Believer: My Forty Years in Politics by David Axelrod Read Free Book Online Page A

bit,” Despres said one day, his tongue firmly planted in cheek, as he railed against a proposed taxi fare hike. “But if each and every member of the transportation committee were on the payrolls of the Yellow and Checker Cab companies, they wouldn’t behave any differently than they do right now.”
    The target of Despres’s attack, a crusty, old ward boss named Vito Marzullo, shook his fist in rage, uttering expletives in two languages. A decade later, when Despres was shot in the leg while on his way home from a late night of work, Marzullo offered a tart observation that probably summed up the feeling of many council members: “They aimed too low.”
    Despres became a great resource as well as a mentor to me. By then, in his fifth term as alderman, he was an undisputed expert on the City Council and the labyrinthine workings of local government. He was always ready with a brilliant, biting quote. Yet I learned as much from Korshak, a wry, world-weary veteran of the Democratic machine, who migrated to Hyde Park from Chicago’s notorious Twenty-Fourth Ward.
    Once a Jewish ghetto on the city’s West Side, the Twenty-Fourth Ward had become a seat of political power in Chicago thanks to its ability to deliver overwhelming margins for the Democratic ticket. The ward’s longtime boss, Colonel Jacob Arvey, was the county Democratic chairman who, in 1948, pulled off an improbable trifecta by carrying Illinois for Harry Truman and two long-shot candidates, Adlai Stevenson II for governor and Paul Douglas for the U.S. Senate.
    The tradition of tight organization and gaudy vote totals continued even after the ward’s makeup turned from predominantly Jewish to black. The first African American alderman of the Twenty-Fourth Ward, Ben Lewis, won a special election in 1958, the handpicked designee of the ward’s real power: a Democratic boss named Erwin “Izzy” Horwitz. In 1963, Lewis was shot to death in his ward office. His bodyguard, George Collins, who said he had gone out for a smoke when Lewis was murdered, succeeded him as alderman and later rose to Congress.
    When Collins, in turn, perished in a plane crash in 1972, his grieving widow, Cardiss, visited Mayor Daley to propose herself as her husband’s replacement. As the legend goes, Daley gently explained to Mrs. Collins that he had another candidate in mind. “Mr. Mayor,” she purportedly replied, “did I mention that George kept a diary?” Whatever occurred in that meeting, Mrs. Collins emerged as the mayor’s choice. Cardiss Collins went on to serve two decades in Congress. The Ben Lewis murder was never solved.
    But if the Twenty-Fourth Ward was infamous for its politics, it had an even seamier history as home to the Jewish wing of organized crime in Chicago, which developed deep ties to labor racketeers and Las Vegas gambling interests. And Korshak maintained a foot in both traditions.
    He had spent his life in service to the Democratic organization, and was rewarded with a series of public positions, from state legislator to the coveted patronage post of city treasurer. Under the friendly rules of Chicago politics, Korshak also developed a lucrative law practice, greatly enhanced by the clout he wielded.
    But Marshall was not the most powerful Korshak. His brother Sidney rose through that other Twenty-Fourth Ward career path and became organized crime’s lawyer in Vegas and Hollywood. Sidney oversaw the legal work for several mob-owned casinos, and through his ties to the Teamsters union, he had the power to bring film productions to a screeching halt until the “right people” got their cut. As such, he was a man the entertainment industry didn’t cross.
    Like Despres, Marshall Korshak became an invaluable resource to me, a tutor on the ins and outs of Chicago politics.
    In 1974, when a local man drowned in the unsupervised swimming pool of a Hyde Park motel with reputedly shady management, I was assigned by the
Herald
to look into it. After a bit of