Chicago Scandal Mill

Chicago's newspapers last week were reveling in the juiciest of exposes. Broken originally by the Sun-Times and then bannered by its competitors as well, the scandal starred Alderman Thomas E. Keane, chairman of the city council's powerful finance committee and friend of Mayor Richard J. Daley. The story had all the ingredients of classic muckraking: secret land trusts, gigantic tax breaks and windfall profits from sales of choice public land. As the inquiries broadened, other city leaders were implicated. The series -five months in the making -was an example of investigative journalism at its most effective, but the Sun-Times could take only part of the credit. As in many recent journalistic attacks on mismanagement or unethical practice in Chicago, the Keane story was the result of an informal alliance between newsmen and a civic group with the deceptively benign name of the Better Government Association.

Sharing. The BGA, with a staff of ten trained lawyers and investigators, routinely lends its expertise to newspapers and television stations in the Chicago area. BGA men and reporters share the legwork and then consult on the finished story -though the journalists retain editorial control. When the Sun-Times editors decided to go after Keane, they called upon BGA immediately. "We go to them on difficult situations," says Sun-Times Editor James Hoge, "where lots of sustained and expert work is needed."

BGA Executive Director J. Terrence Brunner, 36, a former federal and local prosecutor, then assigned his investigators to join Sun-Times reporters in digging into the complex financial puzzles posed by Keane's maneuvers. "Investigative reporting now," says Brunner, "has become a lawyers' and accountants' game." Finally the results of the investigations were rounded into story form by Co-Authors Thomas Moore and Edward Pound. Once the Sun-Times series began running, BGA called a press conference for Chicago's other three dailies as well as for radio and television reporters and confirmed the details of the Sun-Times story. This allowed the rivals to move in without being embarrassed by having to lift their facts right from the Sun-Times.

The unusual collaboration was firmly joined in 1968 when Chicago Tribune Reporter George Bliss became a member of the BGA staff. He later returned to the Tribune, but Brunner, who arrived in 1971, has maintained and strengthened the alliance. As a result, the BGA, rather somnolent for most of its 50 years, now has influence out of all proportion to its membership (1,400) and its annual budget ($200,000). Brunner himself is something of a crusader. He is fond of stopping in midsentence, pounding his desk and exclaiming: "Damn it, people shouldn't take bribes!" Not the least of BGA'S accomplishments has been to increase press interest in investigations.

A Chicago Tribune-EGA series on corrupt and inadequate ambulance service won a Pulitzer Prize. Another Tribune effort prodded the county government into efficiency measures that saved $1,650,000. More than 100 shoddy nursing homes went out of business after the BGA, Sun-Times and WLS-TV exposed mistreatment of patients. The association helped the Pioneer Press report on drug traffic in a suburban community. With the Lerner papers, the BGA documented a civil service scandal in which employees, paid with federal funds, were doubling as precinct captains.

Though the BGA is a common source for almost all Chicago's investigative reporters, the always fierce inter-paper rivalry is as powerful as ever. The association remains strictly neutral in the competition; Brunner and his aides are careful never to tell the Tribune, for instance, what the Sun-Times is up to. Says he: "We're a free pool of investigative reporters who don't write stories and don't get bylines." They do get results. Although Mayor Daley once accused the BGA of "looking through keyholes and over transoms and everything else," he rarely quarrels with its specific findings. In the current brouhaha, Alderman Keane called his first press conference in 18 years to deny any wrongdoing. But Daley called his own press conference -to announce cancellation of one of the franchise deals involving Keane that the Sun-Times had written about.

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