Reyes Probably the Co-Schemer

I’m always fascinated by the different phrases federal prosecutors come up with, but Crain’s is reporting more people close to Daley are being identified in filings.

Federal authorities aimed new corruption charges at City Hall late Thursday?and in the process identified as a “co-schemer” a high-ranking city official that fits the description of former top mayoral aide Victor Reyes.
A federal grand jury indicted former city patronage coordinator Robert Sorich, ex-Department of Aviation staffer Timothy McCarthty, and former Department of Streets and Sanitation officials Patrick Slattery, John Sullivan and Daniel Katalinic on corruption charges. All specifically were accused of participating in an alleged scheme to funnel personnel and other city resources to political campaigns by rigging job tests to help political favorites.

….

But the bigger news was the indictment?s reference to an alleged ?co-schemer? identified as Individual A. The indictment does not name Individual A but says the person worked full-time in the city?s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs between 1993 and 2000, and helped run a political field group known as the Hispanic Democratic Organization (HDO).

That would appear to describe former intergovernmental director Mr. Reyes, who left City Hall in 2000 after joining the staff early in the 1990s, founded and still heads HDO, and was Mr. Sorich?s supervisor at City Hall.

I’m not sure this changes much in terms of interpretation of the big picture, but it leads to where a lot of people believed it would–Reyes.

My take on the overall situation is that Daley is probably not in much legal trouble and political trouble is generally overestimated, but could become serious.

The genius of the Machine as much as one can say it still exists–isn’t so much that it’s a highly centralized system with orders coming down from on high, but that it’s an operation that alligns the individual’s interests with those above them making it generally true that those at the top don’t have to be involved in decisions to support the Machine on the operational level.

Sorich and Reyes had every incentive to make Daley better off politically–because if he is, they are better off and they can benefit from the overflow of that power when they move on from public employment.

It’s a mistake to assume that, especially in a case like Daley, the plot goes all the way to the top. It could be true, but just because people as high as Sorich and Reyes are involved doesn’t mean Daley was. Is Daley negligent for not monitoring the behavior? Absolutely. Is he involved? That’s a question I trust Patrick Fitzgerald to answer–though that doesn’t release Daley from accountability. One suggestion by Shakman was to hold Daley and the City in contempt for violating the Shakman decree and that might well be called for in this case.

You do better in the Machine, as it stands now, by providing more foot soldiers and more effort–how you do it has never been questioned and it should have been by people at Daley’s level because they knew the history of abuse.

Crowing that Daley is being brought down isn’t going to make it so. The more likely challenge would be a credible challenge that brings white liberals, Latinos and African-Americans together–but frankly that person doesn’t exist right now (well he might–but he’s in the US Senate). Jackson Jr. is no Harold Washington and while he might get some press out of it, he’s not going to run against Daley in 2007.

It’s exactly the neglect by Daley that also attracts people like Tomczak or the Duffs–they know they can exploit the system and that is where Daley is at fault is by not making it clear that such behavior is not to be tolerated.