It was the call T — a naturalized citizen who emigrated here from Mexico 19 years ago — had hoped he would never receive. (His name is being withheld because he fears for his safety.)

His father, a farmer in Michoacán had been kidnapped by La Familia Michoacana, a drug cartel. The cartel is known for its rapid rise to power in Mexico’s drug war and the bloody enforcement of its authority with beheadings and notes of terror attached to its victims.

T tried to explain to the caller that he did not have enough money for the ransom — a carefully calculated five-figure amount based on the perceived assets of his father’s five sons. The man replied: “All right, well, if you don’t love your dad, then that’s fine. We’ll just kill him.”

During the four days it took to negotiate the release of his father, the depth and scope of La Familia’s influence — reaching from Michoacán in southwestern Mexico to Chicago — was brought into sharp focus. With their sophisticated intelligence network, the kidnappers knew that T had four brothers and two sisters living in the United States, and that he usually worked seven days a week at his landscaping construction business.

T was the perfect target to help fuel the cartel’s deadly operations in Mexico and, by extension, its drug distribution in this country: He had money and a large family.

Stories like T’s and the fear they generate are becoming all too familiar for those with family back in Michocan. “We are afraid to go to Mexico, yet our families are suffering,” said José Luis Gutiérrez, director of Casa Michoacán and assistant director of the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities.

Of the 1.2 million Hispanics in Cook County, 78 percent identify themselves as Mexican, and according to 2008 census data they make up the second-largest Mexican community in the United States. The largest segment of Chicago’s Mexican population — nearly 15 percent according to 2007 data supplied by the Mexican Consulate — is from Michoacán (pronounced mee-sho-ah-KAHN), La Familia’s home state.

Like other cartels, La Familia uses the state’s port city of Lázaro Cárdenas to import cocaine and other drugs from Peru and Colombia and relay them to its networks. La Familia also produces large amounts of methamphetamine in the desolate and seemingly lawless Sierra Madre range, said Mr. Gutiérrez in an interview at Casa Michoacán in Pilsen, an umbrella organization for Michoacán clubs and associations. .

Chicago and Michoacán are more than 1,500 miles apart. Mexicans here maintain close contact with families in Mexico, which makes it easier for La Familia’s extended network to single out immigrants who own businesses both here and in Michoacán, making extortion threats against their operations and relatives in Mexico.

“Nobody wants to talk about it, but everybody is afraid of it,” said José Luis Gutiérrez, director of Casa Michoacán and assistant director of the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities. “We feel powerless because from here there is nothing we can do about it.”

Xóchitl Bada, a professor of Latin American studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said families in Chicago “know they are at the mercy of a very corrupt justice system” in Mexico. “And if you are thousands of miles away,” he said, “of course your fear gets magnified.”

Agustín Pradillo, a spokesman for the Mexican Consulate in Chicago, said the consulate had not received phone calls from families here about kidnappings or violence in Mexico.

Those problems are “not our specialization,” Mr. Pradillo said. “We try to help the people here with the problems they have here, because in Mexico they have the authorities. They are in charge of this.”

But Mr. Gutiérrez acknowledged that violence and security were the main concerns for Mexican immigrants.

Ties to Michoacán are strong. It is the only state in Mexico that allows emigrants to vote in local elections, and it maintains closer ties with them than most other states, experts and community members said. The state has also provided financial assistance to Casa Michoacán.

Leonel Godoy, Michoacán’s governor, denied that the state had a problem with drug-related crimes. During a visit to Chicago in June for events celebrating the bicentennial of Mexican independence and the centennial of the Mexican revolution, he was asked about cartel activities in Michoacán.

“It’s a lie that there is violence in Michoacán,” Mr. Godoy said. “Life in Michoacán is normal.”

Tourism was up 9 percent in 2009, he said.

But Michoacán has an Office of Kidnappings and Extortion in Morelia, the state capital, where the phone is answered with a simple “Sequestros!” (“Kidnappings!”).

Jonathan Arredono, an employee of the office, said that investigations were opened there, but that many people did not call to report kidnappings, “because of disgrace, fear or to avoid being put in more danger.”

In Chicago in early June, at another event promoting the Michoacán community in the city, Jesús Garibay García, a Mexican senator, talked in an interview about La Familia’s and other cartels’ strongholds.

“The gangs who make these drugs are now all over the world,” Mr. Garibay García said. “No family, whether here in the U.S. or in Mexico, is safe from falling victim to it. And if we ever want to help in resolving this issue, we have to recognize that we do have these issues.”

On Nov. 20, two months after T received the call about his father, federal authorities indicted 15 people connected to the Chicago drug-distribution cell of La Familia. Investigators seized 550 pounds of cocaine and $8 million in cash, largely in the suburbs, including Berwyn, Bolingbrook, Hickory Hills, Joliet, Justice and Oak Lawn. The raids were part of a multiagency investigation that began in 2007 and focused on La Familia’s network in the United States.

Most experts and outreach workers believe that the arrests show that La Familia intends to expand its base in Chicago’s suburbs, not in the city itself.

“I don’t see it in Chicago as anything more than isolated examples of the power of these cartels,” said John Hagedorn, a professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, who studies Chicago gangs.

Cartels are exerting more pressure on local gangs in an effort to control drug distribution in the Chicago area, he said, but so far it has not been successful.

“But Chicago is too far away and the gangs are too established, so I don’t think it’s a strategy that’s going to work,” he said.

For T, that distinction is meaningless. He said that his four phone calls over four days to negotiate the price of his father’s release were peppered with encouragement from the kidnappers: “Try harder,” “Put your all into it,” “You can do it.” Finally he was able to speak to his father, who tried to sound composed. He told T that he was fine, but to please hurry. He said he was sure they would kill him if a deal wasn’t reached.

T said he called his local municipal office in Michoacán for help. A secretary assured him that someone would follow up, but no one did.

“There is so much corruption,” T said. “Once I saw that I wasn’t going to get any help, I realized it would be easier and quicker to get the money together.”

With loans from family members and friends in Michoacán, T said that at the end of the four days he arranged for a friend to deposit the ransom into a bank account with a number provided by the kidnappers. The kidnappers also offered him a monthly payment plan, with interest, as an alternative. He said he declined, wishing to be done with the situation.

T told the kidnappers that the transaction was complete, and they gave him a drop-off location. But even that was meant to confuse rescuers, he said.

“They call you many times, different people from different numbers, telling you different places,” T said. “//‘He is at the corner. He is in the street.’//”

Eventually, T said, his father was dropped in a remote location in Michoacán with duct tape covering his eyes, his nose broken, his ribs broken from beatings, and a lump on his head from being pistol-whipped.

T and his siblings are still gathering the money to repay the loans, and he said he would prefer never to set foot in Mexico again. “Mexico is like a relative that isn’t there,” he said.

He talks with his father two or three times a week, but not about the kidnapping.

“We talk about everything but that topic, I never want to relive it,” he said. “We’ve already paid. It’s someone else’s turn.”

Idalmy Carrera and Kalyn Belsha contributed reporting.

Mayor Richard Daley has said most of the revenue from the parking meter privatization would come from downtown, documents show that the majority of revenues are coming from meters in the city's neighborhoods. The Brighton Park neighborhood has meters along the 4300 block of Archer Avenue in front of small area business.
Jose More/Chicago News Cooperative

Thanks to revenue largely generated in the city’s outlying neighborhoods, cash flow to the private company running the city’s parking meter system is stronger than expected. The firm plans to increase revenue even further by stepping up enforcement on the 36,000 meters in the second half of 2010, according to new documents reviewed by the Chicago News Cooperative.

Despite the public outcry after the 218 percent increase in the meter rate since the privatization deal, the drop in meter use was less than expected, according to documents related to a planned bond issue by the private company, Chicago Parking Meters LLC.

Although Mayor Richard M. Daley has said that motorists who park downtown would bear the brunt of the increased parking fees, the documents reveal that the majority of Chicago Parking Meters’ revenue is being generated in the city’s neighborhoods. They also inform investors that parking rates in the Loop “could be among the most expensive”’ in the nation by 2013.

The mayor and his aides have heatedly denied criticism that the $1.15 billion lease payment they received from the meters company in February 2009 would have been worth far more to taxpayers had the meters remained in public hands. But what seems indisputable is that the 75-year deal is so far proving to be good business for the private company, according to reports issued July 19 by independent credit-rating agencies.

The financial documents raise new questions about whether the city negotiated the best deal it could for leasing away one of its most lucrative assets. Chicago Parking Meters is on track to take in more than $73 million in 2010, according to Standard & Poor’s, one of the agencies. That is more than three times the roughly $20 million a year that the city had reaped from its meters before the privatization deal.

“We view the company’s business-risk profile as excellent,” analysts for Standard & Poor’s wrote in their report, citing high revenues and “the strong concessionaire protections” guaranteed in the agreement.

The other report, issued by Moody’s Investors Service, was similarly bullish, noting that rate increases have not significantly dampened demand and that further increases in the next three years would bring “dramatic expected improvement in the company’s cash flows.”

Mayor Daley’s chief financial officer, Gene Saffold, said Thursday the city has no regrets. The revenues reported by the parking company are “well within what we had projected when we decided to accept the bid” from the company, Mr. Saffold said.

He added that he thinks revenue projections for the company “are on the optimistic side” and that there is a strong chance that parking demand could drop off at some point due to future rate increases or expanded use of public transit. “There are still significant risks,” he said.

After rates quadrupled at most meters when the private company took over in early 2009, a further increase averaging 25 percent was instituted on Jan. 1. The revenue from the higher rates more than offset the slight decline in meter use.

Despite hourly rates ranging from $1.25 in the neighborhoods to $4.25 at the priciest downtown spaces, the meter company’s revenues from February to April were 20 percent higher than the same period last year. Those figures represented only a 4 percent decline in demand and exceeded projections, the Moody’s report said.

“You figured that with all the hatred for the deal, usage went down immediately, but people eventually come to the point where they can’t avoid the meters,” said Alderman Scott Waguespack (32nd Ward), who cast one of the five dissenting votes in the 50-member City Council when the deal was quickly ratified in December 2008.

“They have no choice,” Mr. Waguespack said. “It’s great for the investors. It’s just the opposite for the public.”

Moody’s analysts said the company was attractive to investors because of a lack of public transit options beyond downtown and because of limited free street parking near “key destinations.”

“Public transportation is not convenient to areas of the parking system outside of the central business district, which are expected to generate the majority of revenues,” the analysts wrote.

Officials for Morgan Stanley, which has a 50.1 percent stake in Chicago Parking Meters, declined to comment on the Chicago venture’s revenue numbers.

Both Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s gave investment-grade ratings to Chicago Parking Meters. But the company announced last week that it “chose to postpone” what was to be a $500 million bond sale “due to unfavorable market conditions,” according to a Morgan Stanley spokeswoman.

In November 2009, the Chicago News Cooperative reported on the company’s internal financial records that showed how meter revenues rose in late 2009 after weaker-than-projected returns in the first few months of its takeover. The privatization process initially was plagued by widespread technical problems. The new reports from Wall Street provide the fullest picture yet on the company’s improving cash flow, and the anticipation of even higher profits.

The deal with the city allows the company to raise meter rates by an average of 20 percent next year, 17 percent in 2012 and 14 percent in 2013, with increases beyond that year to be based on inflation. Those increases are expected to lift revenues to almost $162 million a year in 2020, the Standard & Poor’s analysts estimated.

That report shows that most of the revenues generated by the meters this year — 56.4 percent of total payments — is coming from motorists who park beyond downtown.

“It’s another tax on the middle-class people of the city of Chicago,” said Clint Krislov, a lawyer who has filed suit challenging the privatization deal in Cook County Circuit Court.

The city retains the right to reduce rates or even decrease the number of meters. But if officials do anything to hurt the private investors’ cash flow, taxpayers will have to make up the difference. Analysts believe that such contractual obligations protect the meter company from public opinion that could sway the city’s elected leaders.

“Despite significant initial public opposition to the concession, political risk is largely mitigated by provisions in the concession agreement and is not considered an undue concern,” the Moody’s analysts wrote. “In addition, public acceptance of the concession appears to be growing.”

Under the 2008 deal, the company and the city both can issue tickets for parking violations, with all ticket revenues going to the city. Compliance in feeding meters is hovering at about 75 percent, and consultants have told the company that tougher ticketing would raise revenues by almost 10 percentage points in 2011.

The company suspended writing tickets last year to focus on correcting mechanical problems with meters and switching from coin-fed meters to credit-card machines. It announced last month, however, that it would resume ticketing.

A Revenue Department spokesman said the company had 10 ticket writers and planned to add another five this year. Avis Lavelle, a former aide to Mr. Daley who now works as a spokeswoman for the company, declined to comment Thursday on its enforcement plans.

Besides Morgan Stanley’s role, significant minority stakes in Chicago Parking Meters LLC are held by German financial company Allianz (25 percent) and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (24.9 percent).

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A spent syringe on the ground at an encampment for heroin addicts on the west side of Chicago.
Bonnie Trafelet/Chicago News Cooperative

In a haunted world of heroin and hurt and heartless hustles, located between a dusty brickyard and rusty railroad tracks along the border of Chicago and blue-collar Cicero, Steve Kamenicky, known as Pony Tail Steve, is the go-to guy.

Longtime addicts and novice users seek out Mr. Kamenicky, sometimes in the middle of the day, other times deep into the night. They go to him, usually in a panic, desperate for an injection for a fallen buddy or lover of what some call “a miracle drug.” They hurry over the paving bricks that Mr. Kamenicky neatly laid to lead the way to his tent, pitched among the tall weeds and trees in one of a string of small encampments of the homeless on the edge of the brickyard.

But Mr. Kamenicky, 52, is not a dealer. His own heroin addiction is much too strong. He shoots every $10 bag of heroin he can.

Mr. Kamenicky is considered a savior by his fellow addicts.

“I’ve saved more people than the paramedics,” he boasted the other evening as he sat in a Cicero parking lot, his long, salt-and-pepper ponytail snaking down his back.

The drug he administers to fellow heroin users is called Naloxone or Narcan, its brand name. Mr. Kamenicky estimated that in the last few years he had brought back from the deadly depths of heroin overdose at least 35 addicts — in abandoned buildings, crack houses and around kitchen tables.

Naloxone, which is injected, reverses the effects of an opiate overdose. A drug that was a few years ago given by doctors and paramedics, Naloxone is now directly dispensed to hardcore drug users like Mr. Kamenicky, who are registered with the Chicago Recovery Alliance. The effort is part of an up-from-the bottom movement in the struggle to save those addicted to heroin and other opiates.

“It saves lives,” said Dr. Virgilio Arenas, who leads the addiction division at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. “Naloxone is an effective antidote. It works within minutes once administered.”

Mr. Kamenicky receives Naloxone free, as do drug users across the city, from the alliance, a nonprofit needle-exchange and H.I.V.-prevention program. The alliance also dispenses fresh syringes, condoms and other paraphernalia to users in the hope that they will stay alive long enough to make “any positive change,” the group’s mantra.

Dr. Arenas said there were similar “harm-reduction” projects in Milwaukee, New York and other cities where needles and Naloxone were distributed.

Not everyone endorses the effort. “Some people in the addiction field feel it might foster more drug use,” Dr. Arenas said, adding, “but I don’t think people will use more because they have the antidote. I favor the harm-reduction approach.”

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the Naloxone campaign is saving lives in the Chicago metropolitan area, which led the nation in heroin-related hospital emergency-room visits from 2004 to 2008, according to a recent study. The Illinois Consortium on Drug Policy at Roosevelt University found that there were 23,931 such cases during that period, 50 percent more than were reported in New York City, which ranked second.

Dan Bigg, director and co-founder of the Chicago Recovery Alliance, said the group had collected about 2,000 reports of overdose reversals since 2001 when it began widely dispensing Naloxone to addicts — and even family members, including one Lake Forest mother, who keeps a vial in her home in case her heroin-addicted daughter has another overdose.

“She wants a living daughter,” Mr. Bigg said, “despite whatever potential challenges she might bring in terms of struggling with drugs or education or marriage or anything else.”

Mr. Bigg said he had used Naloxone to reverse five overdoses. Greg Scott, a sociology professor at DePaul University and the recovery alliance’s research director, said he had reversed 24 overdoses, including a case two years ago when he used Naloxone on Mr. Kamenicky.

For years, Professor Scott has been documenting life in the “Brickyard,” Mr. Kamenicky’s encampment. In the last three years, he said, he has interviewed up to 300 suburban residents who come to the Brickyard to use the heroin they buy in surrounding neighborhoods before slipping back into mainstream society.

Mr. Scott said he had interviewed suburban housewives, hard-driving commodities traders and “weekend warriors,” who shoot up and get a thrill from hanging out at the Brickyard. He said the traders were the least responsive to his offers of Naloxone.

“They don’t want to admit they might have a problem,” he said.

Mr. Scott, 42, has also been on the other end of the needle. He said he was addicted to opiates until a few years ago, overdosing on three occasions. Each time, he said, the overdose was reversed by Naloxone.

“It really is a kind of miracle drug,” he said.

Not everyone is as lucky as Mr. Kamenicky or Mr. Scott. In 2008, the most recent year for which statistics are available, there were 390 opiate-related overdose deaths in Cook County, up from 280 in 2007, said Dr. Nancy Jones, the Cook County medical examiner.

Dr. Jones said it was impossible to say how many might have been saved by Naloxone and not “end up on my table.”

The Chicago Recovery Alliance dispenses Naloxone from a fleet of silver panel trucks, which are parked in designated spots around the city every day. One truck recently sat baking in the sun at 61st Street and Calumet Avenue. Cheryl Hull, an alliance employee, has dispensed syringes, advice and compassion from the trucks for nearly 17 years.

Ms. Hull said she gave addicts a bottle of Naloxone and a DVD instructing them on its use. For those without DVD players or places to watch the disc, Ms. Hull pops a disc into the truck’s portable player. Many people do not take the time to watch the instructions, she said, adding that young suburbanites were the most reluctant to linger and learn because they were afraid of the police and city crime.

On Wednesday night, Mr. Kamenicky sat on a plastic bucket, waiting for the alliance truck at a Cicero parking lot. He said it felt good to save a life, to give someone a second chance.

“I’ve only lost one person,” he said.

The victim, he said, was his boss at a suburban print shop. The man started snorting a $10 bag of heroin and then lost consciousness. Mr. Kamenicky ran to find his miracle drug.

“But somebody took it,” he said. “I tried to get some other people to help me, but they were too busy getting high. They couldn’t be bothered.

“By the time I found some Narcan, it was too late. I gave him a shot, but he was already dead.”

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Frank Knight in the back yard of his Northwest Side bungalow.
John Konstantaras/Chicago News Cooperative

When Frank Knight fell behind on his house payments in 2008 and the mortgage lender began a foreclosure case, a process server said he handed Mr. Knight the court papers at his bungalow on Chicago’s Northwest Side.

But public records show that at the time the server said Mr. Knight was being served, Mr. Knight was at a job site on the West Side, more than seven miles from his brick home in the Jefferson Park neighborhood.

“He lied on his affidavit,” Mr. Knight said this week. “I just feel like they were trying to foreclose upon me and my family as fast as possible. Why? So the bank could get their hands on this property, so they could turn it around.”

The man responsible for hand-delivering the foreclosure papers to Mr. Knight’s home is a special process server, an employee of a private detective agency. In the summer of 2007, with the housing bubble bursting and the number of foreclosure cases soaring, a Cook County judge issued an order making it easier for mortgage-foreclosure lawyers to hire special process servers to do what otherwise would be carried out by Cook County sheriff’s deputies, according to records reviewed by the Chicago News Cooperative and the Better Government Association.

The process server in Mr. Knight’s case was Timothy McWard, who said he did not recall the case. But Mr. McWard said he has served more than 20,000 legal documents in the past five years and the papers are “always given to somebody,” he said. “They will say whatever they can to save their house.”

A lawsuit filed last week in federal court in Chicago is challenging the practice, saying it is a violation of state and federal law for the judge to allow freer use of special process servers. The lawyer for David L. Washington, the foreclosed property owner who is the plaintiff in the suit, said he hoped to convert the case into a class-action suit that would void tens of thousands of foreclosure cases handled by special process servers in recent years.

Tom Dart, the Cook County sheriff, said he was eager to resume carrying out service duties for foreclosure cases, noting concerns with the behavior of private process servers, who had long been used to a lesser extent. Private servers are required to follow the same rules as sheriff’s deputies, who must swear that they have handed the court documents filed by lenders to the debtors or to another adult at the property. State law requires process servers to register with the sheriff, but only one has done so, because there are no penalties for failing to do so, said Steve Patterson, Mr. Dart’s spokesman.

Mr. Dart also said that if the sheriff’s office resumed process-serving duties in foreclosure cases, it would be an opportunity to take in millions of dollars a year in fees for the county.

The issue is becoming more urgent as the caseload of foreclosures in the county’s courtrooms continues to increase. There were about 16,000 foreclosures in 2005; that number almost tripled in 2009.

Dorothy Kirie Kinnaird, the presiding judge in the Chancery Division of Cook County Circuit Court, cited those rising figures in issuing an order in 2007 that liberalized the process by allowing law firms to hire private companies to serve foreclosures for three months rather than having to seek permission to bypass the sheriff in each case.

Judge Kinnaird declined to comment on the order or the lawsuit challenging it.

Clifford L. Meacham, who was the supervising judge in the Mortgage Foreclosure/Mechanics Lien Section of the Chancery Division when Judge Kinnaird issued the order, defended expanding the use of special process servers as necessary to deal with the skyrocketing number of foreclosure filings.

Now retired, Mr. Meacham was asked recently at a legal seminar whether the practice violated state statutes.

“It all depends on how rigidly you want to read the law,” he replied, according to an audio recording from the Distressed Real Estate Summit on May 13 at a downtown hotel. “Is there a statute that says the sheriff should get first crack? Well, yes, but you know, so what?”

In an interview this week, Mr. Meacham said his remarks as a panelist at the conference were “flippant,” but he did not retreat from his defense of the order. “To the extent that people think it violates their rights, I disagree,” he said. “Frankly, this is such a trivial matter.”

Mr. Meacham said he believed that private process servers who were found to be doing a bad job would be removed. The main reason for Judge Kinnaird’s order, he added, was that the sheriff’s office was overwhelmed in dealing with the increased number of foreclosure filings.

Mr. Patterson, the sheriff’s spokesman, said the office was ready to serve foreclosure papers in every case. “We would prefer to handle all process serving in the county, particularly since it is one of the few ways we are able to actually bring revenues to the county,” he said.

Sheriff’s deputies serve hundreds of thousands of legal documents each year, generating $20 million in fees, Mr. Patterson said. Handling all foreclosures would bring in an additional $5 million a year.

Edward T. Joyce, the lawyer for Mr. Washington, the plaintiff in the case, said Judge Kinnaird’s order was well-intentioned. But Mr. Joyce said her action was most favorable to banks and foreclosure lawyers because it allowed them to serve papers on debtors more quickly and cheaply. He also said the private process servers often engaged in “sewer service” — stuffing court papers between sewer grates in front of debtors’ homes.

Mr. Joyce said he had not discussed filing the federal case with the sheriff, although he had a long-running business relationship with Mr. Dart’s father.

Mr. Washington lost his home in Broadview, which he had bought in 2002, to Wells Fargo Bank after receiving papers from the same company that handled Mr. Knight’s case. Wells Fargo is the sole defendant in Mr. Washington’s suit. A spokesman for the bank said it followed procedures established by court officials in Cook County.

Court files show that at least five property owners who defaulted on their mortgages tried to have the cases thrown out in the last couple of years by arguing that the court’s order increasing the use of special process servers was illegal. That argument did not sway the judges in those cases, records show.

Mr. Knight, the Northwest Side homeowner facing foreclosure, bought his bungalow for $400,000 in 2007 and stopped making his $3,400-a-month payments after a year. He still lives in the house and is continuing to fight the foreclosure, claiming he was the victim of predatory lending.

In court, Mr. Knight produced public records showing that he was at a city sewer inspection in the 4700 block of West Superior Street when the process server swore he was presenting him with foreclosure papers in Jefferson Park. Mr. Knight testified that the foreclosure notice was left in his mailbox. As a result, the judge in Mr. Knight’s case granted his motion to “quash service.”

The favorable ruling was only a temporary reprieve for Mr. Knight. Another private process server was back at his house four days after the decision, and this time the company made sure to hand the documents to Mr. Knight’s wife, whose is also an owner of the home.

Dan Mihalopoulos is a reporter for the Chicago News Cooperative. Patrick Rehkamp is chief investigator for the Better Government Association. Emily Funk, an associate investigator for the association, contributed reporting.

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Daniel Burnham's book Plan of Chicago laid out a plan for the development of the Chicago metropolitan region in 1908. The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning has presented Go to 2040 which recommends actions for future development of the Chicago region.
John Konstantaras/Chicago News Cooperative

As the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning sees it, Chicago in 2040 will no longer be battling its suburban neighbors for growth and prosperity opportunities. Instead, the city will be part of a super region competing with areas like China and Brazil. Two million more people will probably be crammed into the Chicago region, and the city may be served by a new, huge transportation hub in the West Loop with high-speed trains and other new transportation ideas.

If all goes according to the agency’s new “Go To 2040” plan, the Chicago area 30 years from now has a much different look and feel. But much of the plan’s momentum and vision might seem familiar, thanks in large part to Daniel Burnham, Chicago’s original uber-planner.

His influence is on display, both in the strategy the planning agency has put together for the city’s future, and literally in the shrine-like glass display case in the agency’s office reception area, which holds a well-thumbed and slightly faded copy of Mr. Burnham’s 101-year-old “Plan of Chicago.”

“When you think about planning in the city of Chicago, you can’t ignore Daniel Burnham’s shadow,” said Randall Blankenhorn, CMAP’s executive director.

Mr. Burnham was the architect who designed some of Chicago’s earliest skyscrapers and oversaw the construction of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. But his greatest contribution to Chicago may have been the 1909 plan that gave the city its broad boulevards, its miles of lakeshore park and an enduring sense that Chicago is still destined for great things.

“The main legacy of the Burnham plan is that it got people to believe in the idea of planning itself,” said Carl Smith, an urban history scholar at Northwestern University. “It convinced them that you can intervene in history and remake a city.”

The planning agency is inviting public comments on the 404-page draft through Aug. 6, and the formal launch is scheduled for October.

“Go To 2040” and the Burnham plan share a common pedigree — both were created at the behest of the Commercial Club of Chicago, an invitation-only conclave of the city’s business leaders.

In 1996 the club set up a group called Chicago Metropolis 2020, which in 1999 published a plan so elegant it was sold as a coffee-table book. One of its recommendations was the establishment of a regional planning agency. Acting on that suggestion, the Illinois legislature created CMAP.

The planning agency’s 2040 draft envisions Chicago as the hub of an integrated region that, in order to prosper, will need to add 2 million people and a million jobs over the next 30 years.

That is the view of many experts who foresee a 21st century global economy that revolves around a dozen or so mega-regions spread across Asia, Europe and the Americas. Mr. Blankenhorn said his job is to make sure the Chicago area is one of those regions.

“It’s no longer Chicago against Joliet and Waukegan and Elgin,” he said. “It’s us against India and China and Brazil.”

The architects of the 2040 plan also share Mr. Burnham’s belief that Chicago’s principal purpose is to serve as a transportation hub.

One of the plan’s key proposals incorporates Union Station into a new West Loop Transportation Center, an underground complex that would run beneath Clinton Street between Lake Street and the Eisenhower Expressway. The center would serve as a hub for commuter trains, the El, bus lines and a long-dreamed-of intercity high-speed rail network.

The plan also emphasizes that the movement of freight is what links Chicago to the global economy. But with government studies indicating that the already massive volume of freight handled by Chicago is likely to increase by 60 to 70 percent over the next 30 years, the 2040 plan focuses on modest transportation upgrades that aim simply to keep congestion at today’s barely tolerable levels.

“It’s unrealistic to think that congestion will go away,” said Mr. Blankenhorn, the former Bureau Chief of Urban Project Planning at the Illinois Department of Transportation.

In recent decades, regional planning has been driven — often to its detriment — by federally financed transportation projects.

“It became a competition for transportation dollars,” said Tom Cuculich, director of planning and development for DuPage County. “Whoever hired the best lobbyists got their project.”

Mr. Cuculich, who has been involved in the planning agency’s project from the start, said the new plan attempts to reverse this logic. Instead of allowing the eagerness for federally funded transportation projects to shape planning priorities, the emphasis is placed on land-use considerations, conservation, green technology and job growth.

“It’s a paradigm shift that needed to occur,” he said.

Although CMAP does not have authority over zoning and land use — that remains in the hands of local municipalities — the agency is not without influence. It has statutory power to decide which federally funded transportation projects get built.

But Mr. Blankenhorn said the key to implementing the 2040 plan lies not with the disbursement of federal dollars, but in winning over the public.

The Chicago Plan Commission recognized the importance of that a century ago when it hired an indefatigable salesman named Walter Moody to promote the Burnham plan. Mr. Moody went on the lecture circuit with lantern slides — the “power point” equivalent of the times. He papered the city with pamphlets, produced a newsreel that was shown in local theaters and even managed to have the plan incorporated in the civics curriculum of public schools.

But Mr. Burnham’s ideas were realized mainly because they had the financial and political backing of the Commercial Club. These days the club no longer carries that kind of clout.

“That’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Mr. Smith said. “Our society is more open, more democratic, which is good.”

In terms of democracy, the Chicago area may get bogged down by too much of a good thing. In addition to 284 individual municipalities, the region encompasses more than 1,400 separate units of local government, the most of any region in the United States. The New York metropolitan area, by contrast, has fewer than 200.

The tension between city and suburb is often the biggest obstacle that regional planners must overcome. But even as Chicago’s suburbs emerge as economic powerhouses in their own right, groups like the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus, founded by Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley in 1997, have helped foster a spirit of cooperation, according to city and suburban officials.

The 2040 plan also revives what might be called the hidden legacy of the Burnham plan. Mr. Burnham cared deeply about living conditions for ordinary citizens, and in his original, 300-page handwritten manuscript he argued for providing day care to the children of the working class and making sure police did their work in a transparent manner. He also wanted the city to be equipped with plenty of public restrooms maintained to a standard of “perfect sweetness.”

These recommendations were trimmed from the final version, but according to Mr. Smith, it is clear that Mr. Burnham wanted a city that was not only grand, but also livable.

The new plan makes no mention of restrooms, but it contains chapters devoted to education, nutrition, access to health care, energy conservation and other quality-of-life issues. “Livability” appears to be a main goal.

As the planning agency’s staff members ponder the strategies for selling the 2040 plan to the public, they need look no further than the words on the jersey of the CMAP softball team: “What Would Daniel Burnham Do?”

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Former Governor Rod Blagojevich signed his book for Nora Zerante as he walked out of the Dirksen Federal Courthouse.
Jose More/Chicago News Cooperative

Since the corruption trial of Rod R. Blagojevich began five weeks ago, a jury has heard recordings of him uttering an expletive more than 200 times, seeking big jobs for a vacant United States Senate seat, and searching urgently for ways to make money in exchange for state action. With crassness apparently proven beyond a reasonable doubt, the prosecution felt the jury had its fill.

The United States Attorney’s office left hours of recordings of the former Illinois governor on the cutting room floor as it wrapped up its case several weeks sooner than expected, and it kept two potential witnesses — Stuart Levine and Tony Rezko, convicted political fundraisers — off the stand.

The swiftness caught the defense by surprise and raised key questions by former prosecutors and defense lawyers about whether the government did enough to convince the jurors that Mr. Blagojevichwas a corrupt politician and — more important — that what he did was a crime.

“You have to be surgical, because at end of day you are going to be held accountable to the indictment,” said Jeff Cramer, a managing director at the Kroll consulting firm, who was part of the federal prosecution team in the trial of Conrad Black, the media executive who was convicted of fraud. “The jury is going to go through the indictment and parse out what elements they have to find beyond a reasonable doubt. Jurors at end of day will parse through these indictments, and you will see some challenges in this case.”

Establishing the point of diminishing returns is a key decision for the government in a case where there are hundreds of hours of audio evidence.

“As a prosecutor, you don’t want to do overkill,” said Richard Kling, a Chicago-Kent law professor. “There is a point at which the jury puts their fingers in their ears and says, ‘enough already.’.”

In the end, the government whittled down its audio evidence to 111 recorded snippets culled from the home, office and cell phones of Mr. Blagojevich, his brother Robert, and Alonzo Monk and John Harris, his former chiefs of staff. In addition, the jury heard recordings from listening devices that had been planted in the campaign headquarters of Friends of Blagojevich.

Though they originally indicated that they thought it would take up to four months to present their case against Mr. Blagojevich, prosecutors finished after just 24 days.

“For the prosecution, less is more, so that is a clear indication that they feel their case went very well,” said Ronald Safer, the former lead prosecutor in the Black case who is now a partner at Schiff Hardin.

There is another advantage to the shortened prosecution case, said Ron Allen, a law professor at Northwestern University.

“You have an engaged jury that was told that the government’s case was going to take 16 weeks,” he said. “This is a great strike in the government’s favor.”

However, some observers say that in wrapping up so quickly, prosecutors may not have clearly established how Mr. Blagojevich’s schemes constituted crimes. The former governor is charged with 24 counts ranging from conspiracy to extortion.

“I think, frankly, what the prosecution did not do exquisitely is define the crime,” Mr. Safer said. “I think people say, ‘Well, where is the smoking gun? I don’t see the smoking guns.’ There are smoking guns. Those tapes are really smoking guns for the crime. The problem is the prosecution didn’t define the crime.”

Mr. Safer said that if he were prosecuting the case, he might have taken the unusual step of asking Judge James Zagel to explain to jurors the elements of the crimes before witnesses were called. Other legal experts argued that this was unnecessary, that the law can be fully fleshed out for jurors by the prosecution’s closing arguments and the judge’s jury instructions.

In the 2005-6 trial of Governor George Ryan, Mr. Blagojevich’s predecessor, there was no recorded evidence, and the government relied almost entirely on testimony from witnesses. This dependence had its problems from the start, beginning with the tear-stained, at times contradictory testimony of Scott Fawell, Mr. Ryan’s former campaign manager who was a key prosecution witness.

“Having tapes makes it a much more difficult case to defend than Ryan’s was,” said Joel Levin, one of the Ryan prosecutors who is now an attorney at Perkins Coie.

The challenge for the Blagojevich prosecutors was to strike a balance between supporting the indictment and going too far or too long in their presentation, experts said.

While the recordings produced powerful atmospherics, the government had to be wary that they did not go over the top, inadvertently playing into a defense argument that Mr. Blagojevich was prone to impertinence, and that his most incriminating words should not be taken seriously.

To that end, prosecutors spent some time building up to their most blustering recordings of the former governor. They waited until the third week of the trial before introducing the particularly explosive Nov. 10, 2008, conference call between Mr. Blagojevich, his wife Patti, and several of his key political advisers. In it, a rattled Mr. Blagojevich alternated between tones of defiance and despair as he implored his kitchen cabinet to help find him a way out of a job he loathed and, according to testimony, often avoided.

“The whole world’s passing me by and I’m stuck” in this job as governor now, Mr. Blagojevich told the group, adding an expletive when he talked about his position.

Mr. Blagojevich’s attorneys are expected to begin calling their witnesses on Monday, after both sides finish debating which tapes the defense can present to the jury. The defense has said that it intends to argue that Mr. Blagojevich did not believe his conduct was unlawful, blaming aides and advisers for misleading him.

As the defense scrambles to finish preparing its case more than a month ahead of schedule, Mr. Blagojevich’s lawyers will seek to quickly let some air out of the government’s balloon.

“It is critical for them to put a witness on the stand early and effectively that is going to put a positive face on the defense theory,” said Lance Northcutt, a lawyer.

However, the consensus among many of those following the case is that Mr. Blagojevich’s salvation comes down to his own testimony. The former governor and his attorneys have told the court that he will take the stand.

“If you can say anything about Blagojevich,” said Ken Cunniff*, a defense lawyer, “it is he clearly believes in what he is saying, and whether that belief is communicated to the jury can win or lose the case.”

Patrick Collins, the former Assistant United States attorney who was the lead prosecutor in the Ryan case, said he thinks Mr. Blagojevich’s legal team erred in not better preparing the jury during opening arguments to anticipate the offensiveness of the tapes.

“One of the potential flaws in the defense case is that the honest-man portrait that was painted of Blagojevich in its opening is inconsistent with the vulgarity and decision-making processes and personal habits he engaged in,” Mr. Collins said.

The government’s final recorded conversation came on Tuesday afternoon, with Pat Magoon, the president and chief executive of Children’s Memorial Hospital, on the stand.

Mr. Magoon testified that he had felt pressured by Robert Blagojevich to provide a $50,000 campaign contribution to Friends of Blagojevich in order for the governor to keep his pledge to increase state Medicaid physician-reimbursement rates. The allegation is considered to be the prosecution’s key sequence in the case, which is most likely why they waited until the end of their presentation.

“I’m following up on a conversation we now had a couple of weeks ago and I called him last week,” Robert Blagojevich is heard saying to Mr. Magoon’s receptionist. “I’ve not heard back from him and so I’m hoping he’ll call me back.”

As Mr. Magoon testified this week, he never called back. That was one call the government did not have on tape.

*Correction: The original version of this article misspelled Ken Cunniff’s name.

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WGN radio studios at Tribune Tower have windows to Michigan Avenue and Pioneer Plaza.
Jose More/Chicago News Cooperative

The Tribune Company has come under scrutiny over the past few years for the jarring changes that a management team, laden with radio industry executives, has made to its stable of newspapers. But it is the dramatic and risky revamp occurring inside the bankrupt media company’s flagship radio station, WGN-AM 720, that is now making headlines, as its big fan base grows increasingly angry and its grip on the city’s radio advertising market loosens.

The folksy banter from talk-show hosts — who in some cases have stayed with the powerhouse station for more than 20 years — helped build a special bond with an audience that became the envy of others in the industry for the long hours Chicagoans spent listening each day. Until recently, WGN was the city’s most lucrative and widely listened to station, one that seemed to deserve its familiar tag line “The Voice of Chicago.”

But a spate of changes — the recent ouster of a well-known daytime host, the hiring of a former jailed politician to replace a popular sports show at night, and an unfamiliar name from out of town occupying its prized morning slot — has produced a negative response. Some observers question whether the city is witnessing the beginnings of one of the biggest radio blunders in Chicago media history.

“At some point, this will be a case study of how to dismantle a radio station,” said Paula Hambrick, a longtime local radio media buyer. “People were such loyal listeners, 10 hours a day. They’re upset and angry, and they are going to look for places to park themselves.”

Last year, WGN was the only Top 5 station in Chicago to lose market share. It dropped to 8.1 percent of advertising dollars billed from 8.5 percent, good for second place in the market, according to data compiled by BIA/Kelsey. At the same time, the news station WBBM-AM 780, the No. 1 biller in the city, increased its share of the advertising pie to 8.9 percent in 2009 from 8.6 percent in 2008.

WGN’s 2009 advertising revenue was $36.5 million, compared with $44.5 million in 2008, an 18 percent decline in a year in which the whole ad market was down.

Ratings drive billings, and for WGN, the ratings for the three-month period ending in March were flat. In May, they were up slightly mainly due to excitement surrounding the Blackhawks playoff run, which was carried on the station.

Stations around the city will await July ratings to show a truer picture of the effects of the WGN changes. So far, the ratings picture has not reflected the anger from listeners on blogs and chat rooms around the city.

The upheaval comes at a crucial time for executives at the Tribune Company, which is hoping to exit bankruptcy later this year. Management teams are usually risk averse when it comes to major operational changes during bankruptcy, fearing the loss of even more revenue.

But the Tribune Company has taken a different tack under Randy Michaels, the chief executive. A former Clear Channel Radio executive, Mr. Michaels had helped Sam Zell, the Tribune Company’s chairman, sell a radio group to Clear Channel for a premium during a wave of consolidation in the 1990s. Mr. Michaels has brought in several executives from his radio past to help with WGN operations, including Kevin Metheny, who was named WGN program director in late 2008. Howard Stern dubbed Mr. Metheny “Pig Virus” in his book “Private Parts,” after battling with him earlier in Mr. Stern’s career.

Asked about the strategy and the anger that the changes have elicited, Tom Langmyer, the station’s vice president and general manager, said that one of the things often overlooked is the overall performance of the station. “The station was getting down to 30th place in key day parts with 25 to 54 year olds,” he said. “Those people who are listening are going to be upset. They’re upset that their favorite radio station is changing.

“Any time you have a heritage brand like WGN, any time you make changes, you are going to have people who are going to be upset. You have to have the courage to do the things that make sense. That is the reason for it. I don’t think the typical listener has as much information on the business side. And some of the changes we’ve made have helped.”

Mr. Langmyer said that changes have been calculated and based on audience feedback. “There is a need to make a change to keep the station strong and viable,” he said. “The advertising market and the economy in general have changed dramatically, along with the company restructuring. We have to change more rapidly than we normally would.”

Mr. Metheny returned a reporter’s phone call, but declined to comment.

Over the past several months, management at WGN parted ways with longtime hosts, like Kathy O’Malley and Judy Markey, and mothballed its evening “Sports Central” show. To fill the sports show’s slot, the station hired Jim Laski, a former Chicago politician and felon who had not done radio before — a move that stunned insiders at the station as well as listeners. “Laski has done more time in jail than on the air,” Ms. Hambrick said.

In the coveted morning slot, traditionally filled by a host who had spent years getting comfortable with the audience in one of the station’s other slots, WGN introduced Greg Jarrett, who was brought in from San Francisco last year. Ms. Hambrick said that Mr. Jarrett has so far not caught fire with listeners, although Mr. Langmyer said that Mr. Jarrett has had “the highest ratings in that morning show slot since 2003.” Another outsider, Mike McConnell, a personality from Mr. Michaels’s former station in Cincinnati, WLW-AM, is expected to join the station next month in an undetermined role.

The most public change was that of Steve Cochran, the midday host who teed off on management after he was shown the door last month, another move that shocked listeners who were not accustomed to sudden dislocation at the station.

“I was literally dismissed while I was walking out of the men’s room,” Mr. Cochran said. “There was no explanation given.”

Behind the scenes, other staff members have also departed over the past several months, including Wendi Power, the station’s well-respected top advertising sales executive, who left to run a smaller radio station group in Tampa, Fla.

Stacked against the station is history: Chicago tends to be unforgiving to newcomers. And with WGN pulling in the second- most radio revenue in the market behind WBBM, its moves are fraught with risk.

“It was always difficult to bring someone in from out of town,” said Bob Sirott, a longtime Chicago broadcaster who recently rejoined WFLD-Channel 32 as its evening anchor and who still fills in at WGN. “If you’re new coming in, it’s a little more difficult to be accepted.”

Mr. Sirott said it often took years before radio and television personalities were embraced by Chicago audiences. “Now with so many more channels and more fragmented audiences, it’s next to impossible,” he said. “In today’s media landscape, to try to establish someone is risky.”

WGN executives had a shot at going after a well-known personality like Jonathon Brandmeier, the former WLUP-FM 97.9 personality, but passed. Richard Roeper, the Chicago Sun-Times columnist who is also a familiar local television and radio presence, was picked up by rival WLS-AM 890.

Any time a station undergoes major changes, there is a risk that listeners will begin sampling other outlets and never return, executives say. Stations like WLS and WBEZ-FM 91.5, the public radio station, are probably beneficiaries of any sampling by WGN listeners. The “Eric and Kathy” morning show on WTMX-FM 101.9 could benefit from more female listeners from WGN, if they decide to look elsewhere.

Ms. Hambrick, the advertising buyer, said WGN had put at risk a unique cachet in the market: its singular relationship with loyal listeners.

The station “sold on results for clients and being the absolute voice of Chicago,” Ms. Hambrick said. “It always had a special place with listeners and advertisers. Advertisers didn’t feel they had a complete campaign unless they were on WGN.”

Julie, who was raped in 2007, spoke at the Human Rights Watch meeting.

With considerable fanfare this week, Gov. Patrick J. Quinn signed into law a measure to improve rape investigations by Illinois authorities. But it came too late for women like Christina.

After a night out with a friend and the friend’s boyfriend in April 2007, Christina went with the pair to the friend’s Hyde Park apartment to sleep on the living room couch. When she was alone, she said, the boyfriend came into the room, pushed her roughly to the floor and raped her.

Christina said she was upset and concerned about medical costs so she waited two days before she went to the University of Chicago Medical Center. She reported the rape, and waited nearly all night for a rape kit, which preserves evidence after a sexual assault. A nurse noted signs of forced penetration in her medical records.

The next day, Christina called the detective who had interviewed her and written her report and asked how long it would take to get results from the rape kit. Two weeks, he told her.

For months, she said, she got no answers.

Finally, a pro bono lawyer connected her with the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office, who she said encouraged her not to press charges because she did not have a strong case. Prosecutors eventually dropped the case.

Like Christina, thousands of Illinois women and children have gone through the hours-long, invasive process of collecting evidence for a rape kit, which includes DNA samples like semen and saliva, only to have it languish in police storage facilities or state crime labs or simply disappear. This makes arrests, prosecutions and convictions less likely, allowing perpetrators to rape again, prosecutors say. It also gives victims the impression that their trauma is not a priority for investigators.

In a report released July 7, Human Rights Watch found that of 7,494 rape kits collected in Illinois from 1995 to 2009, only 1,474 were confirmed tested, and more than 4,000 were left in storage. Nearly 2,000 were destroyed without being tested. The actual numbers are probably higher because 82 out of the 267 Illinois law enforcement agencies contacted by Human Rights Watch did not provide information.

Illinois is not the only state with a rape kit testing problem. Thousands of rape kits remain untested in cities including Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, San Antonio and San Diego, according to news reports. Advocates hope the Illinois law will serve as a model for other states.

Christina said said she was determined to get the results of her rape kit. “Even if there wasn’t a chance in hell of winning, I wanted there to be a record of this,” she said. “If he went on and raped other women, my case would make theirs stronger.”

She was put in touch with a Human Rights Watch investigator, who filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the police report. It said no rape kit had been administered.

“They lost it or they threw it in the trash, and that’s how they’re covering up for it,” Christina said earlier this week, her voice still reflecting anger three years after the attack.

A spokesman for the Chicago police said the department did not keep the rape kits, but sent them to state crime laboratories for testing. “We send every kit to be tested, no exceptions,” he said.

On Tuesday, Governor Quinn signed the nation’s first state law mandating that all rape kits be tested, as long as “sufficient staffing and resources” are available. Under the law, the police must send all kits to state labs within 10 days, all kits must be tested within six months, and state police must provide a timeline for testing the backlog of kits.

Sarah Tofte, author of the Human Rights Watch report, said she was concerned about the law’s language on resources.

“We need to make sure this loophole doesn’t effectively nullify the law, that they don’t just move the backlog from police storage to the crime lab,” Ms. Tofte said.

Lisa Madigan, the state’s attorney general, who initiated the bill, said she was not counting on any help from the strapped state budget. But Ms. Madigan said she was confident that adequate federal money would be found, including grants under the Violence Against Women Act and the Forensic DNA Backlog Reduction Program.

The previous governor, Rod R. Blagojevich, tried to address the rape kit backlog in 2004 by pushing legislation requiring the testing of kits within one year. But that measure did not clearly state that police departments must send all rape kits to the labs.

Patti Sudendorf, chief of the Sex Crimes Division for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office, said she welcomed the changes announced this week. “We’re really hoping it makes a good additional tool for us,” Ms. Sudendorf said.

But victims and their advocates are uncertain about how much things will change. They see the failure to test rape kits as symptomatic of larger issues.

“One of the most heartbreaking things about this data is it’s symbolic of how unseriously we take violence against women,” said Anne K. Ream, founder of the Voices and Faces Project, a nonprofit multimedia documentary initiative collecting victims’ stories of sexual assault.

In cases of acquaintance rape like Christina’s, which make up the majority of cases, the Human Rights Watch report said the police often decided it was not worth testing a kit because they were not convinced a rape had occurred or they did not think the case was winnable. In Illinois, only 11 percent of reported rapes yield an arrest, according to statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Attorney General Madigan said, “I strongly believe that by having this law in place, we will see an increase in victims coming forward, if they know they won’t be going through evidence collection in vain, just to have it put on a shelf and ignored.”

Ms. Madigan said the new law underscored that rape of any type was a serious crime and that all kits must be tested. Even if a suspect’s identity is known, DNA evidence can identify if there were other rapes by the same person, point out inconsistencies in the suspect’s testimony and provide hard evidence for a conviction.

Only a small fraction of rapes are even reported, advocates for rape victims say, in part because of the invasive rape-kit procedure and often fruitless law enforcement process.

Julie, a 25-year-old hairstylist in central Illinois who was raped in 2007, said she hoped the new law would save other women from the anger and fear she suffered after learning that her rape kit would not be tested and that her attacker would remain free.

After she picked up a girlfriend who had been drinking on June 24, 2007, the friend invited Julie up to her apartment to watch a movie. While there, she said, a man she had never met before raped her when the friend was in another room.

Julie said she drove straight to the hospital and spent almost four hours undergoing a rape kit procedure. “I felt invaded, terrified and exposed during the rape kit,” she said. “After undressing in front of strangers, I was poked, prodded, scraped, swabbed, combed and photographed. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

Several months later, she learned that her accused attacker, who was on parole at the time, would not be prosecuted. She said a detective told her that if she wanted the results of the rape kit, she would have to pay for the test herself.

“They said it came down to he said-she said, but what’s in that box could have told a different story,” Julie said. “This was evidence in a major crime. To just drop a case without looking at the evidence doesn’t make any sense.”

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Mayor Richard Daley holds his hand in the form of a gun during a press conference at City Hall on the Supreme Court's ruling on Chicago's gun ban.

“Something has to be done, Mr. President, about the sale of guns.”

Forty-four years after race riots prompted Mayor Richard J. Daley to make that vain plea to President Lyndon B. Johnson, Mr. Daley’s son, Mayor Richard M. Daley, spent much of the past week reacting furiously to the latest setback in his fight for gun control.

A Supreme Court ruling on Monday effectively ended Chicago’s 28-year-old handgun ban despite Mr. Daley’s argument that the prohibition was needed primarily to protect police officers and paramedics. It was soon clear that any replacement ordinance would have to fall short of an outright ban to keep from violating the second Amendment’s right to bear arms.

Indeed, on Friday the City Council met in a hastily summoned session to approve Mayor Daley’s new “Responsible Gun Ownership” ordinance, allowing handgun owners to be able to register one weapon per month after undergoing classroom and firing range training.

Though Mr. Daley complained that the court’s 5 to 4 decision rendered the ban “unenforceable,” the head of the police union said it was rarely enforced anyway.

“It apparently didn’t have much of an impact, judging from the number of shootings and the number of guns seized on an annual basis,” said Mark Donahue, president of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, which represents officers below the rank of sergeant.

Both Mara Georges, the Daley administration’s top lawyer, and Jody Weis, the police superintendant, said they did not know how often anyone had been charged and convicted of violating the handgun ban.

The number of guns seized by police has stayed consistently high in recent years, according to department statistics. Not counting guns acquired by authorities through weapon turn-in programs, 7,326 guns were confiscated in 2008 and 8,259 last year, more than any other United States city, according to the Chicago Police Department. With 4,139 guns seized from Jan. 1 to June 28, this year is on course to top the 2009 total.

Phil Cline, a former Chicago police superintendant, said the biggest decrease in the number of guns on the street came in the mid-1990s, after the passage of the state’s “Safe Neighborhoods Act,” which made it a felony to carry a gun in public. Before 1995, the crime had been a misdemeanor. Mr. Cline said the numbers plummeted by roughly 50 percent at that time. But Chicago Police officials did not respond to a request for statistics.

“That was one piece of legislation that really had an impact on the streets,” Mr. Cline said last week, adding that the best course of action now is to pass state laws that require tougher mandatory penalties for gun violations.

Mr. Daley took offense at the Supreme Court’s suggestion in its ruling that local leaders may not be doing all they can to stem gun violence.

Alderman Robert Fioretti (2nd Ward) said, however, that he did not think the justices’ point was without merit. “If we don’t have the full compliment of police on the street, we’re not doing everything possible,” Mr. Fioretti said.

The city’s budget problems have torpedoed the mayor’s promises to put more officers on the street. In this year’s budget, there were 13,200 positions for officers, a decrease of 300. The actual size of the force is about 12,500, or 680 fewer than two years ago, said Mr. Donohue, the police union leader.

“On a day-to-day basis, a 5 percent drop is very significant,” he said. “A lot of officers have been redeployed to special units, leaving the rank-and-file officers to run from call to call instead of doing any proactive police work.”

Although the mayor and his aides described the measure that was passed on Friday as the strongest of its kind in the nation, what was ratified was far less stringent than what the administration had suggested it would push for as recently as Wednesday.

The day after learning that the city could no longer entirely ban handguns, Ms. Georges told the aldermen that the mayor wanted to cap handgun ownership at one firearm per home. By Thursday, city officials said they would set a limit of one gun purchase per adult per month.

“We simply changed our minds,” said Jennifer Hoyle, a spokeswoman for the Law Department.

Mr. Daley also backed down from his initial suggestion that the city require gun owners to purchase liability insurance, fearing that such an action and the one-gun-per-home restriction would leave the city vulnerable to legal challenges.

The new regulations were approved quickly with little public notice.

Top mayoral aides rushed from a park district field house on the South Side — where Mr. Daley announced his plan at 9 a.m. Thursday — to attend a meeting of the City Council’s Police and Fire Committee. The panel quickly gave the revised measure preliminary approval at the meeting, which had been announced less than two hours before it began. The full council voted 45-0 in favor on Friday.

Despite the revisions that made the regulations less onerous for gun buyers, the final version still creates several hurdles to gun ownership in the city.

Anyone who wants to keep a gun in his or her home will have to undergo training in a classroom and at a firing range. Because the new measure bans gun shops from operating in the city, prospective gun owners will have to go out of town to get trained.

Firing ranges in the suburbs anticipate a boom in business. “Obviously, it’s going to be good for us,” said Noel Incavo, co-owner of Midwest Guns & Pistol Range in Lyons. He estimated that the cost of training in his shooting range would be about $100.

Guns will be allowed only inside homes — not on porches, not in backyards and not in autos, city officials said.

Daniel W. Webster, co-director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, met with city officials last week to discuss the new ordinance. He praised the provision that bans gun ownership by anyone convicted of a violent crime, domestic violence or two or more offenses for driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

“Certainly, there was a lot of gun violence even with the ban, but it could have been worse were handguns readily available,” Mr. Webster said. “It’s very difficult to know.”

At a news conference at City Hall on Wednesday, the mayor shrugged off questions about how effective the ban had been. Just saving one life would be worth the trouble if it saved your son, he said.

The mayor had followed the same impulse as his father, and has tried to limit gun sales. Whether those actions can withstand legal challenges and make Chicago safer is not yet known.

The mayor — a lawyer who often decries the litigious nature of Americans — said he did not fear the inevitable legal battles over the new regulations.

“Everybody has the right to sue,” he said. “I wish I could craft something perfect. Nothing is perfect in life.”

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Clinton Lehman of Sturgis, MI works on a pull out for a recreation vehicle at Jayco, Inc. Middlebury, IN. Lehman was just hired back after being layed off.
John Konstantaras/Chicago News Cooperative

ELKHART, Ind. — Working so hard on the assembly line that his T-shirt was soaked, Clint Lehman hustled to build a camper trailer meant for someone else’s vacation. He could not have been happier.

“It’s great to be back,” said Mr. Lehman, a stocky 29-year-old who had been laid off for eight months last year. Called back to work by a surge in demand in the recreation vehicle industry, he is earning $30 an hour for Jayco, one of the largest manufacturers in Elkhart County.

People are returning to work at some of the best manufacturing wages in the region, but what is just as crucial, the humming production lines indicate an increased demand for parts suppliers and affiliated businesses in the Chicago area. Unemployment in the county has dropped to 13.7 percent from a high of about 20 percent in March 2009.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Elkhart, the nation’s center of recreation vehicle production, became a symbol — “the poster child of the recession,” as a wry local catchphrase has it. In February 2009 President Barack Obama used the city as a rallying stage, a backdrop to help him promote his stimulus plan.

Residents of Elkhart County, about 90 miles east of Chicago, now hope that improvement here augers a broader recovery.

“The recreation vehicle industry is a leading economic indicator for the nation,” said Sid Johnson, the director of marketing for Jayco. “We lead the country into recessions, and we lead the country out of recessions.”

Across the street from the Jayco plant in nearby Middlebury, a new hotel is being built, a sign that some people here take as a wager that good times are coming back to this stretch of the Midwest factory belt.

While the upturn might signal growing consumer confidence, recreation vehicle industry leaders acknowledge that much of the boost in production has been driven by the need to replace inventory that dealers were hesitant to restock during the financial crisis.

Officials in the region are unsure whether the new rigs being produced and shipped to dealer lots will move quickly enough to encourage factories like Jayco to hire even more workers. “We’re at a critical juncture,” said Mike Yoder, a county commissioner in Elkhart County, which has a population of about 200,000. “Everything depends on whether these actually sell.”

Dealers say there is cause for optimism. At Camping World in Lincolnshire, just north of Chicago, the headquarters of the nation’s largest chain of recreation vehicles, sales have improved significantly for some models.

Marcus Lemonis, the chairman of Camping World, which owns 80 stores, said sales have increased 40 percent this year for the camping trailers that are towed behind a truck or car, models that cost an average of about $28,000. He said sales were flat for luxury motor homes, the gleaming highway palaces that can cost $500,000 or more.

“The consumer has come back,” Mr. Lemonis said, “but in a more conservative way.’’

The ripples of the rebound are reaching Chicago.

Kevin McNamara, an economist at Purdue University, said increasing purchases of high-ticket luxury items “suggests the economy is picking up.” While production of recreation vehicles is centered in Indiana, he said that “some of the suppliers of the raw materials for those RVs are going to be coming out of the Chicago market.”

Zip Dee, an Elk Grove Village manufacturer of expensive powered awnings for recreation vehicles, has ramped up production as demand has increased from plants in Elkhart County and elsewhere, according to Jim Webb, the company president.

“It’s getting stronger every month,” said Mr. Webb, noting that workers who had been cut to three days a week a year ago were now working four or five days a week. “I’m optimistic, but I’m not jumping on any bandwagon. It’s going to be a slow recovery.”

In Elkhart, people say they are grateful for an increase in any kind of buyer.

About one-quarter of the jobs in the county are tied to the recreation vehicle industry, said Dorinda Heiden-Goss, the county’s president of economic development. “We’re seeing positive signs,” she said. “We’re just praying that it’s sustained.”

Nationwide, production in the industry is about 93 percent higher than a year ago, said Kevin Broom, a spokesman for the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association.

Conditions in the industry had become disastrous. Nearly half of the 400,000 workers in the recreational vehicle industry in the United States lost jobs during the recession, according to Mr. Broom.

Paul Thomas, an 87-year-old businessman and the town historian in Elkhart, noted that two years ago many people in the county had already given up and moved away. United States Census Bureau figures show that Elkhart County saw a net out-migration of 2,366 people between 2008 and 2009, although a rising birth rate made up for the exodus and population figures remained relatively stable.

Plenty of houses stand empty, and many others are being foreclosed or sold at fire-sale prices.

On Main Street in Elkhart, the talk over coffee in the Old Style Deli is more upbeat these days.

“It feels like things are turning around,” said Allen Knight, 59. “There for awhile, it seemed like another company was closing its doors every day. People wondered, ‘How long can this go on?’ It doesn’t feel so depressing now.”

But no one believes Elkhart will see a return to the high-flying days of the 1970s, when it seemed like any entrepreneur with a dream and some gumption, and a few good workers, could go into the recreation vehicle business and become a millionaire.

The recreation vehicle industry collapsed in 2008 when credit markets tightened significantly. Even when credit eased, banks looked skeptically at discretionary purchases of such big-ticket items as recreation vehicles.

The problems with the economy, along with a period when gas prices topped $4 a gallon at the peak, left many dealers in ruins. Some 180 recreation vehicle stores around the country closed last year, according to Phil Ingrassia, a spokesman for the Recreation Vehicle Dealers Association.

For now, comparatively low gas prices of less than $3 a gallon are helping the industry. Winnebago Industries, an Iowa-based maker of motor homes, earlier this month posted its first quarterly profit in more than a year.

Jayco, which is privately held, expects shipments to dealers to increase by about 70 percent in 2010 compared to a year ago, according to Mr. Johnson.

Despite signs of an improving market, manufacturers said they are being conservative, protecting themselves against getting stuck with a glut of inventory.

Mr. Yoder, the county commissioner, said many in the industry had been so badly hurt that they were reluctant to make brave predictions about success.

“When times are good, nobody ever thinks they’ll go bad again,” he said. “And when times are bad, nobody ever thinks they will ever get good again. We’re going through some of that psychology right now.”

The same kind of caution is evident among workers on the assembly line. Mr. Lehman does not pretend to be an economic expert, but he knows that $30-an-hour jobs are coveted. He knows about layoffs and financial pressure. He has a young family to support.

His shift starts at 5 a.m. He shows up early to pull on his tool belt, ready to sweat and grateful for the chance.

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