There is a new tactic to try to get George Ryan out of prison – will it work?

Requesting clemency from a now-former president in the final weeks of his administration didn’t work for George Ryan. Neither did appealing to the current president’s sense of home loyalties and creating the image of a doddering old man whose health could take a turn for the worst at federal taxpayer expense.

So perhaps it should not be a surprise that the people who are willing to publicly back Ryan these days (whose numbers are far greater than the total who will ever say they support Rod Blagojevich) are trying a new tactic.

THEY’RE APPEALING TO a sense that perhaps Ryan has already served his prison time, and ought to be released.

That is the basis of an appeal attorneys for Ryan filed this week, saying that some of the charges upon which he was convicted ought to be dismissed and that he has served enough time at the Federal Correctional Center near Terre Haute, Ind., to satisfy what remains.

It is now in the hands of U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer to decide whether or not there is any legal merit to Ryan’s claim, and while a part of me thinks it is a totally reasonable request, I am not convinced she (or any other judge) will be inclined to grant it to him.

Which means if I had to put money down on this, I’d argue that Ryan will remain inmate 16627-424 for quite some time.

WHAT IT COMES down to is that ruling made by the Supreme Court of the United States earlier this year with regards to criminal convictions based on “honest services” – the belief that a person who fails to perform up to his best abilities on the job is committing an infraction worthy of criminal charges and prison time.

That ruling specifically related to officials with Enron whose behavior cost many people their financial livelihoodm, but the nation’s high court went so far as to restrict the ability to use such laws in public corruption cases.

Then, one-time newspaper publisher (and Chicago Sun-Times executive) Conrad Black was able to use that ruling as the basis of having a federal judge in Chicago knock some time off of his prison term – allowing him to be released. Conrad is a free man.

Which is what George Ryan – who has been held in federal prison for nearly three full years – wants to be.

RYAN WANTS US to believe that the charges upon which he was found guilty that rely on the “honest services” concept (the idea that by ignoring the fact that his Secretary of State employees were soliciting bribes from unqualified drivers, he himself was committing an illegal act) ought to be disregarded and downplayed.

When one considers that the bulk of the counts against him were based on the concept, it becomes clear that Ryan’s 6 ½-year prison term would be so significantly reduced that he probably would only really owe the federal government a year or two of his life in incarceration.

And as I pointed out earlier, he already has served 34 months in prison.

He wants us to think he did the time. Which means George Ryan is focusing less on getting his conviction overturned than he is in just trying to get out of the Terre Haute federal penitentiary (which fans of The Blues Brothers will point out serves a terrible cabbage roll to its inmates) any time sooner than his scheduled release date of July 4, 2013.

I POINTED OUT that last tidbit about having served the “time” because I have lost track of the number of people whose response Wednesday to Ryan’s request is to quote that old Baretta cliché, “Don’t do the crime, if you can’t do the time.”

But it does go to show how anything that even slightly resembles compassion toward Ryan is going to tick off a certain segment of our society – one that is determined to take a harder line toward the former governor than they would to many other people.

So it will be with some interest that I wait and see when Pallmeyer holds a hearing to allow attorneys (including former Chicago-based U.S. attorneys James R. Thompson and Dan Webb) to argue the merits of this particular request (and allow the prosecutors to dump all over it). Because I can’t envision any judge being that eager to have her (or his) name on an order that sets George Ryan free. At the very least, it will tick off those prosecutors who will perceive it as a challenge to their authority – and their conviction records.

It also would outrage that segment of the public that, for politically partisan reasons, wishes Ryan could be required to serve more time (not less). Even though it probably is the right thing to do, nobody – not George W. Bush or Barack Obama or anyone else – wants to put their name on the piece of paper that shows compassion in this case.

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Blagojevich did us a favor by shutting up, even though some don’t appreciate it

I couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief when it became official Wednesday that Rod Blagojevich is NOT going to blather on for days, if not weeks, on end, trying to justify himself as a noble public official – rather than just a government geek who got where he did because of his father-in-law.

In fact, we may have heard the most honest thing we will ever hear come from the mouth of a public official when he told reporter-types at the Dirksen Building courthouse, “maybe the biggest lesson I’ve learned is that I talk too much.”

THE IDEA OF a politician piping down is something we ought to be thankful for – even though the tone of much of the punditry about Blagojevich’s criminal trial these days is that he somehow owed us his testimony.

That idea was based on all the boasting that Blagojevich did throughout the months leading up to this trial claiming that he wanted a chance to “tell” his own story so as to convince the public of his innocence of any criminal behavior.

It was pleasant to know that the Republican research teams doing work for the various GOP candidates will have to dig elsewhere, rather than just write down the words Blagojevich said on the stand in their efforts to dig up dirt on Democrats who nominally were the former governor’s political allies (but in reality were more pleased than Republican legislators when he was impeached and removed from office over a year ago).

Because that would have been one of the few benefits to actually having Milorod on the stand during his trial.

SO WE SHOULD thank the defense attorneys who talked Blagojevich into not testifying – and give a coscorron a la cabeza (a smack to the head, for those who don’t habla Español) to the one defense attorney who said he wanted Milorod to testify.

Now I will go so far as to make this prediction. While I think there is some legitimate thought to the idea that the prosecution did not prove its case against Blagojevich, I don’t think that matters.

I expect Rod Blagojevich to be found guilty of all counts in the case before him. If this jury feels any compassion, it will be in terms of determining the fate of brother Robert. They may feel he was an un-political rube who got thrown in way over his head, and shouldn’t have his life ruined because of his younger brother.

Then again, the contempt factor for Rod may be so intense that it will take down everything in its path – even Rob, who amused me when he admitted during his testimony that he still considers himself to be a Republican. That will be one fact the GOP “attack dogs” will ignore.

THERE ALSO IS the fact that U.S. District Judge James Zagel is determined to set the rules that the jury must follow in ways that ensure they disregard many of Blagojevich’s claims.

How else to explain Zagel’s comments outside of the earshot of jurors when he compared one-time first lady Patti Blagojevich to a pair of madams from 19th Century Chicago, and his comments about how conspiracies can be just words (since Blagojevich’s attorneys have tried saying that much of the political trash talk caught on FBI tapes was merely speculation that never occurred, and the former governor himself describing it as “brainstorming ideas”)?

As Zagel put it (and was reported by the Chicago Tribune), “you can have a conspiracy entered into with fools and bumblers, and it’s still a conspiracy.”

“Fool” and “bumbler” are probably the nicer words that people would use to describe Blagojevich these days. Is that what we really would have wanted to hear coming from the witness stand for the next few days?

I HONESTLY BELIEVE that if Blagojevich has a chance at having his name cleared in a strictly legal sense (the bulk of Illinoisans are going to think that Rod is skuzzy, regardless of the jury’s eventual verdict), it is going to come in the appeals courts.

Blagojevich could wind up suffering the same fate as former Gov. George Ryan, whose appeals up to the Supreme Court of the United States were unsuccessful – despite the firm belief of dissenting justices who think that Ryan’s behavior wasn’t criminal.

But it likely would be there that we will learn whether Zagel’s rigid control over what could or could not be said in court was truly an attempt to keep Blagojevich from turning the trial into a circus, or merely a judge leaning too far to benefit the prosecution

One last thought.

SHOULD BLAGOJEVICH SOMEDAY have his name cleared, I would envision him spending the rest of his days on this Earth blathering on and on about how he was victimized – similar to how I now expect former newspaper magnate (and Chicago Sun-Times owner) Conrad Black to behave, now that he has been granted bond to be free from prison while his criminal appeals are pending.

True justice would be to lock the two of them in a room together and let them suffer from each other’s over-bloated egos.

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Peterson and Black want to get sprung from jail – in their wildest of dreams

Conrad Black is the newspaper publisher who used to control the Chicago Sun-Times who never would have wanted to be perceived as a little guy – not many Canadians-turned Brits who become a Lord would identify with everyday people.

Drew Peterson is the former suburban Chicago cop who probably thinks he’s the ultimate common guy – one who can’t help it that young women find him appealing.

BUT BLACK AND Peterson have one thing in common these days. The two of them seem to think they’re about to get out of jail while they go about proving that they are the true victims when it comes to the criminal cases pending against them.

The Supreme Court of the United States ruled recently in ways that make it more difficult for corruption cases to proceed. Actual bribery has to be proved – not just the fact that something stupid happened.

Black seems to think that will reduce the amount of time he should have to serve in prison, possibly taking his sentence from its current six-plus years to just over two years (which just happens to be the amount of time he has been locked away in federal correctional centers).

Peterson learned this week that his trial will have to be postponed. It was supposed to begin this month, but the prosecutors in Will County are appealing a court ruling related to the use of hearsay as testimony in criminal cases.

PROSECUTORS HAD PLANNED to use such hearsay to make up for the fact that Peterson’s most recent wife is still missing and merely presumed dead – rather than an actual corpse buried away somewhere.

But the drawback to that is that Peterson’s attorneys can now seek a motion asking for the one-time Bolingbrook police sergeant to be released from the Will County Jail while the criminal case is pending in the courts.

Listening to the so-called legal experts, they want us to believe that it is a long-shot that either Black or Peterson will be released from their respective jails anytime in the near future.

But I can’t help but wonder if we run a chance of seeing either one of them any time soon walking the streets of the Chicago area. It was on Tuesday that Black’s attorneys filed the necessary paperwork to ask a judge in U.S. District Court to allow Black to post bail while judges figure out if the Supreme Court ruling truly applies to his case.

ON THE SAME day, Peterson’s attorneys let it be known they think their client should be let out of jail in Joliet while the prosecutors appeal whether court rulings related to hearsay testimony should have any bearing on that criminal case.

Actually, Black would be the last person I would ever expect to see around here. I always sensed when his company ran the Sun-Times and all the suburban newspaper properties they acquired throughout the last two decades that Lord Black of Crossharbour saw us as being a bit drab, and our newspapers as the major U.S. property he acquired when his early 1990s bid to purchase the New York Daily News fell through.

From a newspaper perspective, it would have been intriguing to see a Black-run Daily News take on the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post. Instead, we got to see Black and his aides bleed dry our local newspapers into their current shrivelled-up status.

In Peterson’s case, his attorneys think it is only fair that he be set free, since prosecutors have already have had the beginning of the trial postponed once (it was supposed to begin last month), and that putting it off indefinitely a second time is somehow cruel, if not quite unusual.

PETERSON’S ATTORNEYS ENGAGED in their own cheap-shot rhetoric, telling the Chicago Tribune that prosecutors are getting “cold feet” and are “chickening out” because of their failure to just go ahead and begin the trial.

I have to admit that I think both Peterson and Black have interesting legal theories. I’m not willing to write them off as completely absurd.

Black is dealing with the concept of “honest services,” and to what degree is someone’s professional screwups worthy of criminal charges. Peterson is dealing with “hearsay” testimony in that prosecutors want to have people testify about what Drew’s fourth, still-missing, wife told them about the death of Drew’s third wife.

I have a problem with the idea of hearsay being permitted in a court proceeding. Our judicial system is supposed to hold prosecutors up to a high ideal, and allowing hearsay here could take us down a path by which it becomes too acceptable in other criminal cases.

LIKEWISE, A PART of me worries (particularly when it comes to political corruption cases) about whether people could use a broad interpretation of “honest services” to start going after their political opponents and imprisoning them for not being of the “right” ideological beliefs.

In theory, I can understand why the two men want out of jail, although it sounds like it has been a more pleasant experience for Black (who has been able to publish his writing while incarcerated) than it has for Peterson (who has been kept in isolation so as to keep other inmates from trying to enhance their reputations by attacking – if not killing – him).

Yet I’m skeptical that either judge, whether in the federal court or the circuit court in Will County, is going to be willing to let either one of these men out of jail anytime soon. Release for either of them will draw so much hostile public attention.

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What will ruling mean for Milorod?

Jeffrey Skilling of Enron. Newspaper publisher Conrad Black.

Those are a pair of business executives whose professional failures left a lot of people worse off financially and angry, and the Supreme Court of the United States on Thursday issued a ruling that gives credence to the belief that the public outrage unduly influenced prosecutorial types to go after them – resulting in criminal convictions and prison time.

SO AS MUCH as it would seem odd for anyone to willingly want to make that duo into a trio, perhaps it is natural that Rod Blagojevich has an interest in the concept of “honest services” and when, if ever, such behavior should be considered criminal.

Blagojevich had been counting on an overwhelming ruling of support for Skilling and Black, hoping that it would knock the legitimacy out of many of the criminal charges that the one-time Illinois governor is now on trial for in U.S. District Court for Chicago.

The high court ruled that in Skilling’s case (he was one of the top-ranking Enron executives who saw his company wither away into insignificance under his watch), his professional failings were not necessarily criminal.

Yet the court didn’t overturn any convictions. It merely said the lower court that found him guilty in the first place would now have to re-review his case to see how many of the convictions stand up to a strict interpretation of the law.

IN SHORT, IT is a victory for Skilling in that it could significantly reduce the amount of prison time that officials would claim he should have to serve.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg got to write this court opinion, where she said that there had to be clear evidence of receipt of a bribe or some sort of kickback of financial value in exchange for someone’s negative professional conduct on the job in order for there to be a law broken.

In short, someone behaving stupidly is not automatically a criminal – even if that incompetence crosses over and has a negative impact on the public.

That would be helpful to Blagojevich if discussed broadly because he could claim to have never received anything significant. Then again, prosecutors are starting this week to show the evidence of people who say Blagojevich was obsessed with getting people to either give him a significant political post that would enhance his image and power or help him financially to create some sort of foundation that he could run once he left electoral politics.

THAT FOUNDATION THEORETICALLY would allow Blagojevich to do good work for the people, or it would allow him to pay himself a significant salary for working whenever he felt like it. A lot of this depends on one’s politically partisan interpretation of an official’s character to begin with.

Prosecutors already have altered the charges once against Blagojevich so as to make them less reliant on “honest services” fraud. They will claim their case stands up regardless of Thursday’s high court ruling.

U.S. District Judge James Zagel seems inclined to agree, refusing on Thursday to put a halt to the Blagojevich trial until people could further study the Supreme Court ruling.

So the Blagojevich trial continues, which made the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform happy. The good-government type group issued its own statement saying it wants “justice” to be done for Milorod.

“TESTIMONY IN THE trial to date certainly makes it appear as though Rod Blagojevich saw public office as a tool for forcing payments to benefit himself,” the group said.

Of course, the federal prosecutors, in their admitted desire to prevent Blagojevich from impacting the appointment of a replacement senator from Illinois for Barack Obama, prevented that so-called moment of payback from ever occurring.

Does this Supreme Court ruling mean that the prosecutors should have waited until Blagojevich made the Senate appointment – perhaps having U.S. marshals march into a press conference and arresting him at the moment he tried to make his decision public?

It certainly couldn’t have been any more humiliating for him that way than what really happened – picking him up at 6 a.m. at his house when he was getting ready to go jogging.

THE ONE THING that seems obvious about the Supreme Court’s ruling is that it will not significantly impact the conduct taking place in Zagel’s courtroom. Too many people have an interest in seeing this case proceed to an outcome of conviction for this to stop it.

Which means it likely will be that same Supreme Court that ruled Thursday that Skilling and Black may have had the “honest services” fraud law wrongly applied to them that will someday have to decide whether Blagojevich should be considered within that group as well.

Only Rod Blagojevich could find himself in a situation where he would eagerly want to turn a duo into a trio of people whom the public thinks of as scum-bags, regardless of what any court may say otherwise.

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Newspaper bankruptcy gives joy to few

There are two types of people who will experience a moment of glee upon learning that the Bright One has joined the World’s Greatest Newspaper in bankruptcy court.

Some people who can’t handle the concept that not everybody on Planet Earth perceives issues exactly as they do will want to cackle and claim the Chicago Sun-Times is getting what it deserves for being “out of touch” with themselves.

THEN, THERE WILL be the competition.

Let’s not forget the way the Sun-Times intended to play up big the news back in December 2008 that the Tribune Co. had to file for bankruptcy protection to allow itself to restructure in hopes of surviving as a company.

By extension, that means the Chicago Tribune that had always been perceived as the fat, wealthy newspaper beat the scrappy, but impoverished Sun-Times to bankruptcy.

Had it not been for Rod Blagojevich getting busted by the feds the very same day (allowing the Tribune to legitimately play up a story unrelated to its financial struggles), we likely would have received day upon day of economic pontification over whose fault it was that the Tribune is a bankrupt newspaper.

NOW, ANYBODY AT the Sun-Times who was taking some joy out of the Tribune’s predicament ought to pipe down. Both of the surviving metropolitan newspapers of the Second City face bankruptcy, which will inspire the most sarcastic of our pundits to claim they are failed business entities that deserve to die.

Don’t think that competing newsrooms aren’t willing to rub it in. It is not limited exclusively to the downtown offices of the new newspapers.

I couldn’t help but notice the website Tuesday of the Times of Northwest Indiana, the Munster, Ind.-based newspaper that competes for local news in the area around Hammond and Gary, Ind., with the Post-Tribune of Merrillville.

The latter paper is owned by the Sun-Times News Group, which means they too are included. Hence, we got the headline “Post-Tribune parent company files for bankruptcy.”

AS FOR THE Tribune proper, they settled for an almost subdued “Chicago Sun-Times files for bankruptcy,” on top of a story that rehashed all the scandalous business activity engaged in during the years the newspaper was run by the Canadian (but wishes he were British) press baron Conrad Black.

Now I am the first to acknowledge that just because somebody filed for bankruptcy protections in court, it does not mean that the business itself (that of covering the news via the medium of a printed newspaper) is about to die off any day now.

For nearly 12 years, I worked in one form or another for the once-great wire service United Press International, which had already been in bankruptcy court when I started there in the early 1990s.

I used to be able to tell people that my job was to “help keep a bankrupt wire service alive,” and I wasn’t joking. But my point is that UPI survived its bankruptcy stint, and in fact is still in existence – even if in such a smaller form that a lot of the old-timers who once worked there like to pretend that the news service really “died” once they departed the scene.

UPI LIVES ON, and I expect both Chicago newspapers to continue publishing for the foreseeable future. The real trick is to figure what form they will take.

As far as the Tribune is concerned, I am not a subscriber. I pick the paper up at newsstands or drugstores or wherever I happen to be in the morning. That means I am getting used to seeing the tabloid format version of the newspaper.

And I must admit I am getting used to it. On the rare occasions during the week when I see a broadsheet version of the newspaper, it looks so bloated and awkward to deal with pages that big (even if they’re the smaller-scale version of broadsheet that exists now, compared to what they used to be).

I sense that this period is the adjustment to what the Tribune ultimately will become. If the newspaper were to ultimately die off, it likely would be because the powers that be just didn’t want to adjust to the new reality.

THAT NEW REALITY is the old reality for the Sun-Times, which has been a tabloid ever since the Chicago Sun and the Daily Times merged back in 1948. It is obvious that when it comes to producing a tabloid format newspaper these days in Chicago, the Sun-Times does it better.

But does that really matter?

It could be that the current economic conditions are what finally take down the paper, which for decades has had miserable luck in throwing off the perception that Rupert Murdoch (who was only here on the newspaper scene from 1984-86 before selling the paper so he could buy WFLD-TV) somehow still runs things.

And because the Sun-Times has so aggressively purchased a lot of the significant local newspapers in the outer Chicago suburbs in recent years, their fate is now intertwined.

THOSE SMALLER PUBLICATIONS theoretically should be able to cope better with current business conditions because they have smaller scale operations. They don’t cover as large an area, so they can get by with smaller staffs.

I used to think there was a chance that those suburban papers could wind up bolstering the Sun-Times, helping to prop it up even though those papers probably wished they could have thrown at least some of their profit margins back into their own publications. But could it be that the ghost of Conrad Black (which at times reeks of Rupert Murdoch) will be what drags down a dozen newsgathering organizations throughout the area?

It wouldn’t bother me if I thought anyone would rise up to replace them – even if they were computer-oriented geeks who prefer not to have to publish a physical product. But without all those little staffs and the two “big’ news staffs working downtown, there is going to be a lot less news reported that can be picked upon by various websites.

This is going to be an issue where most people will not realize how bad the problem is until it is too late to do anything about it. And the fact that yet another set of Chicago newspapers is in bankruptcy court is evidence that we’re another step toward that outcome.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Leave it to the Chicago Tribune to publish the memorandum that told (http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-sun-times-letter-march31,0,1344385.story) Chicago Sun-Times employees they, too, now work for a bankrupt company.

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.