The Paper in Her Pocket
As Loren-Maltese might have told the Institute for Latino Studies, read El Dia every week if you don’t think Cicero’s a wonderful town. No newspaper around has a sharper eye for the bright side. Even when Loren-Maltese and seven codefendants, most of them former town officials, were charged a year ago with racketeering, in an alleged scheme to siphon $10 million from the town’s insurance fund, El Dia’s spirits didn’t flag. The front-page headline announced in Spanish and in English, “Loren-Maltese confident she will be exonerated.” Last March, as her trial date neared, an El Dia headline proclaimed, “No evidence links Loren-Maltese to fraud.” And when the trial began in late May El Dia reported that “the town of Cicero has been on hand in court to show support for Betty, whose innocence is clearer than ever.”
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When Loren-Maltese ran for another term as town committeeman this spring–overcoming a challenge based on evidence that she actually lives in Las Vegas–El Dia cheered her on. She’s the “heart and soul of the Republican Party in Cicero,” the editorial endorsement gushed, and “we want to retain her in power for many years to come…. Her detractors go to all kinds of chicaneries to remove her from power. But voters of all denominations know better. More power for Betty means a better future for the town of Cicero.”
She took over a brutally insular town (in the 60s blacks knew it as “the Selma of the north”) finally being overwhelmed by outsiders: from 1980 to 2000, according to Bordering the Mainstream, Cicero’s Latino population rose from 9 to 77 percent. It was an irresistible tide, and Loren-Maltese decided to go with the flow. Ray Hanania, a former Sun-Times City Hall reporter hired by Loren-Maltese and her political allies as a consultant in early ’93, advised reaching out to the Spanish-language press. Loren-Maltese invited the publishers to drop by.
George Jr. and Giovanni Montes de Oca are both on the El Dia masthead–George Jr. as advertising director and Giovanni as public relations director (though apparently not the sort of PR boss who gets right back to reporters). It’s highly unusual, to say the least, to find newspaper executives on the payroll of the city their paper covers. I thought Ana Maria Montes de Oca-Rojas was well placed to offer some perspective on this uncommon relationship, but town spokesman David Donahue called me back instead. Donahue said he didn’t see a problem. “None of those people is in a policy-making position” with the city, he said. “They’re strictly rank-and-file.”
Eric Muniz is the reporter who wrote El Dia’s rebuttal to the Notre Dame study on Latinos in Cicero. “My assignment was to find any mistakes done in the report,” he tells me. He thinks the plan to discredit the study was concocted in the town hall, and he ridicules some of the civic organizations rounded up to discredit it. “I do not know the Italian Civic Society Club or whatever. There is no such thing.”
A.E. Eyre had been scrutinizing press reports of the sensational legal decision in the Ninth Circuit. “The suit objected to the object of the preposition,” he mused. “I was always more bothered by the preposition itself.”
