Former Streets and Sanitation commissioner Al Sanchez is scheduled to go on trial again this morning on federal corruption charges.
Once a high-ranking member of the Hispanic Democratic Organization, Sanchez was convicted last year of rigging the city hiring process to favor HDO campaign workers, but a new trial was ordered because prosecutors failed to disclose the criminal history of a key witness against Sanchez.
Also going on trial for the second time will be Sanchez aide Aaron Delvalle, who was convicted in March 2007 of lying to federal investigators about illegal patronage hiring in Mayor Richard M. Daley‘s administration.
As the head of the largest City Hall department from 1999 to 2005, Sanchez is the highest-ranking former Daley aide ensnared in the federal probe of city hiring. In 2006, a federal grand jury convicted longtime mayoral patronage chief Robert Sorich and two other city officials of hiring fraud to favor pro-Daley campaign workers.
In winning these convictions, prosecutors have used a federal law that makes it illegal to deprive taxpayers of “honest services.” But a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last month sharply curtailed the honest services statute as too vague, prompting Sanchez’s lawyers to seek to have the entire case against him thrown out, court records show.
The judge in Sanchez’s case, Robert Gettleman, ruled that the case can proceed to trial. As they have done in their ongoing case against former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, prosecutors amended their indictment of Sanchez to include only allegations that he violated other criminal laws, not merely the honest services statute.
HDO was the largest component of the mayor’s political machine, and Sanchez led the group’s operations in his native Southeast Side. According to the indictment against Sanchez, HDO Southeast had as many as 500 loyalists who worked for candidates at election time and were rewarded for those efforts with city jobs or promotions.
Alderman George Cardenas (12th Ward), who was elected in 2003 with the help of HDO, said Sanchez had done a good job as a public servant.
“I hope he’s vindicated in this trial,” Cardenas said. “He was always up front about what he was about, which was empowering Hispanics.”
In his first trial, Sanchez took the witness stand in his own defense, denying that he rigged hiring. “I don’t sit in my office thinking about who to hire and who not to hire,” he told jurors. “I’m thinking about keeping the streets clean and getting the garbage picked up and killing rats.”
Sanchez also testified that he resented the notion of HDO as a patronage army, instead describing its members “as people who actually cared about the community” and wanted to empower Hispanics.
One of the witnesses in the first trial was a city truck driver and HDO member named Denise Alcantar, who was hired despite not having any relevant work experience. Alcantar was behind the wheel of a garbage truck when she pinned a co-worker against a telephone pole with the truck, severely injuring the laborer.
Alcantar testified in the first trial against Sanchez that she got her job after doing campaign work for HDO and filling out a city job application at a political meeting in a bar.
Prosecutors have subpoenaed Alcantar and other city employees who were witnesses in the first trial to appear again in federal court, according to records obtained by the Chicago News Cooperative.