The Chicago money man behind Rahm

Michael Sacks, far right, then-Deputy Mayor Mark Angel. 

I call Rahm the "Little Emperor" because of his bullying approach to management. But the emperor doesn't say boo without getting the nod from his big-money patrons in the Civic Committee. Chief among those is behind-the-scenes operator Michael Sacks, CEO of Grosvenor Capital Management, one of the world's largest hedge funds.

Sacks has known the Little Emperor since Rahm left the Clinton White House in the late 1990s to become an investment banker.

Word is, he's the link between Mr. Emanuel and the Daley camp, "alert to potential friction when the mayor, while not mentioning predecessor Richard M. Daley by name", shifts blame for problems he inherited, from the “rotten” meter contract to underfunded pensions. Sean Conroy, Mr. Daley's son-in-law, is a director at Grosvenor, where he has worked since 2004.

Sacks, who actually brokered Rahm's latest parking meter deal, is featured in a recent Chicago Tribune piece.

When Chicago aldermen wanted answers on Mayor Rahm Emanuel's new parking meter deal, they heard the details not only from a City Hall lawyer and administrator but from a rich and influential businessman who has no official city job at all. 

People tied to Sacks' Grosvenor Capital Management firm donated nearly $450,000 to help get Emanuel elected, including $100,000 from Sacks personally. He has paid for sports tickets, meals and transportation for his friend since then, though neither man will detail the gifts.

Sacks is the Vice-Chairman of World Business Chicago board  and is also a big player in managing the $39 billion teachers pension fund. Grosvenor has provided investment management services for Illinois teacher pension funds as well as Los Angeles County public employee retirement funds. Grosvenor's fund of funds is second in size only to New York-based Blackstone Group L.P.'s. It routinely vies with the likes of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. for the business of big pension funds and other institutional investors.

There's also a revolving door between city and county government and Grosvenor. When Kurt Summers left his job as Cook County Board Pres. Tony Preckwinkle's chief of staff last November, he was immediately hired by Grosvenor as senior vice-president.

Sacks is a big promoter of charter schools and serves as a mayoral adviser on the topic. He also sits on the board of After School Matters, Mayor and Maggie Daley's cash-cow after-school program which was used as back entrance to the old City Hall patronage system.

According to the Tribune:

He is vociferous in his praise of Emanuel's leadership, but always vague when asked to describe his own role in city affairs.

They come and they go

Catalyst follows the comings and goings of the cogs in Chicago's corporate reform wheel. The latest to catch my eye is Oliver Sicat, who leaves CPS to become the CEO and president of Edvocate, the charter management organization overseeing USC Hybrid High School in Los Angeles.

Sicat

Sicat was the founder of University of Illinois at Chicago College Prep, a campus of the Noble Street Charters Schools.  USC Hybrid High, now in its first year, is a charter school authorized by the Los Angeles Unified School District and designed and built by the University of Southern California Rossier School.

He was hired by Rahm to run the charter school wing of the mayor's school-closing operation. You know how that goes -- close a neighborhood public school, claiming it's "underutilized" and then open 3 charter schools around the corner, run by private companies. It's an economic and political win-win for the mayor and the corporate guys. And Sicat was the guy brought in to make it work.

Rahm even invented a new position of chief portfolio officer specifically for his rising star bureaucrat.  So why is he leaving a position created just for him? Don't know. Rahm likes to keep the revolving door revolving. It keeps any one department from getting too much power. Plus he's had to make room in the bloated school-closing/charter bureaucracy for new blood, like ex-marine colonel and hostage negotiator, Tom Tyrell and for Ald. O'Connor's sister, Catherine Sugrue.

Much like the military-industrial complex, where operators slide easily from the government bureaucracy to corporate board rooms, so it is with the edreform-corporate complex.

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One group that sticks around is the corporate patrons of charter schools themselves who also keep Rahm on a short leash.

From the Chicago Tribune:

Yet the mayor's kitchen cabinet of advisers includes political donors from the strata of high finance in which he himself made millions of dollars. Those advisers, many active in promoting charter schools, include Michael Sacks, the CEO of Grosvenor Capital Management, who also heads Emanuel's World Business Chicago economic development panel; Kenneth Griffin and his wife, Anne Dias Griffin, who each run hedge fund firms; and venture capitalist Bruce Rauner, a likely candidate for the Republican governor nomination.