The Ten Lessons of Rahmses -- Lesson Two

Being Da Boss:

Obey? Moses, Moses, are you fuckin' kidding me?

Bring me a fuckin' pencil so I can fuckin' stab you in the fuckin' neck.

Then say "Thank you, Boss!"

Background: From this 2005 Sun-Times article, a distillation of Chicago's favorite, unanswered clout-related question: "Who hired Angelo Torres?"

Torres' clout remains a mystery

August 26, 2005

BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter

The Daley administration gave up the ghost Thursday on two priorities stemming from the Hired Truck scandal: privatizing the program and finding out who placed a former gang member in charge of it.

Nineteen months after the Chicago Sun-Times blew the lid off the scandal, City Hall released a pile of documents that track Angelo Torres' personnel history, including three pay raises over a two-month period in 1998 and 14 salary increases over eight years. But the documents shed no light on the identity of Torres' political sponsor.

The closest thing to a smoking gun is the revelation that Torres got his first Shakman-exempt position -- as principal operations research analyst for the Office of Budget and Management on Sept. 1, 1998 -- after sign-off by four city officials.

They are: Victor Reyes, the Hispanic Democratic Organization founder who ran the Mayor's Office of Intergovernmental Affairs at the time; then-Budget Director Barbara Lumpkin; Glenn Carr, the mayor's longtime personnel director who was fired in June, and Robert Sorich, the mayoral patronage chief who was recently indicted in the city hiring scandal.

Observers have long suspected Reyes was responsible for Torres' meteoric rise, citing the Hired Truck czar's past ties to HDO.
...

As much as City Hall wanted to solve the Torres mystery to get a political monkey off Mayor Daley's back, it's not possible, Huberman said. So the question of who put Torres in charge of a program that doled out $38.5 million a year in no-bid trucking business will apparently remain unanswered until the feds choose to solve it.

The Torres case is typical of how, despite a lot of hoo-ha about reform and cleaning up gummint, any genuine accountability and genuine pain is always reserved for lower-level, unprotected flukies. Just like the mob, when it comes to Da Mare, his lieutenants always close ranks to protect him.


Tomorrow, Lesson Three: Voters