The Worm Turns

Mark Brown, Sun Times columnist and occasional reader of this site (he wrote to us once), notes the Sorich defense in the Hired Truck scandal is turning on the mayor and his inner circle:

• There have been times during the past few weeks when you would swear that Thomas Durkin is as much Mayor Daley's lawyer as Robert Sorich's, so eager is he to put a pro-Daley spin on the evidence in the City Hall patronage trial, even though it's his client Sorich sitting at the defense table, not the mayor.

  Tuesday was not one of those days.

This makes sense of course. Durkin needs to paint Sorich as merely following orders, following an established pattern of misconduct in order to make the jury feel that convicting Sorich and Co. would just be a couple of "small fish," so why bother? And it's probably the only defense that could be plausibly presented at this juncture.

But we hope that the jury can see beyond curtains as the George Ryan jury did earlier this year. The mayor has been throwing "small fish" under the bus for so long, one would hope that eventually, some bait would land a larger fish. It seems the only thing holding the whole system together is a willingness for "small fish" to do 18 to 24 months in the pen for a Machine that shows them absolutely no loyalty in return.

Or should we be looking at what everyone who keeps their mouth shut is getting afterwards?