Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [42]
Once, when a priest, Father Jim Kastigar, complained about treatment of Hispanics in the town—town officials had ordered a bank that flew a Mexican flag to lower it, and police allegedly would regularly shake down Mexican-Americans for money if they didn’t have a green card—he had his permit denied to hold the annual Way of the Cross procession, a Mexican Catholic tradition. Then the town closed down the church’s kitchen because, officials claimed, they were running a food business without a license. (A church youth group had been selling tamales.) And then the town cut off parking access to the public school across the street, which had always left its lot open for churchgoers on Sunday. “Cicero,” one resident said at the time, “is like the twilight zone.”
When I first met Boyle, he’d just come back to town, and his spirits were high. He referred to Loren-Maltese in terms that probably are best left out of print. “What do you plan to do?” I asked. “I’m applying for a building permit,” he said.
“No,” I tried to clarify. “What are you going to do to go after Loren-Maltese?”
He laughed. “Apply for a building permit.”
“I don’t understand,” I told him.
“I’ll mandamus them,” he said. He planned to sue them. Boyle was going to prick them every chance he got. When an Hispanic candidate challenged Loren-Maltese for reelection, the candidate was followed home from a party and arrested for driving under the influence. Boyle thought it was a setup, and so he filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the arrest reports. And he would show up at city council meetings, where he’d badger Loren-Maltese and address her as “Madam President,” drawing out the syllables, his voice mockingly reverential, as if she were a Third World despot. Once at a town meeting, he urged her to resign, to which she snapped, “Why don’t you shut up and let the people speak.”
When David Niebur, a former police chief, sued the town and Loren-Maltese for wrongfully firing him, Dave and Nadine appeared at every day of the trial, taking notes. Dave identified with Niebur, who had also taken on Cicero’s powers, and, like Dave, had suffered the consequences. Niebur had made the mistake of responding to citizen complaints about the town’s aggressive towing policy. The town had been towing roughly eighteen thousand vehicles a year, and shortly before Niebur had arrived, the town had awarded its sole towing contract—at five hundred dollars a tow, a lucrative deal—to a newly incorporated company that Niebur began to suspect had ties to town officials. The FBI apparently had similar suspicions, and Niebur soon was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury. Then Niebur caught one of the tow firm’s owners rifling through police records. Niebur turned over the department’s towing records to the state police and to the FBI.
One of the things that doesn’t go down well with Cicero’s establishment is assisting the feds, the penultimate outsiders. Niebur testified that the town attorney at one point said to him, “You’re not cooperating with those fuckin’ assholes, are you?” A few days later, Loren-Maltese fired Niebur and publicly called him “stupid” and a “nitwit.” Niebur also testified that when his belongings were sent to him, among them was a figurine of a police officer holding the hand of a lost boy. It had been a gift from his nephew. The head of the police officer had been twisted off and laid neatly next to the statue in the Styrofoam packing. Niebur, who had returned to his hometown of Joplin, Missouri, was awarded $1.7 million.
Within the year, Loren-Maltese was brought up on charges of pilfering more than twelve million dollars from the town, along with a troika of alleged mob-connected men and another former chief of police. It appears that all along, at least in the short time Boyle had been back, Loren-Maltese had been under investigation. She was convicted, and her attorneys pleaded with the judge for a lenient sentence, especially because Loren-Maltese was a single parent to her five-year-old daughter. But it was soon