Chicago’s governing style and practices have been consistently characterized as criminal and corrupt since the days of the prohibition-era gangster, Al Capone. Last year Daniel Elgber wrote an interesting piece on this same topic titled ‘Why is Chicago so Corrupt?’

Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan received a sentence of six and a half years in prison on Wednesday, after being convicted on charges of racketeering, mail fraud, filing false tax returns, and lying to investigators. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that in the last three decades, at least 79 local elected officials have been convicted of a crime, including three governors, one mayor, and a whopping 27 aldermen from the Windy City. What makes Chicago so corrupt?

Elgber then goes on to provide some context, historical background, and past parallels with other cities. He points to a few possible factors behind this windy city’s continuous struggle with chronic political corruption:

In Chicago, corruption persisted, to some degree because the city never had the benefit of a reformist mayor like New York City’s Fiorello LaGuardia, who had political ties to FDR. Instead, Chicago moved towards a one-party system that made it even more vulnerable to corruption: The city’s last Republican mayor left office in 1931. Today, not even the Democratic primaries are competitive—for the most part, once you’re in office, you stay there. The weak campaign finance laws in Illinois probably helped to stave off competition in recent years.

The star power of Chicago politicians may also contribute to the city’s continuing problems with corruption. Incumbents tend to be big personalities who get celebrity coverage in the local papers—which sometimes translates into ethical leeway from voters. (In cities like Los Angeles and New York, local politicians take a back seat to the media celebs.)

Lastly, Elgber talks about corruption measurement and relevant points. This is a very interesting and obviously still relevant and applicable piece, so I suggest you read it in its entirety here and check out the links provided.

The media has long been reporting on Chicago’s corruption related scandals, and the intensity and frequency of these stories have increased tremendously in the last few years. So why am I so interested in this windy city of Bears?

Those of you who know me and/or are familiar with my case know the answer: Could it be the Political System Termite Dennis Hastert? Could it be the case of still under question marks Jan Schakowsky and the clear-cut record of her convicted husband? Could it be the Turkish criminal operatives with their HQ in Chicago since the early 90s? Could it be that Chicago was one of the two centers of the FBI’s nearly decade-long espionage and criminal investigations?

Well, the answer to all those ‘could it be’s is a firm yes, with more answers still buried somewhere in Chicago…For now let’s look at a small gallery of a much bigger gallery on recent key political personalities who happen to be connected to each other in more than one way and with more than a tie or two. Treat it as you might an exhibition room in a museum showcasing a series of relevant portraits all set against the same windy city background. Or if you wish, which I hope you do, go even further and add your points and possible interpretations for each portrait.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel

I am starting with Rahm Emanuel since he prompted this piece on Chicago Politics’ Figureheads in Corruption. I know what you’re thinking, and no I am not going to walk down the same path and talk about the creepy odd personalities making even a creepier and odder couple. Catch my drift? While the outcome of that marriage may end up interestingly, the marriage is not as advertised. It is not far left with far right, but purely and simply a good example of in-breeding: when the byproducts of the same establishment couple with each other…In ordinary life the off-spring sum up the result. In the murky, smoke and mirrors, basically plain swampy and dirty world of partisan politics the outcome is what you watch on Fox TV, or the like.

Okay, so while the latest with Rahmie prompted this piece, the reasoning and the points herein have nothing to do with that. After all, Rahm Emanuel’s past record has always been out there for anyone who wanted to look, to see, to know about: his father’s Ziono-Terrorist background, his own active duty with Israel’s military, his dual citizenship, his highly questionable loyalties, his even more questionable financial gains from swampy financial institutions’ practices, his connections to the corrupt and criminals, his dirty mouth, his dirtier deeds in the campaign finance area…That’s right. All this has been known for quite a while. Somehow, the far left, while advertising for and promoting Obama, chose not to see their man’s choice of White House Chief of Staff, and worked very hard to hush anyone who did. Now that their con man of choice is secured in place, combined with only God knows what agenda, they choose to mumble about him. Read more ?

Mizgin’s Desk Reports:

It would appear that the True Believers of the Democratic Party are a entering the State of Denial over the “relationship” of Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky with a female Turkish spy.

In spite of the congresswoman’s claims that she has not been involved with the Turks, we know that in 2001, which is included in the time frame of wiretaps that Sibel Edmonds translated, Mehmet Celebi, of Hillary Clinton fame, donated $350 to Jan Schakowsky. Celebi was a fundraiser for another Chicago politician, Rahm Emanuel. Later, Celebi became a bundler for Hillary Clinton, raising $100,000 for her presidential campaign. She finally had to dump Celebi because of his role as producer of the Turkish film “Kurtlar Vadisi Irak“.

Celebi held high-level positions within the Chicago-based Turkish American Cultural Association (TACA) and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA). Both organizations had been “targets of an FBI counter-intelligence operation investigating the corruption and bribery of high-level US officials from 1997 onward.” Furthermore, the Celebi family in Turkey has been involved in arms- and narcotics-dealing and Mehmet Celebi admits to having:

” . . . worked in management capacity at some of the world’s largest financial institutions and has provided financial guidance to many high-net worth individuals and celebrities as well as corporations. He has been consulting some of the largest corporations in Turkey on mergers and acquisitions in addition to international funds wishing to invest in Turkey and the region.”

While Celebi was moving and shaking for the Democratic Party in Chicago, Schakowsky’s husband, Robert Creamer, a political consultant, was under investigation for bank fraud. The investigation was ongoing in 1998, which was well within the timeframe of the FBI wiretaps from Chicago that Sibel Edmonds translated. It may very well be that Turkish agents targeted Schakowsky in order to obtain favors from her husband. As Sibel stated in The American Conservative interview:

They needed Schakowsky and her husband Robert Creamer to perform certain illegal operational facilitations for them in Illinois.

Chicago has its connection to Susurluk, too. Abdullah Catli, a state assassin and narcotics trafficker, had long been a member of the Gray Wolves and was wanted by Interpol in the 1990s. Catli helped fellow Gray Wolf Mehmet Ali Agca escape from a Turkish military prison in 1979, just after Agca assassinated a newspaper editor but a few short years before he carried out the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II.

In 1989, Abdullah Catli, under the name Mehmet Ozbay, showed up at the Turkish consulate in Chicago to request a new passport. He showed up at the Chicago consulate for a second time in 1994 to pick up a new passport and request a new Turkish identity card. In 1995 he showed up a third time to request an extension of his required military service. It would also appear that Catli, as Ozbay, married an American, obtained a green card, and went on Interpol’s wanted list during the time that he was in the US.

More interesting is that he was also reported to have been issued an American passport under the name Michael Nicholsan.

Therefore, it’s pretty well established that one of Turkey’s most notorious state assassins and narcotics traffickers lived close enough to Chicago to be compelled to use Chicago’s Turkish consulate to obtain official documents.

In Vanity Fair’s 2005 piece on the Sibel Edmonds case, the magazine clearly established the fact that the FBI named Chicago as the epicenter of Turkish corruption operations targeting US officials.

It’s very difficult to believe that any politician from the Chicago area would have nothing to do with the Turkish community there. For Jan Schakowsky to deny any relationship would be utter foolishness, of course, because she’s been very much involved lately with the Fethullah Gulen movement through the Chicago-based Niagara Foundation, whose honorary president is none other than Hocaefendi himself. This year Schakowsky wrote a Letter of Recognition for the Niagara Foundations 2009 “Peace and Dialogue Awards”. And Schakowsky did the same in 2008 and in 2007.

Naturally, these facts raise questions. How intimately does Representative Schakowsky know the Niagara Foundation in order for her to show such consistent and strong support? What benefits does the Niagara Foundation provide Schakowsky and the City of Chicago? Since the Chicago City Council backs and promotes the Niagara Foundation, what is the foundation’s real connection to Mayor Daly and former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, both of whom are involved in major, ongoing corruption cases?

Inquiring minds want to know.

But could there really be any problem here with Fethullah Gulen? He represents the Islamist trend in Turkey which has generally been at odds with the Nationalists, especially with the ultra-nationalists known as Gray Wolves, right? That’s the simplistic explanation; the reality is far more complicated and would take us from Susurluk and Chicago to Ergenekon.

Last week someone kindly brought to my attention the fact that Günay Hakkı Övünç (Evinch, according to his Americanized spelling) had become the president of the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA). Rastî readers will remember Övünç in connection with an American-based Turkish mercenary company that has a training facility in Silopi. More on that from Yeni Özgür Politika:

On some 1,000 acres of land between Silopi and the Habur Border Crossing the Black Hawk Security Company is working feverishly using up to 20 trucks carrying sand, five heavy plant and various other vehicles to get the base finished. The company was reportedly structured according to a model used by the Special Forces. The Washington-based company is shaping its organizations in Turkey and Iraq in order to meet the requirements of a low intensity war. With a cadre comprised of retired soldiers and intelligence operatives taken from special units the company provides a broad spectrum of activities including armored convoy security, defense tactics, low intensity combat, counter-terrorism and intelligence, air operations and hostage rescue.

The company, which has named its site in Habur “Black Hawk 1 Headquarters,” will also have three other HQs in Zakho, Kirkuk and Baghdad.

The company will also have over 1,000 “retired” military personnel from the Turkish army attached to it. They will undergo a short refresher training course at the HQ in Silopi. At the Habur HQ, where some 300 service personnel will also be on duty, there will be a mobile hospital, a helipad, one casevac helicopter, one escort helicopter, and 300 vehicles including armed Hummers, and a truck park for 8,000 vehicles.

[ . . . ]

Günay Hakkı Övünç: Company partner and legal architect Günay Hakkı Övünç owns a law practice in Washington. Övünç, who for years has pursued law suits in the United States filed by the Turkish Embassy and the General Staff, is also the American-Turkısh Assembly’s deputy chairman in charge of Washington.

Also involved in Black Hawk Security, Inc. is the TSK’s retired Lieutenant General Köksal Karabay, who was in charge of Turkish special forces when American marines “bagged” them on 4 July, 2003.

YÖP asks some pertinent questions about the purpose of “Black Hawk 1 HQ” at the Habur border crossing:

The company will also have over 1,000 “retired” military personnel from the Turkish army attached to it. They will undergo a short refresher training course at the HQ in Silopi. At the Habur HQ, where some 300 service personnel will also be on duty, there will be a mobile hospital, a helipad, one casevac [medevac] helicopter, one escort helicopter, and 300 vehicles including armed Hummers, and a truck park for 8,000 vehicles.

[ . . . ]

There are many unanswered questions such as how did the partners meet one another, why did they take on this job, how did they get permission, what kind of relationship do they have with the US authorities, with whom do they share the intelligence they obtain, when the day comes how are they going to use “Turkish-Kurdish-Arab” and perhaps even American personnel, and are they simply going to be escorting trucks and nothing more? As part of an agreement made with this company the Koc Group and Milangaz Company send 1,600 tankers of LPG into Iraq every month. They send 200 tankers of aviation fuel ever day. They provide 70 percent of the United States requirement for diesel fuel via this crossing. When they talk about “security for Turkish trucks” they mean these tankers. However, this much military hardware and these names beg other questions.

Indeed.

Another interesting fact about Övünç is that he’s from Chicago. According to the Sibel Edmonds case, Turkish nationals were apparently deeply engaged in covert activity in two major American cities and one of those was Chicago:

It may be more than another embarrassing security scandal. One counter-intelligence official familiar with Edmonds’s case has told Vanity Fair that the F.B.I. opened an investigation into covert activities by Turkish nationals in the late 1990’s. That inquiry found evidence, mainly via wiretaps, of attempts to corrupt senior American politicians in at least two major cities—Washington and Chicago. Toward the end of 2001, Edmonds was asked to translate some of the thousands of calls that had been recorded by this operation, some dating back to 1997.

[ . . . ]

. . . in December 2001, Joel Robertz, an F.B.I. special agent in Chicago, contacted Sibel and asked her to review some wiretaps. Some were several years old, others more recent; all had been generated by a counter-intelligence that had its start in 1997. “It began in D.C.,” says an F.B.I. counter-intelligence official who is familiar with the case file. “It became apparent that Chicago was actually the center of what was going on.”

I wonder how close a relationship there is between Övünç and another Turkish Chicagoan, Mehmet Çelebi, whose fundraising for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was eventually dropped faster than a hot potato.

We know that sometime in 2005 or, perhaps, very early 2006, Övünç was “summoned” to Iraq, in Övünç’s own words:

I was summoned to Baghdad. As I did not want to worry my wife, I told her I was going to Turkey for a conference on the Armenian matter – which was true. But, the complete truth was that after the conference I would continue to Iraq via Istanbul Atatürk International Airport, one of the safest routes to Baghdad for civilians. Passengers go through four levels of security checks, and the pretty woman sitting next to you in the plane might be a Turkish sky marshal who can break your neck faster than you can say, “Turkish Delight.”

So who “summoned” him and for what purpose? Inquiring minds want to know.

What may be even more scary is the ATAA’s president-elect, Ergün Kirlikovalı (Check the ATAA’s board of directors page for verification). He should be Övünç’s successor as president of the ATAA in the not-too-distant future. You can get an idea of some of the things Kirlikovalı believes in these comments to a Forbes opinion piece asking, “Should Turkey Apologize to the Armenians”.

Or check out a blog entry at the Orange County Weekly, which has a lot of interesting links to comments Kirlikovali is making all over the Internet . . . Like his psychotic babbling here or his anti-Mexican rant here.

Can someone explain to me how Kirlikovalı’s ranting squares with Övünç’s vision for the ATAA in a statement last month, in which he says, “ATAA is a proud interlocutor, as the voice of reason and credibility in Washington DC for nearly 500,000 Turkish and Turkic Americans nationwide”? And why is it that we should believe the psychotic ravings of the future president of the ATAA on his word alone?