Wolf point ashe cayne, p.13
Wolf Point (Ashe Cayne), page 13
“He had a lot of friends,” I said.
“But many of those friends were also his enemies.”
“Friendship is constant in all things, save in the office and affairs of love.”
The man smiled. “One of my favorite Shakespeare plays, Much Ado About Nothing. But Walter was a smart man and very tough. He let them think that he had been lulled by their friendship, but he knew they were enemies behind his back.”
“Care to share any names?”
“Money really is the engine of corruption,” he said, looking at the painting.
“Which is why you wanted to meet me here. To drive home the point.”
“And sometimes one can feel the loneliest in the biggest of cities.”
“Which is what Hopper signals to us in Nighthawks on the other side of the wall.”
“Do you know how the city’s Office of Inspector General works?” the man asked.
“Rudimentary understanding. They investigate misconduct and illegal behavior by city employees.”
“That’s part of their mission. They also address inefficiency and waste within the programs and operations of city government.”
“Then they must never sleep. Our city government is one big twisted heap of inefficiency.”
The man nodded. “OIG is a very powerful office. They have the authority to conduct both criminal and administrative investigations. They can even issue their own subpoenas in furtherance of such investigations. The office, by charter, is supposed to be independent and nonpartisan.”
“Independent and nonpartisan in Chicago?” I said. “Good luck with that.”
“Walter was being investigated by OIG.”
“So I’ve gathered.”
“But the investigation should’ve never happened. Or at least not through OIG.”
“Why not? The personal credit charges on the city card were small, but technically they could be considered misconduct.”
“Ah, but CPS is such a massive and complex system, it has its own inspector general separate from the city’s. He’s specifically charged with investigating all acts of malfeasance anyone in the school system is alleged to have committed. Remember the Barbara Henson case?”
Barbara Henson was the former CEO of the Chicago Public Schools. She had been a major ally in Bailey’s never-ending feud with Shawna Simpson, the president of the teachers union. Henson had steered a combined $23 million of contracts to close business associates and her former employer, who was in the business of training educators, all for a few hundred thousand dollars in kickbacks. She’d finally resigned when the pressure and scrutiny became insurmountable and the reporters started putting the Fifth Floor in their crosshairs. Henson pleaded guilty and received a four-and-a-half-year federal prison sentence. The city moved on, and her case became just another footnote in Chicago’s long history of rampant corruption.
“Henson was a convicted felon,” I said. “I wouldn’t compare a few hundred dollars in Griffin’s case to the twenty million plus she shoveled out.”
“Agreed. My point is that the OIG for CPS handled the initial Henson investigation; then, when it got really good, the Feds stepped in and finished the job.”
“What’s your point?”
“Paul Shulman is the OIG for CPS. Tough as nails and about as honest as they come. If Paul found a dollar on the bathroom floor, he’d turn it in to lost and found. He’s always kept an objective distance from the Fifth Floor. He rarely speaks with Bailey, and when he does, he either takes notes of the conversation or makes sure there’s someone else in the room with him. Paul’s office should’ve been the one handling the investigation into Walter’s credit card charges. Instead, Pete Dent, the city’s OIG, handled the case.”
“Who made the decision that Dent would handle it?”
“I don’t know, but I know it came from high up.”
“Why would someone want Dent to handle it when Shulman could be trusted to do everything by the book?”
“That’s exactly why they didn’t want Shulman to handle it. He would’ve done his investigation, filed a report, and disposed of the case. That’s obviously not the outcome someone wanted. Everyone knew Walter wasn’t trying to take the city for a few hundred dollars, but Dent mysteriously gets the case and is hell-bent on squeezing Walter. There was all kinds of talk about looking into his personal finances and his other businesses and prior deals with the city. Dent was giving Walter a really hard time.”
“Why would Bailey let them do this to one of his closest confidants? He could’ve had the plug pulled anytime he wanted.”
“Friendship is constant in all things, save in the office and affairs of love.”
“Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues.”
“You’re as well read as they say you are. Walter had been an insider for a long time. There was no city department where he didn’t have friends or a connection. From Streets and Sanitation to the Fifth Floor, he knew everyone from the security guards to the men in the corner office. But sometimes you can know too much, and that makes you a liability, because you know where all the skeletons are hidden, the deals that were made behind closed doors. Walter was loyal, but he also wasn’t anyone’s fool. He wanted to get his share just like everyone else.”
I considered his words before saying, “How did you know I was working on this case?”
“Everyone knows.”
“Who’s everyone?”
“The people that matter over on LaSalle. All of Walter’s friends around the city. Everyone is watching you.”
“That sounds scary.”
“It is. I wouldn’t have the courage to take on a case like this.”
“But you had the courage to reach out to me.”
“I wouldn’t call it courage,” he said, gazing back up at the painting. “It’s about fatigue. I should’ve spoken up a long time ago. When you see so much bad shit for so long, you just reach a point where you have to do something. You’re the one who can finally bring Walter some justice. He didn’t deserve to die that way.”
“You think he was killed.”
The man smiled slightly. “Think? I know.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“Because if Walter had problems, he was not one to run away from them. I also know that a lot of people weren’t sad he was out of the picture.”
“Any names you want to share?”
“Start with Pete Dent. His investigation was motivated by more than a few hundred dollars on a credit card. Then look at a company called Sunrise Holdings.”
“What can you tell me about Sunrise?”
“Not a lot, other than they were connected to seventy million in CPS contracts last year. You have to follow the money.”
The man got up and casually walked out of the gallery. It wasn’t until he was gone that I realized I didn’t even know his name.
25
MIKEY LESTEAU HAD BEEN AT&T’s chief state lobbyist for more than thirty years. When he wasn’t at the capitol in Springfield twisting the arms of legislators, he was at some boozy golf tournament presenting a sizable company check to the pet project of the very legislators he was asking to pass favorable legislation. He and my father had been friends for as long as I could remember. When I called, he was walking up to the first green on Cog Hill’s championship course Dubsdread.
“I need a favor, Mikey.”
“Can it wait? My third shot just landed in a green-side bunker. Everybody else made it to the green.”
“I’m going to text you a phone number and the first name of the person who had that number. I need the person’s last name.”
“Easy enough. This got anything to do with Walt? Wendell told me you were working on something for his family.”
“Yes and yes.”
“Walt was an old friend of mine,” he said. “We did a lot of business together through the years. We all know he didn’t shoot himself. He was a good man.”
“And a helluva golfer from what I hear.”
“His second office.”
“Good luck on that bunker shot,” I said.
“I’m gonna need it. My sand game has been in the toilet these days. I’ll have something for you by this afternoon.”
While I waited for news about Bryce, I went to work on my computer, looking to find anything I could on the company my anonymous informant had mentioned. My initial search for Sunrise Holdings turned up nothing, no website linked to the company, nor any press mentions. I spent over an hour looking at databases that held corporate information. How could a company that held $70 million in city contracts not be mentioned somewhere? I then remembered a database my younger cousin from New York had introduced me to last year. Offshore Leaks was a database, compiled by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, that tracked corporate offshore accounts. I typed in the company name and immediately got a hit.
Sunrise Holdings had one listed officer, the Bearer, and it was connected to one intermediary, a company called Roseland Monaco SAM. It had been incorporated in 2010 and registered in Panama. The data on the company had been collected from the Panama Papers, a famous leak of eleven and a half million files from the database of the world’s fourth-biggest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca. I clicked on Roseland Monaco SAM, and that took me to another page, which showed a diagram that looked like a spider’s web. Roseland Monaco SAM was at the center, and the spokes connected it to eleven other companies that it served as an intermediary. I pulled up another search to better understand what that role was. Basically, an intermediary agency was registered to do business in foreign countries and had undergone all the checks and documentation to give it the legitimate rights to conduct business activities. That meant Sunrise Holdings didn’t have to bother with any paperwork with foreign governments, could pay fewer taxes, and could be largely hidden from the tax authorities of its native country. Roseland Monaco made deals on behalf of Sunrise and its clients, collected money, paid the requisite taxes, took a fee for its service, and deposited the rest of the money in Sunrise’s bank account.
I scrolled back to the first page of the search and clicked the hyperlink to the Bearer. It wasn’t an individual but a company that had one unlisted address in Ukraine. The company was connected to twenty-three other entities and thirty-seven officers. For the next couple of hours, I kept following the links and the intermediaries and all the connections. They had all kinds of names that didn’t give any indication about the nature of their business. Names like Babylonshia, GEM, Sheephead, and many more, but I couldn’t detect any pattern. Tracking them was like playing a shell game with fifty coconut halves and ten balls and five guys behind the table moving everything at once. It was dizzying just trying to keep up.
The names of the officers were hidden, but I wrote down the names of the twenty-three entities in alphabetical order. I then turned to a Google search and started with the first company. A few results came back, but nothing caught my eye. It wasn’t until I searched for Belvedere Technologies that I got a hit. Belvedere was a Frankfort, Illinois–based company that managed and developed creative IT solutions. It had a fancy website with a lot of tech jargon describing what they did but no mention of the ownership or officers by name. It did, however, list their clients, and sitting at the top was CPS. The dots connected. Belvedere had the contract with CPS, but Sunrise Holdings, through a complicated structure that most probably didn’t know, actually owned Belvedere. The whistleblower hadn’t told me to look at Belvedere. He wanted me to look at Sunrise. He knew the connection. What was he really trying to tell me?
THE CHICAGO TEACHERS UNION occupied an enormous brick building prominently situated in an industrial area in the Near West Side. Shawna Simpson helmed the more than twenty-five thousand union members representing teachers, paraprofessionals, and clinicians working within CPS. The fiery Simpson, a former high school physics teacher, had become a sort of national union celebrity when she’d pulled her teachers out of classrooms for a week last year to demand a contract that increased teacher compensation, reduced classroom size, and eliminated merit pay based on teacher evaluations.
Simpson sat behind an enormous glass desk in a corner office that out of one window had views of the United Center, where the Chicago Bulls and Blackhawks played, and out of another row of windows the formidable Chicago skyline. She got up from behind her desk and met me as I made my way into the office. She was much taller than she appeared on television. Her large frame moved easily underneath a flowing powder-blue silk pantsuit. She ushered me to a long glass conference table underneath the east window.
“If you don’t look like a young Dr. Cayne,” she said, shaking her head. “I mean a carbon copy of what he looked like when he was at Columbia Med and I was at Teachers College.”
“Hopefully a more handsome version,” I said.
“And got his sense of humor too.” She laughed. “I remember your mother bringing you to the Delta Sigma Theta meetings in diapers, and just look at you now.”
I smiled. “Pretty spiffy offices,” I said, getting comfortable in a soft leather swivel chair that felt like I was sitting on cotton.
“You say that with surprise,” she said. “As if teachers and leadership should live by some vow of poverty.”
“No offense intended,” I said, raising my hands. “Just admiring the view.”
“It’s even nicer at night when darkness falls and you can see the lights of all the buildings. If it’s not too cloudy, you can see the planes flying across the lake.”
“And you have an almost direct sight line to city hall.”
“I have a sight on city hall no matter where I am,” she said, turning down her lips. “We’re in a fight for our lives and the students we serve.”
“Another walkout on the way?” They had called a strike just last year over a better contract. It was the first time a strike had been called in twenty-five years. This one lasted for seven long, contentious days.
“If Bailey and Milton continue to play their bullshit games, absolutely we’re gonna walk out. We don’t have a choice. Too much at stake.”
Andrew Milton was the newly appointed CEO of CPS. The CEO, just like a corporate CEO, had the unilateral ability to make all the decisions—unlike in the old structure that left decisions to be shared between a superintendent and the local school boards. Like everything else in Chicago, the creation of the CEO position had been politically charged, and the union viewed it as yet another attempt to curb their power.
“How did Walter Griffin factor into all of this?” I asked.
Simpson shook her head. “We would’ve had a contract by now had Walter not died,” she said. “His death was a great personal loss to me and the CPS family. He was Bailey’s man, but only to a point. He knew Bailey and Milton were being unreasonable. He was doing his best to move them closer to the middle so we could get some kind of deal done without having to strike. They were being hard-asses and wouldn’t budge.”
“But Bailey put him on the board and made him chairman,” I said. “He was still on Bailey’s team.”
“He was, but Bailey didn’t own him like he does the other board members. Walter obviously had an allegiance to Bailey. They had been friends for over forty years, and Bailey was the one who appointed him. But that didn’t stop Walter from standing up for what he believed in.”
“Was there tension between Griffin and Bailey?”
“When it comes to that egocentric, unethical little dictator sitting on the Fifth Floor, there’s always tension whenever someone dares to think for themselves and not as they’re told.”
“It’s clear he’s not your favorite person.”
“The only way he knows how to govern is through intimidation and vindictiveness. He’s a spoiled little man whose father and his cronies handed him the mayor’s office. He doesn’t understand the concept of compromise. It’s either his way or no way. Well, those days are over, at least when it comes to what we’re willing to accept as professional educators. We’re not gonna sit back and let a man who has not an ounce of educational experience in his body tell us how to teach and what’s best for the almost four hundred thousand students we serve.”
“Did Griffin feel the same way?”
“Behind closed doors, he absolutely did. Walter was a product of CPS. His mother was an elementary school teacher over in Homan Square not too far from here. He knew the challenges we face as educators trying to do what’s right for the children under exceedingly difficult circumstances. He was not afraid to fight.”
“Who else was he fighting besides Bailey?”
“Andrew Milton, the CEO.”
“But wasn’t Griffin the chairman of the board that elected Milton to that position?”
“He was, but you have to take a closer look at the vote. Of the seven board members, six of them voted in favor of Milton. One board member abstained from the voting.”
“Let me take a guess.”
“Exactly. Walter never thought Milton should get the job. He didn’t say as much publicly on account of it was Bailey’s pick, but we all knew where Walter stood. He knew Milton would ultimately be voted in by the rest of Bailey’s lieutenants, but he wanted the record to show he was not part of that decision.”
“Did Griffin and Milton get along?”
“Publicly? They were a united front. Privately? They hated each other.”
“Why was Griffin never on board with Milton?”
“The same reason the rest of us who really care about the issues weren’t on board. Milton has no business running the country’s third-largest school district. He helped run a midsize insurance company in Philly. He grew up somewhere in Pennsylvania and had never set foot inside a CPS school before he was appointed. He couldn’t tell you the difference between a selective enrollment school and a charter school. Then all of a sudden we’re supposed to accept this complete outsider with no previous experience in education coming in telling us what to do when we’ve been in the struggle for years trying to get things back on track. Hell to the no.”
“In all fairness, I’ve lived here my entire life, except for a college stint in Boston, and I can’t tell the difference between those schools either.”
