It`s good to have friends in high places, and so it must have been with some joy that Fred Sudak greeted the news of Eugene Sawyer`s election as mayor.
But Sawyer`s success, along with Sudak`s recent realization of a longtime ambition to become a judge, has been eclipsed by a decade-old business transaction between the heretofore obscure alderman and his lawyer friend.
Less than three weeks since Sawyer`s election and three months since Sudak`s appointment to the Cook County Circuit Court, the judge has landed in center court in a controversy as convoluted as Sawyer`s rise to mayor.
If the public knew little about Sawyer when the 6th Ward alderman succeeded the late Mayor Harold Washington on Dec. 2, they knew even less known about Sudak. The Tribune reported last weekend that Sudak paid a $20,000 fee to Sawyer in the late 1970s, about the time Sudak`s law firm was representing developers seeking a zoning change in Sawyer`s ward.
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Sawyer, after originally confirming the fee, now says the payment totaled $30,000 and was his reward for helping Sudak arrange a bank loan in 1978.
”Had it been for zoning, I would not have taken a check,” the mayor said Friday. ”You know, if somebody`s going to cut a deal, you wouldn`t take a check. You`d try to take cash.”
Through recent interviews with his friends and business associates and a review of public records, Sudak, 57, is emerging as someone who is well known in political circles, though he never has achieved a high public profile.
Starting 30 years ago with his membership in the Young Democrats-the farm team for future political leaders where he met Sawyer-Sudak has nurtured friendships with some of the party`s most prominent local figures. They in turn repeatedly have helped Sudak, who has spent much of his legal career drawing public funds through the largesse of powerful politicians.
Repeated attempts to interview Sudak for this story were unsuccessful.
According to Alan Sohn, a former partner in a law firm where Sudak once worked, Sudak ”specialized in bringing in business. Fred had a way of making you think he was the world`s best lawyer.”
Among the political friendships that proved profitable to Sudak was one with Edmund Kelly, who for 14 years was general superintendent of the patronage-rich Chicago Park District until Washington ousted him 18 months ago. Sudak`s ”a very nice fellow, always volunteering to help anyone,” Kelly said.
But Sudak`s assistance sometimes came with a price tag.
According to George Galland, who became park district general counsel for a year when Washington`s forces ousted Kelly, records showed that Sudak had been retained as outside counsel to represent the park district in worker`s compensation cases during Kelly`s reign. But Galland found on reviewing Sudak`s billings that he was charging the agency for work that he was passing on to Richard Sorman, a young associate in a law firm adjoining Sudak`s office.
”It turned out that Fred wasn`t doing any work on these cases, so I essentially laid down the law that I was willing to pay Sorman to defend the cases but not Sudak,” Galland said. ”It was clear to me that Sudak had gotten the work through political connections but just passed it on to Sorman to do.
”What was unacceptable about the arrangement was that it ended up costing the park district money to pay both the lawyer who does the work and the lawyer who brought in the work,” Galland said. ”It was really almost equivalent to the Sudak-Sawyer arrangement. It amounted to a finder`s fee.”
Sorman, who now bills the park district directly for his work, confirmed that Sudak engaged him to handle the cases, though he would not say what his fees were.
”I would send a statement to Sudak, he would send a statement to the park district,” Sorman said. ”If that bill was enhanced or increased, I don`t know. In essence, I worked for Fred as well as the park district.”
While practicing as a private attorney, Sudak was retained by Cook County Treasurer Ed Rosewell to be superintendent of tax collections from 1979 until he became a judge in September, records show. Rosewell, who said he met Sudak in the 1950s during their membership in the Young Democrats, was paying Sudak $1,908 a month in county funds when Sudak left to join the court.
”Freddy was the best man I ever had in that position,” Rosewell said of Sudak, who filed claims in Bankruptcy Court for the county. ”I wish I still had him.”
On the day Sudak left the treasurer`s office, his wife, Jan, was hired by the county Office of Education Services. She is paid $1,101 a month as a bookkeeping machine operator, according to records.
In addition, Sudak until last May was the lawyer for Central Stickney Elementary School District 110, a one-school district in unincorporated Cook County that was placed on probation last year after state auditors found widespread travel-spending abuses.
Sudak worked for the district for ”at least 8 years, probably 10,”
according to district Supt. James Nelson. Nelson said Sudak resigned in May
”because he had other outside interests. His job became too much for him.” Sudak was not implicated in the auditors` findings, which included evidence that school officials had shredded three years` worth of records related to spending.
Just before his appointment to the Circuit Court in September, Sudak also made about $2,700 in city taxpayer money for five weeks of work as a consultant to the City Council Committee on Finance. According to Edwin Bell, the committee`s chief administrative officer, Sudak was placed on the payroll to draft a bill creating an aldermanic pension fund.
But such a bill never was introduced, and council members unsuccessfully tried to ride piggyback on a county retirement bill passed last month by the Illinois General Assembly. According to a Finance Committee source, Mayor Sawyer, then the powerful chairman of the City Council`s Committee on Rules, sponsored Sudak for his committee job.
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Sudak`s statement of economic interest indicates that his private and public practices have been profitable. According to the statement he filed this year with the clerk of the Illinois Supreme Court, he owns a condominium at 1360 Sandburg Terrace in Chicago and a condominium in Hollywood, Fla., and is a limited partner in a condominium in Paradise Valley, Ariz.
Yet county records also show that liens had been placed against Sudak and his wife for nearly $54,000 in federal income taxes that had gone unpaid in 1976, 1983 and 1984. The Internal Revenue Service has since removed the liens. Sudak, who Sohn says ”always wanted to be a judge from the first time I`d known him,” now earns $80,599 on the Circuit Court bench. He was appointed to the post to fill a vacancy, but he has been slated by the county Democratic Party for the March primary election. Sawyer was vice chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party committee that endorsed Sudak.