Icon Of Chicago Corruption Towers Over Poor West Side Mountain Of Refuse Grew Out Of Bribery And Kickbacks

Neighbors call it “the Mountain,” a tangled, rat-infested mound of broken concrete, rusted metal and tires that rises five stories high over a poor neighborhood on the city’s West Side.

Prostitutes turn tricks in its hollows; local bandits evade police on a twisting trail through its ridges.

The Mountain wasn’t much more than a molehill to most of the city until last week. Now it’s a foul-smelling icon for a 3-1/2-year federal investigation that caught local officials taking bribes.

Even in Chicago, with its fabled history of official corruption, there’s never been a case in which citizens were so literally dumped on.

“In the summertime you can really smell it,” said 20-year-old Donald Holman, who lives just 30 yards from the dump.

“There might be dead bodies up there. Prostitutes go back there. The police come through every night, but they can’t keep up with it all. There’s so much chaos. Once you get over these bricks, there’s a trail over to (the other side) where you can lose the police.”

The story behind the Mountain and other illegal dumps surfaced last week as federal prosecutors announced the culmination of Operation Silver Shovel.

At the center of the operation is contractor John Christopher, a convicted felon who became an informant for the federal government in 1992.

U.S. Attorney James Burns said last week the government has 1,100 tape recordings of Christopher’s meetings with local politicians, union leaders and organized crime figures.

One Chicago alderman, Ambrosio Medrano, has pleaded guilty to taking $31,000 from Christopher for a variety of favors. Those included getting favors for Christopher from other aldermen and state legislators and allowing Christopher to run an illegal dump in his ward.

The city water commissioner has also resigned as a result of Silver Shovel, and prosecutors say at least 40 other figures are targets of the probe.

“No other case has had such a (public) symbol that seems to crystallize the corruption this way,” said Terrance Norton, a former U.S. Justice Department attorney and now a professor at Chicago-Kent Law School who specializes in Chicago corruption.

Before becoming an informant, Christopher had served four years in prison for defrauding the city with inflated costs for snow removal in 1979. Throughout the 1980s, he ran illegal dumps and other shady deals, often through backdoor connections into City Hall.

Last week, in pleading guilty to tax fraud, Christopher also said he continued to operate illegal dumps even as an FBI informant.

The Mountain began to grow in the late 1980s, when Christopher paid Alderman William Henry $5,000 a month so Henry would keep the city from interfering. Henry has since died.

The dump site was left vacant in the 1980s when two closed factories were torn down. Trucks bringing their illegal loads often knocked down neighborhood power lines, leaving residents without electricity for days, said Judge Watkins III, 33, who lives next door to Holman.

“My father was thinking about selling or renting his house maybe four or five years ago,” Watkins said. “The appraiser said it was worth $85,000. Just last year, the guy said he would give him $50,000. He said, ‘It’s not the house, it’s the eyesore.”’

Watkins motioned to his small, fenced back yard, dwarfed by the looming dump just yards away.

“Look, if you had a barbecue, would you want to stand there and look at this?” Watkins asked.

John Gallo, the assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting the case against Christopher, said the federal government ordered Christopher to stop dumping on the Mountain when he became an informant in 1992. Still, Christopher beat a city lawsuit that sought to force him to remove the dump, and other haulers continued to dump there, Gallo said.

The city hired a contractor last week to begin tearing down the Mountain. Getting rid of it all could take years.

Neighbors are frustrated by the combination of greed, corruption and inefficiency that allowed it to grow in the first place.

“Somebody knew something,” Watkins said, pointing to wiry weeds shooting through a thick covering of snow on the dump. “How could they not? Look at those trees coming out all over at the top. That tells you this thing’s been here a long time.”