Some good ideas being batted around, however I just can’t buy the “bog down the WC angle”. Chicago is one city, albeit a big one, in a big world. The council is worldwide (more or less). Heck – one young inexperienced, semi-rogue wizard named Harry was sufficient to the task of taking care of things in the early books – hardly a threat to the WC.
If you think about it, it took the softening up of the Red Court/White Council war, followed up by a worldwide fomor incursion to force the WC to pull back and concentrate on defending Europe as we learned in CD. So the developing of a few minor league magic users in Chicago, if it were an attempt to weaken the council, was simply a poor plan.
I’ll concede the point if we have evidence of black magic and other weird stuff being on the increase worldwide during the same time. Then the events of the early books could have been a small part of a bigger wear down the WC plot.
The wearing down of the barrier between worlds, and the removal of Marcone seems to be the major goals.
Why Marcone? He represents a power in the area of Chicago, a power that likes things stable. Also the area its self is important because of its nearness to demonreach and it is also near the stone table in faerie. Perhaps there are other reasons.
Getting back to Marcone – maybe someone leading team evil has foresight on a par with Odin and saw that their evil plans would be more likely to succeed if Marcone was removed. Odin saw this to and made Gard and other help available.
I love these books because they are wonderfully complicated.