Just a few years ago, when he was among the most important members of Mayor Richard M. Daley‘s Cabinet as well as the Daley political machine, Al Sanchez would have been the mayor’s go-to guy for a major snowstorm and a city election campaign.
But on Thursday morning, the day after a major blizzard and less than three weeks before election day, Sanchez instead was in another place where many Daley aides have ended up: the federal courthouse on Dearborn Street.
There, U.S. District Court Judge Robert W. Gettleman sentenced the former Streets and Sanitation commissioner to 30 months in prison for his role in the illegal commingling of city hiring and political activity in Daley’s City Hall.
Sanchez was a leader of the Hispanic Democratic Organization, which for a decade dominated politics in the city’s fast-growing Latino community on behalf of the mayor. He was convicted of being involved in a scheme to rig city hiring and promotions to reward loyal HDO campaign workers, in violation of a federal civil court decree that forbids the city from basing personnel decisions on political affiliation.
Sanchez’s attorney, Thomas Breen, told Gettleman that his client was not responsible for the hiring policies in place at City Hall.
“There’s an elephant in the room, and it’s not Al Sanchez,” said Breen. “It would be wonderful to know who came up with the hiring process.”
After being sentenced, Sanchez told reporters that Breen had been referring to Daley. The retiring mayor has denied wrongdoing in the hiring fraud, which has led to the convictions of several top aides, including his former patronage chief Robert Sorich.
But it’s unlikely that the master architects of the hiring fraud, whoever they include, will ever be subject to the sort of punishment that Sanchez faces. When a jury convicted Sanchez last year, prosecutors said his case would mark the end of the corruption probe.
The sentencing guidelines called for a 46-month prison term for Sanchez’s crime, but the judge said that was the same sentence handed down to Sorich and it did not seem right to punish Sanchez as severely when he was lower down in the system than Sorich.
In handing down the sentence, Gettleman also took into consideration Sanchez’s military service during Vietnam and that Sanchez is 63 years old. Talking to reporters, Sanchez thanked Gettleman for handing down a reduced sentence.
“Judge Gettleman is, I consider, a good judge,” said Sanchez. “I respect that he took in all that stuff into consideration.”
In the courtroom, Breen had repeated the defense that Sanchez had voiced when he testified in his trial. Breen said Sanchez did not enrich himself and was motivated to engage in politics only by his desire to empower the Latino community.
“It would be hard to find anyone — anyone — who would say something bad about Al Sanchez,” Breen told Gettleman.
Breen also said Sanchez did a great job for the city, contrasting snow-removal efforts under Sanchez with the city’s failure to clear Lake Shore Drive after this week’s blizzard.
Sanchez did not deny recommending political workers for city jobs, but Breen said he based those recommendations on merit more than clout. “Here’s something interesting judge: Did he ever recommend a deadbeat?” Breen said.
But during Sanchez’s trial, federal prosecutors said one of the HDO-affiliated hires in Streets and Sanitation was a truck driver who had no work experience behind the wheel of anything more than a rented moving truck. The worker said she was hired because of her campaign work for HDO politicians. The clout-heavy driver seriously injured a co-worker that she pinned between a city garbage truck and a telephone pole.
Prosecutors also said the city hiring fraud had deprived many applicants who lacked the right connections of well-paying jobs that they could have received.
Sanchez led HDO members on his native Southeast Side, where one of three HDO cells was centered.
Campaign workers for the group helped elect politicians across the city, Latinos as well as non-Hispanic politicians, including Daley and Rahm Emanuel, who is a candidate to succeed Daley in the Feb. 22 election. Although federal court records and testimony show that Emanuel’s successful 2002 campaign for Congress benefited from the help of HDO, Emanuel has said he was not aware of the hiring fraud and does not condone allowing clout to influence personnel decisions.
Mayoral rival Miguel del Valle sought to capitalize on the ties between HDO and Emanuel. In a reference to an Emanuel campaign commercial promising merit hiring at City Hall, Del Valle said the front-runner in the polls “benefited from the same patronage system which he talks about reforming.”
Sanchez quit the Daley administration in 2005, shortly after federal authorities probing corruption raided the mayor’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, which coordinated the clout hiring scheme that colored city personnel decisions for most of Daley’s tenure.
While Sanchez has continued to assert his innocence, the Chicago News Cooperative reported that his son, Matt Sanchez, recently became a lobbyist with the firm of former HDO chairman and top Daley aide Victor Reyes.
Breen said he plans on filing an appeal within the next 14 days.