Clout Rules!

"Out the Clout" and you'll probably find a veritable ant farm of connected chambers, tunnels and such:

• A city supervisor could face up to seven years in prison after an undercover investigation allegedly caught him stealing cigarettes seized by the city from an evidence room and selling them to convenience stores run by members of his family.

  Abd Ayesh is a $66,564-a-year supervisor of Tax and License Compliance for the city’s Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection.

• Typically, he is accused of placing the cartons in a black plastic bag in his office. An inspector working under Ayesh then allegedly would pick up the bag, drive to convenience stores at 48th and Wood and 69th and Damen run by Ayesh family members and sell those relatives half the cigarettes for a fraction of the cost. Investigators further allege that the inspector sometimes sold his own half of the take to the Ayesh family for $20-a-carton.

  [...] The joint investigation by the FBI, the state’s attorney’s office and the city’s Inspector General Joe Ferguson got a boost when the inspector agreed to wear an electronic eavesdropping device after being snared in an unrelated investigation.

So there was another unrelated investigation that led to this one? How typically Daley-esque. And it isn't really a scandal until you drag in the Police Department somehow:

• Ayesh worked as an Aviation security officer for less than a month in 2001, then abruptly resigned. Two years later, he spent a few weeks as a probationary Chicago Police officer before going to work for the city Revenue Department, where he received a series of promotions.

"A few weeks" as a PPO, then off to another series of connected jobs? He must have heard we weren't promoting fast enough.