burke’s office five years ago, news of the butcher paper covering his windows and swarming FBI agents tore through City Hall.
The building was quiet Monday with no meetings scheduled. But despite the stillness, the two-year prison sentence and $2 million fine delivered to the longest-serving Chicago alderman ever was already reverberating around the City Council he long lorded over.
“It is really shameful to see elected officials abuse the public trust,” said Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez, 25th. “Nobody is above the law.”
Burke — first elected in 1969 — had long been an emblem of Chicago old-guard politics: a well-positioned alderman who carried essential clout in his own ward and the power and standing within City Hall to help or hinder council colleagues (and mayors) who were seeking to advance their own agendas.
But after a six-week trial, a four-day jury deliberation and a final five-hour hearing Monday, Burke’s clout came to a resounding end as he was sentenced on racketeering conspiracy, bribery and attempted extortion in a series of schemes to use his office to try to win business from developers for his private property tax law firm.
“Justice, even at the end, matters, to send a message to the public,” Sigcho-Lopez said.
Joining Chicago’s long list of disgraced council members should taint Burke’s reputation, alongside his role leading white aldermen in the “Council Wars” of the 1980s that saw Chicago’s City Council split along racial lines when Mayor Harold Washington governed, Sigcho-Lopez said.
Still, for some aldermen who long served with Burke, seeing the old colleague be sent away is painful.
Ald. Nick Sposato, 38th, held out hope after hearing the sentence that Burke will get out early for good behavior.
“He is a friend. I’m loyal to the death. I stand behind my friends, and I was hoping it would not be more than a year or so,” Sposato said. “He did a lot of good things. He did a really terrible thing at the end there. Still hard for me to comprehend, and he is paying a price.”
Sposato, always quick to share folk wisdom when he speaks in council meetings, summed up the lesson he thought his colleagues might now learn: “You do something wrong, you gotta pay the price.”
But that lesson, he added, is one Chicago aldermen surely should have already grasped. You always think this will be the last time, Sposato said.
“I know there’s some aldermen who I feel aren’t that intelligent that I could see if something did happen to him, I could say, well, he or she was not very smart. That doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “But you know, when a smart person does something and they know they’re doing wrong, it’s just hard to comprehend.”
“I don’t know if it will ever stop,” he said.
One alderman notably did not react to the news of Burke’s sentencing. When a Tribune reporter called Burke’s 14th Ward successor, Ald. Jeylu Gutierrez, a half-hour after the decision, she said she had not yet heard the news.
Gutierrez declined to comment on Burke’s sentence.
“I just need to read more about the case,” she said.
The sentencing was top of mind Monday for Ethics Committee Chair Ald. Matt Martin, 47th.
“When elected officials like Ald. Burke use their position to enrich themselves and those close to them, the public loses,” Martin said.
He hoped the case would motivate Chicago’s elected officials to reflect on their dismal corruption record. The City Council and mayor need to rebuild trust and improve their reputation, he said.
One way to do that, he added, is by embracing ethics-focused reforms like the plan to partially publicly finance aldermanic campaigns that he introduced in the City Council earlier this month, he said.
“It’s really important that we take verdicts and sentences like this to heart,” Martin said.
jsheridan@chicagotribune.com
