EXTRA: Job opens up in Oak Park

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is in the Chicago suburbs to try to help the Illinois Republican Party raise money for use come the Nov. 2 elections, while Democrat-turned-independent Scott Lee Cohen picked a political anonymity to be his lieutenant governor running mate.

Yet there are those people who will insist that the top “political” story of the day occurred in west suburban Oak Park, where Salerno’s Pizza & Pasta is now looking for a new hostess to seat customers at the restaurant.

THAT JOB IS the one that has been filled in recent weeks by Betty Loren Maltese, the former Cicero town president who earlier this year was released from prison after serving her sentence for a political corruption conviction.

WLS-TV reported Wednesday that the restaurant manager said she quit. She was not fired. She left her job on good terms.

Since I don’t see anyone connected with law enforcement now talking about going after her for violating the terms of her parole in any way, I’m assuming she has something else lined up in terms of gainful employment so that she can justify to probation officers that she’s not goofing off.

But the reality is that she is going to be one of the characters on the fringe of our society. She has made radio appearances and recently spoke to students at DePaul University (where one student reporter couldn’t help but notice she wore the same fragrance as the student’s grandmother). So maybe that is what Maltese’s future is going to be while she focuses her personal attention on trying to regain legal custody of her adopted daughter (who is now 14).

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Betty is back! Is Blagojevich watching?

Following the newscasts on Monday, I couldn’t help but wonder if Rod Blagojevich was watching as well. Because seeing the “return” of Betty Loren Maltese to the Chicago metropolitan area could have given him a clear vision of what his life could be like some day.

Maltese, the one-time president of the Town of Cicero, has suffered the fate that many people are eagerly hoping befalls the now-impeached and removed Illinois governor some day.

SHE WAS SENT to prison, which broke her mentally. She was hit with fines and demands for reimbursement so high ($8 million) that she seriously is in debt. Her employability these days is so limited that it is highly unlikely she will ever be out of debt no matter how long she lives.

She has no home, no income. In fact, she has no family around her – they all left the Cicero area after Betty was sent away to prison.

So bringing Maltese back to the Chicago area on Monday was really more about personal humiliation than anything else.

Maltese served more than six years in federal correctional centers outside of Illinois, but is now finishing her prison term living in half-way houses – which in theory are preparing her for re-entry into society. She had been staying in such facilities in the Las Vegas area (which is not far from her adopted daughter now living in Arizona).

BUT OFFICIALS GOT her shifted to Chicago to finish the four more months she still must stay in such a place, specifically at the Salvation Army facility on Ashland Avenue where many convicted corrupt pols wind up finishing their prison time.

Why do I think this was about personal humiliation?

I think it was all about subjecting her to that final “perp walk,” where she had to get out of a car and walk into the facility while television cameras preserved the moment for “eternity,” or at least the few seconds of airtime that it took to show the footage on the Monday night newscasts.

For the record, Betty had nothing to say. No last-minute confessions. No curses at a reporter whose microphone got a little too close to her face for comfort.

ALSO, FOR WHAT it’s worth, none of the overly made-up appearance that used to be the “trademark” of Maltese. She was downright subdued.

I expect she will keep her mouth shut for so long as she must be in the Chicago area, then will leave us for good once she no longer has the federal government watching her every move (she must do three years probation, once her prison term is officially complete).

If it reads like I’m giving you a lot of trivial details about Maltese’s return to Chicago, you’d be correct. Because there really isn’t much else to say or write about her.

She was found guilty back in the early part of the past decade of allegations that Cicero taxpayers were ripped off of $12 million-plus by an insurance company that overcharged for its services, with some of that excess money supposedly going to associates of “a certain Italian subculture” (which is how actor Vince Curatola’s Johnny “Sack” Sacramoni character once described organized crime in an episode of “The Sopranos”).

THERE’S NOTHING NEW here.

The thought that she has to repay this money (conditions of her probation is that she has to cough up at least 20 percent of every paycheck she receives in the future toward her restitution) also isn’t new.

In fact, about the only new aspect is the revelation that Maltese is NOT among the ranks of the 47 million uninsured U.S. residents. Cicero government must provide her with a health insurance policy for the rest of her life.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that current Cicero municipal officials are looking into altering the perk, but even they concede they can only change it for future officials – not Maltese.

SO AT LEAST Betty can afford to go to the doctor when she gets sick. That might very well be the highlight of her life, at this point.

I find it all interesting because, as I hinted earlier, I think Maltese is the prototype for what people want to happen to Blagojevich.

Perhaps it is because Maltese’ so-called crime involved elements of organized crime, but she gets to be the pariah of our local politics. Someday, she likely will be joined by Blagojevich.

Perhaps they will make a nice couple. They’d even be bipartisan examples of how government corruption can break someone (after all, Betty considered herself to be a good Republican).

NEITHER MALTESE NOR Blagojevich is going to get the Dan Rostenkowski treatment (guest lecturer at Northwestern Universtiy, senior fellow at Loyola U. of Chicago, Election Night commentator on local television newscasts), which – if he survives, he turns 76 on Feb. 24 – is the fate I ultimately expect to occur for former Illinois Gov. George H. Ryan.

I guess that’s the difference between being an “old school” pol like Rostenkowski or Ryan who can point to real accomplishments in their political careers that benefitted the public, and the younger pols who didn’t stick around long enough on the political scene to achieve something of lasting value.

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Could Maltese, Blagojevich (“we didn’t do it”) be Illinois' perfect political couple?

This could be a new technique – those who are convicted of criminal offenses get out of prison and sue everybody they can think of for all the bad things that happened to them during their legal proceedings.

But then again, no one would ever have thought of Betty Loren Maltese as being someone who would follow the pack. If anyone was destined to make a public splash upon completing time in prison, it would be the one-time town president of Cicero.

MALTESE WAS THE heavily made-up beauty (in her own mind) who ran Cicero government – the political entity whose historic ties ran back to the late 1920s when Al Capone used the town for a few years to evade Chicago authorities who actually had the nerve to think they should try to do something to bring his criminal behavior to an end.

The point is that for decades, Cicero political officials have suffered from the perception that they were just a little too cozy with elements of organized crime.

In Maltese’s case, her late husband was a man who mob-watchers would contend was a low-level affiliate of the Chicago “outfit.”

In the end, Maltese suffered the same fate as many other people in her circles – the federal government came after her, prosecuted a case, got a conviction, and she received an eight-year prison term (much of which has been served in facilities in the southwestern U.S.).

THESE DAYS, MALTESE is no longer being kept in prison facilities. She is far enough along in her term that she is now living at a halfway house near Phoenix, where she theoretically is being given final preparation for the day when she is set free.

But Maltese, while she claims to have no interest in returning to Cicero or Illinois to live or work (she seems to be thinking “Las Vegas”), apparently isn’t letting go of the past.

She has a lawsuit that seeks a combined total of nearly $40 million from 27 different people – all of whom she claims did something to make her life miserable during the period when she was in the news on a daily basis because she was on trial in U.S. District Court in Chicago.

As she puts it in the lawsuit (for which she is serving as her own legal representation), my, “civil rights were deliberately and flagrantly hindered and severely abused.”

AT THE TIME of her incarceration, Maltese actually had an adopted daughter who wound up going to live with her sister while Betty was in prison. But now, Maltese thinks it was bad for her sister to have the child, even though most people would be grateful that a child remained within the family – rather than being sent off to a “foster home” of sorts.

So she’s suing her sister, claiming lies were told in order for her to get custody.

She’s also suing her one-time defense attorney for not including her physical presence at some of the court hearings. She claims he told her “I don’t need you there.”

Many people enjoy the idea of not having to show up for court, and it is common in criminal cases for instances where the attorneys for all sides get together to discuss the legal issues – in hopes of cutting through some of the procedure to try to achieve an actual result a lot sooner.

HER LAWSUIT ALSO names the U.S. attorney’s office that prosecuted her, the federal court system that tried her, the Bureau of Prisons that incarcerated her.

I wonder if she seriously considered including the quality of food at the prisons she was held at, since I heard reports throughout the years that Maltese lost so much weight while incarcerated because she couldn’t bring herself to eat the foodstuffs served to inmates – much of which technically includes nutrients needed to keep someone alive but was picked more for its low purchase cost than for its substance.

It seems like anyone who had the misfortune of coming into contact with Betty Loren Maltese during her years of legal travails now faces the likelihood of being named in her lawsuit.

It is very likely that Maltese will go to her grave someday (not that I’m wishing for that to happen sooner, rather than later) believing she was wrongfully convicted and incarcerated. Which is probably why we citizens of the Chicago metropolitan area are better off that Betty no longer wants to live among us.

HOW QUICKLY WOULD we become disgusted with her tales and her lawsuits and her likely future antics? She might actually make George Ryan look like a respectable, standup character by comparison.

If anything, she might very well be the Republican counterpart to Democrat Rod Blagojevich. They could both go around together claiming, “I didn’t do it.”

I understand that Maltese is contemplating her own book, partially as an attempt to explain her “story” to her adopted daughter – who was too young to understand what was happening to “mommy” while it was happening, but may someday get to see the cold hard language of the federal indictments and other legal documents related to her case.

In which case, we could take Maltese’s book and put it alongside copies of “The Governor” and try to figure out which one gives more political-style “bull” for the buck.

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From pols to publishers, they all offer differing tales of federal prison life

Some people like to make jokes about “Club Fed” and life in prison as somehow being cushy. I’d like to think that those people are just being ridiculous, and not really so clueless.

But then I read about the conditions that one-time Chicago Sun-Times boss Conrad Black is enduring while serving a 6 ½-year sentence at a federal prison in Florida, and I have to wonder.

THE TORONTO STAR published an account Thursday that noted – among other things – that Black has made arrangements with prison officials so that his cellmate is assigned to work as Black’s butler, cleaner and all-around gofer while in prison.

Who says you can’t find good hired help?

The Star took its information from the British newspapers, which has long been far more interested in “Lord Black of Crossharbour” than we in Chicago ever were. To them, he’s a member of the House of Lords who got “busted.” To us, he’s just the cheap bum who gutted the Sun-Times to the point where it may be impossible for “the Bright One” to recover financially.

Considering that this account in the Chicago Argus is a rewrite of a Toronto Star account that is a rewrite of a story that appeared in the Daily Mail, it is possible that some aspect of truth has been lost in translation.

BUT OTHER TIDBITS about Black’s prison life include that he started his term with a job as a dishwasher, but has since been reassigned to the prison library – where he now has access to newspapers and e-mail.

He even was pictured in the newspaper wearing black t-shirts and gray sweat pants. The British press made a point of saying that such attire was far less dignified than the stylish, tailored suits he used to wear.

But I can’t help but note that they are a step up from the castoff military fatigues that are the standard issue attire of most inmates in facilities run by the federal Bureau of Prisons.

Is Black getting a cushy prison stint because of his background? I don’t understand why he would, but it would appear that way.

AND THE ANSWER is “no,” I don’t have any evidence of payoffs by Black or his supporters. So don’t ask.

But what catches my attention is that his version of prison life seems so radically different from the politically prominent inmates from Chicago who are serving (or have served) time in federal prison facilities.

It is the same bureaucrats who are running the prisons, so it ought to be the same type of conditions for the inmates.

After all, Black’s old newspaper in Chicago on Thursday published an account giving several former government officials a chance to talk about what their life in prison was like.

FORMER GOV. GEORGE Ryan is now an inmate at the minimum-security work camp that is part of the maximum-security Terre Haute federal correctional center. His prison job these days is so depressing that his family doesn’t want to talk about it, although when he was an inmate at the minimum-security Oxford Correctional Center, his prison job was to work in the exercise room.

One of his duties was literally to wipe inmate sweat off the exercise equipment.

Former Alderman Ambrosio Medrano told the newspaper he literally used to clean toilets, while former Alderman Wallace Davis Jr. had to work in the prison kitchen for a time – which is ironic because he now owns a restaurant that peddles fried catfish.

Not that everybody had gross stories to tell.

THERE WAS ALWAYS the situation of former city Clerk Jim Laski, who says that after starting out working in the kitchen, he was transferred to a special unit where his job involved no actual work.

“It’s like the city jobs you hear about where people show up and do no actual work,” Laski told the Sun-Times. “They have those in prison too.”

Some public degredation is involved, as federal bureaucrats who like to think of themselves as “law and order” types don’t mind giving junk duty to inmates who were once prominent people.

Former Gov. Dan Walker has often told the story of how he suddenly got reassigned by a new warden to a job picking up trash, using a special spear emblazoned with the words “Governor’s Stick” to remind him of how far he had fallen.

PERHAPS THERE IS something similar in the fact that Ryan (according to former Illinois first lady Lura Lynn) once thought he would get a job working in a prison library, only to suddenly get the duties that are too shameful to be spoken of.

But then, there are the inmates who complain about their plight. It turns out Black is one of them.

Despite evidence that his time in prison is not as negative an experience as it is for many other individuals, “Lord Black” is displeased.

The Toronto Star quotes an official who says Black the inmate “remains very snobbish” and is astounded at the lack of education of most of his fellow inmates – many of whom are from non-Anglo racial or ethnic groups who never graduated from high school and are serving time for drug-related offenses.

BECAUSE THESE PARTICULAR inmates have not caused serious disciplinary problems while in prison, they have been moved to the same minimum-security facility as a one-time member of the British Parliament.

Another person who thinks she is a step above her fellow inmates is one-time Cicero Mayor Betty Loren Maltese – who has been assigned to a crew that serves food to other inmates with special dietary restrictions (mostly to accommodate religious beliefs).

As a result, Betty these days has to listen to other inmates complain about the low quality of “slop” they are expected to survive on.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Betty looks down on her fellow inmates (at least one of whom has complained about receiving smaller bananas than other inmates) while also complaining about the quality of food she is expected to eat.

THE NEWSPAPER NOTES she has complained to prison chaplains that the food is not cooked to her preferred specifications, and she also wants to know why she can’t be served items such as cheesecake on a regular basis.

Admittedly, there is a continent between the two (Maltese is doing her time in California, while Black is serving time at a prison near Orlando, Fla.), but it almost is a shame that Lord Black of Crossharbour can’t be paired up with Mayor Betty from Cicero.

With their combined reported gripes, they’d be the perfect prison couple.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Chicago pols have varying accounts of life in prison following (http://www.suntimes.com/news/watchdogs/1118867,CST-NWS-watchdog21.article0) convictions on charges related to political corruption, but not many politicos wold compare prison jobs to Chicago city jobs the way Jim Laski does.

A butler, gofer and cleaner? That is what former Hollinger bigwig Conrad Black has arranged for himself (http://www.thestar.com/News/World/article/482704) in prison.