Married To The Mob

I remember how completely this floored me. I was 22, a somewhat traumatized Vietnam vet just beginning to worm my way into the political machine that ran Chicago under the first Mayor Richard Daley. I'm doing some fancy dining at a high-end restaurant with my boss, Daley henchman and powerbroker Ed Rosewell, soon to become Cook County treasurer. The wine has begun to flow when Ed glances at the other guy dining with us, looks back at me and says, there's something we need to tell you.

I had fallen into an increasingly confidential relationship with Rosewell, so this drift in the conversation wasn't entirely out of the blue. After a brief stint with the FBI, I was on the city payroll as a sheriff's deputy. But basically, in the early going, I was Rosewell's go-fer and muscle. I carried a gun; I'd chauffeur him and his girlfriends on shopping sprees. Later I would get involved in a kickback scheme that put Rosewell under indictment and landed me in federal prison. But this wasn't about politics or money. Not yet.

Wine glasses clinked. Candles flickered.

Rosewell came out with it: "We're married," he told me, glancing gain at his lover, another political operative named Ray Carvis. .
Two men. Married. I'm wiping the soup and the stunned expression off my face when Rosewell and Carvis went on to say they had even found a priest to perform the ceremony. Of course they weren't really married. It wasn't legal back then, even in Massachusetts, let alone Illinois.

This was 1972.

Ten years later, I went to prison rather than turn state's evidence and rat out the whole echelon of corrupt politicians and mob bankers I'd been running with, Rosewell among them. The reason was simple: I had less confidence in the feds ability to protect a songbird than in the power of the mob and the machine to make my life extremely unpleasant in or out of prison.

Thirty years later, the public fascination with Chicago politicians -- ranging from Blagojevich to Burris and beyond -- has generated a certain amount of media interest -- radio interviews, blogging, that sort of thing -- in a memoir I'm preparing, one that will lay out the whole sordid saga I wouldn't tell in court. Based on recent revelations about the sale of political offices in Illinois, it looks like many of the patterns of corruption that were rampant in my day still persist. Some things never change.

But some things do: The young woman interviewing me on Chicago's public radio station the other day was startled by my revelation that Ed Rosewell was "married" to his lover. But the news that he was gay -- the secret he tried so desperately to keep from the wider public -- scarcely raised an eyebrow. And that, of course, is exactly as it should be.

There's something the younger generation needs to appreciate, however. Being gay back before gay lib didn't just carry a risk of embarrassment. It was dangerous.

Rosewell's legal problems stemmed not from greed but from his vulnerability to extortion. People aware of his political power and his secret life began subjecting him to blackmail. My personal jones was loose women, pricey cars and and a playboy lifestyle. On a salary in the mid $20s, I aspired to live like Hugh Hefner. Chicago moneymen fronted me close to $1 million as a gratuity on interest-free operating accounts I set up in their banks and pumped full of county tax revenues. But a portion of every illegal loan was kicked back to Rosewell and on to his blackmailers.

As his relationship with Rosewell fell apart, even Carvis began blackmailing him. In due course, Carvis's corpse was found hacked into pieces. People in the know had no reason to doubt that it was payback -- not by Rosewell, a gentle man -- but by a mob crew sent to plug the leak in his finances that was causing the blackmailed county treasurer to fall deeper and deeper into debt. God forbid a public servant so useful to the bankers would lose his job!

Rosewell, by dint of high office -- an office he would have lost instantly had he "come out" -- was an especially vulnerable man. But to a greater or lesser degree, this is the shadowland in which a whole generation of closeted gay men was operating. After all, this was the era of J. Edgar Hoover, my former employer, a secret cross-dresser who liked nothing better than to develop files on "deviants". Why? Because, as Hoover explained, their vulnerability to extortion might make them security risks -- a self-fulfilling prophesy, if ever there was one.

Author's note: Gary Goehl is working on a memoir of his years as part of the Chicago political machine.