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12 The Biggest Bully in the Bar “ F ast Eddie”—that’s what the columnists and pundits had been calling Ed Vrdolyak for as long as anyone can remember. Certainly Vrdolyak wasn’t wasting any time organizing against Washington. At an informal City Council meeting held the Friday after the general election, Vrdolyak stood to warn his council colleagues. Already a Washington aide named Jim Houlihan, he said, has started telling people the mayor-elect would work to replace any alderman who didn’t swear his allegiance to his administration. Northwest side alderman Richard Mell stood to confirm the threat. Later, Houlihan told a reporter that he said nothing of the sort—to Vrdolyak or to anyone. Mell confessed he hadn’t quite told the truth; he had only repeated the story secondhand, as Vrdolyak had told it to him. Marian Humes, a black alderwoman on good terms with Vrdolyak, decided she would talk with Vrdolyak to clear things up. A loyal machine soldier who had risen through the ranks, Humes was no more enamored by Washington ’s victory than Vrdolyak. But she was close enough to the Washington team to know that the mayor-elect had chosen Wilson Frost, one of their own, not Houlihan, to represent him in the council reorganization. Where Houlihan was anti­ machine, Wilson Frost was a party regular and a close Byrne ally through her tenure. Frost and Vrdolyak were allies, perhaps even friends; later, confronted by charges he was antiblack for his opposition to Washington , Vrdolyak pointed out that he and Frost used to golf together. What Humes couldn’t understand is how Vrdolyak didn’t know Frost was the point person, not Houlihan. Humes stopped by Vrdolyak’s office shortly after the council meeting broke up. There she found him meeting with most of the council’s white aldermen. 134 Chapter 12 The scene struck her like a shot to the solar plexus, but she said her piece: Frost is the one you should talk with. Wait to see what Washington and Frost have in mind. Afterward, with time to think, she was no longer surprised but instead suspicious. Did Vrdolyak fabricate the Houlihan story as a way of convincing the white aldermen they needed to band together? There were plenty of people pushing Washington to do just what Houlihan supposedly advised: Dump the Old Guard. Yet Washington recognized that he needed new allies if he was to have a working majority in the council. His plan was to single out only those aldermen most closely identified with Byrne— Vrdolyak, Ed Burke, and an alderman named Fred Roti, routinely described in press accounts as having “reputed mob connections.” He might have included Wilson Frost in that group, but Frost was important to him if only as a symbol to the rest of the Old Guard. As Washington explained only after it was too late, he sought to dilute this troika’s powers, not strip them of all vestiges of their clout. Burke, for instance , headed the Police and Fire Committee. Washington planned to break Burke’s committee into two and allow him to keep half of his old post. Vrdolyak chaired the Zoning and Buildings Committee, a plum spot second only to the Finance Committee. Vrdolyak also served as the council’s president pro tem. That meant he presided over council meetings in the mayor’s absence. Washington sought to bisect Vrdolyak’s committee and name someone else as pro tem. Vrdolyak would be offered a committee but not Zoning. The details would work themselves out in the next couple of weeks, before the next formal meeting of the City Council. Washington was pleased and also hopeful. A great many machine regulars, black and white, resented the hoarding of power under Byrne. They had been left with crumbs while Vrdolyak and a few others feasted on the pie. Through Frost and other emissaries, Washington would dangle committee chairmanships in the search for new allies. Diluting the power of Vrdolyak, Burke, and Roti seemed a good start toward winning new friends—so, at least, Washington figured before he quite understood the role that race would play in his dealings with the council. Washington and Vrdolyak met shortly after the general election, along with Frost. Vrdolyak told Washington he had no problem stepping down as president pro tem. “The mayor should have his own guy in,” Vrdolyak agreed. But all pretense of civility ended when Washington told him he couldn’t support him as...

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