It took less than a day for a federal jury to convict former Chicago Streets and Sanitation Commissioner Al Sanchez Wednesday of rigging city hiring to favor members of the once-vaunted Hispanic Democratic Organization.
Sanchez was initially convicted last year but appealed and won a new trial. The proceedings had a familiar ring: Many of the same witnesses were questioned again by prosecutors, Sanchez took the stand in his own defense for the second time, and the outcome was the same for the former high-ranking aide and political ally of Mayor Richard M. Daley.
After the verdict was announced, Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie Ruder said job applicants without political connections were cheated out of a fair chance at city employment to benefit campaign workers for the now-defunct, pro-Daley Hispanic Democratic Organization, or HDO. Sanchez commanded a major branch of the city-wide political group on his native Southeast Side, building it into one of the biggest cogs in the mayor’s political organization.
“There was a fair process in place but through the fraud that Mr. Sanchez participated in, people were not given equal opportunities to compete for those positions,” Ruder said.
Sanchez’s conviction follows similar federal successes in hiring fraud cases against other top Daley aides, including former mayoral patronage chief Robert Sorich. But Sorich and others went to prison rather than cooperate with investigators, and Sanchez has continued to insist on his innocence.
The mayor was interviewed by federal authorities in the hiring probe in 2005. Testimony in the corruption trials of Daley aides had suggested the involvement in politically motivated city hiring of even more prominent mayoral aides than Sanchez, including Timothy Degnan and longtime HDO chairman Victor Reyes. But they were never charged.
After the Sanchez ruling, prosecutors all but conceded that their investigation of illegal hiring has ended.
Noting that the hiring probe was an outgrowth of the Hired Truck bribery scandal, Assistant U.S. Attorney Manish Shah said, “It is fair to say this represents the conclusion of the Hired Truck investigation. We’re not going to comment on what else we are or are not investigating.”
The second Sanchez trial was overshadowed by another jury trial in the same federal courthouse – the corruption case of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Sanchez’s defense lawyer, Thomas Breen, said the climate created in part by that trial likely contributed to the guilty verdict for Sanchez.
“He knows that politics and politicians have bad reputations these days,” Breen said.
Sanchez had defended himself by saying he did a good job as head of City Hall’s largest department from 1999 to 2005 and merely wanted to increase the political voice of the Latino community in Chicago. His hiring decisions, he said, were based on finding the best employees and were not influenced by political considerations.
But a key government witness against him, city truck driver Denise Alcantar, said she was hired by the city after filling out a job application at an HDO meeting. Alcantar was put behind the wheel of a city garbage truck despite lacking relevant work experience. She struck and seriously injured a co-worker while trying to drive a truck out of an alley.