Local politicians just can't seem to give up the ghosts

Web-posted: Tuesday, January 28, 1997

ossibly the best government employee we've ever had in Chicago and Cook County was a craggy-faced man named Charles "Cap" Sauers. If you haven't heard of him, that's OK. He didn't seek attention.

Sauers spent most of his adult life as the superintendent of the Cook County Forest Preserve system. If it were not for Sauers, the system probably wouldn't exist as it does today.

A professional naturalist, he was hired to build and run the forest system in the days when it was being created.

He got the job in an unusual way. A citizens committee that had pushed for a system of forests, meadows and ponds that would ring the entire county realized it was being put together piecemeal and chaotically for the profit of politicians.

Especially Anton Cermak, a future Chicago mayor who was then boss of the Chicago machine.

Instead of acquiring land that could be part of a logical blueprint for the system, chunks of scattered land were being bought cheap by politicians or their agents and sold to the county at inflated prices.

The citizens group gathered evidence and quietly threatened to blow the whistle on the pocket stuffing. But it used a bit of civic-minded blackmail to give Cermak a way out of a scandal while advancing the public good.

The group would sit on the evidence if Cermak agreed to have the Cook County Board hire a professional naturalist with impeccable credentials and let that person guide the growth and management of the system.

Cermak, no dummy, went for the deal. He knew that his political future held all sorts of sweet profit potential.

So in 1929, Sauers got the job; held it for 35 years; and if you picnic, hike, bike or fish in the incredible belt of green that encircles Cook County, he more than anyone else deserves your thanks.

It was my good fortune to cover county government as a young reporter when Sauers, who died in 1970, was still active. And he once described his basic philosophy for dealing with political patronage.

Virtually all of the forest preserves' thousands of jobs were held by people dumped on Sauers by political bosses.

Sauers was a realist and knew he couldn't do anything to change the Chicago machine's system of jobs for votes. His goal was a bigger and better forest system.

If that meant placing an army of precinct captains in jobs, he'd do it. But under his terms.

As he told me: "I always let ... them ... know what I expect."

By "them," which was uttered with a certain distaste, he meant the political bosses and some of the people they sent to him for jobs.

With a slight smile, he said: "They know that if they are going to receive a day's pay, they must give me at least a half a day's work."

A half a day's work for a full day's pay might not seem like a good deal to the taxpayers or those running a business in the private sector. But in a city with a political tradition of ghost payrollers, it wasn't a bad compromise.

I thought about Cap Sauers' practical half-a-loaf approach when it recently came out that Ald. Eddie Burke might have stepped on his own, uh, toes while providing City Hall ghost jobs for one of his law firm associates.

In pleading guilty to federal charges, Joseph Martinez said he had ghost jobs on three City Council committees while he was a full-time lawyer for Burke's law firm.

He was given the ghost jobs, he said, because Burke's firm didn't provide medical coverage but the city did.

The city jobs also provided paychecks, which Martinez pocketed, apologetically returning the money only when he knew the feds were closing in on him.

Boy, oh, boy. For someone who has the reputation for being the brainiest guy in the City Council--maybe all of city government--is that dumb.

Especially when it turns out that Martinez appears to have a political spine as firm as a strand of angel-hair pasta.

Obviously eager to minimize the length of time he will have to spend in a federal pokey, Martinez is blabbing to the feds about how Eddie did it.

As if Martinez, a lawyer and former alderman, wasn't aware that it is illegal to draw paychecks and other benefits while doing absolutely nothing to earn these goodies.

Of course, there is nothing new about ghost-payroller jobs in our local governmental bodies. Some big political names put in their time as ghost workers.

In his younger, politically formative days, the late Harold Washington held a job in the city's Legal Department.

He not only failed to ever show up to do some work, but he told those who were allegedly his bosses that he considered it an unnecessary imposition for him to be required to come to City Hall to pick up his paycheck.

Since he was a fine precinct captain, they agreed and it was arranged that his paycheck would be mailed to him.

But in recent years, with federal snoops constantly sniffing around City Hall, you would think that a bright fellow such as Burke--whose father was a ward boss and an alderman--would know better than to risk his career and freedom for someone such as Martinez.

In politics, there are those known as "standup guys." Martinez, by eagerly bleating to the feds, is more of a "fall-down and grovel guy."

This just shows that when an alderman gains a reputation for being "brilliant," as Eddie Burke has, it is really a relative term.

What it means is that if Burke tilts his head to one side, his brain might not fall out of his ear.

© 1996 Chicago Tribune