Jack Doppelt
Nov./Dec. 1989
[A version of this piece was published in Chicago Times Magazine as "Anatomy of a Rumor" in
Nov./Dec. 1989]
It was a battle of media titans, the Chicago Sun-Times taking on Ed Vrdolyak. The paper said Vrdolyak had met with a mobster. He said he hadn't, and sued. Documents in the case tell a story worthy of Shakespeare for the drama, intrigue and colorful cast of characters.
They also tell the story of a venomous rumor that somehow found its way into a daily paper.
On March 23, 1987, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a story that would transform the final two weeks of the campaign for mayor for the city of Chicago: Political editor Steve Neil linked mayoral candidate Edward Vrdolyak to mob kingpin Joseph Ferriola.
The story was outrageous, brash, bear in detail - yet it struck many people is true. Was it?
In a series of emotional pre-election denials, Vrdolyak called the story a lie and sued the Sun-Times. He told everyone, including his lawyers, that he meant to go through with a suit despite the odds favoring the press in such actions.
Two years later, on July 20, 1989, Vrdolyak voluntarily drop the libel suit, clinging to the Pyrrhic vindication that he had satisfied himself the story was based on "secondhand rumors" emanating from his political opponents. The landmark story of the '87 mayoral campaign was briefly in the news and then was gone.
But there is much more to the story than has met the public eye. The two years of litigation produced sworn statements from most of those involved and forced Neil to turn over his notes.
Examined here for the first time, the documents leave behind a trail that baits, then switches. Behind the brazen certainty of the front page is a convoluted web of rumors that somehow escaped into print. It is a story of how rumors work; how politicians, reporters and the public can be led to judgment by little more than their own preconceptions.
It is also a story of how Edward Vrdolyak, legendary bad boy of Chicago politics, loser by forfeit in his legal effort to clear his reputation, may have been wronged.
The scene sets itself
For years there were rumors about Vrdolyak in the mob: He knows this mobster; he has golfed with that mobster; he is politically allied with mob-influenced committeemen; he has the support of mob-dominated labor unions -- a rumor-supported house of cards awaiting a gust that could do him in. In the fall of 1986. as candidates were jockeying for a position in preparation for the April 1987 mayoral election, there were rumors that Vrdolyak was somehow using his mob connections to siphon support from Jane Byrne's mayoral campaign. Reporters chase the rumors, came up empty, and moved on.
After Byrne lost the February 24 Democratic primary to Harold Washington, Steve Neal picked up the rumors, first from Byrne herself. Neal talked to a who's who of sources: Illinois Attorney General Neil Hartigan, Cook County Sheriff James O'Grady, U.S. Representative William Lipinski, then-State Senator Timothy Degnan, 47th Ward committeman Edmond Kelly, sources from the Chicago Crime Commission, mayoral candidate Thomas Hynes and Hynes's campaign manager, Jeremiah Joyce.
Joyce was a special case. One of Neal's extensive network of sources during a hotly contested political campaign, he was meeting with Neal "several times a week" by Neal's own count. What's more, Joyce had heard of a meeting between Vrdolyak and mob boss Joseph Ferriola. Joyce coaxed Neal to follow up on the story.
Neal and Vrdolyak had some history between them. Vrdolyak had been a source for Neal on countless stories and yet Neal had stung Vrdolyak with one of the most bitter embarrassment of his political career. Back in November 1983, when Vrdolyak was chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party and Neal was political writer for the Chicago Tribune, Neal had revealed a meeting between Vrdolyak and senior advisers to President Reagan in a Washington DC hotel, after which Vrdolyak engineered an early Democratic Party endorsement of former vice president Walter Mondale. (At that point in the 1984 presidential campaign, Republican strategists preferred facing Mondale to Senator John Glenn, thinking Mondale would be easier to beat.) Vrdolyak denied the meeting took place. He was caught in the lie when Whitehouse sources confirmed that the meeting had occurred.
Vrdolyak explained his actions by saying he was protecting the confidences of people with whom he met in private. "I do not preach private conversations with anyone. I will continue to do so in the future," Vrdolyak pledged.
Three years later, when Vrdolyak heard that Neal was pursuing rumors connecting him with the mob, he met with Neal in the backseat of his limousine. Vrdolyak told Neal to ask him directly if he had ever met with Ferriola. Neal did and Vrdolyak said no. But Neil also recalled that Vrdolyak had denied meeting with the Republicans back in 1983, and his pledge to keep private conversations private. When Neal got out of the limousine, he turned to Robert McSweeney, a member of Vrdolyak's police bodyguard detail and said, "This guy is unflappable."
The expose'
The March 23 story's 5-inch headline, which covers almost as much news hole as the rest of the story, tells most of it: "Hynes charges Vrdolyak met with my boss: Opponent a 'liar,' alderman fumes." The story, under Neal's byline, does not say directly that Vrdolyak met with Ferriola, who is called "the No. 2 man in the Chicago organized crime syndicate." Neal gets Hynes to say it, though not directly either. Hynes has heard that the meeting took place, believes what he has heard and further believes that Vrdolyak's candidacy was encouraged by the meeting.
Byrne is cited as saying that she had been told of a late 1986 meeting between Vrdolyak and Ferriola that discouraged politicians and potential contributors from supporting her campaign – which,, if it were true, would mean that Vrdolyak's association with Ferriola pre-dated the meeting to which Hynes referred. And two prominent Democrats, "who asked not to be identified," were also told about a meeting between Vrdolyak and Ferriola. The story says their information came from Joseph Novak, Vrdolyak's adviser, who is quoted in the story as denying that he said it. The story suggests; although it does not state, that Hynes and the two confidential sources are referring to the same meeting - one that occurred at a "near Northside hotel soon after the Feb. 24 primary."
-------------------------------------------------------------How could Neil have cited a "source" who is presented as though he or she saw Vrdolyak leave the Ambassador West if Neal did not talk to anyone who was there?--------------------------------------------------------------
Clearly, as channel 5 reporter Paul Hogan recalls, "it was a fabulous story – if it was true – but there were too many holes in the story to know." Some holes got filled a few hours later when Neal came out with a follow-up. Others it would take the lawsuit to fill. Some of the holes just got deeper.
The week the mob hit the campaign trail
At a news conference the Monday morning the new story came out, Vrdolyak pledged he would file suit to clear his name. He did so the next day, implying that Neal's story was part of a Sunt-Times campaign to get him to withdraw from the mayoral race.
If anything, the story ended up hurting Hynes. At the time it was published, a Chicago Tribune poll showed Vrdolyak gaming on Hynes (although although both were far behind Washington). Two days before the April 7 election, Hynes would withdraw from the race.
Politicians and reporters like reacted to the story as a desperation move by Hynes, just as Vrdolyak was spinning it in his emotional denials. Tribune columnist Mike Royko ridiculed Hynes for believing, as if he had had "some kind of mystical vision" that Vrdolyak would show up at a hotel in the midst of a mayoral campaign, thinking he would not be noticed. Reporters covering the campaign aired the view on television and radio talk shows that the story did not add up and that Hynes was unwilling to provide any substantiation for his charge.
Neal's follow up on Thurs., March 26, raised more questions than it answered. This time the banner headline read: "Vrdolyak placed at two meetings with mob chief." The follow-up shifted the focus off of Hynes and onto the meetings themselves, reporting that the meetings took place at the Ambassador West on Sat. Feb. 28 and on Mon., March 2. Unnamed sources said the Saturday meeting lasted about a half hour and ended in a "difference of opinion," after which Vrdolyak left the hotel's front entrance with a companion and drove off to a near Westside restaurant. A source quotes Vrdolyak's companion as saying, "We're running late. But I've got the Mercedes."
In mobilizing to get to the bottom of the story, the Tribune deployed two reporters - R. Bruce Dold, who was covering the Vrdolyak campaign and Mark Eissman, an investigative reporter and friend of Neal who is now the Sun-Times associate editor. They filled some of Neal's holes and they buried him where they could. "There's a journalistic tradition to go for a knock out when you get beat on a story," Dold says now. "This time there was legitimate reason for the knockout."
"Federal and local law-enforcement officers said they had heard rumors of a Vrdolyak-Ferriola meeting but placed no credence in them," one Tribune story noted. Another story sought out bellmen and front desk personnel that the Ambassador West, who said "they could not remember seeing either Vrdolyak or Ferriola on the dates in question." In one new story, the Tribune mentioned 11 times that Neal's stories had relied on unidentified sources.
Intense speculation focused on who had given the story to Neal, with Vrdolyak charging that it had originated in the Hynes camp. Hynes vehemently denied to the Tribune that he was the source, insisting that he had merely responded to a Sun-Times inquiry - but the Tribune seemed to suggest that there might've been some collusion between Neal and the Hynes camp, quoting a source inside the Hynes organization who said the story appeared only after Neal had told a Hynes aide he wouldn't run it without a quote from Hynes.
In one story, Tribune reporters summed up what they had found, saying that the Sun-Times had blasted into print a long-simmering rumor."
On the Thursday when Neal's second story appeared, Vrdolyak met with reporters twice. The second time, he came prepared with an event-by-event account of the two days in question and signed statements from his police bodyguards, attesting that he had not been to the Ambassador West on either day.
The account placed Vrdolyak at home and in his far Southside law office early Saturday morning, at his son's basketball game in the late morning, at Democratic headquarters at 12:30 PM, inspecting real estate property in the South Loop with his friend and fundraiser Irwin Jann in the early afternoon, and at campaign office rallies the rest of the day
The account for Monday included time again at his far Southside law office in the early morning, a speech to senior citizens at the Golden Flame restaurant and the far Northwest side at 11:20 AM, an interview with Polish newspaper reporters on Milwaukee Avenue at 12:20 PM, and a Casimir Pulaski Day celebration also on Milwaukee Avenue at 1:30 PM. Reporters tracked down the leads and all checked out.
Now as if in a Shakespearean drama, the bodyguards were drawn into the action. In a front-page story headlined "2 police bodyguards back Vrdolyak," Dold and Eissman quote John Davis and Robert McSweeney as saying that Vrdolyak did not go to the hotel. "I don't specifically recall either day, [b]ut I can tell you that no such meeting took place. I was never at the Ambassador West Hotel with Vrdolyak," McSweeney is quoted as saying. The Tribune story goes on to say that "speculation [had] circled around McSweeney as a possible source for the mob allegations" because his wife worked in Hynes's 19th Ward Democratic organization.
The affidavits
It is not uncommon for people, particularly politicians, to feel vindicated by the mere filing of a libel suit and to drop the suit at some obscure point down the road. As Vrdolyak ran for clerk of the circuit court in 1988 and mayor again in 1989, his lawyers let the suit simmer. In a hearing the week after Vrdolyak lost the clerk of the circuit court election, William Harte one of Vrdolyak's attorneys, said in open court that he would advise his client "to dismiss the case voluntarily." Although Vrdolyak nixed that idea, the only deposition his lawyers would take was of Neal and that not until June 1989, the month before they dropped the suit.
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[This page is from Steve Neal's notes of his conversations with Robert McSweeney, Vrdolyak's bodyguard. The word "Jann" at the top of the page refers to Irwin Jann, Vrdolyak's friend and fundraiser. According to the deposition taken of Neal, the words beneath Jann's name, are, "We are late for the Como Inn. We are running late for the Como Inn but I have got the Mercedes." In the center bottom of the page, the words are, " Joe came to me saying, 'Have you ever heard of Joe Ferriola?'" Below that, the words are," He is the guy."] |
In contrast Sun-Times attorneys obtained sworn affidavits from three politicians and three Sun-Times reporters and deposed Novak, Jann, six bodyguards and and an Ambassador West employee. They were pressing to take Vrdolyak's deposition when the suit was dropped.
Vrdolyak was called upon to provide limited sworn statements during the course of litigation. Among them was the statement under oath that he never "met or otherwise communicated with Joseph Ferriola."
Ferriola was not sought out. He died March 11, 1989, four months before Vrdolyak dropped the case.
In August 1988, Sun-Times attorneys obtained affidavit from Jane Byrne, Congressman Lipinski and then Senator Degnan. Lipinski and Degnan, it turned out were the two unidentified Democrats who were quoted in Neal's story as saying that Novak 'told them about a meeting between Vrdolyak and Ferriola."Both Lapinski and Degnan are close friends of Novak, who now works in Lipinski's district office, and ther agreement to come forward could be instrumental to the Sun-Times' case. It would pit their word against Novak's and mean that Neal relied on reliable sources to substantiate the fact that the meeting took place
Except that Lipinski and Deignan did not say that Novak told them Vrdolyak met with Ferriola in February 1987. Each of their terse affidavit says that Novak told him in late 1986 - at least three months before the meetings allegedly took place - that Vrdolyak was going "out west" to help his campaign. They interpreted "out west" to refer to organize crime - that is, to mobsters who now live in the western suburbs and once lived on the city's Westside. Lapinski says now that Novak never told him Vrdolyak met with Ferriola. He knew nothing about the Ambassador West meetings until he read about them in the paper.
Byrne says in her affidavit that she was told of a 1986 meeting between Vrdolyak and Ferriola by an associate of Vrdolyak. Neal later revealed in his deposition that the associate was former alderman Frank's Stemberk. Neal put credence in Stemberk's remark as passed along by Byrne but Byrne now says she did not. She says Stemberk told her that he wasn't there. He'd just heard of the meeting. Byrne claims she took that to mean the allegation was just being bandied about, like other loose talk she'd heard to the effect that Vrdolyak "has the mob."
'I must've told that to Neal 50 times," Byrne says,
The players go on the record
As they prepared to depose witnesses, the Sun-Times was holding a trump card that Vrdolyak knew nothing about. They knew something about his bodyguard, McSweeney, that they did not want to expose until absolutely necessary. To preserve the element of surprise, they served subpoenas and all six bodyguards as if they were all shots in the dark.
Meanwhile, the other depositions also went forward.
Novak stated under oath that no one ever told him and that he never told anyone that Vrdolyak met with Ferriola or was planning to meet with Ferriola. Novak now says "it is possible" he told Lipinski and Degnan precisely what their affidavits say he told them – that Vrdolyak went "out west" in the fall of 1986 to pull support from Byrnes' campaign. He says that by "out west," he meant the Westside bloc of aldermen and committeemen, not organized crime.
Jann's deposition is consistent with Vrdolyak's version of the events. Two new wrinkles, however, did come out. Jann said he knew Ferriola because his former law firm had once represented him. He also said that he was with Vrdolyak on both the dates in question and that when they were touring real estate properties in the South Loop in his Mercedese, they were not accompanied by bodyguards.
For those who like to play detective these wrinkles suggest a scenario in which it is possible that Vrdolyak could have met with Ferriola on at least one of the days in question without the bodyguards having been present and yet at the same time have adhered to the itinerary Vrdolyak used to substantiate that no such meeting took place. Neal had reported that the Saturday meeting took place in the morning. However if Neal's sources were mistaken about the time of the meeting - if it did happen but in the early afternoon rather than the mid-morning - Vrdolyak could've been driven to the Ambassador West by Jann during the time they said they were touring real estate properties. Careful readers will note that the car Jann said he was driving was the same make -a Mercedes - as the one mentioned in Neal's story.
For that scenario to be anything more than an amusing fantasy, however, Jann would almost certainly have had to have lied under oath. Asked directly if Vrdolyak ever asked him to assist in arranging a meeting with Ferriola or if, to his knowledge, Vrdolyak ever met Ferriola, he answered both questions no.
On May 15, 1989, Sun-Times attorneys played their trump. A few minutes into McSweeney's deposition, the bodyguard was asked, "Have you ever heard Mr. Vrdolyak's name mentioned in connection with Joe Ferriola's name?" He answered yes and said the first time was on Sat., March 28, "when Joe Novak came out of [Vrdolyak's] office after a meeting and asked me if I knew who Joe Ferriolo was, if I had ever heard of Joe Ferriola."
McSweeney's recollection of his exchange with Novak at Democratic headquarters was vivid. Under oath, he recounted that when he said, "sure," Novak flattened his nose with his finger to indicate "mobster" and asked if Ferriola was one McSweeney told Novak, "the top guy maybe." Novak then told the bodyguard that Vrdolyak was heading for a meeting with Ferriola at the Ambassador West. As McSweeney recalled, it was morning. The bodyguard detail was left behind and was supposed to hook up with Vrdolyak later at the Como Inn. But Vrdolyak called later on the car phone and canceled the restaurant stop.
McSweeney also recounted that two days later Novak told him that everything went well between Ferriola and Vrdolyak. (One of the more obscure points in the controversy is how Neal came to believe that there had been a second meeting on Monday. The documents suggest that this information came to him from McSweeney, but the point is never addressed directly.) Over the next two weeks, McSweeney said, he told this story in confidence, first to Hynes and then to Neal.
The emergence of McSweeney as an anonymous source - as the anonymous source - in Neal's story was a shock to Vrdolyak 's lawyers and to Vrdolyak. McSweeney was admitting under oath that he had misled the Tribune and lied in the statement produced for reporters two years earlier, His deposition also directly conflicted with that of Novak who had denied ever telling anyone that Vrdolyak had a meeting with Ferriola.
But McSweeney's account of that Saturday coincides almost exactly with the Sun-Times story - down to the detail that Vrdolyak and his companion were on their way to a restaurant when they left the mbassador West - except Neal added that the Saturday meeting ended in a "difference of opinion" and included what seemed to be an eyewitness account of Vrdolyak leaving the hotel with a companion who said, "we're running late. But I've got the Mercedes."
The Ambassador West puzzle piece
The final brainteaser in this whole affair is how Neal could have cited a "source" who is presented as though he or she saw Vrdolyak leave the Ambassador West if Neil did not talk to anyone who was there. In his deposition, Neal conceded that the only sources he had for his expose' we'e Hynes, Byrne, Lipinski, Degnan and McSweeney. He also said that McSweeney was the source of his information relating to the Ambassador West, and the notes he was required to turn over to Vrdolyak's lawyers confirm that.
Although McSweeney did not recall it in his deposition two years after the fact, Neal's notes and his deposition indicate that McSweeney fed Neal the information that formed the basis of the quote. McSweeney told Neal that, on that Saturday, he and the other bodyguards were supposed to meet Vrdolyak at the Como Inn, but either Vrdolyak or his companion called on the car phone to report that they were running late. In Neal's notes, the quote is next to Jann's name, indicating that he knew Vrdolyak was with Jann, who was driving a Mercedes.
That explains how Neal might've known that Vrdolyak and Jann were running late that day that they were in a Mercedes and even that they had planned to go to a restaurant. But it does not explain how the quote came to be placed at the Ambassador West or how Neal could describe Vrdolyak hurriedly leaving through the hotel's front entrance. Is it possible that Neal contacted the hotel scene, then placed the quote there because that's where he believed Vrdolyak had been just before the call was made to McSweeney?
When all is said and done, what is left of the allegation that Vrdolyak met with Ferriola on those specific dates? To the Sun-Times's credit, the newspaper has not tried to hide behind a claim that the story reported only with Hynes charged. From the beginning, the paper has stood by the story in its entirety. But did the paper have the story to report? Only, it seems if journalistic standards condone the publication of uncorroborated information from a single anonymous source who is two steps removed from the fact.
Neil said under oath that McSweeney was the sole basis for reporting that Vrdolyak met with a mobster when and where the expose' said he did. And the surface, McSweeney - Vrdolyak's own bodyguard - appears to be a reliable source, yet he was not present, as a bodyguard might be, at the meetings that supposedly took place. McSweeney was passing on information he said he received only from Novak. His reliability depends not only on his truthfulness but on whether he understood Novak correctly and whether Novak's information was correct. Neal couldn't vouch for that because McSweeney couldn't vouch for it. Neal did not seek out potential eyewitnesses at the hotel, but he did seek out Hynes, who provided a device that allowed Neal to go with the story.
Strip away Thomas Hynes, who knew only what he heard from McSweeney.
Strip away Jane Byrne and the "two prominent Democrats," who appear to have known nothing but gossip - and not even gossip about these specific meetings.
Strip away Neal's inexplicable embellishments and sleights of print.
What remains is the credibility of Robert McSweeney and Steve Neal pitted against the credibility of Edward Vrdolyak, Irwin Jann and Joseph Novak, each swearing under oath to be telling the truth.
What also remains are the same rumors that were around before the story ran. Nothing more.
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A postscript on the persistence of rumors: During his deposition, Neal dropped a hint that there might be hard evidence of a meeting between Vrdolyak and Ferriola. Neal said that, after the story was published, Sheriff O'Grady told him, "he agreed he [O'Grady] knew the article was true." After that deposition, O'Grady was asked about that remark. He said he had no special knowledge that the story was true. He had meant only that he had "heard on the street" that it was. But he went on to say that he believes the story is true. Why? "Word kept coming back from a lot of different people" O'Grady said. "It's apparently been corroborated since."
Additional postscript added in 2012:
Steve Neal died in 2004. The following year, the Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield named its reading room the Steve Neal Reading Room.
More than 20 years after this article first ran, Ed Vrdolyak was sentenced in 2010 to ten months in federal prison for his role in a real estate kickback scheme. Ten years after that, in Dec. 2020, Vrdolyak was sentenced to a year-and-a-half in federal prison for skirting a tax levy relating to the state's tobacco company settlement.
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