The “conflict-of-interest” measure reads in part: “No Employee at the level of a department head or higher shall have any Business Relationship with any entity other than the Village. However, prompted by questions from the BGA, Melrose Park’s village board did the right thing in the end: just before Christmas, trustees passed an ethics ordinance that, officials said, prevents the type of business relationships Castellan and Campanelli had with their town.

It was legal-and apparently not even frowned upon-for a municipal worker in Melrose Park to have a private business arrangement of this kind with the municipality. The BGA detailed some of this a few months back (along with revelations that Assistant Fire Chief Bill Campanelli ran a vending company on the side that was dispensing snacks and pop at Village Hall and other village facilities, as well as local businesses that face inspections from Campanelli’s public agency.)Īlthough this surely represented a conflict of interest, it wasn’t against the rules. Turns out the current deputy police chief in Melrose Park, Michael Castellan, ran a company that, until recently, sold uniforms and other supplies to the very agency that he also helps run. With Scavo as a backdrop, you’d think Melrose Park employees would be cautious these days about their secondary employment, and how it interfaces with municipal government. Scavo “was convicted of racketeering and extortion for strong-arming local businesses into using the two private security firms he illegally ran out of his west suburban police department.” What’s more, “Scavo used on-duty officers and village equipment to staff his firms.” The Chicago Sun-Times puts it quite succinctly: The mob aside, run-of-the-mill public corruption hasn’t disappeared from the western suburb, as evidenced by a scandal a few years back that sent the now-former police chief, Vito Scavo, to federal prison. While the current leaders of Melrose Park may not like that image, they don’t do a lot to correct it either, considering Mayor Ron Serpico continues to take campaign contributions from a waste-hauling company that the FBI has long contended is run by two high-ranking mob figures. Historically it was a town with strong organized crime influences.

Radio silence ex