From the Tribune:

John Kass
Vrdolyak always a good judge of power

Published May 11, 2007

The first time I met Fast Eddie Vrdolyak, I was a kid reporter on my first job for a small paper on the Southeast Side, assigned to cover Vrdolyak's big summer political bash.

Every year, Vrdolyak, then the 10th Ward alderman and de facto mayor of Chicago, would open his home to politicians, tough guys with funny nicknames such as "Ox" and "Crazy Joe" and neighborhood people.

It was the kind of party where bagmen would drink with iron workers and bankers. There were no lace curtain pretensions at these parties. They were for drinking and eating and politics, and I'd just been assigned the political beat.

"Want a beer?" Vrdolyak asked me at the door.

He knew that another reporter and I were investigating his role in kinky city scrap metal contracts that cost the city millions each year, but he turned on the charm.

"How about a beer?"

OK, I said.

Off to the side, near large tubs of iced beer, there were a few tired-looking gray men of middle age, in white shirts, attentive, leaning along the wall like waiters with sore feet. He gave one a look, and the old guy's face perked up, the way a dog's face perks up when told to roll over.

"Hey, judge," Vrdolyak told a fetcher. "Get the kid a beer. And make sure it's cold."

"Right away, Eddie," said the judge, who would later be sentenced to 15 years after fixing murder cases for the Outfit. "Right away."

Now Vrdolyak may be facing prison time if convicted on indictments announced Thursday by U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald, on bribery, wire and mail fraud charges related to an alleged North Side real estate kickback scheme.

Vrdolyak is old now, nearly 70, a grandfather. But age won't protect him from prison if he's found guilty.

His buddy, the corrupt former Chicago Police Department chief of detectives William Hanhardt, 78, was convicted in an unrelated case of running an Outfit-sanctioned jewelry heist ring. Hanhardt is now going crazy inside and demanding a new trial on the grounds he shouldn't have pleaded guilty in the first place.

Hanhardt's guilty plea spared Chicago a trial that would have gutted City Hall and the Police Department like a fish. A Vrdolyak trial could have the same effect on politics.

Vrdolyak's lawyer, Mike Monico, said the feds have no real case against his old friend and client. "It's a shame the government has seen fit to bring this case," Monico told me. "It's a sad day. The allegations will not withstand the scrutiny of a trial. Ed Vrdolyak is not guilty."

The feds say they can't put the money in Vrdolyak's hand, but I'm told they have tape in which he reportedly schemes. Apparently, Vrdolyak forgot his own advice: "Always assume everything you say is taped."

Fast Eddie has no angels fluttering around him in Chicago, like those hovering over the head of Robert Sorich, the convicted patronage boss of Mayor Richard M. Daley who has been compared in Bridgeport to Christ, though Christ never tossed out hundreds of qualified city job applications to put the mayor's stooges on the payroll.

If Vrdolyak has an angel, it's Mephistopheles, the tempter. He always has reveled in that role, always the dark lord of politics, a guy who gets a kick out of ordering judges to fetch kid reporters a cold beer from deep in the ice, offering a lesson in how Chicago really works.

Virtue is supposed to win out in the end. But this is Chicago, and Mephistopheles has always been the better story and Vrdolyak has been one of its great stories.

So here's what people will write: about the attempted murder charge and the alibi that he was in law school, the screaming matches with the late Harold Washington, his switch from Democratic Party boss to Republican dealmaker and all his time as grand poobah in Cicero, the town of the Spanos and the Infelices. Spanning politics and the tough guys, low-profile for years, Vrdolyak is an archangel of the Illinois Combine that runs things.

He always has worn the black hat, and deservedly so at times because of his style, so abrasive and combative and too slick by half, and that habit of his of always snickering when he wins.

Still, when it came to Chicago politics, Vrdolyak was a brilliant short-term tactical alley fighter, funny and intensely loyal to his friends and family. But he was a lousy long-term strategist, having led the white-ethnic group of 29 aldermen against the city's first black mayor.

Washington didn't consider him a racist. The late mayor used race and so did Vrdolyak. But the scribes paint Fast Eddie as some kind of racist, and that's how he's remembered.

"He's not a racist. He's a bully," Washington was quoted as saying in a book by his press secretary, Alton Miller. "He'll use race, hell, he'll use anything. He'll use his own grandmother to get what he wants, but that doesn't make him a bad guy in my book. Amoral, yes. Racist, uh-uh."

Fast Eddie has been on the edge for so long that I figured he'd take up space in the trunk of a car before he'd ever take up space in federal court. I always thought he was too smart to get caught, too quick, too fast.

But it looks like they finally got him.