As his story ends, as he leaves it, Chicago is still corrupt. City Hall gleaming in a blue pin-striped suit, sharp pocket square, like a Kelly-green Cadillac with a white vinyl top.īurke came up in a Chicago that was politically corrupt and politically brutal, in the city of tribes, fighting it out with the other tribes, the Irish and the Italians, the blacks and the Poles, and the Appalachians, Lithuanians, Greeks and many other tribes and now Latinos. And so, you see him there in that photograph, Burke standing alone, standing out, Mr. Out on 52nd and Peoria Streets, whether you had lace curtains on your windows in the two-flat, whether your grandma sipped her whiskey in the pantry, or drank her beer from a bottle on the front porch for all to see, we were all brutalized. I suppose the smell was of the unspoken fear of the livestock that hung all about us, the wet wool and hides that permeated everything, from the gray painted stoops in the backs of the two-flats, the way the smell of ash and molten steel hung in the air over South Chicago. Those who remember the slaughterhouses remember the smell. I was born in his neighborhood, in Visitation Parish on the South Side, near the Union Stockyards, the smell of tens of thousands livestock to be slaughtered hanging in the air. As his federal corruption trial gets underway this week in downtown Chicago, consider the photograph of the Chicago Democrat who is the personification of The Chicago Way ™:

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