Rahm Emanuel, investment banker, former Congressman and former White House chief of staff was elected mayor of Chicago Tuesday, in a decisive victory in which he bested five rivals to oversee the affairs of the nation’s third-largest city.
Emanuel defeated all opponents with 55 percent of the vote – a margin that allowed him to avoid an April runoff. He needed more than 50 percent to win outright.
This was Chicago’s first mayoral race in more than two decades without former Mayor Richard M. Daley running among the candidates. Daley and his father have acted as Mayor of Chicago for more than 43 out of the last 56 years. Richard M. Daley is widely known for his role in the John Burge torture cases.
John Burge, a convicted felon and former Chicago Police Department detective / commander who gained notoriety for torturing more than 200 criminal suspects between 1972 and 1991, in order to force false confessions, was allowed to ply his trade as a torturer on the Chicago Police Department’s payroll.
Richard M. Daley, who was Illinois’ State’s Attorney during Burge’s trials, has been publicly charged with withholding evidence that Burge repeatedly and systematically tortured black criminal suspects to force false confessions. Although Burge was eventually convicted of criminal wrongdoing, he was recently sentenced to a mere four (4) years prison with full retirement benefits of $34,000 a year from the Illinois pension fund, indicating that Burge’s “ethnic cleansing” of young black men from civil life in Chicago was state-sanctioned.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson stated in late January that the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition is filing a lawsuit to eliminate Burge’s pension.
Emanuel called the victory “humbling” and said the outgoing mayor had “earned a special place in our hearts and our history.”