`LA PRESIDENTA’

If an office can speak volumes about its occupant, then what statement comes blaring from the smoky inner sanctum of Betty Loren-Maltese at Cicero Town Hall?

Even at midday, the blinds are drawn and the room is as dimly lit as a cocktail lounge. A garden of fake ivy dangles from the walls. Stuffed animals and dozens of clown figurines, one waving a pair of White Sox pennants, are scattered everywhere.

The desk is broad and its wood-laminate top is littered with foot-high mounds of paper, a pair of terrariums, bouquets of artificial flowers, awards, a woodcarving that spells out “La Presidenta,” a statuette of a Democratic donkey lying on its back, with the initials “R.I.P.,” and a police scanner that crackles incessantly.

There are also ashtrays for the two-pack-a-day Loren-Maltese, and three framed photographs: one of her recently adopted daughter, Ashleigh; another of her mixed-breed terrier, Punky; and another–much larger and signed–of heartthrob crooner Julio Iglesias.

Gazing over it all hangs an imposing wall photo of a tuxedoed Frank Maltese, the one-time political boss of Cicero, a confessed mob gambler and Loren-Maltese’s late husband. Nearby is a plaque dedicated to his memory: “This man of opportunity. This man of peace. This man of friendship that will never cease. . . . This man is Frank Maltese.”

It is from this office that Loren-Maltese has presided for five years over a riveting municipal soap opera. She was installed as town president by Maltese and his cronies to fill a vacancy and protect their grip on Cicero’s $70 million annual budget and 500-plus-job town payroll, a patronage sinecure for friends and relatives of those in power.

And ever since, things have been tumultuous, to put it mildly.

Cicero, a blue-collar suburb of 67,000 named for a great Roman orator and statesman, seems to lurch from scandal to scandal these days. A task force of federal investigators is prying into an array of alleged misdeeds from police corruption to political shakedowns to sweetheart deals and misuse of municipal resources. Heightening tension is a nasty civil war in the once chummy ranks of ruling Republicans that has turned friend against friend and raised howls of treachery and deceit.

In the center of the storm is the 48-year-old Loren-Maltese, whose colorful, controversial and puzzling reign over Cicero evokes memories of Chicago under Jane Byrne.

Since taking office in 1993, Loren-Maltese has suggested that gang members be forced to clean up graffiti while wearing pink aprons, called in drug-sniffing dogs to prowl offices of political foes, dumped one-third of the police force for various alleged misdeeds, launched a sweeping purge of critics from her payroll, amassed a campaign war chest that at times has topped $1 million and saw her personal bank records subpoenaed by federal agents who also planted hidden recording devices in Town Hall.

All that has occurred while Loren-Maltese’s personal life was also in tumult. She has seen her husband sentenced to prison and die of cancer. She has also refocused her world around Ashleigh, adopted at birth last year, whom she calls “The Princess.”

At night, they sleep side by side in the nursery at Loren-Maltese’s three-bedroom bungalow, the Princess in a crib and the President in a child-size bed that Ashleigh has yet to grow into. “I still look at her and can’t believe that I have her,” said Loren-Maltese of her only child, momentarily revealing a vulnerability that is usually shielded from view.

Like her office decor, Loren-Maltese is a puzzle of mismatched images: self-deprecating but defensive, brassy but brittle, gregarious but alone.

“I’m really a shy person,” Loren-Maltese declared the other day in between puffs of Carlton 100s. “I’m not what people perceive me to be.”

But coming away with clear perceptions or insights is difficult because Loren-Maltese is definitely not an easy read. She defines herself as a reformer, yet records show that Loren-Maltese showers fat contracts on friends such as former Chicago Ald. Ed Vrdolyak, whose law firm was paid a whopping $500,000 last year by Cicero for legal work. Vrdolyak is Ashleigh’s godfather.

A self-proclaimed take-charge administrator, Loren-Maltese blames virtually every municipal woe on disloyal and incompetent aides. Exhibit A is a swirling controversy over millions of dollars of insurance premiums for Cicero workers that may have disappeared after the town steered its insurance coverage to a fledgling Schaumburg company.

The contract was signed by her predecessor, Loren-Maltese frequently points out, gliding past the fact that the alleged diversions continued for years after she took office.

A caricaturist’s delight, Loren-Maltese sneers with defiance at those who snicker over her exotic bouffant hairdo (she does it herself) and long false lashes (she does those too). “If people don’t like the way I look, well, I’m sorry,” she declares. Yet she is self-conscious enough about yo-yoing weight to pop four to six “natural” diet pills a day, which she bought after hearing their praises sung by disc jockeys on a country-and-western radio station.

Though she appears to govern with a pugnacious zest, Loren-Maltese says she only recently managed to tame severe agoraphobia, a condition that set her heart palpitating and left her sweaty and feeling faint when in open spaces or with crowds of people.

To Loren-Maltese, her critics are rarely just wrong. They’re “crazy,” “racist” or “goofs.” And those are some of the milder adjectives she has used–and in public. At a recent Town Board meeting, Loren-Maltese savaged David Niebur, the police chief she fired after only four months on the job, as “stupid” and a “nitwit.”

Loren-Maltese complains with regularity that the media and her enemies are out to get her, and that she lives in fear. A police car is stationed by her home round-the-clock. The alleged plotting of two fired aides, Niebur’s predecessor, Emil Schullo, and town spokesman Ray Hanania, has become a particular obsession with her.

“When you make changes, you create enemies,” she declared. “There isn’t an in-between with me. People either love me or they hate me.”

In her own mind, Loren-Maltese is much maligned and misunderstood, and she complains of not getting appropriate credit for turning around a town that was a financial basket case with a crumbling infrastructure.

“There is controversy,” she acknowledged, “but I did win in another landslide election (last year) because the people know the positive changes that have happened in town. The majority of the people spoke and liked what they saw.”

She sees herself as crusading against a tide of greedy, backstabbing ex-confidants so craven–she contends–that they huddled around the casket at her husband’s wake a few years ago to begin plotting her demise and divvying up the municipal spoils.

To others, in particular that growing roster of exiled former aides, such assertions show Loren-Maltese to be nothing short of a paranoid, wacky dissembler.

“She’s the type that would cut your legs off,” said Ritchie Schullo, Emil Schullo’s brother and a top Fire Department official who has sued Loren-Maltese over a demotion and subsequent firing. “She would take you in if you were a lost little puppy, but she can turn on you. She’s a vicious, vindictive person.”

But Merrick Rayle, a private attorney who has worked closely with Loren-Maltese during recent crises, insisted that he has never seen her act in “an arbitrary and capricious manner.” “She is tough but balanced and fair,” he said.

Whatever the truth, the picture is rarely simple. Loren-Maltese herself is often the first to make light of herself even while bristling at the insults of others.

“I am not an exciting person,” Loren-Maltese declared, offering as proof the simple fact that she has virtually no social life outside of politics.

“I don’t meet people. And if the newspapers keep writing all this stuff that’s negative about me, I’ll never meet people.”

Since Maltese’s death, she has dated only one man, and that was only briefly. Loren-Maltese said she broke it off because he couldn’t get along with her mother, Kitty, who has lived with her since her father died seven years ago.

Loren-Maltese hasn’t been on a vacation in eight years and has never been out of the country. For recreation, she prefers the solitude of the weekend retreat in northwest Indiana that she and Maltese moved into in 1991. They spruced up the cedar-sided ranch home, which sits on the edge of a small lake, with the help of Cicero town workers.

The home has a boat dock, and the lake is stocked with ample quantities of bluegill, perch and catfish, which Loren-Maltese loves to catch. But she can’t swim, so does most of her fishing from the shore.

Since Ashleigh arrived, Loren-Maltese said she has cut back drastically on her attendance at fundraisers and political affairs and has become more disciplined about working late.

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“I don’t stay here till 10 or 11 at night anymore like I used to,” she said. “I’ve always been a workaholic, but Ashleigh’s the most important thing to me. She can take a bad day and make it a good one.”

Though she has rarely strayed far from Cicero during her life, Loren-Maltese was born in Baton Rouge, La., where her father, Roy Loren, had served a stint in the Army and later settled down to open a tavern and ice cream parlor. Roy Loren, however, was a Chicago native, the son of Lithuanian immigrants who had shortened the family name from Lauranitias.

Only months after Betty was born, Roy Loren’s businesses soured. He packed up his wife, Kitty; his eldest daughter, Pat; and Betty and moved back to Chicago, where he became a janitor.

Settling first on the West Side near Marshall High School, the family moved to Cicero and then to Riverside, where Loren-Maltese attended–and loathed–Riverside-Brookfield High School. It was too cliquish, she complained.

Her family remained in Riverside, but Loren-Maltese flouted residency rules and transferred to Morton East in Cicero as a junior. When Morton officials found out midway through her senior year, they demanded she pay out-of-district tuition. Instead, she dropped out and took a clerk job at a catalog company. By 18 she was married; by 24 she was divorced. She got a GED after that.

She has worked as a waitress, once ran a deli and sold real estate. She even published a community newspaper, setting the type, selling the ads, writing a column and stories and, by her own account, working herself into such a state of exhaustion that she suffered a breakdown and spent months in bed.

But the truly pivotal event in her life occurred the night she went with her mother to a charity bingo game and ran into Maltese, 19 years her senior. “He said if there’s anything he could do for me to let him know and I said `fine,’ and I don’t think I talked to him for another five, six months,” Loren-Maltese explained. “And then he called. We were just friends and had coffee a couple of times. Not boyfriend-girlfriend.”

Things obviously changed, but she’s hazy about exactly when. In the past, Loren-Maltese has said the two were engaged for 17 years before their 1988 marriage. That timetable would push the relationship well back into her first marriage and his second. But she insisted recently that wasn’t the case.

On the other hand, she described her first entree into politics as a fundraiser she attended with Maltese for his friend Vrdolyak, who at the time was running for Cook County assessor. That campaign took place in 1974, years before Maltese left his second wife.

In court papers filed in his 1982 divorce, Maltese listed his address as the same Austin Avenue bungalow owned by Loren-Maltese. He lived for years in the basement while she bunked upstairs, she said.

“You really had to know Frank,” Loren-Maltese said, explaining why she fell for a man a generation her senior. “Frank would help anybody, everybody; he was just that type of person.”

One of the people he helped most was his wife. As Maltese rose though a succession of political and government jobs in Cicero, Loren-Maltese did too. It also didn’t hurt that Maltese’s best friend was Henry Klosak, the town president.

Klosak appointed Loren-Maltese to be his housing commissioner, then head of the Violations Bureau, which collected parking fines, and finally his administrative aide and deputy liquor commissioner.

Maltese was the odds-on choice to someday replace his pal Klosak. But in 1991 Maltese pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy charges after acknowledging that he had been a bookmaker for West Side mob boss Ernest “Rocco” Infelice. About the same time Maltese was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. He died in October 1993 before serving his 9-month prison sentence.

But he was still alive, and serving as town assessor, in late 1992 when Klosak died suddenly of pneumonia. Maltese and his Republican pals needed a replacement who wouldn’t rock the boat and settled on Maltese’s wife, who was installed by the Town Board as an interim replacement for Klosak in January 1993.

With Maltese pulling the strings, Loren-Maltese was at first a refreshing whirlwind. She appointed a youth commission, started a senior housing program, privatized garbage collection and forced a cleanup of weedy lots and abandoned buildings.

There were also loopy publicity stunts designed to shake Cicero’s shady image as the former headquarters of Al Capone. In one, Loren-Maltese turned to creative cartography to proclaim Cicero the birthplace of novelist Ernest Hemingway. (He was born in Oak Park in 1899, when it was unincorporated and still part of Cicero Township.)

Still, her honeymoon in office was a brief one. Only months after her appointment, Loren-Maltese won a raucous contest for a full term marked by several rock-throwing incidents and an accusation that she publicly flipped the finger at supporters of an opponent, something she flatly denied.

Since then, she won another election and has surrounded herself with a revolving door of aides and advisers. Perhaps the biggest constant has been Vrdolyak, the Democratic wheeler-dealer turned Republican who Loren-Maltese says checked in almost daily on her husband when he was dying.

At one time she was also tight with former Police Chief Schullo–who once was charged with burglary but had the indictment quashed on a technicality–and Hanania, a former reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times who left abruptly after being caught doing political work on the side.

But by 1996, about the same time word began to leak of the federal corruption probe in Cicero, Loren-Maltese turned on Schullo, Hanania and other associates with a vengeance, firing several of them and dumping others from her 1997 re-election slate. Many of those former aides formed a rival slate.

According to Hanania, the split became painfully apparent at the town’s ethnic festival that summer when Loren-Maltese hunkered down in the bingo tent, avoiding Schullo and other Republican leaders who had planted themselves at the Italian beef stand.

Loren-Maltese said she acted after learning that members of her inner circle had been plotting since her husband’s death in 1993 to stage a coup against her leadership.

“In ’96, I learned about a conversation that occurred at the wake right in front of Frank’s casket that included Emil, Ray Hanania and a couple of others about how they were going to take over the town and knock me out,” said Loren-Maltese, who declined to reveal the source of her information. “They would bide their time but have everything in line (for the 1997 municipal election).”

Schullo and Hanania said the only plot to topple Loren-Maltese was in her own mind. “To her the job was personal,” Hanania said. “She became vindictive, striking out at people who had been loyal to her for years.”

Loren-Maltese went on to wallop her enemies at the polls, but things have hardly calmed in her second term as the federal probe into both the town’s finances and her own intensifies.

She has steadfastly denied any wrongdoing and insists she is blissfully unconcerned by the investigation. “I don’t think the feds are on the attack,” Loren-Maltese said. “I think they’re only doing their jobs. People can say whatever they want.”

In Cicero, they usually do.

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