Perhaps the weakest federal criminal charge against
former Chicago Ald. Ed Burke was about his plot to extort the Chicago Field
Museum because a friend’s daughter never heard back about an internship after
Burke sent over her resume.
US District Court Judge Virginia Kendall seemed
“unimpressed” by federal prosecutors’ reasoning in mid-December after Burke’s
legal team moved to dismiss the charge ahead of closing arguments, according to
Chicago Tribune reporter Jason Meisner.
Judge Kendall ultimately decided not to dismiss the
charge, but said, “It certainly is an extremely odd attempted extortion count.
I’m going to allow it to go to the jury, but I’m taking it under advisement,”
Meisner reported at the time.
Burke’s lawyers had argued that to be convicted of
extortion, the government must prove that the defendant knowingly took a
substantial step toward extortion with the intent to commit extortion.
Burke had already hired his old friend’s daughter by the
time of his conversations with the folks at the Field Museum, his attorneys
pointed out. “In fact, he specifically repudiated the Field Museum’s overtures”
about working something out, they maintained.
Burke did snap at a governmental relations staffer who’d
called to see if he was opposed to the Field Museum’s admission price increase
proposal because Burke had earlier come out hard against another museum’s entry
fee request with the Chicago Park District. Burke said he was angry that the
museum had dropped the ball on the internship application and asked, “So now,
you’re going to make a request of me?”
“I’m sure I know what you want to do,” Burke said.
“Because if the chairman of the Committee on Finance [Burke] calls the
president of the park board, your proposal is going to go nowhere.”
The employee testified that she perceived that as a
“threat.”
But Burke didn’t try to stop the park district from
ultimately approving the fee hike, and while the museum offered to find another
spot for the young woman, she never acted on that. And Burke’s lawyers claimed
that the governmental relations person wasn’t a “decision maker” at the museum,
pointed out that Burke had no direct control over the park district and that
the museum’s CEO testified he didn’t believe he’d been shaken down.
“The requirement of proving a substantial step serves to
distinguish people who pose real threats from those who are all hot air,”
Burke’s lawyers quoted from an appellate court case, U.S. v. Gladish. Judge
Richard Posner continued in that 2008 opinion: “You are not punished just for
saying that you want or even intend to kill someone, because most such talk
doesn’t lead to action. You have to do something that makes it reasonably clear
that had you not been interrupted or made a mistake … you would have
completed the crime.”
To be abundantly clear, this is in no way a defense of Burke.
He bullied people for decades and, hey, what goes around comes around. And he
was not only convicted on the Field Museum charges, but on a whole lot of
other, more concrete and straightforward charges – which might possibly have
helped buttress the case that Burke did indeed make a “real threat” against the
museum.
Instead, this is a warning to everyone else in the
political business.
The federal government has now convicted a former elected
government official for making an oblique threat that he never followed through
on (the museum’s fee hike was approved soon after) over his personal
embarrassment that an internship application of the daughter of an old and dear
friend that he’d forwarded had been lost in a bureaucratic shuffle.
I’ve been around long enough to know that this sort of
thing is not a rare event in government at just about every level.
A lawmaker, for instance, feels insulted. So, in anger,
the legislator makes a likely empty threat to retaliate on a bill, or an
appropriation, or whatever. And maybe the threat isn’t even all that empty.
Don’t do it.
This article appears in Getting back to business.
