Sink Or Swim

Named Top Cop On The Day The Loop Flooded, Matt Rodriguez Still Faces Some Tidal Waves

June 21, 1992|By Sharman Stein.

For 12 years, you`ve sat at the superintendent`s right hand during daily command meetings, watching your colleagues lob and duck, thinking how much better you could run the show-if.

Twice before, you have tried to make the ``if`` a reality. Twice, you`ve been shot down, watched two other men get the coveted police chief`s job, pin on the four gold stars, get all the attention.

You persevere. You apply a third time. And then-kabam! One Monday morning in April, a flood of gargantuan proportions inundates Loop basements. It is, coincidentally, the same day Mayor Richard Daley has decided to announce your long-awaited appointment as the new superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, the second-largest police force in the country.

Any other day, your appointment would have been front-page news, but municipal disasters take precedence. You take the job. You put your granddaughter in the high-backed superintendent`s chair for a photo and go off, not to a celebratory luncheon, but to a makeshift command center in the middle of the flood.

It is a baptism by water, and it doesn`t stop with the flood.

Weeks later, there is the Rodney King verdict and the subsequent rioting in Los Angeles. There is a series of controversial shootings by police in Chicago, including the killing by a gang crimes officer of 12-year-old Joey Chlopek on June 6.

Then there is the looting and burning during celebrations after the Chicago Bulls` victory in the NBA Finals. Police are seen standing by as mobs trash taxis and loot stores; merchants complain that police respond too slowly, or not at all.

Matt Rodriguez, 56, is at the eye of this storm, exactly where he wanted so much to be. He is still at the morning command meetings, only now he has moved over one seat-to the head of the table.

These days, Rodriguez said, he scrutinizes the command staff with the eye of someone who knows that, in six months, he will have replaced half of them. ``I think we have a fine Police Department, but I think we can be the most progressive department in the country,`` he said.

What does he most want to accomplish?

``People have looked at us as a parochial department; we have looked at ourselves the same way. We have to come out of our shell.``

Rodriguez, the son of a Mexican father and a Polish mother, grew up in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, one of four children (two boys and two girls). He speaks some Spanish and Polish, having spoken both languages as a child.

He has been with the department 33 years, spending one year as a patrolman, a few more as an officer assigned to various districts, and the bulk of his career investigating organized crime, vice and gambling.

A careful, steady man

He is a careful man, a steady man, married for 37 years to his wife, Ruth, whom he met in high school. He was 19 when they married; she was 17. They have one grown daughter.

Living in two distinct ethnic worlds was culturally rich, Rodriguez said. He was often sent, with his brother, Richard, from the Polish parochial school and church they attended to fill in as altar boys at the smaller Mexican church down the street.

This former altar boy at two churches does not tend to buck conventional wisdom.

He is unlikely to be as outspoken as his predecessor, LeRoy Martin, who returned from a trip to China suggesting that that country`s concept of constitutional rights might be applied to good effect in the U.S.

``He is the opposite of me,`` acknowledges Martin, whose retirement opened up the chief`s post. ``There are times I get rather upset and rather vocal, but he would never say anything confrontational. He would wait an hour or two and come back to the office, tell me where he thought I had gone a little too far, all of it in a gentlemanly manner.

``He has the strength and ability to get people working together. People can`t help but like him.``

Immaculately groomed, every steel-gray hair in place, Rodriguez projects a thoughtful authority. He looks better, handsomer, in his suit and tie than in his uniform, in which he tends to appear dwarfed. He plays golf, is a baseball fan and worries about exercising more.

Rodriguez is funny, in a low-key way. He looks for humor in a situation, and he likes to laugh. ``I just hate this comparison,`` the 5-foot-7-inch police chief said as he handed an award to 6-foot-7-inch U.S. Atty. Fred Foreman.

Having agreed to an interview on the unbelievably busy day after his appointment, he chatted amiably and in a remarkably relaxed manner for 20 minutes before saying something so softly he had to be asked to repeat it.

``Could you get out of here now?`` he wanted to know.

Rodriguez thinks before he talks. When he does speak, it isn`t always packaged in neat sound bites. But it does sound sincere, though politically proper, befitting the son of a man who was a successful precinct captain. He puts people at ease.