COLUMN ONE : ‘Thousand Points of Corruption’ : A travel guide practically guarantees tourists that a Chicago official will be indicted during their stay. The fabled machine may be gone, but dirty politics is alive and well.

CHICAGO —  Once a week or so, Fred Roti makes his regular rounds through a warren of cubicles in Chicago’s City Hall where aldermen, the city’s council representatives, conduct routine business on their way to and from chambers.

A pint-sized powerbroker who served for 23 years as alderman from the city’s populous 1st Ward, Roti, 72, no longer makes his visits in an official capacity. Rather, they are an exercise in nostalgia for a man who recently suffered the occupational hazard of Chicago politicians--a federal corruption conviction.

“He really doesn’t have anywhere else to go,” says Alderman Ted Mazola, Roti’s successor in the ward, which spans the Loop financial district and blighted housing projects. “This place was his life.”

Roti, who resigned before he was found guilty by a jury last month for taking bribes to influence court and zoning cases, is the 18th Chicago alderman in the last 20 years to be convicted of misconduct in office. It is an unenviable streak matched by Operation Greylord, the 1981 federal undercover sting that resulted in the convictions of 12 Cook County judges and three dozen lawyers, and skeins of other prosecutions leveled in recent years against scores of officials in the city and several neighboring suburbs.

Fresh corruption cases are such a common feature of the political landscape here that tourists are advised by the Gault-Millau travel guide that they are “almost guaranteed one or two criminal indictments of public officials during even a short stay.” According to one University of Illinois study, 110 elected officials and 377 government workers were indicted in the Chicago area between 1970 and 1987. The majority were convicted.

Veteran reformers predict that real change is coming. The city’s once-fabled Democratic political machine has already splintered into mutually hostile fiefdoms. And an ethics code and a cadre of internal inspectors now provide a framework to shake up the city’s cozy existing order.

Yet the burst of federal activity over the past month also shows the glacial pace of altering what reformers describe as the region’s underlying culture of corruption. Just this week, a federal jury upheld bribery charges against the former Republican mayor and two council members of the blue-collar suburb of Chicago Heights. Prosecutor Chris Gair found it “hard to imagine a town more corrupt,” forgetting, for a moment, the metropolis to the north. The deputy commander of the Cook County sheriff’s office, a leading Republican, was recently indicted. And cases loom against a former Chicago city clerk and yet another municipal judge.

“The machine itself may be pretty much dead but the political tradition that it bred is still alive,” says former alderman Dick Simpson, a University of Illinois professor who ran a losing campaign last year against Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), the House Ways and Means Committee chairman and himself the target of a Washington grand jury probe.

Experienced prosecutors like Assistant U.S. Atty. Gary Shapiro, who directs the office’s criminal cases, have few illusions about their work: “We have 1,000 points of corruption here. You can’t come in and change that overnight.”

Many Chicagoans tend to agree, resigning themselves to a government perpetually oiled by graft. Some, says Governors State University political science professor Paul Green, find a “perverted sense of satisfaction” in their corrupt politicos, as if they were the public sector equivalent of Mike Ditka’s once-daunting Chicago Bears football team.

And then there are those who view corruption as a simple financial transaction. A 1987 survey of business executives by Crain’s Chicago Business weekly found 21% willing to pay a $100 bribe to a city inspector to “speed up procedures.”

“They’re all crooks here,” says taxi driver Robert Rice. “It’s just that some are just better at it than others.”

Rice should know. His stepfather, a loyal West Side Democratic Party precinct captain dating back to the 1930s, complained constantly after his retirement that “he never got the same level of graft everybody else he knew got.

“He figured he had it coming,” Rice says. “They all do.”

Nowhere is the incremental crawl of reform--and the city’s stake in its success--more visible than in the 1st Ward, where the feudal political apparatus that spawned Fred Roti held sway for decades.

Shaped like an automatic weapon, the ward is awash in temptation for weak-willed politicians. It contains City Hall and the financial district, bustling Italian and Chinese restaurant districts, the University of Illinois at Chicago campus and swelling residential pockets of wealthy professionals.

The 1st Ward’s influence dates to the turn of the 19th Century, when prototypal political bosses Michael (Hinky Dink) Kenna and (Bathhouse) John Coughlin pioneered the tactic of using derelicts to vote early and often. Their most recent successor, 1st Ward Committeeman John D’Arco Sr., although less flamboyant, wielded power just as baldly--often aided, say law enforcement authorities, by an organized crime faction dominated by the late Tony Accardo, who once served as a driver for Al Capone.

“It was an open secret for years that the 1st Ward pols and the street crews worked hand in hand,” says Jerry D. Gladden, chief investigator for the Chicago Crime Commission.

Dispensing patronage and favors, D’Arco and an aide, Patrick Marcy, ruled daily life in the ward, say politically attuned residents. “If you wanted a street light fixed or an eyesore cleaned, you cleared it with Pat,” says Florence Scala, a longtime activist in the ward’s Italian stronghold. “If there wasn’t a deal involved, Fred preferred not to be bothered.”

A ghost within his own ward, Roti kept to City Hall, kibitzing in the council press room, tending to family (17 Roti relatives were on the city payroll) and acting as council weather vane for a succession of mayors, signaling with his thumb at the start of each roll call how the rest of the aldermen should line up.

Federal authorities finally acted on the persistent rumors of corruption in 1986, launching Operation Gambat to expose “the loyalties to organized crime and the 1st Ward that existed high in the judiciary and City Hall,” says Anton R. Valukas, a former U.S. attorney who is now in private practice.

The sting--short for “gambling attorney”--was named for the wagering habits of federal informant Robert J. Cooley, a defense lawyer with a penchant for placing large bets with bookmakers. Agreeing to work for the government in exchange for immunity from prosecution, Cooley later testified that almost “every day” of his recent career, he paid off judges, prosecutors, policemen and others “to be successful in court.”

Roti’s role in the process became apparent after federal agents planted a video camera and bugging devices inside the black vinyl cushion of a booth at Counsellors Row restaurant, a now-defunct eatery where lawyers and political denizens gathered daily. The camera and a tape recorder hidden in Cooley’s suit caught Roti loudly counting bribe money. Once, as he pocketed a payoff, Roti asked the informant: “You got an envelope?”

Prosecutors, in fact, were after bigger scores than Roti. “Every time we put out bait,” says a source close to the case, “Roti was the first to bite. For a while there, he was so eager to get his take, nobody else could get close.”

But by the operation’s conclusion, prosecutors had enough to convict Roti, former state Sen. John D’Arco Jr.--son of the elderly ward leader--and former Circuit Court Judge David Shields. Cases are still pending against Marcy and another judge, Thomas Maloney.

Planning to appeal his conviction, Roti would not discuss his case prior to his sentencing, said his attorney, Thomas Breen.

The 1st Ward’s regulars are still around these days, but new alderman Mazola, a real estate entrepreneur elected in 1992 to replace Roti, claims their clout is gone. Constituent calls are now routed through his office and he takes care to appear at community meetings. “Anything of an official nature has to come through me,” Mazola says.

In Chicago, such changes are not made by will alone. Shortly after Operation Gambat was launched, and under pressure from late Mayor Harold Washington, the council passed the city’s first ethics code, a landmark act that reformers such as Terry Breuner, director of the independent Better Government Assn., “never expected to see in my lifetime.” Regulating conduct and imposing firings and other administrative remedies, the ordinance was strengthened after the 1989 election of Mayor Richard M. Daley, son of the city’s last great boss, Richard J. Daley.

The younger Daley, a former county prosecutor who has stressed clean government as an issue, has pushed through campaign funding limits and passage of an independent inspector general’s department with subpoena power over most city departments. Only the aldermen remain unanswerable to inspectors, an exemption that some reformers say is the main defect.

Alex Vroustouris, the city’s first inspector general, says his staff of 25 police and 20 civilian inspectors has already made an impact, cracking down on city building inspectors who extorted bribes and 1st Ward city maintenance workers who rarely showed up for work.

Some law enforcement authorities say the inspectors have made a difference, cooperating with their agencies to broaden administrative cases into criminal prosecutions. Others say that the bulk of Vroustouris’ cases have been lodged against low-level miscreants, rarely targeting the widespread graft schemes regularly exposed by federal probes.

Similarly, the city’s ethics ordinance both is praised for setting clear rules for officials and workers to follow, and belittled as a paper tiger so full of loopholes “it could grate cheese,” scoffs one reformer.

Harriet McCullough, who served as director of the city’s first Ethics Board until resigning to work as a private consultant, says the ordinance’s great strength is its sweep, covering more than 40,000 city officials. Yet she acknowledges its flaws. Among them, she says, are loose financial disclosure requirements and a section covering aldermen that is ultimately enforceable only by the council itself.

She claims limited success. “We had 100 cases our first year,” McCullough says. “The next year it was 200. More and more department heads would tell their people: ‘You better check with the ethics people first.’ ”

Among those who sought advice were Mazola, Roti’s successor. Soon after his election, he realized that the real estate agents he employs might expose him to conflict-of-interest charges if they sold property to the city.

But Mazola didn’t call the Ethics Board. Seeking a “definitive answer,” he went to a higher source, former Illinois Supreme Court Judge Seymour Simon, who had helped Daley fine-tune the ethics law. Mazola says Simon advised him that he would have no problems as long as he was not intimately involved in any city property sales.

“I could probably get in trouble once a week if I wanted to,” says Mazola. “People come to me with incredible schemes.”

One supplicant wanted Mazola to use his clout to grease the path for the opening of a juice bar for teen-agers in the 1st Ward--despite Mazola’s own attempts to make it tougher for such nonalcoholic, youth-oriented nightspots to win permits. “This guy says, ‘Look, let me make you a silent partner.’ I told him, ‘Thanks a lot, now get the hell out of my office.’ ”

Hard-eyed neighbors from the 1st Ward wonder whether Mazola, who professes to be a new breed, is not all that different from the old precinct regulars. Human frailties, not legal reforms, they say, really govern the pace of change in Chicago.

During Mazola’s election campaign, the cynics say, he ran with the quiet support of the old men from the 1st Ward. And even if he rarely takes their calls any more, the common wisdom goes, he would only supplant their faltering organization with his own.

“People down here are just accustomed to power always being wielded over their lives, I guess,” says Florence Scala, one of the cynics. “Chicagoans always sound so tough and hardened about their politics. The sad thing is that we’re really helpless. As long as things stay the same, all we can do is sit here and sound tough.”