The bribery charges that Illinois state Sen. Emil Jones III, D-Chicago, faces might not only end his political career but also mark the fall of the once-powerful 34th Ward Democratic organization — the latest Chicago political dynasty to crumble as the result of federal investigations.
Jones and his father, former Illinois Senate President Emil Jones Jr., emerged from the same Far South Side political machine that also nurtured 34th Ward Ald. Carrie Austin.
After Austin was indicted in 2021 in an unrelated corruption probe, she couldn’t keep the boundaries of the 34th Ward from being erased around Roseland and redrawn around the Loop.
The 34th Ward Regular Democratic Organization traces its power to the late Ald. Wilson Frost. Frost, who was the Chicago City Council’s president pro tempore, memorably declared himself acting mayor when Mayor Richard J. Daley died in 1976 but was rebuffed in his bid to be the city’s first Black mayor.
Frost begat Ald. Lemuel Austin Jr., whose seat was handed to his wife Carrie Austin when he died. He also hired Emil Jones Jr., the future Springfield powerhouse, as his assistant.
‘Same political family’
“We were in the same political family,” Jones Jr. said. “We were quite successful, and we were able to elect a county commissioner, we were able to elect state reps, senators — and it all came out of that organization.”
When Frost died in 2018, Carrie Austin mourned him as her “political father,” saying: “I wouldn’t have a career if it wasn’t for his wisdom and guidance. He has been the legacy we’ve tried our best to uphold.”
Jones III sponsored a Senate resolution in Frost’s honor.
Now, both Austin and the younger Jones are facing federal charges that accused them in unrelated cases of having sold their influence — in Austin’s case in exchange for items including sump pumps and kitchen cabinets, according to prosecutors, and with Jones, for $5,000 and a job for an associate.
Political dynasties fall
The 34th Ward Democratic Organization joins other Chicago political dynasties that have fallen.
Its demise is the latest fallout of a yearslong assault by federal prosecutors on old-school Chicago-style corruption. Some of their investigations can be traced to 2014, though it wasn’t until 2019 that prosecutors began filing criminal charges under U.S. Attorney John Lausch, who’d taken office in 2017.
Members of some of Chicago’s most prominent political empires have been disgraced by charges they traded power for fortunes. As prosecutors have described their evidence, others, like Austin and Jones, were caught with their hands in a cookie jar taking far less.
Ald. Edward M. Burke (14th), the longest-serving member of the Chicago City Council, and former Illinois state Rep. Michael J. Madigan, D-Chicago, who was the nation’s longest-serving state house speaker, face federal indictments that accuse them of having wielded their clout to steer business to their law firms. The conspiracy case that prosecutors have laid out against Madigan spans nearly a decade.
The investigation of Madigan pushed him to give up the speaker’s gavel more than a year before he was charged. Soon after, he gave up his seat in the General Assembly.
Burke has kept his seat. But the recent retirement of his wife, Illinois Supreme Court Justice Anne Burke, has fueled speculation about whether he will run again in 2023.
Former Ald. Patrick Daley Thompson (11th) had no choice but to resign after being convicted in February of lying to federal regulators and filing false income tax returns and then sent to prison in a case that spun off the investigation of a failed Bridgeport bank, Washington Federal Bank for Savings.
The Cullerton family dynasty, which predates the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, is the oldest to feel the sting of the array of corruption investigations. Former state Sen. Thomas Cullerton, a Villa Park Democrat who is a cousin of former state Senate President John Cullerton, pleaded guilty in March to embezzlement. He admitted taking more than $248,000 from the Teamsters union and was sentenced to a year in prison.
Clout traded for sump pumps, feds allege
And then there is Carrie Austin. Indicted in July 2021, she is accused of trading her clout to developers in exchange for bathroom tiles, sump pumps, kitchen cabinets and a dehumidifier.
A recently released but heavily redacted 106-page FBI affidavit says Austin also was offered sweets and meats — all while agents had her under surveillance.
Providing the most detailed account yet of the Austin investigation, it says someone whose name is redacted told Austin in September 2017: “What I wanted to tell you is the bakery that made your cake? … I bought the building, and they’re my tenants now … So when you need a cake or sweets, you call me. It don’t cost me nothin’ no more.”
Around the time of the grand opening of a slaughterhouse in January 2018, someone whose name again was removed from what was made public was quoted by agents as saying: “Please, I’m donating to, to a big shot [Carrie Austin]. … Please make sure that the pork chops are perfect … Give me around four loins … I want good pork chops … Baby back ribs.”
Authorities say Austin got those sump pumps after a July 5, 2017, call in which she seemed to be crying and said, “My basement’s flooded.” The next day, authorities say, she was told: “I’m gonna put brand new pumps in there, big pumps. … I’m gonna buy them today. And don’t worry about the cost. They’re expensive, but it’s on me, OK?”
To which they say Austin responded: “Yes, yes. Thank you.”
Austin’s indictment says an unnamed “Individual A” offered her two “brand new” and “expensive” sump pumps that day. A source has identified that person as Boris Nitchoff, a Lemont developer who died in 2020.
Austin and Chester Wilson, her chief of staff, who was indicted in the same bribery case, both have entered “not guilty” pleas.
Her lawyers have declined to comment.
Jones III defied Pritzker’s call to quit
Jones III also has pleaded not guilty to charges that he agreed to protect the red-light camera company SafeSpeed LLC from legislation that might hurt the company in exchange for the job and the money, according to prosecutors, who say he lied about that when questioned by the FBI.
His lawyers didn’t respond to questions. SafeSpeed hasn’t been charged with any crime and has portrayed a former partner as a rogue actor.
Jones’ father, the former Senate president, declined to answer questions about the case, saying, “We live in a society where every citizen is presumed innocent, all citizens, elected officials, everyone, so he’s presumed innocent, and that’s the way I feel.”
Jones III has resigned his committee chair and vice-chair posts in Springfield but hasn’t given up his Senate seat despite Gov. J.B. Pritzker calling on him to do so.
His Senate district includes West Pullman and Roseland — South Side neighborhoods that long were the heart of the 34th Ward — and a swath of the suburbs as far southwest as Orland Park.
A bid to be acting mayor
In 1976, the 34th Ward was led by Frost. Originally elected in 1967 in the 21st Ward and redistricted four years later to the 34th, he was by then the Chicago City Council’s president pro tem, a position that saw him preside over the body’s meetings in the absence of the mayor.
He did so when the first Mayor Daley was recuperating after a stroke in 1974. Then, when the mayor died in December 1976, Frost declared himself acting mayor.
Black leaders, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, backed Frost’s bid to be the city’s first Black mayor seven years before Harold Washington was elected to that seat. But Frost literally was locked out of the mayor’s fifth-floor City Hall office, told the keys could not be located and that the appointed deputy mayor already was handling administrative matters.
The Council’s white majority eventually pushed through a deal to appoint Ald. Michael Bilandic, who represented the 11th Ward Daley stronghold, as mayor, and Frost as first Black chair of the finance committee, a position that, unlike president pro tem, had real authority and made him the highest-ranking Black member of the Council.
Emil Jones Jr. had been Frost’s aide until 1972, when he ran for the Illinois House and won. He later served in the Illinois Senate until retiring in 2009 as Senate president and pushing for his son to succeed him and take his 14th District seat.
‘We built our own organization’
“Unlike most Black organizations in the city of Chicago, they were hand-me-down type of organizations,” Jones Jr. said in 2008 in an interview with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. “We built our own organization from scratch. We built this organization ourselves. It wasn’t a handed down from a white organization because the community changed. ... Wilson Frost was the alderman, the committeeman.”
Lemuel Austin Jr. benefited from Frost’s and Jones’ influence, working as a legislative aide while Jones Jr. was a state representatives and an administrative assistant to Frost. When Frost retired from the City Council in 1987, Austin succeeded him there and as chair of the 34th Ward Regular Democratic Organization. A loyal ally to Mayor Richard M. Daley, he rose to chair the powerful budget committee before his sudden death at 48 in 1994.
His wife would inherit all three titles, though she dropped out of the race for ward committeeperson in 2019 and then resigned as committee chair after her 2021 indictment.
Austin’s legal troubles and her subsequent announcement that she won’t seek reelection next year made the 34th Ward the obvious choice for the Council’s Black Caucus to sacrifice in the latest ward remap, as the 2020 Census showed thousands of Black residents left the city.
Without the latest in its string of leaders dating to Frost, the newly remapped 34th Ward soon will be in and around downtown. And many of its residents will be back in the 21st Ward, which thanks to the retirement of Ald. Howard Brookins (21st), also is an open seat in next year’s election.
Contributing: Fran Spielman
