Miriam Santos is an American politician who served as

City Treasurer of Chicago The City Treasurer of Chicago is an elected official of the City of Chicago. Current Occupant The current City Treasurer of Chicago is Democrat Melissa Conyears. Conyears was elected by Chicago citizens on April 2, 2019, and took the oath of ...

City Treasurer of Chicago

In 1989, Santos was appointed by newly-elected mayor

Richard M. Daley Richard Michael Daley (born April 24, 1942) is an American politician who served as the 54th mayor of Chicago, Illinois, from 1989 to 2011. Daley was elected mayor in 1989 and was reelected five times until declining to run for a seventh term ...

as City Treasurer of Chicago. She was appointed to replace Cecil A. Partee, who had resigned in order to accept an appointment to succeed Daley himself as

Cook County State's Attorney The Cook County State's Attorney functions as the state of Illinois's district attorney for Cook County, Illinois, and heads the second-largest prosecutor's office in the United States. The office has over 700 attorneys and 1,100 employees. In ad ...

. Santos was being the first

Latinx ''Latinx'' is a neologism in American English which is used to refer to people of Latin American cultural or ethnic identity in the United States. The gender-neutral suffix replaces the ending of ''Latino'' and ''Latina'' that are typical o ...

individual to hold citywide office in Chicago. In 1991, after Santos raised alarm over the city's management of pension funds, mayor Richard M. Daley made an attempt to decrease her powers. Santos was reelected as City Treasurer in 1993 and 1995, and 1999. In

1998 1998 was designated as the ''International Year of the Ocean''. Events January * January 6 – The ''Lunar Prospector'' spacecraft is launched into orbit around the Moon, and later finds evidence for frozen water, in soil in permanently s ...

, Santos unsuccessfully ran for

Illinois Attorney General The Illinois Attorney General is the highest legal officer of the state of Illinois in the United States. Originally an appointed office, it is now an office filled by statewide election. Based in Chicago and Springfield, Illinois, the attorne ...

. Santos' 1999 reelection came despite the fact that she was, at the time, under federal

indictment An indictment ( ) is a formal accusation that a person has committed a crime. In jurisdictions that use the concept of felonies, the most serious criminal offence is a felony; jurisdictions that do not use the felonies concept often use that of a ...

for

mail fraud Mail fraud and wire fraud are terms used in the United States to describe the use of a physical or electronic mail system to defraud another, and are federal crimes there. Jurisdiction is claimed by the federal government if the illegal activity ...

and attempted

extortion Extortion is the practice of obtaining benefit through coercion. In most jurisdictions it is likely to constitute a criminal offence; the bulk of this article deals with such cases. Robbery is the simplest and most common form of extortion, ...

. Months after the 1999 election, she was convicted and forced to resign. Mayor Daley appointed Barbara Lumpkin as Santos' successor. However, Santos' conviction was overturned in 2000, and she was allowed to reclaim her elected position with back pay. However, six months later she again had to resign, as she pleaded guilty to a single count of mail fraud rather than facing retrial.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Santos, Miriam 21st-century American politicians 21st-century American women politicians 20th-century American politicians 20th-century American women politicians City Treasurers of Chicago Illinois Democrats Illinois lawyers Lawyers from Chicago Living people Year of birth missing (living people)