Truck probe led to hiring investigation at City Hall

How did the feds begin with dump truck owners greasing palms -- and arrive at politicos scratching backs?

The seeds of the prosecution of the mayor's former patronage chief Robert Sorich and three other men who worked for the city began with the Hired Truck investigation two years earlier.

In October 2002, the FBI began investigating an allegation by a trucking firm owner that the head of the Hired Truck Program, Angelo Torres, had been shaking him down for money in return for getting him city trucking business.

But the investigation did not progress beyond Torres until the Chicago Sun-Times published a three-part series in January 2004 exposing widespread corruption and waste in the $40 million Hired Truck Program. On the third day of the series, the FBI arrested Torres, and the investigation of the Hired Truck Program began.

Bribe-takers became witnesses

Prosecutors subpoenaed city Hired Truck records after the series ran, and investigators fanned out to interview most of the trucking company owners involved in the program. The owners talked and talked. They gave up those getting bribes in city government.

Eleven trucking company owners or managers, for instance, implicated Streets and Sanitation official Robert Ricciarelli, who took $30,000 in bribes, according to his plea agreement with prosecutors.

Ricciarelli turned out to be a key cooperating witness for the government, secretly tape-recording people such as his boss at Streets and Sanitation, Daniel Katalinic.

Prosecutors worked their way up in that city department and others. Katalinic, whose phone was secretly tapped by investigators, cooperated with the FBI, as did another former high-ranking official, Donald Tomczak, who ran the city's water department day to day. Officials such as Tomczak and Katalinic could not only lay out the crooked landscape of the Hired Truck Program, both men could also describe to investigators how the gears worked together in the mayor's political machine.

They told investigators how the mayor's Office of Intergovernmental Affairs doled out city jobs and promotions to reward political workers in the mayor's organization.

Those men and others in the city bureaucracy led prosecutors to the door of Sorich and his colleagues.