Steve Rhodes

It sits there so humble, squatting flush against the river, its gunmetal gray worn and weathered, a tired servant from another time. In those days, it was a working building, a manufacturing plant that took in newsprint by rail and river and rolled it through a roaring assembly line of presses, spitting out daily editions of the newspaper at the other end.

Purposefully low-slung, the building defers to the architectural icons that frame it, more ambitious buildings with grander auras, though th

One day about four years ago, a young man named Kevin Flynn paid a visit to Don Stephens, the feisty and plainspoken mayor of Rosemont. The two made an odd match. Stephens, then 69, had almost single-handedly transformed Rosemont from a seedy stretch of strip joints and garbage dumps near O'Hare into a tax-rich haven for airport hotels, restaurants, and office buildings. In the process, he had become one of the state's most powerful politicians. By contrast, Flynn, then 30, had a rather thin résumé–a business degree from Marquette and a few years working for his father, Donald Flynn, a former Arthur Andersen accountant who had made a fortune with Waste Management and Blockbuster Entertainment.
The day they met, however, the two had something in common. Stephens eagerly wanted to bring Rosemont a casino, with its promise of vast lucre for village coffers and his own conveniently placed associates. Kevin Flynn was in the casino business; he ran a Michigan City, Indiana, riverboat and his father owned an outfit named HP Inc., a company anxious to move its shuttered gambling operation from East Dubuque, Illinois, to a more promising location.

Despite their mutual interests, the meeting turned into a disaster. By Stephens's account, Kevin Flynn was little more than a cocky, gabby rich kid. "Kevin proceeded to tell me how he was going to save Rosemont and the whole world," Stephens recalled later in a deposition he gave in a federal lawsuit. "I gave him a very short time. I said goodbye and I told [the friend who had set up the meeting], 'Don't ever send that idiot in here again.'"

Before his name ever appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Homi Bhabha was