ChicagoTrib

It started with a complaint that a Chicago water department superintendent was using a city email address to conduct private firearms transactions. The inspector general's investigation turned up a lot more. Besides negotiating to buy or sell four guns and five cars, Paul Hansen traded racist emails with other supervisors and visited websites not related to his job — some containing sexually explicit materials — on "thousands of occasions" in a four-month period.

On city email, on a city computer, on city time.

He also forwarded a confidential workplace violence complaint filed by a subordinate to the employee accused in the complaint, according to IG Joseph Ferguson's report.

The top bosses who were looped in on some of those emails didn't put a stop to them. Sometimes they even joined in. Photos of naked women, jokes about fried chicken and watermelon, a picture of an African-American baby in a bucket described as a swimming pool, a message with the subject line "U Know U Be In Da Hood" — it was all just another day at the office at the Department of Water Management.

A trove of emails obtained earlier by the Tribune contained more of the same: a Confederate flag, a reference to "negro midgets," a crude joke about an employee needing "an inflatable doughnut on the chair" after a Gay Pride weekend. It's the kind of stuff you'd expect from fourth-grade boys with pigs for parents. And it was all happening on your dime, taxpayers.

Here's the other outrage: Nobody is surprised. The water department is larded with workers that somebody sent. In 2006, the department was the focus of a federal corruption trial that showed how then-Mayor Richard M. Daley's administration rewarded campaign workers with jobs, promotions and overtime. Daley's patronage chief, Robert Sorich, maintained the secret "clout list," rigged interviews and falsified documents to grease the hires.

In one of the emails, Hansen, the son of ex-44th Ward Ald. Bernie Hansen, bragged about his ability to "swing elections."

"The water department has been staffed at its highest levels by persons whose social or political connections were their chief or only qualification for the job," Ald. Roderick Sawyer, 6th, chairman of the City Council's black caucus, said this week. "The emails have exposed that these individuals hold black Chicagoans in contempt."[MORE]