The Watchdogs – Chicago Sun-Times

Jodi Hubler was scrolling through job ads on her computer when she hit the jackpot.

“Payroll,” read the ad. “Work from home.”

It seemed like a perfect position for Hubler, a former legal secretary who is disabled, to do from her Loves Park home northwest of Chicago.

She applied, and after some text and online conversations with the firm’s boss, Hubler got the job in October 2017.

“I was elated,” Hubler says. “It was too good to be true.”

The guy who ran the payroll business called himself “Devon Hockensmith.” He said he was based in Atlanta.

He sent Hubler funds to purchase a printer and supplies and trained her to print paychecks for an army of independent contractors the firm had lined up. Hubler spent her days poring over spreadsheets and mailing checks that were drawn from major banks.

Months later, with federal agents knocking on her door, Hubler would realize the job wasn’t what she thought it was.

But in the beginning, it seemed like a way to be productive and earn a little money.

“I’m disabled. I was looking for kind of a cash job that I could do on the side,” says Hubler, 44, who has since moved out of state. “It just seemed so legit.”

A job becomes a scam

Hubler didn’t realize it right away, but her work-at-home job was part of an array of counterfeit check scams that have stolen billions of dollars from Americans in recent years, according to a Better Business Bureau study released this fall.

This type of fraud is growing, with complaints to the Federal Trade Commission’s Consumer Sentinel database and the Internet Fraud Complaint Center more than doubling between 2014 and 2017, from 12,781 to 29,513 — though experts say the numbers are vastly underreported because many victims are too embarrassed to complain.

At first, Hubler’s job was humming. Her boss’ firm was doing customer service evaluations for a major retailer. Hubler’s role was to send instructions and checks to people who had signed up to work as secret shoppers to do store evaluations.

The secret shoppers were told to deposit the checks, for $1,780, in their bank accounts, deduct their $300 pay and use the rest of the funds for the store tests.

The assignment: Buy about $60 worth of products and then test the in-store money transfer service by wiring $1,400 to a company representative.

Of course, the whole thing was a scam. The checks were fakes.

Check used in a fraud scam. | Provided

By the time the checks bounced, the secret shoppers had already wired real money to the scammers — funds for which they were on the hook to their banks.

“Devon Hockensmith” disappeared. Now Hubler thinks he was never even in the country.

‘Mules’ move scam money

Counterfeit check scams such as mystery shopper frauds are usually directed by overseas criminals, though there are some operating inside the United States, says Steven Baker, former head of the Federal Trade Commission in Chicago and now an investigator for the Better Business Bureau. Nigerian scammers have become especially adept at check fraud, he says.

“Most of them don’t get caught,” Baker says.

The scammers use fake email addresses and spoofed phone numbers with U.S. area codes to make it appear they are in the United States.

And they hire U.S. citizens as unwitting money mules to mail the checks to victims.

The scammers use real checks that are stolen from the mail or swiped by corrupt bank employees to create the graphics files that are downloaded by the mules and printed on paper check stock.

These counterfeit checks have real bank routing numbers and account numbers, so most banks won’t catch them right away.

“It seems really legitimate,” says Nicholas Bucciarelli, a postal inspector in Chicago who has worked counterfeit check cases. “It’s on nice business paper, it’s got all these names and phone numbers.”

Bucciarelli adds that the mules create an extra layer between the victims and the scammers, making the perpetrators harder to catch.

Checks haven’t “cleared”

The criminals running the scams count on the fact that under U.S. banking rules, funds from a deposited check must appear as “available” in the depositor’s account almost immediately. Despite this, the check won’t have “cleared” until it has been validated by both banks, a process that can take a couple weeks.

It’s during this time lag that the scammer persuades the victim to wire funds, or in some cases purchase gift cards for the scammer.

Average consumer losses to counterfeit check scams are about $1,200, according to the BBB report.

Hubler says she made about $700 every other week in the couple months she printed and mailed checks and information packets to the people who’d signed up as mystery shoppers.

In the end, though, her boss stiffed her out of $400 she had spent on an additional printer – money that was supposed to be reimbursed.

Jodi Hubler was the victim of a check fraud scam. | Rick Jacobs/For the Sun-Times

Hubler says the first sign something was amiss came when her boss, who had pre-ordered boxes of Priority Mail envelopes for her to use, started insisting that she drive to several different post offices to mail some at each place.

He would berate her if she went too slowly.

With all that mail, Hubler soon drew the attention of local postal officials. Eventually, three agents from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service showed up at her door and said she was involved in a scam.

“I was so scared,” says Hubler, who has cooperated with authorities, though no arrests have been made.

“I was worried to death that I was going to get in trouble.”

Consumer education needed

Though the scammer in Hubler’s case has not been located, authorities have had other recent successes going after counterfeit check scammers.

In July, a Nigerian man in Louisville was sentenced to 15 months in prison for a sweepstakes fraud that included mailing fake checks to victims.

And in August, another man was indicted in Pittsburgh for a mystery shopper scam in which he sent counterfeit postal money orders to victims.

In October and early November, the U.S. Department of Justice made a big push targeting hundreds of alleged money mules in 65 federal districts involved in a variety of scams. FBI agents and postal inspectors sent 300 warning letters to individuals who had recently served as mules, warning them they could be prosecuted if they continued aiding scammers.

Often, however, mules are not prosecuted because they, too, have been victimized, experts say.

For example, a common ploy in online romance scams is to not only to bilk the lonely victim but to persuade him or her to unwittingly be a mule for other scams, such as check frauds.

“It’s hard to charge somebody who doesn’t have the intent,” Bucciarelli says. “They’re actually being set up or they’re being tricked into doing this.”

Given the difficulties in catching counterfeit check scammers, consumer advocates say the best tactic is education.

Consumers should be wary of anyone who asks them to deposit a check and immediately wire money or purchase gift cards.

“There’s no such thing as easy money or get rich quick,” Bucciarelli says. “If it sounds odd, it’s probably a scam.”

Hubler says she wishes she would have slowed down for a moment and realized it was too good to be true.

“I fell for this,” she says, “but I want people to know that they should watch out for this stuff.”

Same scam six different ways

• Mystery shopper scam: Victim gets a bogus check and is told to deposit it, keep some as their pay and then wire the remainder to test a store’s money transferring service. The victim’s bank doesn’t realize the deposited check is a fake until long after the wired money is gone.

• Car wrap scam: College students sign up to have their car wrapped with the logo of a beer or energy drink brand. Scammers send fake checks and tell the students to deduct their pay and forward the rest to the supposed car wrap company (which is actually the scammer). Later, the checks bounce, leaving the students on the hook.

• Law firm scam: Scammers hire a law firm to collect money from a supposed debtor. The firm reaches out to the debtor, who is actually the scammer and who sends the law firm a counterfeit check to pay off the debt. Thinking the issue is resolved, the firm deposits the check, takes out its legal fee and forwards the rest to the client. After that, the check bounces and the firm is liable to its bank for the money.

• Overpayment scam: Fraudsters pretend they want to buy an item sold on Craigslist or similar site. They “accidentally” send a bogus check for more than the sale price; then ask the victim to deposit the check and send them back the difference.

• Nanny scam: Con artists pretend to hire a nanny or caregiver, sending a fake check to purchase equipment like a stroller or wheelchair to prepare for the job. The victim deposits the check, then sends money for the equipment to a bogus equipment seller that’s really a front for the scammer.

• Lottery scam: Fraudsters tell the victim he’s won a lottery or sweepstakes, then send him a counterfeit check for his “winnings.” The victim is asked to wire money to pay taxes and fees — but when the check bounces, the victim is on the hook.

Source: Better Business Bureau

One of the board members of a failed Bridgeport bank that’s missing more than $80 million had a little-known role in the City Hall hiring scandal that sent Mayor Richard M. Daley’s patronage director to prison more than a decade ago, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned.

William M. Mahon — now a deputy commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Streets and Sanitation who also served as a board member of Washington Federal Bank for Savings until regulators shut it down — had been a City Hall personnel director, working alongside key figures in a federal investigation that brought down Daley’s patronage director Robert Sorich in 2006.

Mahon never faced criminal charges but testified as a witness at Sorich’s trial. Mahon’s role in the hiring operation then came under scrutiny by Noelle Brennan, an attorney appointed by a federal judge to ensure City Hall lived up to the Shakman Decree that bans hiring, firing and promoting lower-level city employees, such as truck drivers, based upon political considerations.

After Brennan released her report in 2013, Mahon was slapped with a 45-day suspension by Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Streets and San commissioner, Charles L. Williams, one of the harshest punishments doled out to the remaining city officials involved in the scheme.

As part of Brennan’s recommendations, Mahon, 52, has also been banned from participating in any hiring or promotion decisions, duties he would normally be expected to perform in his job as a deputy commissioner at Streets and San, the agency that picks up garbage, kills rats and plows snow. Mahon’s annual salary tops $116,000, according to the city’s website.

Court records show Mahon was the personnel director for Streets and San’s traffic services bureau in 1997 and 1998, passing along the names of preferred job applicants to the interview panel during the height of the fraudulent hiring scheme detailed during Sorich’s trial.

“Mahon confirmed that the names were given to him so that he could rate them higher but testified that regardless of these pre-selections, ‘I’ve always kind of vetted the employee and rated them to the best of my ability of where I thought they were,’” according to the report Brennan submitted to Emanuel’s Law Department on April 19, 2013.

Federal investigators discovered the fraudulent hiring scheme in 2004 while investigating Daley’s Hired Truck Program that wasted more than $40 million a year hiring private dump trucks that did little or no work on city construction projects. The truck owners paid bribes to get in the program and then made campaign contributions to the mayor and other politicians.

Mahon’s troubles at Streets and San have resurfaced as federal bank regulators continue investigating the failure of the century-old bank founded by the grandfather of John Gembara, the Washington Federal president found hanged last December inside a customer’s Park Ridge home. The feds shut the bank down 12 days later because its assets were dwarfed by losses that have topped $82.6 million.

The FBI has also been examining the collapse of the bank, prompting Mahon and the other three surviving bank board members to hire criminal defense attorneys.

Mahon and his attorney couldn’t be reached for comment. It’s unclear how long Mahon served on the bank board or who appointed him since he had no known background in banking, spending most of his adult life working for City Hall under the Daley administration.

A Bridgeport resident, Mahon has long ties to the 11th Ward Regular Democratic Organization, which has been run by the Daley family since the 1950s. Mahon’s sister is married to a first cousin of former Ald. Patrick Huels, who was Daley’s City Council floor leader until he was forced to resign for taking a loan from trucking kingpin Michael Tadin. The Sun-Times incorrectly reported earlier this month that Mahon was Huels’ brother-in-law.

Meanwhile, the feds are liquidating the bank’s assets, selling 135 residential and commercial loans in October for about $15.7 million, records show. After the sale, the authorities are still holding 169 loans with unpaid balances totaling $108.2 million.

They won’t say whether the remaining unpaid loans include $27 million regulators are trying to collect from Robert M. Kowalski, an attorney and developer, or an $80,000 loan the 11th Ward Regular Democratic Organization got from the bank a couple months before it was shut down.

• Why did Bridgeport bank president kill himself in customer’s Park Ridge home?
• After Bridgeport banker found dead, top debtor tries to avoid repaying $20M
• Feds find massive fraud at shuttered Bridgeport bank whose president was found dead

A Chicago company that buys and resells diabetic testing strips is the subject of a rare second national warning from the Better Business Bureau, which says the company hasn’t addressed a growing pile of consumer complaints.

The alert targets Surplus Diabetic Supplies LLC, which operates as CashNowOffer.com and has a mailing address on the Northwest Side.

Consumers in 46 states have lodged 447 complaints against CashNowOffer with the Better Business Bureau of Chicago & Northern Illinois, which has given the company its lowest rating — “F.”

In September, the Chicago Sun-Times reported consumers were complaining CashNowOffer didn’t pay as promised for their testing strips and that they couldn’t get answers when they complained.

• In hazy market for reselling diabetic test strips, Chicago company is under fire, Sept. 12, 2018

The company’s Jonathan Avila told the Sun-Times then he was “working to get those complaints resolved.”

The Illinois attorney general’s office confirmed late Tuesday that it is investigating complaints against the company.

The BBB says it communicated with the business in January, March, September and October and each time CashNowOffer promised to take care of the complaints, which company officials said originated under former owners.

But in the BBB’s warning Wednesday, it said: “To date, the business has addressed a small number of consumer complaints, but they have failed to remain consistent in alleviating the pattern of consumer complaints or fully modify the ads they promised to address.”

“BBB continues to receive formal complaints, calls, emails and ‘Scam Tracker’ reports about the business.”

Steve Bernas, president of the Chicago BBB, said it’s unusual for a company to be the subject of a second national warning, but, “in this instance, it was deemed necessary.”

The private agency, which promotes ethical business practices, says most people who filed complaints said they weren’t paid and couldn’t get information from the company. Some said they were paid but the checks bounced.

Consumers in California, Ohio, Florida, New York and Pennsylvania have filed the most complaints. Illinois ranks No. 11.

Thirty million diabetics in the United States use about $4 billion in testing strips each year to monitor their blood-sugar. Some use up to 12 strips a day.

That volume has given rise to a booming market for resellers who advertise online, on social media, even on roadside signs, offering cash for unused strips. A box of 50 strips that might cost $99 at a pharmacy is purchased, say, for $15 from a patient and resold for $35 — still a steep discount from the drugstore price.

It’s legal to resell unexpired strips, according to the federal Food and Drug Administration unless patients fraudulently obtained them through Medicare or Medicaid just to sell them.

But the FDA and the American Diabetes Association warn that resold strips can be unsafe, that they could have been stored at improper temperatures, tampered with or replaced with counterfeits.

Surplus Diabetic Supplies LLC, a Chicago company that operates as CashNowOffer.com, buys surplus diabetic testing strips from patients at a cut rate and resells them to others. The company is now the subject of 447 complaints to the Better Business Bureau of Chicago & Northern Illinois. | CashNowOffer website

At a closed-door gathering in August with young men studying to be priests at the Catholic church’s seminary in Mundelein, Cardinal Blase Cupich boasted that the Archdiocese of Chicago’s “record” on sex abuse is “clean.”

“We are not what happened” in Pennsylvania, Cupich said, referring to a grand jury report that recently had been released in that state, showing decades of priests raping children and bishops covering up.

The cardinal also told the seminarians that an ongoing inquiry by Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office into the handling of sexual predator priests in Illinois was no big deal because the archdiocese, the church’s arm in Cook and Lake counties, previously had turned over all relevant information.

But Wednesday night the archdiocese made public the names of 10 more former priests and deacons — some now dead — against whom “substantiated allegations” had been found they engaged in sexual misconduct with minors. The names, released in a statement issued by email, were added to a lengthy public list of ex-clerics.

Few details were provided about what the 10 were found to have done.

And Cupich’s press aides Paula Waters and Anne Maselli didn’t respond to requests for comment on the allegations or the timing of the announcement, which came the same night the archdiocese was announcing the closing or consolidation of a number of Catholic churches and schools on the South Side.

Thursday morning, Madigan put out a statement saying her investigation had prompted the disclosure of the new names in Chicago and at other Catholic dioceses in Illinois.

“Our initial review has found the number of Catholic clergy in Illinois with credible allegations of sexual abuse against minors is more extensive than the church previously has disclosed to the public,” Madigan said. “My investigation will continue in order to provide victims, parishioners and the public with a complete and accurate accounting of sexually abusive behavior with minors involving priests in Illinois.”

The Rockford Diocese, which includes McHenry County, “has disclosed 11 additional names,” according to Madigan’s office.

Her statement also said she “anticipates additional names will be disclosed as her office’s investigation continues.”

Regarding the 10 in the Chicago archdiocese, much of the abuse occurred years ago, according to the archdiocese, and the clerics who are still alive no longer are in ministry.

The new names include archdiocesan priests Edmund F. Burke, Thomas Carroll Crosby, Dominic Aloysius Diedrich and Thomas Francis Kelly.

The additions to the list also include deacons Patricio William Batuyong and Louis Wojtowicz, foreign priests Sleeva Raju Policetti and Czelaw Przbylo and religious order priests: Eusebio Pantoja and Carlos Peralta.

On Thursday, Cupich spokeswoman Maselli said his predecessor, the late Cardinal Francis George, had made the call not to include the names of priests who were dead when accusations were made against them.

“Cardinal George wanted the list to include only archdiocese priests who were still alive when the allegations came forward,” Maselli said.

According to Maselli, “All these cases were reported to the civil authorities, and all are from past decades.”

The Chicago archdiocese’s current full list of “clergy with substantiated allegations of sexual misconduct with minors can be found here.

Some of the 10 whose names were released Wednesday had been the subject of news reports. In one case, in 2002, the archdiocese said that Policetti, who had been assigned to St. Tarcissus Church on the Northwest Side, was accused of sexual misconduct with a parish teen. The priest fled Chicago for his native India.

On Wednesday night, the written statement from the archdiocese said it previously had listed only those priests who were alive when allegations of abuse were received. It said Cupich expanded the list “to include all diocesan, extern and religious order priests and deacons with allegations of child sexual abuse that were substantiated by the Archdiocesan Independent Review Board or similar Archdiocesan process.

“While we are adding these names today based on determinations made in past years, we are not changing our current process for receiving and handling allegations and adding names.”

A day earlier, in a speech to about 200 people at a City Club breakfast in the Loop, Cupich had said transparency is one of the key elements needed to restore trust in bishops and repair a church battered by a worldwide abuse scandal that also threatens Cupich’s patron, Pope Francis. The pope has been accused of ignoring allegations of sexual misconduct by disgraced former Washington, D.C. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who reportedly had a hand in Cupich’s rise in the church hierarchy.

Cardinal Blase J Cupich speaks at the 2018 American Bar Association Annual Conference in Chicago, IL on August 2 2018 on the topic of the death penalty. Colin Boyle/Sun-Times

Cardinal Blase Cupich said Tuesday that transparency is key to restoring trust in the church, then hustled off through the kitchen of the restaurant where he had just given a speech, refusing to speak with a reporter. | Sun-Times files

Despite Cupich’s comments Tuesday, Waters, the cardinal’s main spokeswoman, for weeks has refused to respond to questions about how many current priests from religious orders — who might live or work in the Chicago archdiocese but are part of independent Catholic orders including the Augustinians and Jesuits — face allegations of sexual misconduct.

When a Sun-Times reporter tried to ask Cupich about that at the end of his speech Tuesday, the cardinal quickly ducked into the kitchen of the restaurant where he had spoken and out the door, saying he was late for a meeting.

The attorney general’s office said the names of “credibly accused priests” from other Illinois dioceses can be found as follows:

• The Diocese of Joliet.

• The Diocese of Rockford.

• The Diocese of Peoria.

• The Diocese of Belleville.

• Pope picks Cardinal Cupich to help organize Vatican sex-abuse prevention summit
• Cupich on scandal: ‘We have a bigger agenda than to be distracted by all of this
• Bishop who didn’t alert police on abuser-priests is living at cardinal’s mansion
• Cardinal apologies for ‘my poor choice of words’ on priest sex abuse crisis
• Cupich orders priests to address disputed TV report at Mass

Plagued by problems finding enough nurses to staff its buildings, the Chicago Public Schools will expand its stable of outside nursing firms to eight — including one that has sued the school system.

CPS could also continue doing business with RCM Technologies USA Inc., the private nursing agency it has employed since 2015 that has struggled to provide enough nurses for students who need medical care. Federal law requires such services be provided at school.

CPS officials are asking the Chicago Board of Education on Wednesday to allot $26 million for nursing services from Jan. 1 through June 30, 2021. That breaks down to $10 million a year, up from the $7.5 million annually since July 2015 that it has authorized to pay RCM.

It’s not yet clear how much each agency will be paid.

Rampant nursing problems in the Chicago school system, documented by the Chicago Sun-Times, have required parents to take time off work and even to change jobs so they can care for their children at school when temporary nurses hired by RCM to fill in didn’t show up or lacked the training to care for their kids’ conditions.

After a Sun-Times story about a mother who spent roughly the first month of kindergarten in her son’s classroom because he didn’t have a consistent nurse to help with his feeding tube, CPS announced it was adding 20 more nursing positions and “expanding the pool of nursing vendors to supplement current staffing.” That’s on top of extra positions added over the summer.

So far, eight of those 20 jobs have been filled, according to spokeswoman Emily Bolton.

CPS wants “to expand the vendor pool to ensure greater quality and consistency in nursing services across the district,” Bolton said.

CPS expects to fill 180 to 220 nursing assignments daily, allowing the extra nurses to start working as soon as January even if final contracts aren’t yet signed, according to Bolton, who said those contracts will determine how many nurses each private agency will provide.

The plan has been opposed by the parent group Raise Your Hand, which has been meeting with CPS officials about ways to address the problem.

Members of the group “conveyed the critical need for continuity and competency of care — not a rotating crop of untrained temp nurses,” Raise Your Hand said in a written statement. “Despite their efforts, on Wednesday the CBOE will attempt to solve the nursing problem by tripling down on its failed policy with a $26 million contract for additional nursing temp agencies.”

Among the agencies slated to be hired are ATC Healthcare Services Inc. and Maxim Healthcare Services, Inc., based in Maryland.

ATC previously had been paid more than $11 million by CPS since 2006. But the New York company was dropped after RCM Health Care Services, a division of RCM, was hired in June 2015 to take over some school nursing services and then all nurse scheduling. RCM’s four-year, $30 million contract goes through June 30, with options for two additional years.

Soon after RCM was hired, ATC sued, saying CPS had helped RCM hire away ATC nurses. That case has yet to be decided, though a federal judge has dismissed part of it, records show.

Maxim Healthcare Services also previously worked for CPS, offering additional services to those provided by nurses directly employed by CPS who are members of the Chicago Teachers Union. Since 2009, Maxim was paid more than $18 million.

READ SUN-TIMES’ ‘DIRTY SCHOOLS’ INVESTIGATION

• CPS’ dirty secret, March 28, 2018

• Dirty schools: CPS cheated to pass cleanliness audits, janitors say, April 8, 2018

• Reward for dirty schools? $259 million more from the Chicago Public Schools, April 22, 2018

• Dirty schools unacceptable, Chicago Board of Ed says, vowing to keep closer tabs, April 26, 2018

• Chicago Public Schools’ facilities chief is out after dirty schools scandal, May 31, 2018

A divided Illinois Appellate Court panel has upheld a 10-year prison sentence that a Cook County judge gave a homeless drug addict convicted of the 2015 robbery of a Family Dollar Store on the West Side in which he got away with $33 of T-shirts and underwear.

Appellate Judge Terrence Lavin, writing for himself and Appellate Judge Mary Anne Mason, said it isn’t the job of the appeals court to substitute its judgment for that of the trial judge, Cook County Circuit Judge Mary Margaret Brosnahan. She imposed the harsh sentence on David Lundy, who had 10 prior convictions, most on theft and drug charges.

In a dissent that invoked Nelson Mandela, Appellate Judge Michael B. Hyman wrote that the “sentence punishes Lundy more for the numerous difficulties brought about by his economic status (impoverished), illness (drug addiction), and condition (homelessness) than for the offense for which he was convicted.”

Hyman wrote that the most serious offense Lundy previously was convicted of — robbery and aggravated battery causing great bodily harm — happened more than 22 years ago.

“Since then, Lundy has been convicted of drug offenses and theft,” Hyman wrote. “No violent crimes.”

He also cited a quotation from Mandela: “A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”

Lundy, now 52, was stuffing the underwear into his baggy pants and jacket, and, when a store employee confronted him, he pulled a pocket knife and warned her to back off.

As he left and employees tried to get the underwear back, Lundy threatened, “I’m going to kill you,” then added, after an epithet, “with this knife.”

David Lundy’s scheduled discharge date from prison is Jan. 8, 2023, though prison officials project that he could be paroled three years sooner than that. | Illinois Department of Corrections

The police, flagged down by store employees, arrested him and found three packages of T-shirts, a package of underwear and a red pocketknife in his pants pocket.

In his dissenting opinion, Hyman wrote: “The majority portrays Lundy as dangerous, a betrayal of the facts. Rather, the testimony of the two store employees describes a minor incident. Again, one employee said that Lundy’s behavior was ‘not that upsetting for a small woman like me,’ and the other expressed no fear or concern for her safety.”

He noted that Lundy’s sentence for armed robbery without a firearm amounted to one year in prison for every $3.33 of merchandise he took.

But the other two judges focused on the limited role of the appeals court, writing, “Our role to determine that the aggravating factors present in this case are outweighed by what the dissent characterizes as the ‘small, petty, and sad’ nature of the crime.“

Abigail Blachman reports for Injustice Watch, a nonpartisan, not-for-profit journalism organization that conducts in-depth research to expose institutional failures that obstruct justice and equality.

If there ever was any hope that five Chicago city workers pension funds would make any money by investing $68 million with then-Mayor Richard M. Daley’s nephew and one of his key political supporters, it didn’t last long.
Only months after the deals were made a dozen years ago, problems began to emerge.

The nephew, Robert G. Vanecko, and his business partner Allison S. Davis, a developer who gave campaign money to Daley and was appointed by the mayor to head the Chicago Plan Commission, started investing in a series of property deals that, by the time the last of them are unwound by the end of December, will have cost the city workers pension funds 80 percent of the $68 million they put in — $54 million in all.

READ: Daley Pension Debacle: Where did $54 million go?

After a CTA bus driver clipped a no-parking sign on the South Side, smashing his side-view mirror, transit agency officials reviewed the onboard surveillance camera footage and found something disturbing.

The video showed CTA bus driver Roger Love, at some point during his shift, peeing from his No. J14 Jeffery Jump bus.

“During review of the hard drive of this accident the operator was observed urinating outside of the front door of the bus,” according to a disciplinary report obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.

Love was leaving a “service stop” around 89th and Jeffery in October 2016 at the time of the accident involving the sign.

He got suspended for three days for peeing from his bus, records show.

The Sun-Times reported last month on four other incidents in which drivers were caught relieving themselves on or near their buses, in some cases after being reported by someone who saw it happen.

Records show three of those drivers faced disciplinary action, but none was fired.

In one instance, in September, a driver who didn’t have any passengers at the time parked his bus, walked to the back, pulled a plastic bag from his pocket and defecated. He tried unsuccessfully to throw the bag out a window, and the contents of the bag splattered inside the bus.

Questioned by his bosses, he said a homeless man had done it. But after being caught by his onboard cameras, he admitted what he’d done, blaming “bad tacos.”

CTA officials didn’t buy his story of intestinal emergency. According to a CTA source, it appeared to be “premeditated.”

Facing a disciplinary recommendation that he be fired, the driver instead resigned — which, under CTA rules, means he can reapply for a job with the agency in the future.

The CTA source says there have been “dozens” of incidents in recent years involving bus drivers relieving themselves on their buses. All of the incidents were avoidable, according to the source.

CTA spokesman Brian Steele, who describes the instances as rare, says there’s no excuse for drivers using their buses as a bathroom.

“We don’t know why any operator would do this,” Steele says.

The CTA says it allows drivers to radio in when they need to take a quick bathroom break, even if they have passengers. The agency has placed portable bathrooms along certain routes and, in addition to public buildings they can also use, has agreements with businesses to let bus drivers use their restrooms.

Keith Hill, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 241, which represents bus drivers and includes Love as a steward for the CTA’s 103rd Street bus garage, says the vast majority of drivers do their jobs with professionalism. But Hill says sometimes the urge to go is great, and there’s no restroom nearby.

Love urinated while waiting for CTA officials to respond to his collision with the sign, according to Hill. Apparently no riders were on the bus.

Public urination and defecation are against the law.

Asked why Love wasn’t fired, Steele points to the “progressive” discipline the CTA uses under its union contracts. It was Love’s first “behavioral” violation, for which his union contract “calls for a one-day suspension.”

But because of the perceived seriousness of the incident, Steele says the agency sought “a more serious suspension” — three days without pay and six months of probation.

If the CTA imposes a harsh punishment, Steele says the union often appeals to an arbitrator and gets it overturned.

Love, hired by the CTA in 2004, makes about $73,000 a year.

CTA records of the incident say “Operator Love was found in violation of . . . CTA rules” and “understands how gravitas his actions are and that this type of behavior is totally unacceptable.

“Operator Love also understands that his actions were unsanitary, unprofessional and not becoming of a CTA Transit Professional.

“Operator Love was informed that future infractions could lead to his being removed from service and referred to the Senior Manager with a recommendation for discharge.”

• CTA drivers caught on video urinating, defecating on buses, face little action, Nov. 4, 2018

When Chicago Fire Commissioner Jose A. Santiago retired in August, he was facing disciplinary action from Mayor Rahm Emanuel for failing to file a complaint against his driver, who used the N-word while joking with the fire department’s press secretary, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.

This racial incident remained under wraps while City Hall insiders debated the commissioner’s future as he approached the mandatory retirement age of 63.

There was even speculation from the mayor’s office that Emanuel would ask the city council to pass an ordinance to let Santiago stay on as a civilian to run the fire department, which is predominantly white and has a history of racially charged incidents, largely involving white firefighters.

Ultimately, City Hall parted ways with Santiago after the mayor’s office received an 11-page report on Aug. 7 from the city’s Department of Human Resources, that recommended Santiago be punished for violating the city’s equal employment opportunity policy.

According to the city investigators, Santiago failed to file a complaint about the racial slur that his driver, Cmdr. Richard Rosado, uttered to the fire department’s news affairs director, Larry Langford, in the presence of the department’s chief administrative officer, Annastasia Walker, in a parking lot at fire headquarters at 35th Street and Michigan Avenue on Oct. 11, 2016.

Rosado and Santiago are Hispanic. Langford and Walker are African-American.

Also, Santiago “knowingly provided false information” about the incident when he was questioned by Steven Malec, who is assistant fire commissioner and the fire department’s internal affairs director, according to the human resources report.

“Instead, Santiago’s misrepresentation unnecessarily delayed this investigation by eight months,’’ the report says. “Accordingly, DHR finds there is sufficient evidence to find that Santiago knowingly provided false information to [Malec] . . . “ by denying that he received a formal complaint about Rosado using the “N-word.”

Richard Rosado. | Sun-Times files

Santiago retired Aug. 30 and now gets a pension of $152,046 a year.

He denies many of the allegations in the report. But in an interview he says he now sees that he should have stepped aside from the case and left it to one of his deputies to investigate and weigh whether disciplinary action was warranted.

“You’ve got an individual [Walker] here who doesn’t want to file a report, and I’m supposed to file a report?” Santiago says. “Annastasia didn’t want to file a complaint at that time, and I let it go.

“We’ve got two guys [Rosado and Langford] joking around,” he says. “They shouldn’t have done it. She’s insinuating I hid it . . . This is all about me now.”

Walker and Langford had lunch together on Oct. 11, 2016, then drove back to work together.

Langford, son of the late Ald. Anna Langford (16th), pulled in to the parking lot, where he saw Rosado.

Larry Langford. | LinkedIn

“Say, are you the valet man?” Langford, in an interview with human resources, recalled joking to the commissioner’s driver.

Langford told investigators Rosado responded jokingly, saying “N—–, pleeze,” according to the report.

Rosado told investigators, “I intended the response in a joking manner,’’ adding that Langford “started laughing profusely.”

Walker, who was in the front passenger seat, told human resources she immediately went to Santiago’s office and complained.

“I was visibly angry, on the verge of tears,” she told investigators.

She said Santiago told her: “I keep telling these guy to stop doing that. I keep telling them. I keep telling them.”

Santiago’s secretary, Shirley Evans, backed up what Walker said, saying she was in the commissioner’s office at the time.

In interviews with human resources officials and with the Sun-Times, Santiago disputed that Walker came to his office. He says he went to talk with her after hearing something had happened in the parking lot. He also denies telling her that he previously had warned Rosado and Langford about their racial banter.

Rosado told investigators that when he went to apologize to Walker, she screamed at him, “Get the f— out of my office, you f—— piece of s—.”

Annastasia Walker. | LinkedIn

A few weeks later, on Dec. 2, 2016, City Hall’s inspector general’s office got an anonymous complaint that Rosado had used racial slurs. It was referred to Malec, who told the human resources investigators, “The fire commissioner denies that he received any complaint about Rosado using a racial slur.”

Several months later, on Aug. 18, 2017, the inspector general got a second anonymous complaint, with more information. It said Walker and Langford had witnessed Rosado’s slur. That led to the human resources investigation.

City Hall’s EEO policy “requires all supervisors to report all instances of conduct that may violate the policy . . . Any employee who knowingly provides false information in the course of an investigation may be subject to discipline.”

Even though Santiago denies that Walker wanted to file a complaint about Rosado, the human resources report says Santiago was required to report the incident anyway: “The record is clear that Santiago knew Rosado engaged in inappropriate conduct.”

Rosado, a 32-year veteran of the fire department, ended up getting a three-day suspension for using the racial slur. He served the suspension, then retired Oct. 9 with a pension of $74,469 a year.

Rosado couldn’t be reached, and Walker, Evans and Malec all declined to discuss the incident.

Langford told human resources he wasn’t offended by Rosado’s racial slur, characterizing it as a “jovial response typically used between people of color . . . From my perspective, this incident didn’t need to be reported.

“He made a comment that I thought was pretty funny,” says Langford, who says he and Rosado have been friends for two decades.

Emanuel’s spokesman Adam Collins says, “This is an extremely serious allegation and an action this administration will not tolerate.”

According to Collins, the mayor’s office learned of the incident “once the investigation was underway.”

He says Emanuel never punished Santiago over the incident because human resources recommended that he wait for the findings on an investigation by the inspector general, but that investigation became moot once Santiago retired.

Former Chicago Fire Commissioner Jose Santiago denies that his chief administrative officer wanted to file a complaint. But City Hall investigation found Santiago was required to report the incident anyway. | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

MORE FROM THE WATCHDOGS

• Daley pension debacle: Where did $54M go?

• Another CTA driver disciplined for peeing on his bus, gets 3-day suspension

Shortly before FBI agents raided the offices of Ald. Edward M. Burke, they knocked on the door of the alderman’s top political aide, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned.

The FBI showed up at Peter Andrews Jr.’s home in Mount Greenwood around 7 a.m. on Nov. 29.

That was about 90 minutes before they seized control of Burke’s City Hall suite of offices, dismissed his staff and covered the windows with brown butcher paper. The agents also raided the alderman’s political headquarters, the 14th Ward office at 2650 W. 51st St., where Andrews helps run Burke’s political operation.

Nearly two weeks after federal agents raided Burke’s offices, it’s unclear why they took such a public action, removing boxes of documents and at least one computer.

They had search warrants for Burke’s offices, but there was no search warrant served on Andrews, according to sources.

Andrews, 69, didn’t respond to messages left for him at his home and at Burke’s ward office.

Burke, who hasn’t been charged with any crime, remained silent Monday when a Sun-Times reporter asked him about the FBI’s visit to Andrews’ home.

Federal agents remove computer equipment and document boxes from the Southwest Side office of Ald. Ed Burke on November 29, 2018 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Federal agents remove computer equipment and document boxes from the Southwest Side office of Ald. Ed Burke on Nov. 29. | Scott Olson/Getty Images

• FBI seized cellphone of Chicago’s most powerful alderman, Edward Burke
• Feds raid Ald. Burke’s City Hall, ward offices

Andrews, a retired plumber with the Chicago Park District, has spent decades working for Burke’s political organization. He helped circulate petitions to get Burke on the ballot in February, when he is being challenged for re-election by four opponents, all Hispanics, seeking to end his 50-year reign in the city council, the longest in Chicago history.

Over the years, Burke has relied on Andrews to file legal challenges contesting petitions candidates have filed to run for judgeships and even the Democratic committeeman of the 14th Ward, a position the alderman also holds. In all of those cases, the candidates either were thrown off the ballot for not having enough valid signatures to get on it, or they ended their campaigns.

Andrews is the chairman of two of Burke’s three campaign funds, which total a combined $12 million — money the alderman has raised from companies that have gotten business from City Hall, some that also have hired his law firm, Klafter & Burke, to challenge their real estate assessments, seeking to lower their property tax bills.

Burke has paid Andrews more than $100,000 since 2001 to serve as a political consultant, according to records the alderman has filed with the Illinois State Board of Elections.

Fourteen years ago, Andrews and his wife, Ginger, got caught up in the scandal over the city’s Hired Truck Program under which the administration of Mayor Richard M. Daley spent $40 million a year to hire dump trucks that often ended up doing no work on city construction projects.

Ginger Andrews was listed as co-owner of Base Trucking along with Carmel McGuire, whose husband worked for the Chicago Park District with Pete Andrews.

Base Trucking, the largest female-owned company in the Hired Truck Program, was paid more than $3.4 million by City Hall between 1999 and early 2004. That’s when a Sun-Times investigation led to a wide-ranging federal investigation that sent 48 people to prison — including city employees who were taking bribes from trucking companies paid to do nothing.

The owners of Base Trucking were never charged with any crime. But the company was suspended from the Hired Truck Program, with Daley saying it should have disclosed its connections to Burke, a political rival of the Daley family.

Livid with Daley, Burke responded at the time: “These nice women founded a business. They’re 110 percent legitimate. They’ve done nothing wrong, as far as I know. That’s it. Period. PERIOD.”

Daley’s then-City Hall inspector general Alexander Vroustouris later determined that Base actually was run by Peter Andrews and his partner John McGuire, who put the company in the names of their wives so they could win government contracts set aside for women-owned businesses.

Contributing: Carlos Ballesteros

Brown paper covers the windows of Ald. Edward Burke's office at Chicago City Hall, Thursday morning, Nov. 29, 2018. The office was closed today and the windows covered for a possible investigation.(Ashlee Rezin/Chicago Sun-Times via AP) ORG XMIT: ILCHS105

FBI agents covered the windows of Ald. Edward Burke’s office at Chicago City Hall with brown butcher paper when they raided his offices on Nov. 29. | Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times

Chicago’s most powerful alderman, Edward M. Burke, had his cell phone seized by federal agents who raided his government and political offices late last month, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned.

It’s unclear why the FBI seized the phone or where it was when they took it.

It’s also unclear whether the alderman has more than one cellphone.

Burke wouldn’t comment on the seizure.

• Before raiding Burke’s offices, FBI made no-warrant visit to top aide’s home

• Feds raid Ald. Burke’s City Hall, ward offices

Illinois regulators have launched an investigation into a prominent former University of Illinois at Chicago psychiatrist whose research into children with bipolar disorder was shut down because of her misconduct.

The state Department of Financial and Professional Regulation has issued three subpoenas to UIC seeking records related to Dr. Mani Pavuluri, who resigned from the university in June amid controversy. She has since opened her own medical practice, the Brain and Wellness Institute, in Lincoln Park.

The subpoenas were issued by the IDFPR division that evaluates and grants doctors’ licenses. One was from the state’s medical disciplinary board, which reviews complaints about Illinois doctors and decides if discipline is appropriate. The board approved issuing the subpoena at a September meeting; it ordered UIC to provide records related to a clinical trial that Pavuluri oversaw studying the effects of the powerful drug lithium on children and teenagers.

ProPublica Illinois revealed in April that, in a rare rebuke, the National Institute of Mental Health ordered the university to repay $3.1 million in grant money it had received for the study.

The other two subpoenas are related to Pavuluri’s employment. One ordered UIC to provide Pavuluri’s “complete and unredacted personnel file,” including any complaints, disciplinary actions and investigative files. The other demanded Pavuluri’s “application and credentialing file,” including her references, background checks and medical education records.

The subpoenas, served in late August and early September, came after several ProPublica Illinois reports detailed Pavuluri’s research misconduct and the university’s failure to properly oversee her work. ProPublica Illinois recently obtained the subpoenas in response to a Freedom of Information Act request to the University of Illinois.

State investigations of doctors and other professionals are not made public unless the department imposes discipline. An IDFPR spokesman said the department does not acknowledge an investigation exists until that point.

“Should an investigation yield instances of clear non-compliance with Illinois statute and rules, official action will be taken and be made publicly available,” spokesman Eric Eizinger wrote in an email. Discipline can include a reprimand, probation, or the suspension or revocation of a medical license.

Thousands of complaints are lodged against health professionals each year by patients or other members of the public, law enforcement agencies or others. The department is currently prosecuting about 430 cases.

A UIC spokeswoman said the university “cannot comment on any ongoing investigation.” UIC officials have previously said that they suspended Pavuluri’s research and took other corrective steps when they realized she was not complying with protocols, and that the university “is committed to adhering to the highest standards for research integrity.”

University officials said this spring, and again in response to recent questions, that they did not file a complaint about Pavuluri with the state disciplinary board because “reporting was not required.”

University officials have also said that while there were problems with Pavuluri’s research, a review of her separate medical practice determined that she provided “high quality patient care.”

Reached at her new office, Pavuluri declined to comment.

In an earlier interview, she said her research mistakes were oversights and she made decisions in the best interests of her patients.

“I thought I was doing the right thing and not harming any child,” she said in the interview. “I treated them like an angel, all of them. I was careful and tried to do my best with each individual child.”

Pavuluri joined UIC’s psychiatry department in 2000 and founded the Pediatric Mood Disorders Program, which drew children from around the country with bipolar disorder and other mental illnesses.

She treated and oversaw the care of thousands of children, including 1,200 in the five years after her research first came under scrutiny in 2013, records show. While at UIC, she secured about $7.5 million in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health.

Pavuluri’s five-year study, “Affective Neuroscience of Pediatric Bipolar Disorder,” used imaging to look at how the brains of adolescents with bipolar disorder functioned before and after taking lithium. The scans were compared with brain images of healthy, unmedicated children.

But federal health officials late last year demanded that UIC return $3.1 million they had awarded her. Officials determined there had been “serious and continuing noncompliance” by Pavuluri, as well as failures by the university’s institutional review board, or IRB, a faculty panel responsible for reviewing research involving human subjects.

Among other findings, NIMH concluded that Pavuluri tested lithium on children younger than 13 though she was told not to, failed to properly alert parents of the study’s risks and didn’t ensure that some female subjects had pregnancy tests though that was part of the study protocol. Pavuluri also falsified data to cover up the misconduct, according to a letter the UIC chancellor wrote to another university official after reviewing a university panel’s investigation.

Pavuluri enrolled 101 children and teens diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the lithium study before it was halted when one of the young subjects became ill. Another 132 children and teens participated as healthy control subjects, including her two sons, a violation of university protocol and generally accepted research practices, ProPublica Illinois found.

NIMH concluded that 86 percent of the children and teens in the study did not meet the eligibility criteria to participate because they were younger than 13, had previously used psychotropic medication or were ineligible for other reasons, records show.

The study began in 2009 and was almost complete, with the money spent, when it was halted in 2013. Two of Pavuluri’s other federally funded projects also were stopped at that time, and the university had to return nearly $800,000 that hadn’t yet been spent on those studies.

The ProPublica Illinois investigation found that UIC officials didn’t properly screen or monitor Pavuluri’s research. For example, the IRB approved lowering the minimum age of participants to 10 even though NIMH specifically prohibited it. Pavuluri, going even further afield from the protocol, enrolled a few children younger than 10. Pavuluri and a co-investigator were part of the panel tasked with monitoring the trial’s progress, even though investigators are not supposed to monitor the progress of their own work.

Following an internal investigation in 2015, UIC suspended Pavuluri’s research indefinitely and directed her to retract several scientific journal articles. UIC has declined to provide a copy of its investigative report, but following the investigation, Chancellor Michael Amiridis concluded that Pavuluri’s conduct reflected a “pattern of placing research priorities above patient welfare,” according to the letter he wrote.

The mother of one of Pavuluri’s research subjects said she is glad the state is investigating. She did not file a complaint with IDFPR.

“I would like to know that she will not be able to run something that way again where the patient comes second to the research,” the mother said.

Pavuluri’s research also has been under investigation by two divisions of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, according to subpoenas, emails and other documents: the inspector general’s office, which examines waste, fraud and abuse in government programs, and the Office of Research Integrity, which reviews claims of scientific misconduct.

Federal officials don’t comment about ongoing investigations. But the research integrity review could be nearing a conclusion, according to an email last month between federal and university officials obtained from UIC under the Freedom of Information Act.

Jodi S. Cohen is a reporter for ProPublica Illinois.

When Cook County Circuit Judge Joseph Claps was found not guilty in October of a gun charge, it was because another judge gave Claps the benefit of the doubt in a way that typical defendants aren’t given, an Injustice Watch investigation has found.

Will County Judge Edward Burmila ruled that prosecutors failed to prove that the object Claps accidentally dropped in front of sheriff’s deputies in the lobby of the Leighton Criminal Courts Building on July 3 was a gun.

That was even though what happened was caught on video. And sheriff’s deputies testified they saw the object as it dropped and that it was, in fact, a gun.

After the incident, Claps, 70, was placed on “non-judicial duties.” According to Pat Milhizer, spokesman for Chief Cook County Judge Timothy Evans, “The matter was referred to the Judicial Inquiry Board” — the state panel that investigates allegations of misconduct by judges.

Other defendants have been convicted of gun charges based on less evidence than there was against Claps, Cook County court records show. A review of court cases on defendants charged with gun violations since 2015 turned up 14 cases in which there was a conviction even though no gun was found.

And the Illinois Supreme Court has upheld convictions twice since 2012 that involved the use of a firearm even though no gun was recovered by police.

In the case of James Washington, the state’s high court upheld the conviction based on the testimony of the victim that Washington held a gun on him during a carjacking on the South Side, though his lawyer argued there was no evidence the object wasn’t actually a toy.

Then, last year, the court upheld the 2017 armed robbery conviction of Eugene Wright based on the victim’s insistence that Wright had a gun when he robbed a Rogers Park restaurant, though no firearm was recovered and the police found a BB gun near the crime scene a week later.

Since then, appellate judges have repeatedly upheld convictions involving gun charges based on the testimony of witnesses or on video recordings showing an object that appears to be a gun, even in cases in which no gun was recovered.

Among those cases:

• In November 2017, the Illinois Appellate Court affirmed Keleen Bishop’s conviction for home invasion in a 2012 break-in at a home on the South Side while armed with a firearm after a victim testified he saw Bishop with what looked like a .22-caliber gun but could possibly have been a toy. No weapon was admitted into evidence.

• In 2016, an Illinois Appellate Court panel upheld the conviction of Dwayne Burke for armed robbery based on the testimony of an Evergreen Park gas station cashier that Burke pulled a gun on her and demanded money. The cashier said the gun was “black” and “looked real to me.” And surveillance video showed a black object in Burke’s hand during the robbery. The court rejected Burke’s argument that it could have been a toy or a BB gun, writing that “there is no evidence in the record to suggest that the gun was anything other than a real firearm” despite the police not recovering a firearm.

• In August, the Illinois Appellate Court upheld the conviction of a minor identified as “Jose A.” of armed robbery and battery after the victim said he saw a silver gun in his hand as he was being robbed in Wicker Park. Surveillance video appeared to support that, though no firearm was admitted into evidence.

All but one of those cases involved defendants who are black, the review found. In the other case, the defendant was Hispanic.

Two legal scholars who study race in the criminal justice system, interviewed about Claps’ acquittal, say Burmila’s decision reflected a double standard that benefits the few even as typical defendants don’t get the same breaks.

“Surely, Judge Claps is not being treated like the average defendant, and the average defendant is black,” says Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, an associate professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware and author of the book “Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court.”

Samuel Jones, a law professor at John Marshall Law School, echoes that, saying, “There’s just a long history in the United States of African-Americans being treated differently by law enforcement.”

Those other gun cases stand in contrast to what happened after Claps was hit with a misdemeanor gun charge after he dropped an object that Cook County sheriff’s deputies said was a gun as he walked through the lobby of the courthouse at 26th and California.

The object fell near a deputy, video released by the sheriff’s office shows.

No one stopped Claps as he picked up the object and left. But deputies immediately reported the incident to their supervisor.

The judge — who has a concealed-carry license — was later charged with carrying a concealed weapon in a prohibited area, which carries a maximum sentence of 180 days in jail and a $2,500 fine.

The two deputies testified they didn’t arrest Claps because they weren’t sure whether judges are permitted to carry a gun in the courthouse. Only law enforcement officers on duty are allowed to bring a gun there.

But both deputies testified there was no doubt that the object Claps dropped was a gun.

“It was a firearm,” Deputy Patricia Scott testified. “lt was a gun.”

The other deputy, Vanessa Williams, testified: “I turned around and looked, and I observed a weapon on the floor of the lobby…. I knew that it was a semiautomatic, and it was silver. It was a gun.”

The prosecution also entered the courthouse video as evidence.

Cook County Judge Joseph Claps (left) leaves the Maywood courthouse with his lawyers Todd Pugh and Thomas Breen after being found not guilty. | Andy Grimm / Sun Times

Claps’ lawyer, Thomas Breen, argued that the deputies could have been mistaken: “We know full well that something can look like and appear to be a gun and not, in fact, be a firearm … There are replicas out there. There are cap guns out there. There are water pistols out there. There are BB guns out there that might look like a firearm.”

Burmila, who was brought in to handle the case because it involved a Cook County judge, considered the testimony given at the trial in Maywood and found Claps not guilty. The Will County judge said in court that he thought the deputies would have responded with more alarm if the object was a gun.

Alecia Richards reports for Injustice Watch, a nonpartisan, not-for-profit journalism organization that conducts in-depth research to expose institutional failures that obstruct justice and equality.

CONTRIBUTING: Abigal Bazin, Abigail Blachman, Mari Cohen, Rachel Kim

A state senator. A City Hall lobbyist. A banned former city contractor. And a smattering of city workers.

They’re all part of Ald. Edward M. Burke’s political army, which gathered 7,193 signatures on the nominating petitions he submitted to election officials last month to secure a spot on the February ballot.

It’s the toughest election fight the 74-year-old power broker has faced since replacing his late father on the Chicago City Council in 1969.

Burke is in the crosshairs of an investigation that saw FBI agents raid his City Hall and 14th Ward offices over the past few weeks as he’s battling four Hispanic opponents who say it’s time for voters in the predominantly Hispanic ward to end the 50-year reign of the longest-serving alderman in Chicago history.

His fate could be in the hands of his longtime political operative Peter Andrews Jr., a retired Chicago Park District plumber, who found federal agents on the porch of his house shortly before they raided the alderman’s offices.

Andrews, who moved out of Burke’s Southwest Side ward about two decades ago, headed the volunteer army that collected far more signatures for Burke than the 473 that aldermanic candidates needed to be on the ballot for the Feb. 26 election.

Like Andrews, who has declined interview requests, 80 percent of the 73 volunteers who collected signatures for Burke’s re-election bid can’t vote for him because they don’t live in his ward. Ten of them live in the suburbs, from Park Ridge to Lemont.

Burke’s volunteers included 23 who, in addition to helping to get him on the ballot, collected 1,351 signatures for Gery Chico, a longtime Burke ally who is among the 21 candidates vying to succeed Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Chico spokeswoman Kelley Quinn says Burke “was one of many dozens of people across the city to help Gery circulate petitions and collect signatures.”

Mayoral candidates Gery Chico, left, and Susana Mendoza, right. File photos by Rich Hein/Sun-Times

Twenty-three of Ald. Edward M. Burke’s volunteers also collected 1,351 signatures for Gery Chico, a longtime Burke ally running for mayor. Another Burke volunteer, Michael J. Synowiecki, gathered 121 signatures for mayoral candidate Susana Mendoza, who was married by Burke’s wife at the Burkes’ home. | Rich Hein / Sun-Times

Another Burke volunteer, Michael J. Synowiecki, gathered 121 signatures for mayoral candidate Susana Mendoza, who was recently won re-election as Illinois’ state comptroller. In a ceremony performed by Burke’s wife, Illinois Supreme Court Justice Anne Burke, Mendoza and her husband were married at the Burkes’ home in December 2011, a week before they were married by a priest in Joliet.

Synowiecki, 32, who lives in Burke’s ward, was one of the alderman’s top volunteers, getting nearly 400 signatures for him. Synowiecki once worked as an attorney for the City Council Committee on Finance that the alderman has run for decades.

Now a lawyer with the law firm of Daley & Georges, headed by mayoral candidate William Daley’s brother Michael Daley, Synowiecki is a registered lobbyist at City Hall. One of his clients, Utility Transport Services, has been awarded three contracts totaling more than $144 million to provide rock and other materials to the city’s water department for construction projects. Utility Transport’s owner, James Bracken, has another company, Brackenbox, that has a $60 million contract to provide roll-off dumpsters at city work sites.

Synowiecki is married to a great-niece of Anne Burke, Meaghan Cleary Synowiecki, who works for the city council finance committee. She notarized 173 nominating petitions for Burke and 293 for Chico.

Michael J. Synowiecki. | Daley & Georges

State Sen. Martin A. Sandoval, D-Chicago, whose district includes part of Burke’s ward, collected 60 signatures for the alderman.

Burke turned in 20 signatures gathered by Anthony McMahon, a Park Ridge resident who got caught up in a scandal involving Windy City Electric, a company owned by his wife and sister in law. The company was barred from getting any city work after the city’s inspector general determined that McMahon and his brother controlled the company as it was landing contracts set aside for businesses owned by women.

One of Burke’s staff assistants on the finance committee, David Espinoza, collected 121 signatures to help his boss seek re-election. Espinoza also notarized nominating petitions with 4,081 signatures for Burke and 126 signatures for Chico.

Raul Reyes, an employee in the Chicago city clerk’s office who once worked with Burke’s brother, outgoing state Rep. Dan Burke, gathered 61 signatures for the alderman. Reyes has also filed a challenge to the petitions circulated by one of Burke’s opponents, Tanya Patino, in the aldermanic election.

Burke himself circulated seven petitions, collecting 67 signatures towards his re-election bid. The alderman, his wife and their son Travis Burke signed a petition on Nov. 3, a few weeks before federal investigators raided his offices.

Andrews had circulated that petition, which was notarized by Synowiecki’s wife, one of the employees on the alderman’s city council payroll.

• Feds raid Ald. Burke’s City Hall, ward offices

• Before raiding Burke’s offices, FBI made no-warrant visit to top aide’s home

• FBI seized cellphone of Chicago’s most powerful alderman, Edward Burke

Embattled Ald. Edward M. Burke’s turf war to keep the City Hall inspector general’s office from reviewing workers’ compensation records has cost Chicago taxpayers nearly a quarter of a million dollars in legal fees, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.

The legal bills from Burke’s fight also show that the powerful Southwest Side alderman’s attorneys sent emails and documents to a federal prosecutor more than two years ago, according to the records from City Hall’s law department.

It’s unclear whether the records Burke’s lawyers released to the U.S. attorney’s office in February 2016 are related to last month’s FBI raids of the alderman’s offices at City Hall and his political headquarters in the 14th ward.

The Sun-Times has reported that the raids on Burke’s offices were unrelated to his past controversies, including his chairmanship of the City Council Committee on Finance and its oversight of the $100 million-a-year workers’ compensation program for city employees, which doesn’t include police and firefighters.

Inspector General Joseph Ferguson has long been blocked from examining the workers’ comp program, first by an ordinance that gave him no authority to investigate the city council and then by a new ordinance, passed in February 2016, that gave him the power to investigate aldermen and their staffs but not the programs they run, including workers’ compensation.

By the time Ferguson gained authority to investigate the aldermen, Burke had hired the powerhouse law firm of Jenner & Block to respond to the “inspector general’s inquiries,’’ according to the legal bills, which started coming in on Dec. 1, 2015.

Since then, according to the legal bills that Jenner & Block has submitted to City Hall, the law firm has billed Chicago’s taxpayers a total of $184,229 to:

• Respond to emails from Ferguson’s staff.

• Meet with Burke and his staff, as well as the inspector general’s staff.

• Review documents and produce records to the inspector general, some of those involving workers’ comp records.

Jenner & Block also was paid to represent Burke in a dispute with Ferguson’s staff regarding an investigation of city employees filing potentially fraudulent workers’ comp claims — a dispute that led Ferguson to hire another private law firm, Miller Shakman. Its legal bills have totaled $64,373.

That brings the total legal tab for Burke’s secrecy fight to $248,602.

In a written statement responding to questions, the inspector general’s office confirms that it hired Miller Shakman as part of the legal dispute “as it relates to the obligation of the Committee on Finance to provide records relevant to OIG investigations of allegations of fraud by city employees receiving workers’ compensation program benefits.”

Inspector General Joseph Ferguson. | Max Herman / Sun-Times

Things grew so contentious that lawyers from Jenner & Block began preparing for a lawsuit that Ferguson had threatened to file earlier this year, but hasn’t, against Burke’s committee, the records show.

Burke didn’t respond to an email seeking comment on the legal bills. Two Jenner & Block attorneys who are named in the city records — Jeffrey Colman and Gabriel Fuentes — didn’t respond to inquiries.

The attorneys began billing the city in early 2016 over an unidentified issue involving Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Otlewski. Their bills reflect a series of discussions with federal prosecutors as well as documents that were sent to Otlewski on Feb. 12, 2016. That was the last billing entry regarding Otlewski or the U.S. attorney’s office.

Otlewski, who no longer works for the prosecutor’s office, wouldn’t comment. The U.S. attorney’s office didn’t respond to questions regarding Burke.

Burke, 74, has represented the 14th ward since 1969, making him the longest-serving alderman in Chicago history. He’s seeking re-election in February from what’s now a majority-Hispanic ward and is facing four challengers, all of them Hispanic.

Contributing: Jon Seidel

• Most volunteers who got signatures for embattled Ald. Burke can’t vote for him

• Progressive aldermen move to strip Burke of $100M-a-year workers’ comp program

• Feds raid Ald. Burke’s City Hall, ward offices

• Before raiding Burke’s offices, FBI made no-warrant visit to top aide’s home

• FBI seized cellphone of Chicago’s most powerful alderman, Edward Burke

More than a year after finding that one of its pathologists missed a murder and launching an unprecedented review of every one of the 218 cases Dr. John E. Cavanaugh handled, the Cook County medical examiner’s office is little more than one-third of the way done, records show.

And the county agency says it won’t finish until the end of 2019 — more than two years after Cavanaugh was fired.

Still, Cook County spokeswoman Natalia Derevyanny says, “This is a top priority for the medical examiner’s office.”

Derevyanny says it’s taking time because the pathologists reviewing Cavanaugh’s cases also continue to handle new cases.

Dr. Ponni Arunkumar, the chief medical examiner, ordered the review after finding that Cavanaugh, her former top deputy, failed to realize that a man who was found dead in a burning apartment died as a result of being stabbed.

Arunkumar — whose agency is overseen by Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, now in the race to succeed Mayor Rahm Emanuel — fired Cavanaugh from his $225,000-a-year post. And she said she would have her staff go through records and evidence from each of the cases he oversaw during 10 months with the agency to see whether Cavanaugh made other mistakes and, if so, correct his findings.

So far, Arunkumar’s agency has changed Cavanaugh’s findings regarding “manner of death” in five of the 82 cases reviewed — including that of the unidentified man found in the smoldering East Chatham apartment, whose death was reclassified from “undetermined” to homicide.

In other cases, the manner of deaths have been changed for:

• A gunshot victim, from suicide to undetermined.

• A 2-year-old boy, from “natural” to undetermined because bruises had been found.

• A man, from undetermined to natural.

• Another man, from “accidental” to natural.

Dr. John E. Cavanaugh ruled a 2-year-old boy who collapsed and died in February 2017 at an apartment in the 1700 block of Juneway Terrace died of natural causes — a finding his office later changed. | Tyler Lariviere / Sun-Times

There are 11 other cases in which the manner of death was determined to be correct but the medical examiner’s staff found that the “cause of death” was incorrectly reported by Cavanaugh — including a woman found to have died from “hypertensive heart disease” rather than “acute pancreatitis.” The office says those revisions “have been primarily clerical.”

The medical examiner’s office won’t say whether the protracted analyses of Cavanaugh’s cases has delayed or hampered any criminal investigations involving police.

Pathologists make their rulings based on an autopsy or a less-intrusive examination of a body. The determination of what caused a death — whether it’s, say, as a result of natural causes or a homicide or a suicide or an accident — can prompt a police investigation or mean there won’t be one.

A change in that determination also can mean families may have to deal with a new set of circumstances surrounding the death of a loved one.

Arunkumar’s agency notified Cook County prosecutors and the Chicago Police Department about the review because findings of any mistakes could affect criminal investigations and prosecutions.

Dr. Ponni Arunkumar, Cook County’s chief medical examiner. | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

Of Cavanaugh’s 218 cases, he ruled 24 were homicides. Arunkumar’s staff has reviewed nine of those 24 cases as of Nov. 30, records show.

Derevyanny says the agency is trying “to ensure that each case is thoroughly evaluated while also ensuring that current cases receive adequate resources.”

She says the medical examiner’s office “will take the time necessary to ensure the quality of work is not compromised.”

In cases where Cavanaugh’s findings have been changed, she says the medical examiner’s office has amended the death certificates “submitted to the Illinois Department of Public Health Division of Vital Records and to the funeral home that handled arrangements so the death certificate can be provided to family.”

Arunkumar previously has said she has filed a complaint against Cavanaugh with the Illinois Department of Professional and Financial Regulation, which licenses and disciplines doctors. The state agency won’t comment.

Arunkumar initially hired Cavanaugh as her chief deputy, a job he started in February 2017. A few months later, she demoted him, then fired him effective Nov. 30, 2017.

Cavanaugh, 61, of Crown Point, Indiana, continues to work part-time for the Marion County Coroner in Indianapolis.

Asked about the slow pace of the review, Cavanaugh says, “It doesn’t sound like it was that important.”

The medical examiner’s office has touted improvements since revelations in 2012 — four years before Arunkumar assumed the top job — that coolers overflowed with bodies and corpses in blue body bags were being stacked in hallways because pathologists couldn’t keep up.

In the past year, though, the Sun-Times has reported that some of the agency’s investigators, who help collect evidence, have faced disciplinary action for failing to visit even a single crime scene each month.

The Sun-Times also has reported that the FBI thought Arunkumar’s office botched a murder case, incorrectly finding that Chicago police Sgt. Donald Markham shot himself in the head in 2015. Federal agents believe he was murdered.

• Unprecedented review after medical examiner fires doctor who missed a murder, May 27, 2018

• Doctor fired by Cook County medical examiner now under the microscope in Indiana, July 16, 2018

• Cook County prosecutors want a 2nd opinion on fired pathologist’s murder finding, Aug. 7, 2018

The Cook County medical examiner’s office is reviewing each of the 218 cases that Dr. John E. Cavanaugh handled. | Sun-Times files

Liam Miller needed a nurse to be able to go to kindergarten without his mom having to stay with him at school. Now, he has one.

Nearly every day for six weeks, Krystal Miller had to stay with her youngest son, who’s tethered to a feeding tube as his only source of nutrition, because the Chicago Public Schools went through six nurses before finally finding him one who could properly care for him — and who’d stick around.

Liam had nurses who didn’t show up, or never had worked with feeding tubes (or with children) or couldn’t be with Liam all five days of school each week. Then, in October, CPS assigned 5-year-old Liam a veteran school nurse, one he adores and trusts.

That happened after a Chicago Sun-Times report about his mom accompanying him to Oriole Park Elementary, where she oversaw his feeding tube and pump.

His parents are elated. Because Liam has so much to learn.

He got a slow start as a baby until doctors figured out what was keeping him from gaining any weight, from sitting up on his own, from talking. As a 5-year-old starting school, he couldn’t begin to learn independence as long as his mother was in class.

Click to view slideshow.

Now the sturdy little blonde boy is bursting to show off what he’s since learned at kindergarten on his own:

Counting most of the way from 1 to 20. Saying “hi” in Chinese. Practicing a chirpy rendition of “Mittens and Gloves” for the winter concert.

And then he spells out “L, i, a, m,” with his whispery voice, his chubby hands signing each letter as he says it. Head bent close to the kitchen table, Liam writes out his name, too.

There’s even more: Liam now is speaking in sentences that others can understand, instead of just saying random words. He’s talking about learning to use the potty, like the other kids at school. And he can walk up and down stairs on his own, instead of scooting or using the school elevator.

He’s accomplished so much since CPS did what what it was supposed to so his mom wouldn’t have to stay with him.

“He’s where he needs to be without mom. Because it was like, he would rely or look back at me like how do I answer this?” Krystal says. “At school, he’s not as shy because he’s gotten to know all of his peers and teachers, but he would still look at me and say, ‘You help’… kind of using me as a crutch. But now that I’m not there, he’s becoming more independent.

“Occasionally, yes, he will ask for help, but he will try before he asks for help.”

Hundreds need care

Of CPS’ 361,000 students, officials say about 700 need regular nursing care at school. Federal law guarantees such care to kids with medical needs.

The Sun-Times has documented CPS’s problems keeping well-trained nurses for kids like Liam. RCM Health Care Services, the agency CPS officials have relied on since 2015 to augment their own 300-plus nurses, has high turnover, so some days, agency nurses don’t show up for their assignments. Or, parents have said, the assigned agency nurse lacks training on kids’ specific conditions.

Problems keeping those agency nurses in their temp jobs got worse at the start of this school year, when CPS rechecked the backgrounds of all adults working in schools, and some vendors’ backgrounds didn’t clear in time for the first day of school.

The worst of it hit as Liam was reporting for kindergarten.

Parents have transferred their kids to schools that have permanent nurses who work directly for CPS and are members of the Chicago Teachers Union. Some have filed complaints through the federal Department of Education. Liam’s dad emailed the newspaper weeks after school began, frustrated because his wife had submitted the child’s paperwork far in advance, last June, to avoid the nursing problems she and Liam ended up experiencing.

Diagnosed with shortgut, a condition that hinders the body’s ability to absorb nutrients, Liam can’t eat and is fed only through a tube. So someone who’s trained needs to keep watch every morning over the tube in his belly and the pump he wears on a backpack, and then unhook the tube before the lunchtime recess so Liam can join his friends outside to play, unencumbered.

His mother spent most days at school during those early weeks with Liam, while her husband did his share, too, at home with their two older children before driving to work the night shift.

Changes were in the works the day after the Sun-Times story was published. As for how CPS found a permanent replacement so fast, spokesman Michael Passman said: “When there is a need for support the district works as quickly as possible to ensure resources are in place.”

Schools officials also are nearly done hiring 20 new nurses of their own, with 19 offers accepted, though several dozen other nursing positions remain vacant, according to the most recently available count, taken Sept. 30.

To meet the rest of their demand to cover between 180 and 220 nursing agency assignments a day, CPS plans to spend up to $26 million on up to eight total agencies over the next two and a half years. Parents from the group Raise Your Hand object to that plan, saying kids need permanent solutions, not more temps.

In good hands

To the Millers’ satisfaction, their son’s new nurse showed immediately that she’s comfortable around children and knows her way around feeding tubes and pumps. With Liam, she is warm and kind, and he took to her within a surprisingly short three or four days.

Even better, the CPS veteran asks lots of questions and texts regular updates home. And there’s a backup plan in case she’s absent.

“I’d say this is a really good fit. I mean he likes her, I like her,” Krystal says. “She showed the key things that I was looking for, from day one, or at least was hoping for for day one but didn’t come until October.”

The nurse lets Liam’s parents lower their guard a little, just in time for his dad’s work schedule to change from nights to days. Krystal has had to spend zero days at school taking care of Liam since the new0 nurse started.

That leaves her and her husband with more energy to be the kind of parents they want to be for all three children. When 8-year-old Makayla got sick, Krystal could stay home with her. When 9-year-old Conner performed at school, Krystal could go watch, instead of being stuck in the kindergarten classroom.

And Liam gets to try things his older siblings can do, stuff he’s learning to talk about.

“I went on a field trip,” he explained, to the Chicago Children’s Museum.

To get there? “Go on a bus.”

The dinosaur exhibit was a hit: “I digged it!”

“What else, Mom?”

After the Rev. Richard McGrath was accused in late 2017 of having child pornography on the cell phone he used as president of Providence Catholic High School in New Lenox, he refused to turn it over to police or his religious superiors, thwarting a criminal investigation.

Another criminal probe was subsequently launched when a man who attended Providence in the 1990s accused McGrath of raping him back then – accusations contained in a lawsuit that was recently dismissed by a judge on a technicality but is likely to be re-filed.

The criminal investigation, now in the hands of Will County prosecutors, has not yielded any charges.

Through it all, the order of Catholic priests to which McGrath has belonged for decades, the Augustinians, stuck with him.

But it appears McGrath may not be sticking with them.

According to the Rev. Richie Mercado, secretary of the Augustinians’ Midwest province, McGrath “is unlawfully absent from the community.”

That “law” to which he’s referring is church law, otherwise known as “canon” law.

“Unlawful means that he left the Augustinian community without permission (Canon 665, no 2),” Mercado said via email. “The effect of this ‘absence without permission’ is that his faculties to function as a priest has been suspended.”

“More particularly to our Augustinian community, he could no longer represent the Augustinians in any way or form until the issue has been resolved. Canon Law states that ‘an appropriate penalty may be imposed if the member has persisted in ignoring the warning of the superior, or dismissal from the institute may result after an appropriate process.’”

“As of this time, he is still a priest but without any faculties to function as one.”

Augustinian officials would not answer questions about whether they know where McGrath is now living and, if so, whether he’s in a supervised setting, away from children.

As a religious order, the Augustinians — who say they are “guided today by the ideals and spirit of St. Augustine,” a bishop and philosopher who lived in the 4^th and 5^th centuries — largely govern themselves but also must get permission from local bishops if they want to live or serve in their jurisdictions, or dioceses.

Providence is in Will County, part of the Diocese of Joliet. After McGrath’s legal troubles started, the Augustinians removed McGrath from Providence and moved him to their friary in Hyde Park — within the Archdiocese of Chicago, the church’s arm for Cook and Lake counties, overseen by Cardinal Blase Cupich.

While the Augustinians alerted Cupich’s office to McGrath’s presence in that South Side neighborhood — where they said he was in a “supervised environment,” barred from public ministry — Cupich’s aides in turn did not initially alert a preschool across the alley from the friary or a Catholic grade school several doors down about McGrath being there, as the Chicago Sun-Times reported Sept. 21.

That’s the same day that Cupich, after his press aides were asked by the Sun-Times about the lack of notification to the schools, sent a letter to the parish and school communities of the Catholic grade school blaming the Augustinians for telling his office only about “allegations that McGrath had ‘inappropriate material’ on his mobile phone” and saying “nothing about an allegation of sexual abuse.”

“Had they fully informed us of his status, we would not have permitted him to live there,” Cupich wrote.

Former Providence Catholic H.S. student Bob Krankvich (from left) and attorneys Jeff Anderson (center) and Marc Pearlman

Attorney Jeff Anderson speaks at an April press conference, with fellow attorney Marc Pearlman at right, and former Providence Catholic High School student Robert Krankvich at left, who filed a lawsuit against the Augustinian Order alleging sexual abuse by Augustinian priest and former Providence president Richard McGrath. | Max Herman/For the Sun-Times

It’s unclear why Cupich’s people weren’t independently aware of McGrath’s troubles since Robert Krankvich, the man accusing McGrath of abusing him, held a well-publicized news conference in April, when he filed suit, spelling out what he says the priest did to him. Law enforcement officials also have publicly confirmed they’re investigating.

Either way, Cupich also wrote to the school, “We have asked the Augustinians to move Father McGrath from the friary immediately, and they have agreed to do so.”

Earlier this month, the Sun-Times inquired as to McGrath’s status and whereabouts and learned from the Augustinians about his unauthorized absence, and that the archdiocese “has been informed of his status.”

Cupich spokeswoman Paula Waters subsequently relayed that McGrath “has no faculties to minister in the Archdiocese of Chicago,” and Cupich’s office was informed on Sept. 28 “by the Augustinians that [McGrath] had left the friary and possibly the order.”

“They were no more specific than that,” Waters said. “Try the Augustinians for more information.”

McGrath couldn’t be reached for comment, but his attorney, Patrick Reardon, said, “Last time I spoke to him he felt he was a liability to the Augustinians,” so he moved away.

Reardon wouldn’t say where to, but said McGrath has been in touch with his Augustinian superiors within the past few weeks.

Reardon also said McGrath insists he’s done nothing wrong.

A China Southern Airlines jet was preparing to leave a cargo zone at O’Hare Airport in September when the pilots were told to sit tight and wait for instructions before taxiing across the busy airfield.

Instead, the crew left the cargo area, throttling along a taxiway “without authorization,” and, after other foul-ups, came dangerously close to a departing United Airlines jetliner, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.

It was among a series of runway incidents at O’Hare in 2018 that also included:

• Employees of the Chicago Department of Aviation — the city agency that runs O’Hare and also Midway Airport — driving onto active runways, in one case, records show, when a city worker used the airstrip as a “short cut.”

• A Delta Air Lines plane accidentally crossing a “hold” line near a runway where another aircraft was about to land. That happened in a section of O’Hare designated as a safety “hot spot” while the Delta plane was being towed for maintenance by a contracted tug driver who said the airfield markings were obscured.

Nobody was injured in any of the incidents.

The Federal Aviation Administration investigated all of them and gave the aviation department a “warning letter” over the safety violations by city workers.

“The FAA is concerned regarding the increasing number of runway incursions” at O’Hare, according to the November letter. “Vehicle operators on a complex, ever-changing airfield environment face risks that have the opportunity, if not mitigated, to have catastrophic results when an incursion occurs.”

There were 22 runway incursions at O’Hare in 2017 and 23 in 2018, according to the aviation department.

A China Southern Airlines cargo jet lands at O’Hare Airport. | AP

The incursion involving the China Southern cargo plane didn’t involve city employees and appeared to be the fault of not only the crew but also air-traffic controllers, records show.

After the massive Boeing aircraft was on the move without clearance in the Sept. 19 incident, a controller, identifying runways and taxiways by their designations, radioed the pilot to “taxi to Runway 10L at Delta Delta via Mike, left on Delta, Papa Papa, hold short of Runway 9R,” records show.

The China Southern plane — taxiing to get into position to depart O’Hare — was headed south toward the far east end of Runway 9R, an east-west strip just north of O’Hare’s main terminals.

Another aircraft also was north of Runway 9R, on the far west end, waiting to cross.

As a United passenger jet rumbled west to east on Runway 9R, gaining speed so it could lift off for Hartford, Conn., the other waiting plane was cleared by a controller to cross once the United plane passed by.

The China Southern crew members, apparently thinking they were given that permission, “read back the clearance” to controllers, records show, as did the crew of the plane that actually had been cleared.

Air-traffic controllers “did not catch the wrong aircraft reading it back,” records show.

The China Southern plane then “crossed the hold line at the departure end of the runway” while the United aircraft “was accelerating on takeoff roll” on Runway 9R.

The hold line is 230 feet from the edge of the runway and 305 feet from its centerline.

The China Southern plane “continued rolling” toward the strip “and was 164 feet from the runway edge” when the United plane, an Airbus A319, “climbing through 289 feet, passed the intersection” at around 160 miles an hour.

The Chinese plane entered the runway several seconds later.

A controller radioed the plane, “China Southern 434 heavy, were you instructed to cross 9 Right?”

A pilot responded, “We are clear of 9 Right …”

The controller said, “Roger, you were never instructed to cross that runway.”

The area at O’Hare Airport where a China Southern Airlines cargo plane rolled without authorization in September as a United Airlines passenger jet was taking off. | Chicago Department of Aviation

Officials from the airline — which the Chinese government has an ownership stake in and is one of the largest carriers in the world — didn’t respond to requests for comment. The carrier has eight or nine arrivals each week at O’Hare and the same number of departures, most of them direct flights between Chicago and Shanghai.

Foreign carriers have been involved in other runway mishaps at O’Hare, including one in 1999 in which a departing Korean Air jetliner with hundreds of people on board narrowly averted an Air China aircraft that had blundered onto the runway.

FAA records show no current U.S. flying restrictions on that Air China pilot.

A city electrician who was blamed for driving a city vehicle onto a runway in May as a “short cut” has had his airfield driving privileges revoked, according to interviews and records.

City officials initially told the FAA they planned to fire him, but he didn’t end up losing his job. His base pay in 2017 was $100,568, but, with $33,410 in overtime, he was paid $133,978.

Records show he was involved in another runway incursion in 2016, when he “entered and exited” an active runway four times.

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Chicago Aviation Commissioner Jamie Rhee, appointed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel last year, wouldn’t comment.

In a written statement, her spokeswoman Lauren Huffman said, “Chicago’s airports have an outstanding record for safety and continually receive high marks by the FAA for meeting safety guidelines and standards.”

County, state workers lag City Hall in 6-figure club

Overtime pay helped keep city workers well ahead of their counterparts in county and state government, the Sun-Times analysis found.

Of 23,335 Cook County workers, 2,892 made six figures in 2017 — about 16.7 percent of the workforce. Those workers made a total of about $551 million — roughly one-third of the county’s $1.7 billion payroll.

Among the 74,868 people who took home paychecks from the state, 8,495 were paid $100,000 or more — 11 percent of state employees. They made a total of nearly $1.1 billion — almost a quarter of the $4.5 billion state payroll.

Of 35,587 people who got a city paycheck, 14,823 made six figures — 40.5 percent of all city workers — for a total of almost $1.9 billion, close to 59 percent of the payroll.

The median city worker’s pay — half of all city employees made more, and half made less — was $93,243. That was well above the $69,400 median county pay and $59,300 median state pay.

By comparison, the median total Chicago household income in 2017 was $83,890, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Big rise in ‘specialty pay’

As overtime increased by about 3 percent across City Hall, the amount paid out under so-called specialty pay categories rose by nearly 50 percent, from $164 million in 2016 to more than $245 million in 2017.

The bulk of that, about 90 percent, went to police and fire employees. Those pay boosts included retroactive raises, “duty-availability” pay, uniform allowances, holiday pay and shift differentials.

More than 2,500 city workers — led by police employees — cashed in comp time. Those payments — to retired employees as well as current workers — came to about $29.4 million in 2014, with 10 employees buying back $100,000 or more in comp time.

There’s no cap on how much comp time police employees can accumulate. City Hall typically makes three yearly payments to cover what employees are owed when they retire. That practice has drawn scrutiny from City Hall Inspector General Joseph Ferguson, who has urged city leaders to push in union contract negotiations to change that.

City Hall Inspector General Joseph Ferguson. | Max Herman / Sun-Times

Five of the city’s 44 contracts with labor unions have been expired since the summer of 2017, including contracts with police and fire unions that are expected to result in tens of millions of dollars in retroactive pay raises.

Emanuel has urged the unions to consider the city’s dire financial situation and pension crisis as they negotiate. New deals aren’t expected to be reached until Emanuel’s successor takes office.

The benefits and overtime city employees receive largely are the result of labor contracts negotiated over a span of decades. The rationale has been that workers should be compensated for their unusual schedules and, in some cases, the dangers they face. Overtime isn’t counted when calculating city workers’ pensions.

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