2011年5月17日星期二

The Chicago Way: Figure in 2006 City Hall Patronage Case Has a New Career Lobbying City Hall

在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中,找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件,或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中,找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件,或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。

His new opportunity turns out to involve lobbying the mayor’s office, according to city records. Mr. Kozicki’s employer installs steel covers over the windows of abandoned city properties like police stations and firehouses.

“If, in fact, Kozicki is working for city funds and lobbying people in the mayor’s office, the current administration has no interest in punishing people for illegal hiring,” Noelle Brennan, the city’s court-appointed hiring monitor, said last week. “It suggests instead that such people are rewarded.”

The state’s last two governors have faced corruption charges in cases based largely on the testimony of former top aides. Yet, despite federal prosecutors’ threats to aim for bigger targets at City Hall, their investigation of illegal patronage hiring never reached into the highest echelons of the mayor’s office.

Whenever the smaller fish caught in the federal net would refuse to incriminate their superiors, members of the city’s political class shrugged and suggested that the “stand-up guys” would eventually be taken care of.

But Mr. Kozicki said Friday that his story was not a case of a political loyalist being rewarded for taking the fall for Team Daley.

“It’s a great product,” he said of his company’s method for securing vacant properties. “You can pick on me all you want, but the technology is second to none.”

Mr. Kozicki agreed to testify under a grant of immunity in the 2006 federal corruption trial of Mr. Daley’s patronage chief, Robert Sorich. But Mr. Kozicki surprised prosecutors when he testified that his old boss in the buildings department — rather than the mayor’s aide who was on trial — had pushed to rig the hiring of the young building inspector.

The prosecutors treated Mr. Kozicki as a hostile witness, saying his words on the witness stand deviated from an earlier sworn statement to the authorities. Those authorities suggested he had changed his story because of his deep ties to Mr. Daley’s 11th Ward Democratic power base, of which Mr. Sorich also was a member. Mr. Kozicki was an operative for the ward organization, and he drove the mayor’s brother, Cook County Commissioner John Daley, to and from their Bridgeport neighborhood.

Soon after the trial, the mayor’s office rejected the inspector general’s recommendation that Mr. Kozicki be fired for his role in the hiring of the 19-year-old son of a union official. Still, Mr. Kozicki stepped down in March 2008.

He then registered as the City Hall lobbyist for Vacant Property Security, city records show. The firm covers up abandoned buildings for the city’s property management contractors.

Mr. Kozicki said his work for the city since leaving the Daley administration has owed nothing to clout and everything to the value of the company’s product, as well as his experience as a “good public servant” before the scandal.

“I was not charged with any wrongdoing,” Mr. Kozicki said. “I worked hard. I was the mayor’s top deputy for vacant buildings for 10 years. I’m not some hack who didn’t know anything.”


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