The faces of the village board members are frozen. No one has ever before suggested to them that they should have a minority contractor. This is not Chicago, after all, this is Northfield, an affluent North Shore suburb where blacks have made no inroads. And here sits Phil Krone, not only offering the board the name of a minority contractor, but also baldly telling them that they can’t expect any state subsidies to help them with their project. “You can’t expect the people at 63rd and Cottage to pay for your land acquisitions,” he says.
Krone reels off a series of projects in which he has helped communities and/or developers. There is the current dispute in Marion, Illinois, in which he is assisting the owners of a shopping mall who want to prevent the construction of a competing mall nearby; there is the ongoing zoning battle in which Krone is representing a client who wants to build penthouses atop 229 E. Lake Shore Drive; there was the battle in the mid-80s over zoning for a high rise in Old Town, in which Krone convinced the developer to compromise to get what he wanted. All these cases, Krone points out, involve people who have to be convinced one way or the other–by political pressure, by lawsuit, by simple persuasion, or by some other means he can help find.
Not at all, Krone replies, smiling. “They enjoyed me.” Of course they’ll hire him, he says.
When the eighth-grade reporter reached the lobby of the hotel after his interview, Krone says, he was mobbed by the working press. “They weren’t interested in the substance of the interview, but the fact that I got it. I was hooked. That was politics.”
Philip S. Krone, 48, educated at Haverford College near Philadelphia and at Roosevelt University in Chicago, has been called a political gadfly, an urbanologist, a “nice guy,” a political operative, a “man of great enthusiasm,” a flimflammer, an influence peddler, an “intelligent interpreter of politics,” a mystery, a headhunter, and a “man who knows his way around City Hall better than anyone else in this town.” He calls himself a political consultant, though by that he means that he consults with all manner of people about all manner of politics. On one day recently, he met with two real-estate developers, State’s Attorney Cecil Partee, County Assessor Tom Hynes, and a banker. He rarely earns any money nowadays at what most of us would call political consulting; rather he informally advises his many friends in the political arena. “I get calls from public officials every day asking for advice,” he says. “I don’t bill them. It’s much easier to just have a good positive relationship with them.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Krone admits that his flag stunt–he presented the flag to a public hearing and invited the crowd to join him in the Pledge of Allegiance–was done to get publicity: not for himself, he says, but to prevent a new shopping mall from being built in Marion. But despite his best efforts to focus debate on the proposed mall, Krone himself has become the center of a war between his invisible client in Chicago, Heitman Financial Services, which owns a regional shopping mall 14 miles away, in Carbondale, and the proposed mall in Marion, which the local mayor promises will bring jobs and new investment to the town, where unemployment is estimated at 18 percent. Judging from my conversations with the folks in Marion, the Daily Republican and the mayor have done a good job of making Krone the town’s public enemy number one. (According to some, they’ve had considerable help from Krone himself.) But Krone is not daunted. He is only telling the truth about the defects of the deal the mayor wants to make, he says, and besides, he is getting paid very well. He’s even made some friends in Marion, though when he goes to visit them, he enters by the back door. “That mall, if it ever does get built, considering the problems, won’t get built for many years,” he predicts. He has the law on his side, he says–the mayor is planning to give the developers a tax deal that Krone insists is improper; Chicago attorneys Don Reuben and James Vogler, of Winston & Strawn, are challenging it in court.
In 1961, when Krone was 20 and a senior at Roosevelt University (he had transferred from Haverford because his father was dying of cancer), he was offered a job with the Better Government Association as a research associate. In that capacity he helped to redraw electoral maps for Illinois and to document waste at the Metropolitan Sanitary District. After being away at college, he again became involved in Democratic Party politics. “I began to be very upset with the Democrats,” he says. “They were not open to change. There was not a handful of elected officials who weren’t controlled by the Machine. I try to be motivated by a sense of justice, though I may not always be on target, but there seemed to be no place to go with the Democrats.” He was attracted by several Republicans who he believed were more independent, more attuned to his own beliefs–Charles Percy, for example, who like Krone was a Christian Scientist. In 1962, Krone switched to the Republican Party. “I was a Stevenson-Douglas liberal using the Republican Party as a refuge from monolithic Machine politics,” he says. He doesn’t say so, but it becomes clear that he also saw the possibility of being slated to run for office in the Republican Party, an opportunity he’d not had with the Democrats.
