By Ben Joravsky
But the dead man’s friends and family believe Richman was the victim of bullies with badges who shared the system’s contempt for a bold environmental crusader.
In 1981 Jack’s father, a lawyer and former FBI agent, suffered a stroke; six years later he died. Jack’s only sibling, a sister, lived in Boston. For the last two decades his closest friend and companion was his mother, a Chicago public school principal who eagerly drove him about in her Cadillac Fleetwood. “I’m more of a Chevy person, but I drove the Cadillac for Jack–he needed the room,” says Richman. “He loved to see concerts and he made friends with various artists. They would call him up when they came to town, and I would drive him to meet them, at the Pump Room or the Hyatt O’Hare. I wouldn’t join them–those were his relationships. I felt I had no place there. I’d sit in the car and wait for him. He was a wonderful boy. I loved him so much.”
As Richman saw it, the district was a closed world of tyrannical, mean-spirited bureaucrats unaccustomed to public scrutiny and far too connected to powerful political bosses and chemical manufacturers. He attended almost all the trustees’ meetings. When they wouldn’t let him speak, as happened more than once, he demanded to be heard. He built a web of contacts in the environmental movement across the country, called on reporters to cover his cause, railed against secrecy, and demanded the district declassify budgets and other documents. In the last few months he and his mother even took to following the spray trucks as they made their late-night rounds. “He wanted to see if they were illegally washing their toxins into the sewers,” says one ally. “He wanted to know what they were doing in the dark when they thought no one was watching.”
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Indeed, the trustees contend they gave Richman and his allies more than an adequate hearing; a year ago, in October, they even voted by a three-to-two margin to slap a one-year moratorium on spraying. “They were open-minded on the issue, otherwise they wouldn’t have voted for the moratorium,” says Druker. “But Mr. Richman continued to alienate them. Remember, it was only a one-vote swing on the moratorium. But instead of being complimentary, instead of thanking them for what they did, Mr. Richman was antagonistic and disruptive and extremely arrogant. I don’t think that helped his cause.”
It was a Wilmette policeman, who charged her with improperly standing on a roadway. “I was burning mad, and so at two in the morning I went to the Wilmette police station and introduced myself to the sergeant on duty and asked why did that man stop us? The excuse I got was he thought I was drunk. I said, ‘What gave him the idea that a woman of my age was drunk?’ I wanted my license back, and so I kept calling, and finally the chief of police called me in and apologized and explained it was a mistake. He said there were burglaries in the neighborhood, although I don’t know how they thought Jack and I looked like burglars. I said, ‘Well, what about the ticket?’ The chief said there was nothing he could do about that. In retrospect, I wish he had called the court and said ‘Forget the ticket.’”
