Facing indictment, Ald. Ed Burke will end his run as the longest-serving City Council member ever, won’t seek reelection

Ald. Edward Burke will end his run as the longest-serving alderman in Chicago history.

Fighting a wide-ranging federal corruption indictment, the alderman who has represented the Southwest Side’s 14th Ward for more than a half-century declined to file nominating petitions by Monday’s deadline, meaning his current 13th term on the City Council will be his last.

Earlier in September, his wife, Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice Anne Burke, said she would be stepping down from the bench at the end of November.

Burke’s reign as alderman since 1969 over his ward not far from Midway Airport has seen its demographics shift from a mix of working class Irish and Eastern Europeans to an overwhelmingly Latino constituency. Those changes and the specter of the high-profile charges alleging he abused his considerable power made it far from certain he would have won had he decided to run again.

But it would have been unwise to count him out.

Burke, 78, long stood at the peak of a historic machine-era type of Chicago politics, practiced with handshakes and twisting arms in ward offices and downtown restaurants. He lorded over his ward and held significant sway over the entire city’s purse strings by heading the Chicago City Council’s Finance Committee for decades.

A longtime successful real estate tax appeals lawyer, Burke for years maintained a lucrative outside business of filing property tax appeals for businesses, Chicago’s wealthy and other political insiders that often conflicted with his City Council duties. The dual roles forced him to file long economic interest disclosure lists each year, including detailing which firms his law firm did business for and also had business before city government.

Burke often abstained from committee and council votes because his firm represented businesses that could be affected by the outcome of City Council votes — even after presiding over committee hearings at which the issues were discussed.

The dual roles, documented by news organizations and criticized by reformers for years, became the focus of federal investigators. And in 2019, Burke was indicted on corruption charges that allege he used his City Hall clout to extort work for his law firm and other favors from companies and individuals doing business with the city.

Burke has pleaded not guilty to the 14 counts filed against him, which include racketeering, federal program bribery, attempted extortion, conspiracy to commit extortion and using interstate commerce to facilitate an unlawful activity.

Burke and two co-defendants, longtime aide Peter Andrews and real estate developer Charles Cui, are scheduled to go to trial Nov. 6, 2023, at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse.

In a status report filed Monday, federal prosecutors said they have turned over nearly 9,000 recorded calls from the wiretap on Burke’s phones between May 2017 and February 2018, “consisting of hundreds of hours of recorded conversations,” a much larger trove than has previously been revealed.

More recently, prosecutors gave Burke’s attorneys material that could be used to try to impeach or discredit the star witness for the prosecution, former Ald. Daniel Solis, according to the filing. That production included 90 video-recorded meetings of Solis totaling about 108 hours, as well as 34,000 recorded phone calls and 20,000 text messages.

Before his indictment, Burke was perhaps best known as one of the main architects of the racially charged Council Wars, in which a bloc of white aldermen led by him and then-Ald. Edward Vrdolyak feuded with Harold Washington in the mid-1980s, often blocking the initiatives of Chicago’s first Black mayor in a yearslong fight that earned the City Council national notoriety.

But his political strength outlived that era.

Former mayors Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel mostly maintained an uneasy detente with Burke, allowing him to serve as Finance Committee chairman. Each mayor came to rely on the alderman to help push his agenda by finessing the council process and cajoling or threatening colleagues to get them in line.

In the Finance Committee role, Burke oversaw the city’s workers’ compensation program. He kept the program under tight wraps during his more than three decades of nearly continuous control of the committee, resisting efforts by the city inspector general to investigate the program’s operations.

In 2012, a federal grand jury demanded that Burke’s Finance Committee turn over records related to a “duty disability” program that in 2011 alone paid out $115 million to disabled city workers, according to documents the Chicago Tribune obtained at the time.

The 2012 subpoenas were issued about one week after city Inspector General Joseph Ferguson, a former federal prosecutor, announced that Burke’s committee had rebuffed his attempts to obtain many of the same records.

Burke stepped down in early 2019 as Finance Committee chair after the FBI raids that led to the current indictment against him. Still, Burke went on to win a 13th term as alderman despite the federal case and the fact that Southwest Side progressive power U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García backed one of the two Latino opponents Burke faced in the majority-Latino ward.

One of his most important political contributions to Chicago may have come with the federal raids on his offices. Lori Lightfoot was struggling to make headway in a crowded field featuring several better funded, better known mayoral hopefuls on the November 2018 morning when FBI agents papered over Burke’s office windows and carried out computers and boxes of records.

But in subsequent months, Lightfoot hammered other candidates for their political, financial and personal connections to Burke, promising to “bring in the light” to city government.

“It seems all these other folks are running for cover and don’t want to talk about him, but frankly, that underscores the fact that we’ve got different factions of the political machine manifested in (mayoral candidates Susana) Mendoza, (Toni) Preckwinkle, (Bill) Daley and (Gery) Chico and others who don’t want to rock the boat because they are very much wedded to the status quo,” Lightfoot told the Tribune days after the federal raids on Burke’s offices. “It’s telling that they aren’t willing to step up and say, ‘Look, this guy has been in office way too long, he’s been allowed to amass way too much power.’”

Chicagoans’ anger at Burke’s alleged wrongdoing and long reach throughout the city’s halls of power helped propel Lightfoot to a resounding election win.

The years since Lightfoot’s victory have taken on a different role for Burke, who was long used to being one of the most influential people in the state and a nexus of power in the City Council. As mayor, Lightfoot has openly clashed with an alderman whose diminished power has taken much of the danger out of crossing him.

Burke’s regular City Council speeches on Chicago history have become rarities. He mostly sits quietly in the 14th Ward seat at the edge of the floor rather than in the central position near the mayor reserved for the chair of the Finance Committee, where he long welcomed colleagues to come quietly chat with him, many asking him for favors while the council meeting proceeded.

Despite his diminished stature on the council, his departure will mark the end of another era of Chicago politics.

“It’s another one of those milestones, (former Illinois House Speaker Michael) Madigan’s gone, Burke’s gone,” and with him, the last vestiges of “probably the most well-organized machine in the country,” said Christopher Mooney, political science professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

While the lore of the Chicago political machine is sometimes more myth than fact, Burke and Madigan held onto power for so long, in part, because they continued to deliver for their constituents, Mooney said. “The issue is not why are they going now. The issue is why have they stayed around so long? … Burke was good at what he did. That allowed him to buck demographic trends that were working against him,” a reference to the increasingly Latino district Burke represented.

But both longtime pols decided to exit public service under a cloud of indictment for the transactional politics that had helped them amass power and money because of their positions in government. “The city has changed, politics has changed, the law has changed,” Mooney said. “Really, that’s what trips them up.”

Lightfoot has referred to some of her antagonists on the council as “Ed Burke’s puppets,” itself a testament to his enduring reputation as an astute behind-the-scenes operator, as well as the fact one of the main architects of Council Wars in the 1980s and a council tactician renowned for his ability to use the body’s arcane rules to stymie his opponents has done little to try to publicly challenge her himself.

The mayor used her anti-Burke campaign rhetoric and the charges he faces as a springboard to push to remove zoning requests for businesses from the hands of local aldermen. Her efforts have led to some modest changes, and played a central role in her rancorous relationship with some other members of the council who contend they should retain the authority to make such decisions in the neighborhoods they represent.

A year before he won his first aldermanic election, Burke in 1968 was elected Democratic committeeman for the 14th Ward after his father, Ald. Joseph P. Burke, died of lung cancer while in office. The younger Burke has held that Democratic Party post ever since.

A status hearing in the criminal charges against Burke is set for Wednesday before U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall. She took over the case two months ago after U.S. District Judge Robert Dow announced he was leaving to take a staff job with the U.S. Supreme Court.