Alderman Ed Burke, who has been at the center of his share of ugly conflicts and scandals since he arrived on the Chicago City Council all the way back in 1969, quietly ended his political career on Monday night when he did not file for re-election before the deadline passed.
The 79-year-old incumbent, who once said the only way to leave the Council was through “[t]he ballot box. The jury box. Or the pine box,” was indicted all the way back in 2019 on federal corruption charges, and he’s finally scheduled to stand trial in November for bribery, extortion, and racketeering. Burke’s departure came months after his wife, Anne Burke, announced that she’d step down as chief justice of the Illinois Supreme Court effective Wednesday.
Ed Burke, who worked as a police officer, got his start in politics during the days when Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Cook County Democratic Party utterly dominated the city. Party leaders chose Burke in 1968 to succeed his late father as 14th Ward committeeman, and the 24-year-old won the following year’s special election to fill the elder Burke’s spot on the City Council. Ed Burke would become the longest-serving member of the body, though not entirely by choice: In 1980 he suffered what turned out to be his only defeat at the ballot box when he badly lost the Democratic nomination for county attorney to Richard M. Daley, the son of the late mayor.
Burke went on to be a key antagonist of Chicago’s first Black mayor, Harold Washington, during the infamous Council Wars of the 1980s that pitted Burke and most of the other white members of the body against Washington's allies. Burke later lost control of the powerful Finance Committee after Washington’s side won a majority on the Council in 1987, and he initially competed in the 1989 special election that took place after Washington died in office. The alderman, though, ended up dropping out of the “Super Bowl of Chicago politics” in the face of weak polling and backed his old foe, Daley: The new mayor went on to reinstall Burke as finance chair, where he’d remain for decades.
The chairman spent that time as one of the dominant figures of Chicago politics as his longtime 14th Ward base became a majority Latino constituency and he survived multiple federal probes. Burke himself continued to gerrymander his ward to his liking, and he also benefited from a truly massive war chest: In 2019 the alderman had $12 million available, a haul that would stand out even in a U.S. Senate race.
Burke, though, was also careful to align with prominent Latino power players and make himself accessible to his constituents. “I don’t see anything wrong with the old-school way of doing things,” he told the New York Times ahead of his 2011 campaign, adding, “The proof is in the pudding—I don’t have an opponent.” The chairman additionally forged what the Chicago Tribune characterizes as an “uneasy detente” with Daley and successor Rahm Emanuel, whom the paper says “came to rely on the alderman to help push his agenda by finessing the council process and cajoling or threatening colleagues to get them in line.”
Burke continued to work in real estate law, where helped reduce the local Trump Tower’s property tax bill by $14 million. He ultimately dropped Trump as a client in 2018 months after his younger brother, state Rep. Dan Burke, lost renomination to an opponent who emphasized the family’s Trump ties.
Ed Burke was charged in 2019 for allegedly using his position to try to extort business in order to benefit his tax law firm, and he was soon stripped of his Finance Committee chairmanship. Burke’s fall also upended that year’s race to succeed Emanuel as all four of the frontrunners had connections to him, a development that gave underdog Lori Lightfoot the chance to argue that her opponents were "all tied to the same Chicago machine.”
Lightfoot went on to prevail in a landslide months after Burke himself won what turned out to be his final term 54-29. The badly weakened Burke, though, lost some his best turf following the newest round of redistricting, and his brother urged him to retire rather than risk humiliation at the ballot box. “Do the math,” Dan Burke said last year, “Seventy-eight years old. Come on. When is enough enough? ... They’ve had a long run. It’s not insulting to say there’s an end to everything.” Ed Burke finally agreed Monday.