The Goods on Grant
Happy the reporter who’s got the goods. La Raza’s Jorge Oclander is grinning with delight. The goods make a fat stack of papers on his desk.
Oclander spotted the article and began digging. In early December he wrote again. Now he was itemizing “a new series of questionable, and in some cases possibly criminal practices,” the 5151 repairs among them. In late January his three-part series about the property, “The Privileges of Power,” began in La Raza Domingo, the Sunday supplement carried in the Latino parts of Chicago by the Sun-Times. Those parts are lucky; the English-language pages of the Sun-Times haven’t been so aggressive.
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In 1992, Oclander wrote, the board spent about $180,000 to repair the roof at 5151 W. Madison. Last year it spent about $150,000 more on the interior. The money was lavished on a rental building, he noted, at a time when “the public schools are in such a bad economic state that they carry a budgetary debt of $400 million, have had to close [briefly, last September], and have cut teachers, personnel, and classes.”
Oclander offers himself as the first reporter in town to exploit such evidence, as well as the first to locate the 5151 W. Madison lease and establish that the renter, not the board, is responsible for upkeep. Last month, when the board voted 11-0 to recover the money spent repairing the property, Grant insisted it was property she’d had nothing to do with. “I was talking to Jacquelyn Heard [the Tribune’s education writer],” Oclander tells us. “I said, Jackie, I’m sitting on documents that say just the opposite. She said, can we see the documents? We’ll give you credit.”
Background: In March 1988 Daggett’s Austin Development Center owed more than $27,000 in back rent. The board voted to evict her.
Barbara Peck, chief financial officer: “OK, in that case can we withdraw this?”
The chip on the shoulder and the joy of the hunt come as close as anything to being essentials of the investigative journalist. Oclander is 52, used to teach, has a son who graduated from West Point, writes in Spanish for an ethnic paper most Chicagoans not only don’t read but can’t, and doubles as its sports editor. He produces up to 35 articles a week. In one breath he moans about his workload and in the next would want to do nothing else.
