REDFLEX’S EXCELLENT CHICAGO ADVENTURE: THE STORY THAT KEEPS ON GIVING

3/2/13

This morning’s (i.e., Saturday, 3/2/13’s, page 1) Chicago Tribune reports that Redflex Traffic Systems, Inc., the Arizona based U.S. arm of Australia’s Redflex Holdings, has fired three more executives in the fallout from the scandal involving Redflex’s exclusive contract to provide red light cameras in the City of Chicago.   (See my now seminal 2/8/13 post  REDFLEX TRAFFIC SYSTEMS:   CHICAGO POLITICS CLAIMS A “VICTIM” ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD and the appended thereto 10/18/12 post REDFLEX TRAFFIC SYSTEMS AND CHICAGO POLITICS:   TRUTH NEARLY AS INTRIGUING AS FICTION for early and extensive reporting on the shenanigans surrounding the Redflex deal.)   Redflex Traffic’s president and CEO Karen Finley, general counsel Andrejs Bunkse, and CFO Sean Nolen have now been given the boot.   They join former Redflex Holdings Chairman Max Findlay and board member Ian Davis in having been shown the door.

This story, on which I reported and opined much earlier in its germination (Again, see the above posts.), is far from over, one suspects.   This latest bout of scapegoating, er, sorry, firings, is not about to end the story but does bring three thoughts from yours truly.

--Interestingly, this morning’s Tribune describes Marty O’Malley, 13^th Ward and St. Bede Parish denizen, heavy contributor to Speaker Mike Madigan’s 13^th Ward Regular Democratic Organization, and “consultant” to whom Redflex paid $570,000 in connection with the Chicago red light camera contract, as “a longtime friend” of John Bills, the city purchasing manager in charge of the contract, 13^th Ward and St. Bede Parish denizen, and all-around heavy in the Speaker Mike Madigan’s 13^th Ward Regular Democratic Organization.

In prior stories on this scandal, Mr. O’Malley denied having known Mr. Bills.  As I said in the aforementioned 10/18/12 post:

Mr. O’Malley denies having known Mr. Bills, or Mr. Madigan, before he and Mr. Bills started working together on the camera project.   Mr. O’Malley’s not having known Mr. Bills is plausible, given their ages; Mr. O’Malley is 72, Mr. Bills is 51.   But, for those of you unfamiliar with the mores of the southwest side, one’s parish is a big thing; it often is the center of many of one’s activities, spiritual and otherwise.

I don’t know whether Messrs. O’Malley and Bills have confirmed that they are “longtime friend(s),” but it’s interesting how the story changes when it has such a hard time holding up.

--Redflex is falling all over itself trumpeting its born again approach to ethics and integrity, sort of the political/corporate equivalent of what I think is called something like the “revirgining movement,” in which teenagers or young adults who have lost their sexual virtue declare themselves to be virgins again and promise not to lose that status until they are married.   One suspects the latter has a greater chance of success than the former.

Redflex has declared, according to the Tribune,

“This day, and each day going forward, we intend to be a constructive force in our industry, promoting high ethical standards and serving the public interest.”

Redflex has also introduced reforms such as requiring anti-bribery and anti-corruption training of employees and hiring a new bureaucrat and calling him or her the “director of compliance.”  One can almost hear the late, great Hank Williams belting out “I Saw the Light,” but I digress.

As I tell my students, ethics and integrity are much like another of life’s more salient activities; those who talk about it the most do it the least.   I advise them that when someone begins a presentation telling you how ethical he is, or a corporation spends an excessive number of pages in its annual report telling you how much integrity it has, hang onto your wallet.

--As in most Chicago political scandals, it is the low level worker bees who are being apprehended by law enforcement or other authorities and hung out to dry by who knows what other authorities.  

One could protest that plenty of high level Chicago guys have gone down, but those are the cases we remember, and we only remember them because highly visible people went down.   They are dwarfed in number by the legions of seemingly petty cases of corruption, involving underlings of the guys that matter, that we forget because of the relatively small dollars involved (though not in the Redflex caper; half a million plus is real money, even to, say, a Chicago ward boss or mayoral assistant) or the obscurity of the characters involved.

Further, high visibility, or even holding a seemingly high office, does not necessarily equate to being one of the really important people in the politics of Chicago and/or Illinois.   Look at Governor Rod Blagojevich; he held the title of governor, but he didn’t really matter.   He was, like Frank Pentangeli in The Godfather or Tom Dempsey in The Chairman, small potatoes and very expendable.

Maybe no big guy, a guy that matters, has been touched by the Redflex hanky-panky, or at least not yet, because nobody who matters is involved.   I don’t say that disingenuously; there is a real possibility that this scandal doesn’t touch a heavy in this area’s politics because any genuine heavy in this area’s politics is too smart to get involved in, or at least to get criminally caught getting involved in, a scandal like this.  

Further, as I wrote at the beginning of this post and at the beginning of this scandal, the saga of Redflex and Chicago is not over yet.

See my two books, The Chairman, A Novel of Big City Politics and The Chairman’s Challenge, A Continuing Novel of Big City Politics, for further illumination on how things work in Chicago and Illinois politics.