A lot of people are talking about the scandal-ridden mayor of New York City today. You’re free to chatter amongst yourselves if you want, but I just wanted to drop a quick note from here in the Midwest to offer you the Windy City perspective on all this: It’s gonna take a lot more than a few measly federal indictments for you East Coast losers to catch up with Chicago in terms of hopeless corruption and incompetence. Come back and try again another day, second-raters.
Yes, New York City mayor Eric Adams was indicted today by the S.D.N.Y. for taking something on the order of $10 million in bribes from the Turkish government, mostly in the form of perks such as air travel and hotel lodgings, amusingly and stupidly enough, in return for political access and favors. It’s the quotidian nature of it that disappoints, in all honesty; I would have demanded something more than extra legroom on my plane flights to take bribes from Erdogan’s Turkey, my own seraglio at the very least.
Then again, we’re far more serious about our corruption out here; our pols know how to drive a decent bargain for their services. (Former governor Rod Blagojevich summarized the approach well in his infamously wiretapped 2009 thoughts about how to dispose of Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat.) Chicago’s longest-serving city alderman just reported to prison after being convicted of 1/100th of the corruption he’s actually guilty of. The single most powerful man in state politics over the last quarter-century, former Democratic state house majority speaker Mike Madigan, will likely join him there soon (his long-anticipated corruption trial begins in October). Our current mayor, Brandon Johnson, is frankly too stupid to even have a decent corruption scandal on his record yet, unless you count his entire record in office as the scandal. (I would sleep easier as a resident if Johnson were demonstrably corrupt rather than an idiotic zealot. I can work with a man on the take; I can’t work with someone who cancels ShotSpotter out of insane ideological conviction.)
My editors came to me this morning and wondered whether I, as a Chicagoan, might have some perspective on the travails of another big-city mayoralty. And I said yes, but I didn’t tell them what exactly those thoughts were. I guess they expected me to write a piece about Eric Adams. But I don’t care much about what happens in some podunk small town like New York; I just want them to know that if they think they’re going to beat Chicago at the game it practically invented — spectacular civic corruption — then they have another think coming.