First, he doesn't think Capone ordered the Prohibition-era Valentine's Day Massacre, in which seven men were gunned down.

Second, he questions Robert DeNiro's portrayal in the 1987 movie "The Untouchables," in which Capone uses a baseball bat to fatally bludgeon an underling.

What catches the eye of the cost-cutters is a potential savings of $54.7 million a year.

But don't start writing all those savings into Cook County budget calculations just yet. It won't be all that easy to achieve.

This is good.

Police Supt. Jody Weis tells us this is because of the "excellent police work of the men and women of our police force."

This is bad.

If there is one thing any veteran police reporter can tell you, it's that smart top cops go easy on grabbing the credit for drops in crime for the most obvious of reasons -- that don't want to have to accept the blame when crime rates go back up.

And crime rates, sooner or later, always go back up. Short-range gains matter less than long-range trends.

Good police work can be a significant factor in keeping crime under control and even bringing down the rate, but so much more goes into those numbers -- the economy, the weather, the price of pot or heroin, changes in the population and much more.

Two important observations tend to get overlooked:

Chicago is a pretty safe town to live in, except in its poorest neighborhoods. So tourists can relax, even as a city that cares about all its residents -- especially its children -- works to reduce crime rates in every corner of town.

And, observation No. 2: Per capita crime rates in Chicago, especially for murder, may be declining somewhat, but they still outpace other big cities, most notably New York and Los Angeles.

So nobody's got a thing to brag about.

Still, good news.

So the Chicago Police Department's decision to raise the minimum age for applying to be an officer by four years sounds like a good idea in theory.

But we're concerned about the unintended consequences the change might have for the city's police force.

That was the issue at the heart of a case by the IRS, which was trying to snag more than $70,000 in taxes, interest and penalties from the $120,000 that Darby Tillis was paid for nine years of wrongful imprisonment.

Fortunately, the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law is reporting that the IRS last week agreed to back off.

Stephen Asma, a Columbia College Chicago philosophy professor and author of On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, has traced the evolving concept of monsters over the ages and wonders where we are headed.

"What are the monsters that the new kinds of biotechnology are bringing to us?" Asma asks. "The old Frankenstein story everybody knows, but the sort of application of this Frankenstein syndrome today is something that I don't think any generation before has had any experience with. The fact that you can get into the genome and manipulate it in such incredible ways makes us very frightened about what kind of God-playing we might be doing."

"We will have an independent party on the ballot from now on, because [it will] get enough votes to become an official party here in Cook County," Berrios told the Sun-Times Editorial Board.

"Hey, not even fishing is on the square."

Vrdolyak is a fascination, always has been. He's rich. He's powerful. He's got his health. So why has he lived a life of looking for the angles, cutting corners, dealing from the bottom of the deck?

In his own effort to explain what makes Fast Eddie tick, a federal prosecutor in court ruminated that Vrdolyak went for the easy money, in the scam he cooked up with fellow conspirator Stuart Levine, just because "he could." But that hardly gets to the man's apparent comfort with playing loose with legal niceties.

My guess is that the sarcastic remark to Sneed says it all. Vrydolyak's world view -- honed from growing up above a tavern in a tough neighborhood, watching his old man scrape to get by, seeing the rich swells on Lake Shore Drive with their privileged pedigrees -- is that a regular guy has to hustle a little harder and a little more in the shadows in order to compete.

It's a view that says only a chump believes the world is on the up-and-up, that the wealthy society crowd strung like pearls along the lakefront cut plenty of corners, too -- that's how they got to where they are. Their scams are just more sophisticated, involving more powerful contacts, better accountants and better lawyers.

Does that explain Vrdolyak? You tell me.

Better yet, tell me whether he's wrong.

But Andrew S. Baer, a doctoral candidate at Northwestern, sees another reason for Daley's stepping down -- to duck the embarrassment sure to follow when a rogue Chicago cop who tortured suspects is sentenced in federal court next month for various charges involving obstruction of justice.

As Baer writes at History News Network, a website for historians weighing in on the issues of the day, Daley is looking "to escape scrutiny for his connection to a ring of over-zealous cops who forced confessions from murder suspects on Chicago's South Side from 1972 through the early 1990s."

Baer predicts the Burge scandal won't end with Burge's sentencing, but likely will lead to charges against other cops and officials directly or indirectly responsible for the reign of torture.

My guess is the Burge mess was the least of Daley's considerations when deciding to retire. He's been getting grief -- and ignoring it -- for years about his failure to do something about Burge back when he, Daley, was Cook County state's attorney. But Baer makes an interesting argument.

If you're unfamiliar with History News Network, by the way, it's a terrific website to drop in on once in awhile, well worth bookmarking. The historians and would-be historians posting there seem to share no one political persuasion, and they bring a perspective to current events you'll find nowhere else.

Under the official schedule, the second installment of property tax bills already should have been sent out. In practice, that doesn't happen very often. Last year, property tax bills went out with a due date at the start of December. What's different this year is that Cook County Assessor James Houlihan last spring alleged that some other officials were deliberately holding things up to ensure the bills wouldn't go out before the Nov. 2 election. Houlihan was responding to a March 25 letter from the Board of Review that blamed Houlihan for delays that would make this year's tax bills even later than last year's.

Stone predicted the former governor would be convicted of lying to an FBI agent, but not on the 23 other counts against him. That's what happened, although Stone didn't predict the jury would be hung on the other counts.

On Monday, Stone explained his reasoning: