Government lawyers say they have evidence buried within a stack of 13,428 paper records that the city of East Chicago -- under former Mayor Robert Pastrick -- was an engine of systematic, long-standing corruption.
Attorney General Steve Carter said his civil racketeering lawsuit against the former mayor's regime is the first in history to name an entire city government as a "corrupt enterprise" in a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, case.
Does that mean the city was an engine of organized crime?
"There are different kinds of organized crime," Carter said. "Obviously there is the private sector of organized crime -- that's often what is thought of. And then there are those actions in the public sector, public corruption, that involve more than one isolated incident, more than one person and often can be characterized that way also."
The civil lawsuit against the eight-term mayor and several of his former city officials and contractors is scheduled for trial next spring.
The case is based on findings in several criminal cases against East Chicago officials involving city officials draining public coffers to buy votes for Pastrick and his allies in 1999 by giving out unbid sidewalk paving and tree trimming services to voters.
Defense attorneys in the federal criminal cases said their clients never personally took any of the ill-spent money and that the work benefitted the city by improving its overall appearance.
Pastrick was not charged criminally and has said publicly that his lower-level employees authorized all the work. Some of those underlings, including the so-called Sidewalk Six, have been convicted in federal court for their roles in the sidewalks-for-votes scandal.
Court records filed Friday in the state RICO case indicate both sides have finished their initial information gathering, amassing 70,142 pages of records.
Patrick Collins, the former Chicago federal prosecutor who Carter hired to work on the RICO case, said it's appropriate to use the racketeering laws -- which were originally intended to fight organized crime -- on the political corruption in East Chicago.
"Organized crime, really, if you take out the Mafia connotation, is essentially long-standing, pervasive, systematic activity that is tough to crack," Collins said. "In this case, the city of East Chicago is our enterprise. That doesn't mean these entities are corrupt, per se. It means they've been corrupted."
Pastrick's attorney, Michael Bosch, has said the RICO lawsuit is just a ploy by Carter to grab headlines during a re-election year. Carter responded that he does not believe the public wants public officials to stop doing their jobs during election seasons.
Carter also responded to criticism that he could wind up spending more money going after Pastrick than he could ever recover as part of a civil award.
"I would suspect that there are some defendants who are limited in finances, and there may be some that are very capable of paying a judgment," Carter said.
