What's going on Harvey???

The Mayor out there in the struggling suburb Mayor Eric Kellog is starting to sound like a rough character. He's serving his first term as mayor after defeating his predecessor Nicholas Graves in 2005. This time though there some allegations are coming out about this campaign coming from Mayoral hopeful Brenda Thompson...

But in Harvey, the death threat Thompson says she received last Monday evening has also become a standard, far more ominous feature of election season.

Thompson, 58, became the third mayoral candidate in the past three elections to complain of a warning against her life last Tuesday, when she said that an unidentified man called and told her to drop out of the race.

"He called the campaign office and said, 'You'd better get out of the race, or something is gonna happen,' " she said.

"My daughters tell me I should be worried, but I'm not going to be intimidated."

The threat has been reported to state's attorneys and the FBI, said Thompson, adding that she did not trust Harvey's police department to investigate.

Before it went to the death threat story this Daily Southtown article talked about how elections go. You would hear about the theft of campaign signs. If only that was all it was. Then a death threat has become a much more,"a standard, far more ominous feature of election season."

There seems to be a history of this in Harvey. If there isn't any truth to what is mentioned here, it doesn't help that the allegations are going around...

In 1999, a Harvey police report surfaced alleging that a $2,000 bounty had been placed on then-Mayor Nick Graves by his rival Eric Kellogg.

Kellogg, who beat Graves to become mayor in the 2003 election, scoffed at the allegation.

And the police union, which backed Kellogg in the 2003 election, made its own counter-allegation of a death threat in 2002, claiming in a lawsuit that Graves had threatened to kill union officials during heated contract talks.

After his election, Kellogg then claimed at a council meeting in early 2004 that his and his family's lives had been threatened.

Three months earlier he, Police Chief Andrew Joshua and two controversial officers, Darnell Keel and Merritt Gentry, hauled in three women employed by the city and aggressively questioned them about a plot against Kellogg's life, according to a lawsuit the three women filed in 2004 and the city later settled for $60,000.

Mayoral hopeful Thompson has said that Harvey is a city, "gone wild". Still I don't know it takes a very courageous and a stand-up person to run for mayor of Harvey especially if there are those who are willing to use thuggish tactics to keep someone or themselves in office. It could also reek of desperation.