“Life is like a book. There are good chapters and bad chapters.”
So said one of Ed Vrdolyak’s defense lawyers, Catharine O’Daniel, explaining to a judge Friday why Fast Eddie shouldn’t be sent to prison, not even for a day, for tax fraud.
In the most recent “chapter” of his life — the last 10 years — Vrdolyak has been a good egg who has helped many people, O’Daniel argued. And, she added, he’s really old and frail. Prison is hard on people who are really old and frail.
But U.S. District Judge Robert Dow was having none of it. Or not much.
“Those who are concerned about facing punishment at age 80 or older ought not to be committing crimes at age 70 or 75,” he said.
Dow sentenced Vrdolyak to 18 months in prison, which was no gift of mercy for an 82-year-old man in declining health, though the sentence was below the 24 to 30 months recommended by federal guidelines. But he had it coming.
If life really is like a book, Vrdolyak wrote every word in this latest dark chapter.
From the moment he exploded on the scene in the early 1970s, as a wise-cracking alderman, Vrdolyak has always played the angles hard, showing little regard for ethics or laws.
Forever in a rush for money and power, he ruled the City Council until it blew up on him. He ran an ugly campaign for mayor and went bust. He grabbed beneath the table for every dollar he could — and got caught red-handed.
Ten years ago, he was sentenced to 10 months in prison for bribery.
But even as Vrdolyak back then was being tried, convicted and dispatched to prison, he continued to work a second big scam. He and a partner, lawyer Daniel Soso, were quietly pocketing millions of dollars each year from a legal settlement between Illinois and Big Tobacco — though they did little or nothing to earn the money — and Vrdolyak was helping Soso hide his earnings from the IRS.
On Friday, Vrdolyak presented himself as Contrite Eddie. He said he took “full responsibility.” But Dow seemed to pick up a little of that old Fast Eddie vibe. The judge just wouldn’t let it go that Vrdolyak had hid his involvement in a second criminal scheme during the entire time he was in trouble for the first scheme, and for years afterward.
Had Vrdolyak “come clean” and “accepted his medicine” in 2011, Dow said, he would not now — at age 82 — be going off to prison again. He is to begin serving his time once the coronavirus pandemic subsides.
“It’s really on him,” Dow said, “that he didn’t come forward when he could.”
Fast Eddie was nine years too slow.
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