By Neal Pollack
Jones and the guy sitting next to him got to talking about the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. The story, Jones said, was all about God’s compassion for the poor.
His trial was scheduled for 11 AM, but Judge William O’Malley had a full morning call. Witnesses for the prosecution began to arrive: two platform supervisors for the Chicago Transit Authority and four Chicago police officers, two plainclothes and two in uniform.
A few feet away Jones was conferring with his public defenders. He knew the routine better than Kruesi did. The CTA had been making him show up in court for more than two years to no effect. But that was before Kruesi was on the case.
That changed in November 1996, when David Mosena, then president of the CTA, began cracking down on musicians as part of a campaign against panhandlers and peddlers. Between November 11 and 17 alone, 55 people were arrested on misdemeanor charges on CTA property. Gary Jones was not among them, but his time was coming.
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Just before Kruesi became CTA president, John Kass wrote a column about him in the Chicago Tribune. The column described Kruesi as the ultimate political insider and an unbending Daley loyalist. When Daley was state’s attorney, Kass said, reporters dubbed Kruesi “Honest Frank” because of his tendency to lie to them about the Gary Dotson rape trial. He was one of the mayor’s top operatives until he was dispatched to a high-level policy job in the U.S. Department of Transportation. “Through it all,” Kass wrote, “he got a reputation as a turf fighter who tried to make quid pro quo deals with reporters to harm his political enemies. Anyone who challenged him, including innocent bureaucrats, city commissioners and others, got squashed and leaked on and driven into the ground.”
Kass noted that the Tribune had described Kruesi as “Daley’s Machiavelli,” while the Sun-Times called him “Daley’s Rasputin.” “For those who don’t study history,” Kass wrote, “think of a guy who would stick two dead rats on the ends of a wire coat hanger and sell them to a blind man for earmuffs. Not for the money. Just for the challenge.”
