ATLANTA — A senior aide to a former mayor of Atlanta collapses on a courtroom floor after hearing that she is headed to prison.

F.B.I. agents in Los Angeles haul away computers and documents during a raid of a veteran councilman’s office.

News cameras trail the most powerful alderman in Chicago as he walks to court to face a charge of attempted extortion.

Federal prosecutors in Philadelphia accuse a powerful labor boss of keeping a key city councilman on his union’s payroll.

Four of America’s largest cities are under the dark clouds of major federal corruption investigations. Residents, politicians and power brokers in all of them are holding their breath, waiting for signs of how deeply their civic cultures will be shaken.

The investigations raise questions not just about who else might be caught up in them, but also about whether there can be any lasting cure for the chronic corruption problems that seem to dog big cities, so often dominated by a single party or political machine.

In Chicago, Dick Simpson, a former alderman who is a political scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, called corruption a part of the municipal culture there. To change that, he said, “you have to not only destroy the political machine, but also actually create a history of clean government — that’ll be decades of work.”

Engulfed by Scandal

The investigations have already had a palpable impact.

In Chicago, the criminal charges against Alderman Ed Burke have created all kinds of complications for the municipal elections set for Feb. 26. Political insiders are watching uncomfortably to see whether the scandal will harm any of the 14 candidates vying to succeed Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

In Atlanta, Kasim Reed, who was mayor from 2010 to 2018, has not been implicated in the investigation swirling around his former administration, and he has vigorously maintained his innocence. Even so, the scandal has effectively sidelined Mr. Reed, once a rising Democratic star in the South and one of Georgia’s most powerful politicians.

Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles is not a known target of the widening probe in his city, either, though two of his appointees are under scrutiny, including a former deputy mayor. Last week, Mr. Garcetti put an end to months of speculation about his presidential ambitions by announcing that he would not seek the Democratic nomination in 2020.

A federal indictment in the Philadelphia case, announced on Wednesday, centers on a union leader with major influence in city and state politics, and includes as a co-defendant the majority leader on the City Council, Bobby Henon, a former official of the union. Mr. Henon issued a statement saying he had done nothing wrong.

The Chicago and Los Angeles metropolitan areas are the two most corrupt in the United States, based on the number of federal public corruption convictions from 1976 to 2016, according to researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Philadelphia comes in at No. 8.

Atlanta did not make the Top 10 in that study, but even so, the civic conversation in the South’s most important city is strongly influenced by the 2006 conviction of another former mayor, Bill Campbell, on tax evasion charges stemming from an earlier corruption investigation.

Contracts and Coziness

These investigations often expose webs of small-bore wrongdoing. The bribes that Katrina Taylor-Parks, the woman who collapsed in court Jan. 14, had pleaded guilty to accepting from a city vendor in Atlanta added up to just $4,000. Ms. Taylor-Parks, a former deputy chief of staff to Mr. Reed, returned to court last week, and the judge sentenced her to 21 months in prison.

But her case is one facet of a wide-ranging investigation examining construction contracts, the use of city-issued credit cards, and lucrative concessions at the city’s international airport. It has already led to the conviction of two contractors, who each bribed a city official; a former chief procurement officer for the city, who accepted bribes; and a man named Shandarrick Barnes, who threw a brick through the window at one of the contractor’s homes, warning him not to cooperate with investigators. He also placed dead rodents on the property.

Those gangster-movie touches have come with a decidedly Atlantan twist. Mr. Barnes had business ties to a woman named Mitzi Bickers, who has made headlines over the years as a pioneering gay politician, as a president of the Atlanta public school board, as the pastor of a predominantly African-American Baptist church, and as a controversial political consultant. She was indicted in April on charges that she accepted more than $2 million in bribes when she was the city’s human services director. Ms. Bickers has pleaded not guilty to all the charges.

Mr. Reed’s successor as mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, took office in January 2018, and a big part of her job has been dealing with the mess — rebidding airport contracts, listing the tiniest of city transactions with vendors on a public website, and naming a new “transparency officer.”

In Los Angeles, where the downtown skyline is studded with construction cranes, investigators are focused on cozy relationships between politicians and the real estate executives who write checks to their campaigns and charitable causes.

Such coziness has worried environmentalists and urban activists for decades, the more so now that the city’s neglected downtown is undergoing a renaissance, awash in money from Chinese real estate developers. The F.B.I. is paying attention now as well.

Ever since the raid in November on the office and home of Jose Huizar, the City Council member whose district includes much of downtown, federal agents have been scouring his records for details of his financial connections to developers. (Asked for comment, Mr. Huizar’s lawyers issued a statement saying that Mr. Huizar “continues to work on behalf of the cultural, residential and commercial revitalization of Downtown Los Angeles,” but did not address the investigation.)

A sign that the investigation extends far beyond Mr. Huizar surfaced recently when a researcher stumbled on a search warrant from July, indicating that the F.B.I. was looking for evidence of bribery, extortion and money laundering involving Chinese real estate investors, city politicians and their aides, including two of Mr. Garcetti’s appointees.

The warrant described a sprawling web of possible corruption. Investigators appeared to be looking at whether campaign donations were traded for promises of project approvals, and whether there was outright bribery. The search was centered on an email account belonging to Ray Chan, a former deputy mayor.

The investigators have yet to charge anyone with a crime. Even so, the investigation is rattling the city, and evoking its history of shady real estate dealings as it grew rapidly in the early 20th century, immortalized in the 1974 film “Chinatown.”

“This is our new Chinatown,” said Jill Stewart, executive director of Coalition to Preserve L.A., an activist group that promotes transparency in government. “There was a huge amount of land use corruption. That’s always been a part of L.A.’s historic DNA.”

Mr. Garcetti has sought to distance himself from any wrongdoing.

“I am not responsible a hundred percent for everybody’s actions in this building, elected officials and staff,” the mayor said at a recent news conference. “But I do take my responsibility seriously, and I do expect every city employee to participate fully and cooperate fully with the F.B.I.”

The investigation has revived efforts led by David Ryu, a City Council member, to limit contributions by real estate developers to city politicians’ campaigns and charitable causes.

“There is a perception that exists that local politicians are influenced by developers, or special interests,” Mr. Ryu said. “If this perception exists, real or not, we have to do everything to root it out.”

A Widening Net

Chicago has 50 aldermen on its City Council, but none carried more weight than Mr. Burke, 75, the longest-serving member and the former longtime chief of the powerful finance committee.

Federal authorities say he ran an old-school shakedown, threatening to stall city permissions to remodel a fast-food restaurant unless the owner hired Mr. Burke’s private law firm for real-estate tax work.

“I’ve done nothing wrong,” Mr. Burke told reporters in early January after his first court appearance.

Mr. Burke, who is married to Anne Burke, a justice on the Illinois Supreme Court, resigned his committee chairmanship, and a flurry of proposals quickly emerged for new ethics rules at City Hall prompted by his case. But he said he would go right on seeking re-election to the seat he has held since 1969.

In recent days, tantalizing new revelations have emerged, raising the specter of a widening net: Local news media reported that another alderman has cooperated with federal authorities, secretly recording conversations for months with people at City Hall.

Joe Moore, another Chicago alderman, said the mud from corruption cases tends to splash unfairly on all the city’s politicians. Corruption, he said, is “not the ‘Chicago Way,’ as people like to say — frankly, it’s the human way. Humans are fallible creatures.”

Richard Fausset reported from Atlanta, Monica Davey from Chicago, and Tim Arango from Los Angeles.

Source: Read Full Article