US: Clout, the art of greasing the wheels of the city machine, was a guiding principle in the 21-year administration of Richard J Daley, Chicago's mayor who was also known as "The Boss".
In recent weeks his son and current mayor, Richard M Daley, has been confronting signs that patronage and corruption are again emerging in the City Hall almost three decades after his father's death.
This week Mr Daley will begin searching for a new commissioner for the city's water department after the incumbent and nine department employees were dismissed following revelations on Friday of a payroll scam.
While officials brushed it off as an isolated incident, it is becoming harder for the Daley administration to deny a pattern of influence-peddling that threatens to damage the 2006 re-election prospects of the country's most powerful mayor.
"He has always run virtually unchallenged, but he has seen more stress in the job in the last two years than in the previous 14," says Paul Green, director of the School of Policy Studies at Roosevelt University. A poll carried out last month by the Chicago Tribune and a local TV station put Mr Daley's approval rating at 53 per cent, the lowest level since he was first elected in 1989 and a far cry from the 80 per cent achieved at his fifth election win in 2003.
None of the investigations or scandals has involved or implicated Mr Daley personally. But public unease has grown as the scalps of some relatives have been claimed.
John Briatta, one of the nine water department employees fired on Friday, is a brother-in-law of John Daley, the mayor's brother and Cook County commissioner.
While no one suggests Mr Daley could be unseated next year, recent developments may allow serious political challengers to emerge for the first time.
Speculation has focused on two Democratic figures: Jesse Jackson junior, son of the Rev Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader, and Hispanic Illinois congressman Luis Gutierrez.