Hurlihey might not be connected to the Uzbeki Mob, but he ran the Illinois legislature as if he were a Mafia boss. That didn’t mean he hired people like Nabiyev to snuff out people like Jerry Fugher, mostly because he wielded so much power no one ever tested how far he’d go to win.
He had a right to invest in a building if he wanted to, as long as there wasn’t a conflict of interest with bills he’d put through committee. I went back to LexisNexis to look up any special legislation that affected Virejas Tower.
Two years ago, right before the public announcement of the project, the legislature voted to grant Virejas an exception to performing an environmental assessment, on the grounds that the previous project proposed for the site—the one that nearly bankrupted Sturlese Cement—had been approved by the city. However, as I discovered going slowly through the paperwork, the zoning permission had been granted “pending an environmental assessment,” which never took place.
This was a problem, because all that land on the west side of Lake Shore Drive, across from the big Navy Pier Ferris Wheel, had been a dumping ground for thorium-based gas lanterns a century earlier. Getting an environmental exception meant the Virejas consortium didn’t have to check thorium levels in the soil or take precautions against aerating them during excavation for the tower’s foundation.
That was slimy, but it also seemed to be a way of shooting the project in the foot: anyone buying or leasing at Virejas could look up the same information I had and order an environmental study before plunking down money. Virejas was going to be a mixed-use, residential and business building. Maybe a family wouldn’t think about an environmental report before buying a condo, but most corporations would. Even so, I sent Murray an e-mail with the file about the legislation attached—maybe he’d be able to do a story. Assuming his corporate masters didn’t cave in to pressure from Spike Hurlihey to keep the environmental hazards under wraps.
Rory Scanlon’s insurance agency and Vince Bagby’s trucking firms were also family owned, closely held companies, without a lot of information available. Scanlon, in his seventies now, had inherited an agency started by his grandfather during the Depression, when people used to put aside a few pennies a week for their funerals. He lived modestly, not flaunting wealth with exotic cars or multiple homes. He’d never married, but an unmarried sister lived with him. Three other sisters, who’d all left the neighborhood, had children and grandchildren. No one had ever accused him of sexual misconduct, or any other kind—which didn’t mean it hadn’t happened.
As Conrad and Bobby and Father Cardenal kept insisting, everything in Scanlon’s life seemed to revolve around the South Side—he was a frequent sponsor at fund-raisers for St. Eloy’s, for the widows and orphans of the police and fire departments, for Boys and Girls Clubs, and a slew of other civic-based charities. He also was a steady contributor to local political campaigns. I couldn’t find any records of giving to presidential or senatorial candidates, but he did his part as a Tenth Ward committeeman to keep the alderman, the state reps and the mayor well oiled.
Vince Bagby’s profile was similar—hard to get access to company reports, but lots of public good deeds in the community. No wonder both Conrad Rawlings and Father Cardenal wanted me to stop looking for dirt under either guy’s nails. In an area with 40 percent unemployment, a pair like them kept a lot of machinery oiled.
I quickly scanned Bagby’s personal history. He’d married young, been divorced five years. Delphina was his only child, apparently named for his mother, Delphina Theodora Burzle.
Burzle. I’d heard that name recently, but where? I put a query to my computer, and it came back with the file from the Guzzo case. Nina Quarles’s mother had been Felicia Burzle.
I stared at the screen and then slowly put my pen down, as if it were a heavy, fragile object. I went back to Genealogy Plus for Rory Scanlon’s full family tree—the first time round I’d only gone back to 1920.
I find genealogy tables hard to follow, but I painstakingly wrote down all the names and dates of births and marriages of the Burzles, the Scanlons and the Bagbys. The enormous families people had before World War I made it a tedious project, but in the end, I could see that Vince Bagby and Nina Quarles were first cousins. Vince’s mother and Rory Scanlon were cousins as well. Vince, twenty years younger than Rory, had grown up within two blocks of the Scanlon house.