From Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance, October 4
Citadel’s Griffin Looks Beyond Chicago Amid Surging Crime
Citadel founder Ken Griffin said his firm’s future in Chicago may be counted in years, not decades, if officials don’t get a handle on problems like crime in the nation’s third-most-populous city.
New York has become the “center point” for Griffin’s $38 billion hedge fund, he said. Citadel is hiring all over the country, and is on the verge of acquiring office space in Miami. While New York is still a huge source of hiring, Chicago has “become smaller on a relative basis,” he said Monday in a conversation with Bloomberg’s Erik Schatzker at the Economic Club of Chicago. Recruiting workers there is tougher now and fewer people want to call the city home, he said.
“It’s becoming ever more difficult to have this as our global headquarters, a city which has so much violence,” Griffin, 52 said, citing recent shootings and a carjacking attempt that his security detail fended off as examples of the spike in crime.
Even as he watches friends leave for states from Florida to Wyoming, Griffin said he still hopes Chicago retains the Bears after the NFL team’s owners last week announced an agreement to buy a large property in suburban Arlington Heights.
Griffin, who founded Citadel’s hedge fund business and Citadel Securities, also called for leaders to address Illinois’s ongoing financial problems.
Illinois was the only state to tap the Federal Reserve’s Municipal Liquidity Facility, and did so twice to close a gap caused by the pandemic amid a surge in its borrowing penalty in the bond market. Illinois also has an unfunded pension liability of about $144 billion and almost no rainy day fund, leaving it still the U.S. state with the worst credit rating even after improving revenue and billions in federal aid ease its financial strain.....
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Not kidding about the 'Medieval' thing. As the Sun-Times reported on October 4:
Five men linked to a deadly gang-related shootout Friday in Austin were released from custody after prosecutors declined to charge each of them with a pair of felonies, including first-degree murder, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned.
The brazen mid-morning gunfight, which left one shooter dead and two of the suspects wounded, stemmed from an internal dispute between two factions of the Four Corner Hustlers street gang, according to an internal police report and a law enforcement source with knowledge of the investigation.
The source said police sought to charge all five suspects with murder and aggravated battery. By Sunday morning, a Chicago police spokeswoman acknowledged the suspects had “been released without charges.”....
....But the report also framed the state’s attorney’s office’s decision to decline charges in a different light: “Mutual combatants was cited as the reason for the rejection.” Mutual combat is a legal term used to define a fight or struggle that two parties willingly engage in....
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If I recall correctly, Mutual Combat is derived from common law on dueling which is itself a variation of the old-timey "Trial-by-"Combat." I may be wrong about that, Here's Duhaime's with more.
And from the August 2020 riot-and-lootathon (this was after the May-June George Floyd riots), an amazing spectacle, raising the drawbridges to keep the rioters out of downtown:
All bridges up in Chicago to prevent access to downtown. @cbschicago pic.twitter.com/KutdT8Nbc6
— Vi Nguyen (@ViNguyen) August 10, 2020
Here are the raised drawbridges on May 31, 2020:
Via WGN:
WGN-TV’s Joe Donlon recaps the events of looting and riots in Chicago Saturday night
