Editorial: U.S. Attorney sits on accusations detailing McMahon games with city contracts

Ernie Souchak, Editor-in-Chief, Illinois Pay-to-Play

The lead attorney for Eric Holder’s Department of Selective Justice in the Northeastern District of Northern Illinois has, for years, been sitting on taped conversations that outline how the McMahon companies in Chicago have long played games with city contracts.

Recently, the Sun Times put the McMahon’s in their journalistic crosshairs by citing a Daniel T. Frawley “Whistleblower” lawsuit that we, at IP2P, don’t believe exists.  Now why would they do that?

Because these days the Times gets its marching orders from His Honor Mayor Emanuel, who is out to destroy the myth of the Daley Machine as a regime that made Chicago “the City that works”.  (Meanwhile, the snoring Trib takes it's orders from Rip van Winkle.)  Rahm aims to be heralded as the man who cleaned-up Chicago by revealing the true Daley image as having facilitated “the City that cheats”.

And cheat it does.  The whole nation knows that.  But the nation also assumes that its local branch of the U.S. Department of Justice is working hard to hinder the cheating.  After all, aren’t the crooks of Cook County continually hunted by those intrepid FBI agents of Patrick “Elliott Ness” Fitz’s office, ever alert to the opportunity to stop crime sprees, a la Blago’s.  That’s the meme anyway.

IP2P has recently received summaries of federally monitored conversations from years past that suggest a more accurate image of the local office of Holder’s Department of Selective Justice.  This one suggests an investigative organization on a long voyeuristic trek when it comes to Chicago corruption.  It hides in the shadows, listens in on conversations, and watches criminal activities for years as it waits for…waits for what?

It waits for a green light from incumbent politicos to signal when it’s politically expedient to take out a crooked politician, or a bent real estate speculator?  Or, in the David Koschman case, it sits on evidence of a crooked police official who hindered the murder investigation, and thereby it, too, becomes complicit in the long denial of justice to Mrs. Nancy Koschman for the murder of her son. That’s not Ness-like behavior.

On several occasions, Fitzgerald has said that corruption can only stop when citizens come forward to report what they know.  So should we at IP2P be good citizens and send what we’ve been given to Fitz for further, extensive, thorough, professional “investigation”?   Why bother - they already have it, and have had it for years.

What about the U.S. Attorney’s office enforcing the law based on what they already know?

If not now – then when? When a politician says it’s “OK”?