Introducing The Chicago Ganef of the Day Award
Ganef: (Yiddish) a thief or dishonest person or scoundrel (often used as a general term of abuse)
You may have noticed that almost every day lately, another of the members of our fine Midwestern community is exposed as a ganef.*
Despair not, however. The fact that we even hear about him (it’s usually a him) means that karmic justice may be catching up. That’s a good thing.
Case in point: Our Chicago Ganef of the Day for Nov. 1, Ed Vrdolyak. That day, U.S. Judge Robert Dow ordered the former 10th Ward alderman and Democratic Cook County chairman to begin an 18-month prison sentence at the end of November.
Vrdolyak, 83, and said to be ailing, has been walking free for more than two and a half years after pleading guilty to tax evasion. Dow said in late 2020, "I am not going to send Mr. Vrdolyak to prison during COVID," Jon Seidel of the Sun-Times reported.
This is par for the course for Fast Eddie. He pleaded guilty in 2009 to reduced counts on an unrelated, massive bribery/fraud case, but just got probation from federal Judge Milton Shadur. The U.S. Attorney’s office reacted with indignance, and the sentence was overturned by the appellate court. Another judge resentenced lucky Eddie, and two years after his guilty plea, he finally wound up serving 10 months.
Vrdolyak got caught double-billing law clients in 2005, but walked away after agreeing to let his law license be suspended for a month. In 1960, while still in law school, he was charged with assault to commit murder. Acquitted.
You may remember Vrdolyak propagating the humiliation of the Chicago City Council after the election of Mayor Harold Washington in 1983. He and 14th Ward Ald. Ed Burke championed a 29-member opposition to a Black mayor of their own party, making Chicago look like Selma, circa 1965.
Burke, a likely future Ganef of the Day, was indicted on federal racketeering charges in 2019, but is still stubbornly taking up valuable graft space on the City Council. Dow has yet to finish reading 700 pages of motions so the case against Burke can start.
Vrdolyak, a Republican since 1987, is to enter a federal prison medical facility in Rochester, MN, which reportedly has ready access to the Mayo Clinic. If he dies before finishing his time in the Graybar Hotel, and Burke, 77, croaks before going to trial, Dow might be a candidate for Ganef of the Day, too.
For sure, however, another judge in the news already deserves the Chicago Ganef of the Day award for Nov. 4, and he doesn’t even work in Illinois.
Kenosha County Judge Bruce Schroeder is presiding over the murder trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenage Chicago suburbanite who decided Wisconsin law and order could not be preserved without his help. Young Rittenhouse’s contribution to peace and justice turned out to be the August 2020 shooting deaths of Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber and the wounding of Gaige Grosskreutz.
Schroeder interrupted the Rittenhouse trial Nov. 4 to stage a rant against members of the media who dared criticize how he handled one of his old cases.
He might worry more about his rulings in the extant case. He told prosecutors that they could not refer to the dead guys as victims. That sort of makes sense, since if they’re victims, Rittenhouse can’t claim self-defense. If the prosecutors are calling the kid a murderer, however, it’s hard to see why they can’t call the stiffs victims. What are they, a murderer’s little messes?
More problematically, Schroeder gave Rittenhouse’s lawyers permission to refer to the non-victims as looters, rioters and arsonists if evidence establishes that they are.
How is that going to happen? Are the dead guys going to be tried for such crimes? If they are, they’ll have very little opportunity to testify in their own defense.
Even if they were indeed involved in such mayhem, that doesn’t give a 17-year-old out-of-towner the right to blast away at them. So Schroeder’s ruling doesn’t serve justice in any obvious way.
No matter what Richard J. Daley once said, nobody -- including cops, the National Guard and Antioch High School drop-outs -- gets to shoot-to-kill looters.
*Instead of “ganef,” I actually prefer the vibrant American pejorative that begins with “a” and ends in “e.” You know, the one that rhymes with “crass role.” Or even more local, the one that starts with “j” and terminates in “f.” Rhymes with “hack cough.” But some of you readers have tender sensibilities.
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The lack of consequences for all the goniffs ( this is how I spell it) , from the top ( Former Guy), on down, has made our country a laughingstock and a shyte hole.
Irv, I don’t know why your columns don’t appear in the WSJ or NY Times or even the Chicago Trib. Your column would be perfect next to Leonard Pitts’s column.