Ray Hanania fell on his sword for his newspaper last week. He resigned over a woman–a woman his paper could not comfortably champion so long as he stayed on the payroll. The gesture was not wholly noble: the editor of the Sun-Times made it clear that if Hanania didn’t quit he was fired.
And so it did. Avis LaVelle, the mayor’s press secretary, remembers, “I told Ray a long time ago I know affairs of the heart are difficult to control, but this was a bad idea on both of their parts. I’m no Ann Landers. I’m not going to counsel him to break up with his girlfriend. But I said this is not good from his perspective as a journalist or her perspective as a public official.”
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They broke up after the primary. Hanania was devastated. But from time to time they talked, and some of the coals eventually rekindled. Spielman, who’s still a City Hall reporter for the Sun-Times, told us, “He’d come by [the press room] and see friends and say they were seeing each other, they were having dinner, they were friends. It changed by the day.”
Daley and his aides were stunned and infuriated. Santos had commandeered the media. Rather than face the fact that “political greed” beat all their own explanations for the mayor’s actions, his office looked for a conspiracy. It was easy to find. Obviously someone was pulling this lady’s strings–her savvy paramour, Ray Hanania. Hadn’t Jay McMullen pulled Jane Byrne’s?
Last week the Tribune’s John Kass, an old friend of Hanania’s, called the Sun-Times looking for comment on the Santos-Hanania relationship. As he would write in a long piece this past Sunday, “Hanania has been advising her on tactics, a fact that Santos, Hanania and others close to them acknowledged to a reporter.”
Yet what exactly did Hanania do? “Advising her on tactics,” as Kass wrote, can mean almost anything, and Hanania insists he’s given Santos nothing more than moral support. He admits to one piece of specific advice: he said she should hire Guy Chipparoni, who used to be Edgar’s press secretary, as her media strategist. It was Chipparoni, not Hanania, who helped plant “City pension deals go sour” on page one.
Did Spielman whisper to LaVelle? “I honestly blame Fran for this whole problem,” Hanania told us. “She told Avis I was managing this process.” He is doubly bitter because Spielman’s husband, Dick Stone, is a local political consultant who’s worked for high-profile candidates like James O’Grady and Stanley Kusper. But Spielman’s never been reprimanded.
