Funny How This Works Out

Always some connection to Shortshanks. Always:

• Two decades ago, the city's Streets and Sanitation Department began leasing a block-long garage in Chinatown, in Chicago's notorious 1st Ward.

  The landlord: Fred Bruno Barbara, a nephew of the late 1st Ward Ald. Fred Roti.

  Streets and San moved out by early 2005, when Barbara -- a friend of Mayor Daley -- got caught up in the Hired Truck scandal.

  But Barbara's garage and two adjoining buildings that he owns kept getting free water from City Hall -- until three months ago, when a Chicago Sun-Times reporter asked the Daley administration why it was treating Barbara's garage as a "charitable account.''

Barbara is a shady enough character as it is. But why would that stop the most corrupt and connected political family in existence? Why even bother to keep it in the shadows?

• City meter readers always seemed to have a hard time getting inside the Bridgeport home of the late Chicago mob boss Angelo "The Hook" LaPietra to read his water meter.

  So City Hall repeatedly sent estimated water bills to the 6,000-square-foot home, where LaPietra's daughter, JoAnne Lascola, lives.

  City workers finally got inside on Aug. 26, 2009, to install a new meter -- one that can be read electronically by a meter reader driving past the house.

  In removing the old meter, though, they found they had been drastically underestimating how much water LaPietra's family was using.

"...drastically underestimating..." Amazing how that always seems to happen to connected contractors, family friends, mob associates and the like.

This should be a much bigger story than it is currently playing out to be. This is the definition of the Daley years to a "T."