Foreman 'appalled' by rigged hiring

Jury foreman S. Jay Olshansky, a professor at University of Illinois at Chicago, called the prosecution's case "extraordinarily strong." The panel deliberated four days before reaching its verdicts.

"We were going to take as long as it took to come to the right decision on every count," Olshansky said. "I feel extremely confident that's exactly what we did."

Jurors said they carefully pored over mounds of evidence -- a total of four shopping carts' worth of documents and testimony -- for each of the counts. If they couldn't clearly link a defendant to the alleged crime, they voted to acquit, which they did on three of the nine charges.

"There wasn't enough solid evidence to get a reasonable doubt out of our heads," said juror Jerry Kuykendall, 68, whose son is a Chicago Fire Department captain. "We had four guys' lives in our control. We did not want them to be put in jail because we were taking the law into our own hands and straightening the city out."

Read the Shakman decree

Jurors made it clear that the guilty verdicts weren't intended to send a message to higher-ups in City Hall. They said Daley's name didn't surface during deliberations.

"We didn't look at any other people but the four defendants," said juror Colvin L. Gillon, 56, of the city's Morgan Park neighborhood.

Jurors described a methodical, highly organized roadmap that led them to their final decisions. They started by asking a series of basic questions: Was there hiring fraud? Were job "recommendations" tantamount to orders? They agreed the answer to both questions was yes.

They evaluated the credibility of each witness and color coded the witnesses to keep track of whom their testimony pertained to. They studied the ratings forms used in the hiring process and read the Shakman decree, which prohibits political influence from factoring into most city job hires. The panel of 10 men and two women took turns discussing the evidence on each count before casting secret ballots to hide the identity of any holdouts.

Hugging and shaking hands

"We were very close to a unanimous decision in almost every case," said foreman Olshansky, 52, of Buffalo Grove. The dissenter would write down his or her problem with the vote and jurors would go over the evidence again until everyone agreed.

"We did have disagreements ... but we were reasonable people," Kuykendall said. "The judge said he never saw a jury like us. We were able to get through this without a big blowout. We walked out of there hugging and shaking each other's hands."

The jury convicted Daley's former patronage chief, Robert Sorich, of two counts of mail fraud. Jurors acquitted Sorich of two other mail fraud counts.

Sorich's former deputy, Timothy McCarthy, also was found guilty of two counts of mail fraud, while two other city employees, Patrick Slattery and John Sullivan, were convicted on single counts of mail fraud and lying to an FBI agent, respectively.

Some jurors questioned the wisdom of the defense team's strategy. Kuykendall, for example, wondered why the defense only called two witnesses.

Defense attorneys also introduced a secretly recorded phone call of one of the defendants talking about city job candidates with a political operative. That tape "was probably more hurtful to the defense than not," said juror Neil Jagust, 53, of Lockport.

'How the system worked'

Juror Michael Hall, 52, a truck driver from Algonquin, said the tape showed him "how the system worked" and said he feels "very confident that any 12 people would have come up with the same verdict we came up with."

And that verdict sends a strong message, said Michael L. Shakman, the attorney who successfully fought to remove politics from personnel decisions in most city jobs.

"What the jury said is very important," Shakman said. "The man on the street doesn't think that 'politics as usual' is the way jobs should be allocated in our cities."

Contributing: Monifa Thomas, Chris Fusco, Steve Warmbir and Kent Green