Tom Rosenberg, the alleged shakedown victim in the federal corruption case of Springfield political boss William Cellini, is often referred to as a Hollywood movie producer.
And it is true that he is a producer. He’s made dozens of films in the last two decades, including the haunting “Million Dollar Baby” directed by Clint Eastwood.
But here’s the thing about Rosenberg. He might eat in Hollywood. He might do business in Hollywood. But he’s not some Hollywood guy.
He’s a Chicago guy.
“If somebody’s not from Chicago, he can never understand Chicago,” Rosenberg told Chicago magazine in 1992, as he took those first steps as a producer. “Chicago’s a very complex place, and the politics are almost medieval. I know Chicago politics and I feel it, it’s a part of me, in a way other people can’t.”
This notion that if you’re not from here you can’t really understand the place in ways we native-born understand it certainly burns some people. But there are a few outlanders, even Cardinals fans, who understand the place.
What Rosenberg said might seem rather xenophobic, even parochial, definitely clannish, perhaps even tribal.
So medieval. So Chicago.
The first time I met him it was in the inner sanctum of the chairman’s offices of the Cook County Democratic Party, on election night. Mayor Jane Byrne was going down to defeat, and Harold Washington would make history.
The chairman then was Rosenberg’s friend Fast Eddie Vrdolyak, who would later become a Republican, and is now watching the World Series in the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute, Ind.
The room was full of testosterone and smoke. A lovely young woman with long legs was serving drinks.
There was a combative streak in Rosenberg then. He wasn’t pushy, but he wasn’t a pushover. Even a decade later, in that magazine piece, he outlined Chicago’s code of conduct.
“You can never let people get away with things, ever,” he said. “You have to call them on it, be firm, and if necessary, punish them.”
In politics, you mark your territory. And if you don’t, you fade away. Rosenberg’s father, Thomas Rosenberg, son of Russian and Romanian immigrants, understood this.
As a young man, in the 1920s, in the days when the sons of immigrants cleaved to baseball as a way to become truly American, the old St. Louis Browns wanted to sign him to a major league contract. But grandpa had different ideas. He didn’t want his boy to hang around with ballplayers. He wanted his son to be respectable, to be a lawyer.
So it was the law, and then the Chicago Democratic machine reached out its hand, and the almost-ballplayer for the Browns served three terms as 44th Ward alderman, and later they installed him as a Cook County judge.
In a 1999 obituary of Judge Rosenberg, son Tom — the future movie producer and Thursday’s witness — recalled his father as a feisty guy who won his last fistfight at age 82.
“He was a wild man — he lived it every minute,” Rosenberg said. “There was no minute that wasn’t filled, with entertaining, politics or gambling.”
And so on Thursday, as I watched the son up there on the witness stand in the Cellini trial, I could see his father in him.
Rosenberg wasn’t on the witness stand to talk about some Hollywood movie deal. He was there to discuss his role as a partner in Capri Capital, a real estate and money management firm in line to receive $220 million in state teacher pension funds for investment.
Federal prosecutors contend that in 2004, top operatives for then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich — Tony Rezko and Christopher Kelly — wanted to shake him down for campaign cash. Their alleged messenger? Bill Cellini.
While Tom Rosenberg said Cellini didn’t demand money for himself, he put Cellini right in the shakedown. He testified that Cellini relayed the message that unless money was paid, Rosenberg’s firm would be cut off.
“Bill told me that Rezko and Kelly said it would not go forward until Capri made the appropriate (contribution),” Rosenberg testified.
Rosenberg said he wouldn’t be shaken down.
“I told him I would stand on the corner of State and Madison and discuss this. … I screamed and cursed. I wanted him to pass on the full level of my fury to Rezko and Kelly.”
Later, Rosenberg testified that Cellini called again, and told Rosenberg that Capri would get the $220 million. So he did mark his territory, didn’t he?
Soon it will be the jury’s job to decide whether a crime was committed. But Cellini has a problem: The evidence shows he served as messenger boy and then laughed about it in taped phone conversations.
The prosecution rested and court was adjourned early, so I went over to my unofficial Tribune federal bureau, Miller’s Pub on Wabash.
Miller’s is still an old school Chicago place. Wabash still is an old school Chicago street. It hasn’t been turned into a theme park.
Just as I ordered a sandwich, about a dozen people came in and sat down next to my table. I recognized several as Cellini jurors. I got up quietly, and moved to a far table.
When I looked back, they were clinking glasses after a day’s work.
I get the feeling we’re almost done.
