John Kass:

Lie to me just once, just once, and I’ll burn you to the ground.

It wasn’t an empty threat. Chicago politics wasn’t a cloistered convent. It was and remains a place of thieves protected by the laws and regulations that they themselves controlled. It is a Democrat Barter Town and like all such towns it is hell bent on strangling itself. And there was one top aide to the mayor who thought himself a master manipulator. Frank lied to me and I burned him.

I burned him repeatedly, mercilessly, using a line often attributed to the poet Richard Brautigan: “He’d sell a rat’s asshole to a blind man for a wedding ring.”

Political Chicago understood. He lied. But I would never use “asshole” in the paper. We had editors. So I adapted it to say Frank was the kind of weasel who’d sell dead rats on coat hangers to a blind man for earmuffs. His boss, the mayor, once asked me about the feud with Frank. He lied to me, I said. The mayor shrugged, said nothing more because he knew Frank.

I never spoke to Frank again, never trusted his word, even his allies were dead to me. He eventually left town. I think he’s a goatherd now.