Loren-Maltese Plugging Book After Yard Sale Ends
CICERO, Ill. (WBBM) -- Over the holiday weekend, former Cicero Town President Betty Loren-Maltese sold much of her belongings at a yard sale, to try to pay bills and some of the restitution she still owes the government from her 2006 corruption conviction.
Next, she hopes to sell a book that, she said, "will expose a lot of what happens in Chicago, in the court system."
It had the working title of "Justice, Chicago Style," but she said she's going to change that. But she said she still intends to name names.
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While Loren-Maltese had a reputation for being tough, she insists that she is really a naive person who probably should not have been in politics.
"I'm very sorry I ever took any advice from Ed Vrdolyak (who served as Cicero's attorney during much of her term as town president), and assuming people were friends that really weren't friends that did not have the best interests of the town at heart, but only themselves," she said.
Loren-Maltese said she intends to tell it all in the book, which she said she wrote during her last three months in prison.
One such nugget: How fellow town officials allegedly began to scheme against her at her husband Frank's wake in October 1993.
She said she is expecting a lot of area politicians to buy it, and said that if it is successful, there may be a second book.
"After I got out of prison I learned so much ore about what happened in the judicial system, and people have come forward, that it could really be a separate book by itself," she said.
That is intended as fair warning.
Loren-Maltese is still trying to pay restitution owed to the government because as part of her corruption sentence. But she said she also hopes that publication of the book will help her to regain custody of her adopted daughter, Ashleigh.
