Daley headhunters cut swath through FBI

Andrew Zajac

Mayor Richard M. Daley clearly wanted somebody with an FBI pedigree to run his scandal-plagued police department and he got his man in J.P. "Jody" Weis, the Special Agent in Charge of the bureau's Philadelphia office.

But Weis wasn't Daley's first choice and probably not his second, third or fourth either, according to sources familiar with the talent hunt here in Washington.

Daley would have preferred a Chicago native from the bureau. Weis has worked in the Chicago FBI office, but he hails from Florida.

As has already been reported, tops on Daley's list was Michael Mason, the executive assistant director, who oversees roughly half of the FBI.

A graduate of Mendel Catholic High School on the far South Side, and former Marine officer, Mason knows Chicago and is well-regarded in law enforcement. For Daley, always navigating racial politics in the city, Mason also comes with the added benefit of being black.

But by the time Daley got to him, Mason had already agreed to take a lucrative job in the private sector, as a senior exec with Verizon.

Such was Hizzoner's interest in Mason that he flew to Washington to talk to him anyway in what turned out to be a futile effort to get him to change his mind.

Daley's people also made gentle inquiries about the level of interest of other top level honchos, including at least two with Chicago roots -- Ken Kaiser, the head of the criminal division, and Tom Fuentes, who runs the bureau's growing chain of overseas offices.

The search party also reached out to former Washington DC police chief Charles Ramsey, a former first deputy superintendent in the Chicago PD, but he stayed on the East Coast, accepting a job as police commissioner in Philadelphia.

Why did Daley want an outsider and someone with a national law enforcement pedigree to run the show?

Although he's never has been much of a reformer when it comes to the machinery of city governance, Daley may feel pressure to shake up the police department after serial revelations of corruption and brutality.

His father, Mayor Richard J. Daley, did something similar in 1960 during the Summerdale District scandal--cops working as burglars--bringing in a noted UC-Berkeley criminologist O.W. Wilson, to run the department.

The younger Daley's decision dovetailed with advice from old hands, including former U.S. attorney Tom Sullivan and former congressman/judge/White House counsel Abner Mikva, who urged him to avoid picking an insider.

The city also is trying to land the 2016 Olympics and it can't hurt to have a chief with the national and international law enforcement contacts that go with a senior FBI posting.