Outside the Rosemont Theatre, Donald E. Stephens, founder, mayor, creator of Rosemont, gets behind the wheel of his Mercedes and heads west through a seemingly endless parking lot. He’s giving a tour of his village, and this is something he doesn’t want his visitors to miss: a lone industrial building, surrounded by asphalt, at the very rear of the property.
This large area between River Road and the Tri-State Tollway was, until recently, covered by a grid of streets and long, one-story, six-unit buildings that housed ma-and-pa factories, warehouses and small offices.
In the early years of Rosemont, Stephens worked hard to attract such industrial development to the then-virgin town. But, four decades later, he is in the process of erasing such handiwork to make way for the latest of his mega-projects–mega-projects that have included the Rosemont Convention Center, the Rosemont Horizon, and, now, the theater and its parking lot.
As usual, Stephens invoked the village’s municipal powers to condemn the land, buy it from the owners and then level it. And, as usual, there was someone who was slowing him down-in this case, Commercial Carpentry Corp., an Arlington Heights firm that had a six-year lease on a warehouse in one of the six-unit structures. Commercial Carpentry wanted top dollar to surrender its lease; Stephens didn’t want to pay top dollar. So he came up with a typical–or him–solution.
He had two-thirds of the building chopped off, leaving Commercial Carpentry and one other tenant marooned in the vast expanse of parking. (All other tenants had moved out.)
“I told them, `Just cut it off here.’ He couldn’t believe we did that,” Stephens says, enjoying the memory.
The other tenant quickly agreed to move, but Commercial Carpentry held out. For more than a year, the firm put up with such irritations as chains that blocked the parking lot entrances and snowplows that cleared the lot but left mountains of snow around the warehouse, before reaching a settlement and agreeing to leave this spring.
“He couldn’t believe it,” Stephens says, still chortling, as he turns the Mercedes away and heads for another stop on the tour, “when we chopped the building off.”
Donald Stephens is one of a kind. He has been compared to Mayor Richard J. Daley, Chicago’s legendary “Boss” and the father of the city’s present chief executive. And there are some parallels.
Stephens, like Daley, is a builder–a builder of big things. He’s a political lord, controlling his town with an iron fist and wielding statewide influence through force of personality, vision and campaign funding. He’s blunt, engaging, ruthless, single-minded, friendly, hard-working, and no slave to fashion. And he has ruled his town for 41 years, nearly twice as long as Daley was in office.
But Daley held sway over a city of 3 million people. Stephens’ empire has fewer than 4,000 residents.
When Daley took over Chicago in 1955, he was heading up one of the greatest metropolises in the world. A year later, when Stephens was elected village president of the newly incorporated Rosemont, he was taking on a tiny flood-plagued corner of Cook County, an area of truck farms, roadside restaurants, garbage dumps, brothels and a single subdivision.
In the intervening decades, however, Chicago has struggled while Rosemont has boomed. And it has been O’Hare International Airport that has made the difference.
In the mid-1950s, everyone knew that O’Hare would have an impact on the metropolitan region, but no one could imagine just how far-reaching that impact would be. Daley, with the help of his tiny neighbor, Rosemont, fought off a suburban effort to snatch control of the airfield from Chicago. But, even though he won the battle, Daley lost the war.
Over the decades, O’Hare was the single most significant factor in the shift of power from Chicago to the suburbs. The airport acted like a huge economic magnet, drawing people, industry, offices, stores, businesses and wealth away from the city. Because of their proximity to the airport, the northwest suburbs and DuPage County not only experienced 40 years of explosive growth but now also operate as the power brokers of Illinois politics.
However, no one reaped the O’Hare harvest as cannily or as thoroughly as Don Stephens. Early on, he decided to take full advantage of the airport and the intricate network of highway connections in and around his 4.5-square-mile village. Rosemont wouldn’t be a bedroom community. It would be a going concern, a commercial enterprise. It would turn a profit.
Today, little of the original Rosemont remains. Gone are the onion fields, the roadside amusements, the farm stands and the sleaze, all plowed under to make way for towering hotels and high-rise office buildings. Gone are the gas stations and the garbage dumps, replaced by the convention center, the Horizon and the theater, mammoth arenas that have transformed Rosemont into a key entertainment center for the Chicago metropolitan region and a major convention site for the nation.
While other suburban governments struggle to make ends meet, Rosemont is awash in money.
“Rosemont is unique,” says state Sen. Martin Butler (R., Park Ridge), who has known and dealt with Stephens for nearly 30 years. “Don has been tremendously effective in creating Rosemont in his own image. He literally started with almost a blank piece of property. He didn’t have to concern himself with residents’ attitudes or views.”
If Chicago’s north, northwestern and western suburbs have their own downtown, it’s Rosemont.
It even has morning and evening rush hours. And, if the personal rapid transit system (small automated vehicles on an elevated guideway) approved by the Regional Transportation Authority for Rosemont, is built by the year 2000, as Stephens hopes, the village will have its own Loop, a 2.2-mile-long line circling the convention center and the major hotels along River Road.
Nearly 24,000 people work in Rosemont, six times the population. In any given week, the village, which is situated at the northeast corner of O’Hare, astride the airport’s only highway entrance, plays host to an average of more than 64,000 conventioneers, concert-goers, sports fans and other visitors. In the course of a year, an estimated 3.4 million people attend events in Rosemont.
Rosemont is where Jay Leno set up shop last year when he came “to Chicago” for a week. Frank Sinatra has performed in Rosemont, and Bruce Springsteen. Fleetwood Mac was the opening act at the Horizon; Barry Manilow at the Rosemont Theatre. Major League Baseball owners have held their annual meetings in Rosemont; so, too, the National Football League. George Bush made two stops in Rosemont–little Rosemont–during his 1992 presidential race, and Ross Perot held an anti-NAFTA rally there in 1993.
Rosemont is on the nation’s map, even the world’s, in a way that no Chicago suburb can match. And other suburban mayors and officials look at Rosemont with a mix of envy and abhorrence.
The village’s massive tax revenues from commercial property–Rosemont has an annual budget of more than $93 million–means political peace. It’s easy for Stephens to keep the few thousand residents happy by providing a high level of deluxe services, such as annual home improvement grants, actually back-door property tax rebates, of hundreds of dollars.
But, with all its commercial development, Rosemont is like, well, downtown Chicago.
“When I was mayor of Park Ridge,” Martin Butler says, “we wanted to have a residential community, so we resisted the very things Don would push hard for.”
“We work together. We’re a family. This is like the family business.”
Speaking is Don Stephens II, the son of the Rosemont mayor and the village’s public safety director. He has a backache. Every few months or so, his back will tighten up on him, and this is one of those times.
But it’s not just his back that’s making him uncomfortable as he sits behind his desk in the marble-walled and dark wood-paneled Rosemont village hall. It’s the questions he’s being asked about the future, about his future and the village’s future once his father is gone.
“He ain’t gonna retire,” says Stephens II. “This is like his hobby. We’ve got the antique cars, the antique boats, but he always comes back to Rosemont.”
That’s the way it has been from as early as the 44-year-old Stephens, known around town as Donnie, can remember. “In my younger years, all he concentrated on was on making this town what it is today. When he was home, he was probably the best father you could ask for. But he wasn’t around a lot. He had Rosemont on his mind constantly.”
Growing up, the mayor’s namesake son had no desire to follow in his father’s footsteps. His goal was to become a policeman, and, in May, 1974, he joined the Rosemont police department. (His own son, Donald Stephens III, is now a radio dispatcher for the village.) Two years later, Stephens II lost the use of his left arm following a motorcycle accident, but remained on the force, serving in a number of jobs, including head of the important auxiliary police responsible for directing traffic for the frequent concerts and other special events in the village.
Then, in 1985, his father asked him to serve as deputy mayor, and it was clear he was being groomed as the mayor’s eventual successor. (The elder Stephens, like many suburban village presidents, is called mayor.) But it was an awkward fit. Unlike his father, Don Stephens II is a shy man of modest tastes and interests.
“I felt when I took over as deputy mayor,” he says, “that people were expecting me to live up to what he’s done, and there’s no way in hell, I mean, he’s one of a kind.”
After a difficult 10 years, Stephens was able to convince his father to let him shift over to run the village’s combined police and fire operations as public safety director.
No one has replaced him as deputy mayor, but, as he has receded from the limelight, his two younger brothers, Mark and Bradley, have become more involved in “the family business.”
Bradley has been a village board member since 1989, and is the supervisor for Leyden Township, where his father is the Republican committeeman. Mark, an attorney, has been chairman of the Triton College board since 1992, and his BoMark Cleaners has the contract, worth about $2 million a year, to clean the Rosemont Convention Center.
Their father, who was called “the boy mayor” when he first took office, turned 69 in March, and the question of a successor remains open.
“I know he’s the boss,” the younger Donald Stephens says. “He’s done it all. I don’t think I’m worthy of (being mayor). I don’t think my two brothers are worthy of it.”
Mayor Donald E. Stephens tells this story:
It was the mid-1960s, and he was being investigated yet again, this time by Charles Siragusa, executive director of the Illinois Crime Commission. After shipping a batch of records to the commission’s Loop office, Stephens went there himself for a lengthy interview with the former federal lawman, carefully recorded by a court reporter.
When it was over, the two men found themselves standing side by side in the men’s room.
“Mayor Stephens,” Siragusa said, with a mix of amazement and consternation, “you make more money than I do.”
“Mr. Siragusa,” Stephens replied, “is that a crime?”
Stephens is a former high school and semi-pro football lineman, and he retains a lineman’s hard-nosed, straight-ahead, ramrod sense of self. There’s no room for embarrassment at the scrimmage line. You’re sure of yourself and where you want to go and what you need to do to get there, or you’re knocked on your butt.
Stephens is a burly man with wide shoulders and an oversize chest. Through the years, he has had his share of medical problems: two heart attacks, a thyroid condition, bouts of depression. He walks with a slight bend in his upper body, but there’s no aura of fragility about him.
His eyes, alert, active, are like headlights–with the brights on. He exudes a vitality and zest for life rare for anyone of any age. And he makes no apologies.
Many of the niceties that everyone else lives by, he ignores. Concerns about what others might think rarely enter into his calculations.
Consider political correctness. During a village board meeting, he refers to village clerk Rosalie Lennstrom as “Sweetie.” And, looking down a long list of new auxiliary police officers, he says, in reference to several Hispanic names, “We’ve got some south-of-the-borders on here. Good.”
Or consider Sam “Momo” Giancana.
Showing off his home, Stephens makes a point to pull out from one of his bookshelves “The Don,” William Brashler’s out-of-print biography of the crime syndicate chieftain who was murdered in the basement of his Oak Park home in 1975.
“I read it,” Stephens says, “to find out about the guy, because I’d met the guy.”
Well, actually, Don Stephens did more than meet Giancana. Early in his career, he engaged in a business deal with the mob boss that has tainted his repution ever since. It sparked dozens of investigations by government agencies, prosecutors and the news media over more than a quarter century, so many that Stephens once described himself as “probably the most investigated S.O.B. in the world.”
It also resulted in two federal trials for political corruption, trials that Stephens won resoundingly but that left him shaken and sobbing.
The Giancana deal involved his 53-unit Thunderbolt Motel at 5400 River Road in the village. On Jan. 31, 1963, the mobster sold the business to Stephens and Patrick Greco, a local contractor, for $520,000 (about $2.6 million in today’s dollars). Stephens and Greco paid $150,000 up front, and, when they were unable to obtain a mortgage because of Giancana’s notoriety, the syndicate lord agreed to hold the mortgage himself.
Two weeks later, when word of the sale leaked out, the headline in the Tribune was: “Politician Buys Hoodlum Motel.”
Sitting in his richly appointed village office, with its lush carpet featuring a giant version of the ubiquitous Rosemont rose, Stephens says that the owners of another Rosemont motel had initially sought to buy the Thunderbolt. But they backed off when they realized who owned it, afraid of damaging their reputations.
Didn’t Stephens have those fears?
“Why? We did nothing wrong.”
It wasn’t the first time Stephens had been the subject of bad publicity. Two years earlier, Chicago’s American had disclosed that his home and as many as 25 others in the village had been assessed as if they were vacant land, resulting in annual property tax bills of less than $30 each. (The problem, Stephens says today, was that the assessor’s office misplaced building permits submitted by the village.)
There had been an IRS investigation then that went nowhere. But it was nothing compared with the myriad probes that followed Stephens’ purchase of the Thunderbolt, which he and Greco renamed the Caravelle Motor Inn.
Not all of the investigations, however, were on the up and up.
“Raid Motel Hood Sold to Village Head” was the headline in the Tribune of Jan. 7, 1964. The night before, Richard Cain, the chief investigator of the Cook County Sheriff’s police, had barged into a room in the Caravelle and found 45 cartons of drugs that had been stolen three months earlier from a drug company warehouse in Melrose Park. Included with the article was a photograph of a submachine-gun-toting Cain carefully opening a motel door.
What the caption didn’t say was that it was a door to a closet. But that wasn’t the only thing phony about the raid. In fact, it was all a fake, an effort by Cain, whose close connections to the crime syndicate were not yet known, to protect the thieves who had stolen the drugs in the first place, and, perhaps, to make Stephens look bad. Less than a year later, he and two associates were convicted of perjury for lying about the incident.
Meanwhile, other, more legitimate investigations of Stephens followed one after the other:
– In January 1967, a state and federal probe was launched into a $3 million housing and shopping center development in the village, managed by Giancana’s half-brother Charles. Stephens had purchased two of the development’s 37 Georgian-style, two-story apartment buildings, and his brother and business associate, Ralph Stephens, had written the liability insurance for the development. No charges were filed.
– A month later, the Illinois Liquor Control Commission accused Stephens of giving preferential treatment to his Caravelle and to Charles Giancana’s liquor store. Stephens was ordered to issue liquor licenses to two taverns that he had ordered closed.
– In August 1972, a Cook County grand jury began hearing testimony regarding charges by the Better Government Association and the news media that Stephens had sought to bribe maverick village board members. No charges were filed.
– In May 1977, a newspaper investigation disclosed that Stephens had spent $2.5 million in construction contracts for the convention center, then known as the O’Hare Expo Center, without seeking written bids. Stephens responded that the procedure used was “sloppy but not illegal.” No charges were filed.
Then, in March 1983, Stephens’ luck ran out. He was indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly lying on his income tax returns. And, seven months later, he was indicted again, this time for allegedly accepting kickbacks of more than $87,000.
After nearly three decades of seemingly skirting the edge of propriety, if not legality, while building his village into a suburban powerhouse, Stephens appeared to be on the verge of a Shakespearean downfall.
For Stephens, the experience was an exquisitely painful purgatory.
He was used to having his way, to being the final word. (He argues today that he never was as cozy with the mob as news stories of the 1960s implied because: “Look at me. I could never have anybody telling me what to do.”) Yet, now he found himself just another name on the docket.
“There is no way,” he says, “you can describe the feeling. You go into a courtroom, and, in your heart of hearts, you really believe you’re not a bad guy. You don’t beat old ladies. You don’t spit on young boys. And some guy stands up there and says all these rotten things about you. It’s the United States government versus you.”
On Feb. 29, 1984, the verdict in the first trial was returned: Not guilty.
On Feb. 28, 1985, the verdict in the second trial was the same: Not guilty.
After each verdict, Stephens wept.
And, in the end, there was an added touch of vindication that Stephens could take away from court, an unusual comment by U.S. District Judge George Leighton, who presided at the second trial. Speaking outside the presence of the jury a few days before the verdict was returned, Leighton said of Stephens and his two co-defendants:
“I have admiration for people like this. They are the people who make this country go. These are the people who see a vacant piece of land (and can envision a 40-story building on it). All I see is mud.”
Don Stephens’ eyes are even brighter than usual as he walks amid the shelves and shelves of ceramic Hummel figurines in the Donald E. Stephens Museum of Hummels in the Rosemont Convention Center, another must-see stop on his tour of the village. (Elsewhere in the building is the Donald E. Stephens Ballroom, and over in Rosemont’s main residential area is the Donald E. Stephens Park.)
He points to the figurine of a small boy on a sled and says, “I just think he’s adorable. The one I like the most is `Letter to Santa.’ I just can’t find it right now.” He stops in front of a figurine of a boy and girl standing next to a cradle in which a baby sleeps. “It’s called `The Blessed Event,’ ” the mayor says.
His interest in the Hummels dates back to the summer of 1969.
“My son Donnie flunked world history, so I took him to London, Paris, Berlin–I’d never been to Europe either–Rome, Athens.”
In Berlin, where a bored 16-year-old Donnie finally found a restaurant that served cheeseburgers, his father came upon Hummels for the first time and bought six.
From then on, he was hooked. Every trip he made to Germany and nearby countries–he is a frequent traveler–Stephens would rent a car and haunt small towns looking for unusual Hummel figurines.
A thousand of Stephens’ Hummels–some cost as much as $15,000–are displayed in the museum, which opened in 1987. Now he and his sons collect antique cars (more than 30 so far) and antique boats (10 or so).
“Years ago,” he says, “I collected coins. And I used to collect big bills. If the bank had a $500 bill, I’d buy it. If the bank had a $1,000 bill, I’d buy it.”
Rosemont’s mayor talks diets with Gov. Jim Edgar. He trades notes about model trains with Illinois Secretary of State George Ryan. Former Gov. Jim Thompson is a friend. So was the late Thomas Keane, the powerful Chicago City Council floor leader for the first Mayor Daley.
Men like Don Stephens. Women do, too. (He’s been married five times.)
“He’s an easy guy to talk to and be with,” says Martin Butler of neighboring Park Ridge. But that’s only part of the reason that Stephens is one of the most powerful figures in Illinois politics.
Stephens grew up in the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s Far West Side, and, when he was 11, his father, a factory owner, died. It was then that he, his mother and his two brothers moved to live with an uncle in the place that would become Rosemont.
“When I was young, I wanted to earn money and be independent,” says Stephens. “I really wanted to be comfortable. I wanted to have a new car and that kind of thing.”
Today Stephens, who without benefit of a college degree has sold insurance, owned car washes, built homes, run the Caravelle, developed land and held stock in other hotels–almost all of this in the village–is a millionaire, and more.
“I’ve done well in the private sector,” says Stephens, whose annual salary as mayor is $50,000. “I don’t think I’m dumb. If I could do what I’ve done for the village of Rosemont–and I think I did well–obviously I did the same for myself.”
Like many powerful small-town politicians, Stephens can do little for Rosemont that doesn’t benefit his own interests. And those interests are often linked with the interests of other people doing business in and with the village.
What’s good for Rosemont is good for Stephens–and for his political clout.
The name of the game in today’s politics is fundraising; Stephens is a master. Last year, the four political funds he controls took in more than $800,000 in contributions, and he was generous in doling out campaign money across party lines around the state.
For example, on the Republican side, Edgar got $4,500, and former Illinois House Speaker Lee Daniels, $2,500. Among Democrats, Chicago Ald. Ed Burke (14th), chairman of the City Council’s finance committee, received $1,500, while State Rep. Ralph Capparelli, who represents the Far Northwest Side and is Stephens’ friend, got $16,500.
And it doesn’t stop there. All Stephens needs to do is put in a good word for a political candidate with the major firms doing business in or with Rosemont and suddenly the money starts rolling in.
And, finally, but far from least in the equation of Illinois politics, there is his army of political workers covering the entire northern half of western Cook County.
“There are very few good political organization left in the state, and Don Stephens has one of the strongest,” says George Ryan. “He has the sort of political organization that those of us who run for public office like to tap into.”
No wonder politicians like Don Stephens. Really like him.
Edward “`Red” Heuer, who operated Heuer’s Restaurant on River Road until the village landmark was razed by Stephens in 1985 for an expansion of the convention center, says this about the mayor:
“He’s done a lot for Rosemont, but he’s a son-of-a bitch.”
Heuer’s brother-in-law and former partner, George Eggert, pages sadly through a family album of the restaurant’s final days, including shots of its demolition. He’s bitter about losing the restaurant, but he says: “Whether you like the man or whether you don’t, (Stephens) did a hell of a job. The people of Rosemont, for the most part, think the world of him, and rightly so. They’ve got to be the happiest people in the world. They’ve got their own Camelot.”
Richard F. Dienethal, who has lived in Rosemont for nearly 30 years, ran against Stephens for mayor in 1985.
“The guy is a terrific business manager,” Dienethal says. “(But) the old man just has too much power.” The voters didn’t agree, re-electing Stephens by a 4-to-1 margin. That was 12 years ago. No one has challenged Stephens since.
Don Stephens has more he wants to accomplish for Rosemont, such as winning state approval for a casino. But, as he heads east on Devon Avenue toward the village hall to bring his tour to an end, he is asked about the future, about the post-Don Stephens era.
“Rosemont’s going to be a pretty stable community when I’m gone. You’re not going to be able to write Rosemont off. It’s here to stay.”
Then, thinking about the early days when he and other residents went hat-in-hand to nearby towns–to Des Plaines, to Park Ridge, to Schiller Park–seeking annexation and were rejected, he says: “The worst problem many of these public officials have is: They just don’t have imagination.”
And Don Stephens has one last thing to say: “If I was the mayor of Des Plaines when Rosemont incorporated in 1956, it would never have happened.
“I would have taken it.”
ROSEMONT BY THE NUMBERS
Size of village: 4.5 square miles
Residential population: 3,995
Number of workers: 23,627
Number of village employees: 185 full-time, 1,300 part-time
Average weekly visitors: 64,557
Yearly visitors: 3.4 million
Total number of hotel rooms: 4,760, with another 1,600 planned.
Size of Rosemont Convention Center: 600,000 square feet, making it the 16th largest convention hall in the U.S.
Number of major U.S. trade shows held at the Rosemont Convention Center in 1995: six, making Rosemont the ninth most popular site, tied with Los Angeles and Louisville, and ahead of Orlando and Washington, D.C.
Equalized assessed valuation of real estate in Rosemont in 1995: $222.6 million, or $55,726 per resident. By contrast, the equalized assessed valuation per resident was $10,196 for Chicago; $24,608 for nearby Des Plaines; and $32,056 for Schaumburg, the dominant northwest suburban municipality.
Annual budget of the village government: $93 million.
1995 retail sales: $189.4 million.