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The Chicago Bears may only be halfway through their 2021 season, but could already be thinking about replacing head coach Matt Nagy. In his fourth year as head coach, Nagy’s offense is still stuck in mediocrity and fans have grown tired of the same old press conferences filled with non-answers and little explanation for what […] Chicago Bears Rumors: Top candidate to replace Matt Nagy revealed – Da Windy City – Da Windy City – A Chicago Sports Site – Bears, Bulls, Cubs, White Sox, Blackhawks, Fighting Illini & MoreRead More

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Attorney Stephen Carlson mentored generations of young lawyers at Sidley Austin, including Michelle Robinson, who would become Michelle Obama, first lady of the United States. | Provided

‘I just treated Michelle as I would have anybody,’ he once wrote. ‘I regard it as simply what a Princeton gentleman should do to anyone who asks for his help.’

Stephen Carlson once told Barack Obama that he was responsible for his marriage to Michelle Obama.

The Chicago lawyer wasn’t a matchmaker. But Mr. Carlson mentored generations of young lawyers at Sidley Austin and had a role in the future first lady working for the firm, where she met the future president when he was a summer associate there.

It all started with a letter the litigator received around 1984 from a young Michelle Robinson, then a student at Princeton University.

She wrote Mr. Carlson, a fellow Princetonian, to ask whether Sidley “might have a summer job for a college student with an interest in the law,” according to the 2008 book “Michelle: a Biography.”

He responded that the firm hired only law students for those jobs but sent her the names of legal services organizations that might be hiring, author Liza Mundy wrote.

“Two years later, estimating that she would have graduated from college and might be in her first year of law school, he found Michelle’s Euclid Avenue address and sent a letter to her home, offering to talk to her about her prospects, if she had decided to pursue the law,” according to the book.

They met for lunch. Later, in her second year at Harvard Law School, Sidley hired her for a summer.

According to the biography, Mr. Carlson later recalled: “Somebody on our Harvard recruiting team came to me and said that this woman Michelle [Robinson] had said in part she was interested in talking to Sidley because Steve Carlson was so nice to her.”

Services were held last month for Mr. Carlson, 70, who died Sept. 21 from progressive supranuclear palsy, according to his wife Patricia.

He spent nearly 40 years at Sidley Austin. Among his highest-profile cases, he defended General Electric, United Airlines and McDonnell Douglas against negligence claims in the 1989 crash of a DC-10 in Sioux City, Iowa, in which more than 110 people died, according to Sara Gourley Euler, a retired partner with the firm.

He also defended a pharmaceutical company that used donated plasma to manufacturer a blood-clotting product for people with hemophilia who, as a result, later contracted AIDS.

“More important than the kinds of cases he worked on, he loved to be a teacher,” Euler said. “He always loved to work with brand new lawyers.”

He was known for leaving “excruciatingly long voicemail messages to the associates he was working with, often in the middle of the night, about what legal strategies we should pursue,” said Eugene A. Schoon, another former colleague. “He never stopped thinking about the cases he was working on.”

Though “a brilliant trial lawyer,” he had a homespun demeanor that endeared him to juries, former colleague Hugh A. Abrams said.

“He had that kind of rumpled nerd look,” he said. “He wasn’t a slickster.”

When U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was in town, Mr. Carlson took him to baseball games.

Provided
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito (right) said of his friend Stephen Carlson, “The last time we got together was during a trip to Chicago when we took in a White Sox game.”

“Steve and I were friends for nearly 50 years, going back to our college days, when we were both on the debate panel” at Princeton, Alito said by email. “The last time we got together was during a trip to Chicago when we took in a White Sox game. I like to keep in mind the image of that sunny afternoon with Steve and [his wife] Pat. I will miss him very much.”

Mr. Carlson believed in “the little things you can do about being nice to other people and not pushing them down as you are on your way up,” his wife said. “Even reaching out to Michelle Obama, he had no idea when he helped her she would become such an important person.”

“I just treated Michelle as I would have anybody,” Mr. Carlson once wrote. “I regard it as simply what a Princeton gentleman should do to anyone who asks for his help.”

He also played a role in the career of attorney Erika Harold, the 2018 Republican Party nominee for Illinois attorney general.

Harold said that, at Sidley, “We were working on a large intellectual property arbitration together, and, when it came time to depose the most important person, he insisted I be given the opportunity to do it. He knew it would help me gain in experience.

“He used to say, ‘Time’s up; pencils down,’ ” Harold said. “That was his mantra to remind us that, once we had given our best to a case or a project, we had to move confidently forward.”

Provided
Stephen Carlson with his three daughters in Greece. He loved Greek history and culture.

Mr. Carlson often spoke of his wife and three kids with pride. To young lawyers, that conveyed how important it is to have a life outside the office and the immense satisfaction that could bring, Harold said.

Born in Minneapolis, Mr. Carlson’s family moved to Lake Forest when he was in his teens. He graduated from Lake Forest High School. He met his wife at Princeton, where both were on the debate team.

One day, “As we were crossing the street,” she said, “he grabbed my hand.”

Provided
Patricia and Stephen Carlson.

He joined Sidley in the mid-1970s after graduating from Yale Law School.

The Carlsons raised their family in Dearborn Park. He’d been planning to live in the suburbs, his wife said, but realized Dearborn Park “would be a 20-minute walk, as opposed to an hour-plus on the train.”

Every October, when he heard the oom-pah-pah music outside the Berghoff restaurant, Mr. Carlson organized groups of lawyers to attend its Oktoberfest celebrations.

One time at Christmas, he walked past a house that had a basket outside offering free candy canes.

“Steve began putting candy canes in the basket,” his son-in-law Robert Demke said in a eulogy. “He got a kick out of imagining the family discovering — a little perplexed — that the basket was refilling on its own. He left them candy canes for years.”

In addition to his wife, Mr. Carlson is survived by his daughters Susan and Julie and Elizabeth Wolicki, his sisters Sue and Melanie Day, his brother Richard and four grandchildren.

He loved Shakespeare and poetry.

A few years ago, Mr. Carlson and his wife made a pilgrimage to the Wisconsin cemeteries that held his ancestral relatives. At each grave, he stood and read a passage from George Eliot’s “Middlemarch”:

“. . . .for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

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Ald. Patrick Daley Thompson (11th). | Ashlee Rezin Garcia / Sun-Times

Patrick Daley Thompson’s friend Michael Meagher is president of McHugh Construction, which is restoring the old Ramova Theatre with City Hall’s financial backing.

One of the people slated to testify as a character witness for Ald. Patrick Daley Thompson at his income-tax fraud trial is a longtime friend who’s working on a Bridgeport redevelopment project that has Thompson’s backing and $6.8 million from City Hall.

The friend, Michael Meagher, is president of McHugh Construction, which has been hired by developer Tyler Nevius to restore the shuttered Ramova Theatre as part of a multimillion-dollar project to turn the storied site into a performing arts center with a restaurant and brewery in the heart of Bridgeport, three blocks from Thompson’s bungalow.

Thompson is scheduled to face trial Feb. 1 on federal charges that accuse him of cheating on his income-tax returns by deducting interest payments he hadn’t made on $269,000 borrowed from Washington Federal Bank for Savings. Thompson also is accused of lying to authorities about the money he owed the Bridgeport bank, which federal regulators shut down four years ago because of what they described as a massive fraud scheme.

Thompson — a nephew of former Mayor Richard M. Daley and a grandson of late Mayor Richard J. Daley — and Meagher and their families have been friends for decades.

“I have a 30-year relationship, and I’ve found him honest and ethical,” Meagher says.

He says he expects that, if called, he would testify “about his honesty and high ethics.”

“I’ve known him since college” at St. Mary’s University of Winona, Minn., Meagher says.

He says that, although the alderman supports the redevelopment of the Ramova, “Patrick has nothing to do with our involvement in this project. Zero.”

City financing is a key component for the Ramova, which is in Thompson’s ward, and he helped secure it. He voted along with the entire Chicago City Council to lend $6.6 million in tax-increment financing to the theater in the spring of 2020 and then, this past May, to increase the city funding to $6.8 million. The loan could end up being a grant.

Mengshin Lin / Sun-Times
Bridgeport’s long-closed Ramova Theatre, 3250 S. Halsted St.

Thompson won’t comment about the plans to resurrect the Ramova, a dilapidated property in the 3500 block of South Halsted Street that has been vacant since 1986.

Nevius — who worked for the mega-talent agency headed by former Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s brother Ari Emanuel — has a $28 million budget for the project, including the City Hall loan.

This summer, Nevius’s company Our Revival Chicago, LLC spent $4.1 million buying nine properties for the theater project, including eight that had been owned by families with long ties to the Daleys. That land is expected to be home to a new Ramova Grill, a brewery, a taproom and parking.

The properties Nevius bought have unpaid or delinquent property taxes totaling more than $72,000, including penalties and interest, according to Cook County treasurer’s office records.

The deals for those properties:

Nevius paid $1.4 million for seven vacant lots across from the Ramova Theatre on June 30. The purchases came 28 years after Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration sold that land to Mick-Bert Construction for $195,000, according to records filed with the Cook County clerk’s office.

Mick-Bert — owned by Dominick Bertucci and Michael Bertucci, who did not return calls seeking comment — has made more than $37,000 in political contributions over the years to Daley family members’ campaigns, including $10,000 to Thompson.

The vacant lots, which are also across the street from the Daley Insurance Brokerage run by Thompson’s uncle Cook County Commissioner John Daley, will provide parking for the theater.

On Aug. 20, Nevius paid $1,285,000 for a two-story building at 3506 S. Halsted St. that was home to the Bridgeport News until the Feldman family, who live in Naperville, ceased publication of the paper last fall.

“We sold the building and the newspaper,” Joseph Feldman Jr. says.

Feldman’s father owned the Ramova Theatre for several years, during which City Hall cited him for building code violations. The city of Chicago bought the theater from the family for $285,000 two decades ago, officials say. This summer, City Hall sold the theater to Nevius for $1.

Joseph Feldman Sr. is a relative of Richard M. Daley’s former campaign treasurer, the late Patricia Kilroe, who married a Daley cousin. The Feldmans have given more than $18,000 to Daley family members’ campaigns, records show.

The Feldman family owned one of the hundreds of dump trucks that City Hall paid to use under the second Mayor Daley’s Hired Truck Program, which he was forced to shut down in 2006.

That was after the Chicago Sun-Times reported that the city was spending $40 million a year to hire those trucks even though they did little or no work on city construction projects and that their owners were campaign contributors to Daley and others. The Sun-Times investigation led to federal criminal charges against 49 people, including city officials and truck owners, and 48 people going to prison.

The Feldmans were never were accused of any crime.

They also own several parking lots near the United Center on the West Side. Seven years ago, city inspectors found that the Feldmans also were parking cars on city-owned property nearby.

Emanuel’s administration also cited Feldman for parking cars on two residential lots near the United Center, land the family had acquired in a land swap with City Hall. Feldman hired the law firm then known as Daley & Georges, which was run by the former mayor’s brother and Daley’s former top City Hall attorney Mara Georges. Georges convinced the city to rezone the land so cars could legally park there.

On Aug. 24, Nevius bought several vacant storefronts between the theater’s entrance and the former Bridgeport News offices from businessman Kok Cheung Chin for $1,450,000. Chin had purchased the property for $500,000 in 2012. His attorney didn’t return calls.

A downstater who once lived in Wicker Park, Nevius was living in Brooklyn and working in the entertainment industry in 2017 when he says he decided he wanted to pair live entertainment with a brewery.

He says friends suggested that he contact Kevin Hickey, the acclaimed chef who operates the Duck Inn in Bridgeport. Hickey joined the project, and Nevius moved to Chicago, renting a home from Hickey.

“We wanted to open up a music venue with a brewery,” Nevius says. “We wanted to do it in Chicago, and we wanted to do it on the South Side. I reached out to somebody from the city, and they showed me the venue. I loved it. I said, ‘This could be fantastic.’ “

Thompson “was always nice and always supportive,” Nevius says. “He never stopped it. He said, ‘Yes. This seems like a good team.’ “

His company submitted an application to City Hall in August 2018 to buy the theater from the city while seeking tax-increment financing to renovate the building into a space for performing arts, a brewery and taproom and the return of the Ramova Grill.

The city says it sought other proposals in December 2019, but no one was interested.

Mengshin Lin / Sun-Times
Developer Tyler Nevius outside the Ramova Theatre, 3250 S. Halsted St.

Nevius says he has raised money from about 50 investors, whom he won’t identify, saying “some of the families have been in Bridgeport for a while. . . . There’s no one from the Daley family or any political family that I know of.”

He says the project’s $28 million budget includes an $8 million loan from an Iowa bank, money from investors and City Hall’s $6.8 million loan, which can be converted into a grant under the deal that was approved last year and earlier this year by the entire city council, including Thompson. Nevius says he expects to get the money from the city before the end of the year.

Meagher says his company was tapped for the project around 2018. He says McHugh has done other theater renovations, including working on the Civic Opera House.

The work on the Ramova, which is nearly a century old, is expected to take over a year.

McHugh is one of Chicago’s biggest and oldest construction companies and a contributor to numerous political campaigns — including Thompson’s — that’s made a total of more than $400,000 in contributions to Illinois political funds over the years, records show.

The company has given more than $9,000 to Thompson’s campaign fund and also helped him raise money. The company also has given to campaign committees benefiting his uncles’ political operations.

McHugh and its joint ventures have been paid nearly $500 million for city government infrastructure projects in recent years, including bridges and viaducts and O’Hare Airport, city records show.

Federal prosecutors named the company in a 2016 search warrant affidavit that came to light in 2019 as part of the ongoing corruption investigation of then-Ald. Danny Solis (25th). According to the affidavit, Solis agreed with Juan Gaytan — co-founder of Monterrey Security and a friend of Meagher — to accept a gratuity from McHugh as a reward for “official acts” favoring McHugh’s efforts to win approval of “a 500-room hotel and data center project” near McCormick Place. McHugh hasn’t been charged with any crime.

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This 51-foot Blue Spruce in Logan Square will be cut down and transported to Millennium Park where it will become Chicago’s official 2021 Christmas tree. | DCASE

Last year’s celebration was a virtual affair due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This year’s event features Brian McKnight as the music headliner.

Chicago’s holiday season kicks off November 19 with the lighting of the official city Christmas tree in Millennium Park, it was announced Friday by the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.

This year’s center of attraction, a 51-foot Blue Spruce, is being donated by the Benavides family of Logan Square. The tree was selected from 50 previous nominations.

This year’s event marks the return to a full-on, in-person event following last year’s virtual take on the celebration due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Hosts for the evening will be Tonya Francisco and Amy Rutledge from WGN-Channel 9.

The fun kicks off at 5:30 p.m. at Michigan Avenue and Washington with a pre-show hosted by DJ Selah Say, followed at 6 p.m. with the flipping of the switch amid a larger viewing area complete with video screens. Entertainment will include Mariachi Herencia de Mexico, the cast of Chicago Opera Theater’s production of “Becoming Santa Claus,” a youth dance ensemble from the Kenwood School of Ballet, and special guests Dreezy Claus and Sister Claus. A fireworks show will also be presented.

A concert featuring headliner Brian McKnight, Cirque du Soleil performing an excerpt of ‘Twas the Night Before…,” and Chicago Soul Spectacular follows at 6:30 p.m.

Additional seasonal programming in the park includes skating at the McCormick Ice Rink (Nov. 19-March 6, weather permitting); the Millennium Park Art Market at the Chase Promenade North tent (Nov. 19-21), and the Millennium Park Holiday Sing-Along (formerly “Caroling at Cloud Gate”) at 6 p.m. Fridays, Nov. 26-Dec. 17, and 4 p.m. Dec. 12. The sing-along “has been reimagined to be more inclusive of Chicago’s many faith backgrounds, cultures and holiday music traditions,” Friday’s announcement said.

The park will be open 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily.

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One person was killed and 11 others wounded in citywide shootings Thursday. | Sun-Times file

One person was fatally shot and another wounded in East Garfield Park on the West Side.

One person was killed and 11 others wounded in shootings in Chicago Thursday.

A man was killed, and another man was critically wounded, in a shooting in East Garfield Park on the West Side. About 5:15 p.m., the men, 26 and 34, were near the street in the 3900 block of West Van Buren Street when they were struck by gunfire, Chicago police said. The 26-year-old was struck in the chest, shoulder, and taken to Stroger Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, police said. He has not yet been identified. The older man was struck in the chest and taken to Mt. Sinai Hospital, in critical condition, police said.
A 16-year-old girl and a man were wounded in a shooting Thursday afternoon near Chicago Vocational Career Academy on the South Side. They were near the sidewalk in the 2000 block of East 87th Street when someone opened fire about 3:55 p.m., police said. The girl and the man, 19, were each struck in the thigh, police said. Both were taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center in good condition.

At least eight others were wounded by gunfire in Chicago Thursday.

Six were wounded in shootings Wednesday.

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Justin Fields and Matt Nagy will again be on the same sideline Monday night against the Steelers. | Nam Y. Huh/AP

Matt Nagy and Justin Fields are together again.

Is Justin Fields about to break out? Will the Bears defense stop anyone? And how will Matt Nagy help now that he’s back? Patrick Finley and Jason Lieser preview the Bears-Steelers “Monday Night Football” game.

New episodes of “Halas Intrigue” will be published regularly with accompanying stories collected on the podcast’s hub page. You can also listen to “Halas Intrigue” wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Luminary, Spotify, and Stitcher.

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