Torres' clout remains a mystery

The Daley administration gave up the ghost Thursday on two priorities stemming from the Hired Truck scandal: privatizing the program and finding out who placed a former gang member in charge of it.

Nineteen months after the Chicago Sun-Times blew the lid off the scandal, City Hall released a pile of documents that track Angelo Torres' personnel history, including three pay raises over a two-month period in 1998 and 14 salary increases over eight years. But the documents shed no light on the identity of Torres' political sponsor.

The closest thing to a smoking gun is the revelation that Torres got his first Shakman-exempt position -- as principal operations research analyst for the Office of Budget and Management on Sept. 1, 1998 -- after sign-off by four city officials.

They are: Victor Reyes, the Hispanic Democratic Organization founder who ran the Mayor's Office of Intergovernmental Affairs at the time; then-Budget Director Barbara Lumpkin; Glenn Carr, the mayor's longtime personnel director who was fired in June, and Robert Sorich, the mayoral patronage chief who was recently indicted in the city hiring scandal.

Observers have long suspected Reyes was responsible for Torres' meteoric rise, citing the Hired Truck czar's past ties to HDO.

Lawyers get involved

But as Intergovernmental Affairs director, Reyes would have signed off on any Shakman-exempt hiring. So would the budget and personnel directors.

Mayoral chief of staff Ron Huberman said he attempted to question all of the present and former city officials who signed the documents, but some of them refused to talk on the advice of attorneys hired to represent them in the ongoing federal investigations.

As much as City Hall wanted to solve the Torres mystery to get a political monkey off Mayor Daley's back, it's not possible, Huberman said. So the question of who put Torres in charge of a program that doled out $38.5 million a year in no-bid trucking business will apparently remain unanswered until the feds choose to solve it.

"Within the last few months, the nature of the investigation has changed," Huberman said. "We have a lot of individuals who are now covered by attorneys. A lot of investigations were done directly through the attorneys. So trying to get the kind of very clear-cut answers that would give us the kind of response that you all have been asking for and we wanted ourselves is just not possible.

"I would like nothing better today than to be able to stand up here today and say, 'These are the individual, the two individuals or the three individuals directly responsible for the hiring of Angelo Torres in these different positions. But ... we're just not able to clearly get that answer. And it would be unfair to throw out names of any sort because we can't conclusively say, 'Those are the people responsible.' "

Reyes insisted yet again Thursday he was not the heavy hand behind Torres' promotion.

"My position is what I've told everyone for the last year and a half, two years" -- that he had nothing to do with putting Torres in charge of the Hired Truck program, Reyes said.

City changes direction

A political protege of state Sen. Tony Munoz (D-Chicago), Torres was sentenced this month to two years in prison for pocketing more than $60,000 in bribes from at least 30 trucking firms and shaking down truckers for at least $10,000 more in campaign contributions.

The Sun-Times first shined a public spotlight on Torres in January 2004, on the first day of a three-part series that touched off the biggest scandal of Daley's 16-year administration. Torres was the first person to be arrested as part of the federal investigation sparked by the Sun-Times series. He was immediately fired.

In February, Daley used his State of the City address to announce he would abolish and privatize the Hired Truck Program. On Thursday, Huberman changed course. Instead of hiring a private contractor to inherit a program that's already been cut in half, he said City Hall has decided to use internal reforms and an upcoming reorganization of the Transportation, Water Management and Streets and Sanitation departments to eliminate the program entirely.

Only two of the four bids received from private trucking companies were "responsive," and the cheapest one would have raised the city's costs by $15 million, according to Huberman. All four bids have been rejected.

"The bottom line is that, in the next 18 months, the Hired Truck Program will be fully eliminated," he said. "And the way that we're going to get there will not be by outsourcing. The way we're going to get there is by restructuring our current agencies in a way that makes better utilization of our current resources."

Contributing: Mark Konkol