Snapshots of homes being rented through the Chicago Housing Authority’s biggest program, called the housing choice voucher program, formerly known as Section 8. The CHA would not identify tenants. Sun-Times photos by Rich Hein

The Chicago Housing Authority provided housing aid for 140,192 people last year.

Most of them — 107,411 — are in households that received housing choice vouchers, formerly known as Section 8 vouchers, to rent homes from private landlords.

Voucher-holders lived in a total of 44,773 apartments, condominiums and single-family homes, according to the CHA, which administers the program in Chicago for the federal government.

Under the program — which is used across the country — landlords receive subsidies from the housing authority, based on the income of the voucher-holding tenant. Most tenants have to pay some of the rent, though some pay nothing.

In Chicago, landlords are barred by law from rejecting anyone for using a voucher as long as the rent is covered.

The number of housing vouchers has grown substantially since 2000. That was the year Chicago set out on a plan to tear down most of the city’s high-rise public housing projects, including Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes. At that time, the CHA housed 54,260 people in its own buildings, while 76,666 lived in private residences through the voucher program.

In addition to the 107,411 people living with vouchers last year, 32,781 people were in CHA buildings and mixed-income developments, about 30 percent of them in developments for seniors.

The federal government sets qualifications for any CHA housing assistance based on family size and household income. A family of four had to make less than $60,800 a year in 2015 to qualify. For a single person, the income limit was $42,600.

By Chuck Neubauer and Sandy Bergo 

The Emanuel administration gave 10 contracts worth as much as $43 million to a Chicago sewer and excavation company after federal inspectors cited the business twice for serious workplace-safety violations on city jobs.

City officials say they hadn’t been aware of the safety citations and resulting fines, totaling $150,000, on the two sewer jobs when they gave Pan-Oceanic Engineering Co., Inc. the millions of dollars in additional business.

They say they are now investigating and that the Northwest Side company potentially could lose its current city contracts and be barred from getting future city business, though it’s being given a chance to show it’s in compliance with its contracts and city regulations.

Cathy Kwiatkowski

“Pan-Oceanic did not provide any notification to the city about the two 2014 trenching citations,” says Cathy Kwiatkowski, a spokeswoman for Chicago’s Department of Procurement Services. “Because the lack of notification is a violation of their contract, the city has sent Pan-Oceanic a letter demanding that they disclose any inspections or citations on city projects and submit a compliance plan within 10 days.”

Pan-Oceanic, which opened in 1998, also had been cited for safety violations five times before, starting in 2007, and placed in a federal program for “severe violators” that’s designed to trigger stepped-up inspections and enforcement.

Gulzar Singh, the company’s owner and president, says he’s taken steps to assure his workers’ safety.

Singh says the “safety of my employees is very important to me. Currently, with the help of third-party safety professionals, I have implemented an extensive safety-enhancement program.”

That includes “unannounced site inspections by a third party to monitor my company’s safety and compliance,” says Singh, who has made political contributions himself or through his company totaling more than $25,000 in recent years to political groups and candidates including Ald. Joe Moore (49^th) and Chicago schools chief Forrest Claypool when he was running for Cook County Board president.

No one was hurt on either of the two city jobs for which Pan-Oceanic, which contracts with the city Department of Water Management to do sewer and drain work, was cited by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 2014.

Both citations were for having employees working in unsafe trenches — a safety hazard, according to OSHA and experts who say dozens of workers across the United States die in trench collapses every year.

In each case, inspectors acting on anonymous phone tips found that Pan-Oceanic crews were working in unsafe pits dug to reach city sewer lines for installation and repair work.

In the first instance, in 2013 on a job in the 1000 block of North LeClaire in Austin, an OSHA inspector found a worker in an unprotected trench that was nearly nine feet deep, federal records show. And though work was already under way, the trench hadn’t been shored up, as required, and the materials that were supposed to be used to shore it up were found above-ground.

Federal safety rules require that trenches deeper than five feet be protected against cave-ins.

And records show the inspector learned that another crew member had warned the site supervisor on the job that the supports needed to be put in place but was told in response “not to worry about it.”

An administrative law judge upheld the OSHA citation, fined Pan-Oceanic $50,000 and wrote, “What most concerns the court in this case is the gravity of this violation and respondent’s repeated disregard of the requirements of the cave-in protection standard.

“Working in an unprotected trench is incredibly dangerous and exposes employees to serious injury, often involving death,” the judge wrote.

Under city rules, contractors are required to notify City Hall “immediately” any time their job sites are visited by OSHA inspectors. They also are required to forward copies of any citations to City Hall.

Pan-Oceanic didn’t do either of those things, city officials say.

According to an OSHA spokesman, the federal agency generally doesn’t notify government or private businesses when it cites one of their contractors.

Four months after the inspection at the LeClaire Street job site on the West Side, a second anonymous tip brought an OSHA compliance officer to another Pan-Oceanic work site, this one on the South Side at South Woodlawn Avenue and East 93rd Street. The inspector reported finding two workers in an unprotected 12-foot trench.

That infraction resulted in a proposed penalty of $147,000 that, after negotiations with the company, OSHA agreed to reduce to $100,000.

The LeClaire Street work was part of a $7.5 million city drain-repair contract on the North Side and the West Side. The Woodlawn Avenue work was part of a $3 million project to install new sewer pipes on the South Side.

Chuck Neubauer and Sandy Bergo are investigators for the Better Government Association.

After buying a home in Barrington Hills, Chaoshan Lai and his wife couldn’t unload the 15-year-old townhouse that they’d bought for $935,000 in Central Station, a taxpayer-subsidized development in the South Loop where former Mayor Richard M. Daley lived for years.

Lai couldn’t even find anyone to rent the townhouse on South Prairie Avenue — until he got a call in 2013 about a woman who’d gotten a “housing choice voucher,” from the Chicago Housing Authority through a program that had long been called Section 8.

Lai says the woman wanted to lease his three-bedroom, three-and-a-half bath home, which has a library and is within walking distance of Soldier Field and the lakefront.

“I said, ‘You probably cannot afford the rent,’ ” Lai recalls. “But they said they have a special program in the ‘opportunity area’ that pays much better. I said, ‘Let’s give it a shot.’ ”

It ended up being a good deal for Lai. Since June 1, 2013, he’s collected more than $100,000 from the CHA, which administers public housing in Chicago for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The CHA pays him $3,911 a month in federal funds to lease his townhouse to the woman and three others in her household, including a child under the age of 6, records show.

It also has been a good deal for Lai’s tenant. She pays no rent because, CHA officials say, she has no income. The CHA declined to identify her or other voucher clients, though it released the names of landlords.

Public housing doesn’t conjure images of a near-$1 million home. But the CHA foots most or all of the bill for Lai’s tenant and others to live in luxurious homes, even as tens of thousands of other low-income Chicagoans remain concentrated in poor, segregated areas or stuck on waiting lists to get housing assistance.

RELATED: THE WATCHDOGS: You paid to build them, now you pay to lease them

          RELATED: Emanuel blasts CHA voucher program as policy ‘gone awry’

That’s one of the key findings of a Chicago Sun-Times / Better Government Association investigation that will, over the coming months, examine the effects of the city’s massive “Plan for Transformation” — one of the most ambitious efforts nationwide to shift low-income residents out of crime-ridden, high-rise public housing projects like Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes.

As one of the main elements of that effort, the CHA is providing housing vouchers to more than 107,000 people in nearly 45,000 households in Chicago, most of them African-American. The vouchers give them a financial hand to lease apartments and homes from private landlords in any neighborhood they choose.

It’s an expensive effort, costing more than $47 million a month, with the federal government picking up $35.9 million of that and CHA tenants paying the rest.

But the program is riddled with inequities, the Sun-Times and BGA found. Among them:

• The CHA pays for some to live in high-rent, luxury properties, largely in upscale neighborhoods that are predominantly white. Many of them contribute little or nothing toward their rent. On the other hand, thousands pay far more and remain clustered in poor, black neighborhoods on the South Side and the West Side.

• The amount of financial assistance that voucher-holders get varies widely, largely because of the CHA’s willingness to provide more help to people who find homes in “opportunity areas” that traditionally haven’t welcomed public housing tenants.

• Of those receiving a voucher, 298 are leasing apartments, townhouses and single-family homes that cost $2,000 or more a month. The CHA spends a total of $7.5 million a year on those units, ranging from spacious homes to condos in skyscrapers.

• Taxpayers cover a higher percentage of the total rent for voucher-holders in two downtown wards than anywhere else: 87 percent in the 42^nd Ward and 83 percent in the 2^nd Ward.

Meanwhile, about 50,000 households remain on waiting lists to get one of the coveted vouchers, agency records show — more than the number who have vouchers.

Eighty-eight percent of households in the voucher program are headed by an African-American, most often a woman.

The CHA says it doesn’t tell the people with housing vouchers where to live. They’re free to find any place they can to rent, though the CHA has to inspect and approve it.

One of the more controversial parts of the voucher program has involved the effort to let people know they can move to opportunity areas, away from the old public housing clusters.

Opportunity areas are part of the Plan for Transformation, which, under Mayor Daley, saw housing projects demolished and the number of the federally funded housing vouchers rise.

The CHA currently has 4,690 households, with a total of 9,841 people, living in opportunity areas with the help of vouchers.

Over the past five years, the CHA has been willing to pay a premium — up to triple its standard rent payments — for apartments, condos and houses in these areas. There are now 1,332 households with a total of 3,584 people benefiting from that added financial help.

The most extravagant of the rent deals will end when their leases run out within the next two years, according to the CHA. It began scaling back on paying such high rents in 2014 in response to news stories and after discussions with HUD.

The opportunity-area program will continue. But voucher-holders are going to have to find less-expensive homes to stay in those areas, which include Lincoln Park and the Loop, because the CHA will pay only one-and-a-half times its normal top rents, rather than triple, to help poor people live there.

“We figured we do need to balance the obligations and the fiscal responsibilities we have with the need to provide people with access to the opportunity areas, which is an important part of moving people up the economic ladder,” says Molly Sullivan, a spokeswoman for the CHA.

CLICK HERE FOR PHOTOS AND DETAILS OF CHA’S LUXURY GAP

CHA officials say they don’t have a set budget for vouchers in the opportunity areas. They say the agency provides information on opportunity areas to everyone who gets a voucher, then offers additional counseling to those who want it.

Eugene Jones Jr., the Chicago Housing Authority’s CEO.

Some people want to live in neighborhoods like Englewood because they have ties there, says Eugene Jones Jr., the CHA’s chief executive officer, while others would prefer a high-rise downtown.

“Your choice may be different from someone else’s choice,” Jones says. “We find a lot of people want to stay where they’re comfortable.”

CHA records show 97 percent of voucher-holders live in homes where the rent is between $500 and $1,500 a month. Most of them pay part of their rent based on their income — unlike Lai’s tenant and others who pay little or nothing to live at a swanky address.

RELATED CONTENT: How housing vouchers work

Jamaine Parish and the 14 other people in his household, for example, live in a 1,200-square-foot bungalow in Marquette Park on the city’s Southwest Side. The home, where they moved in December, has seven bedrooms, including two in the basement.

CHA records show Parish has the largest household in the voucher program. He and his wife have seven children. His grandmother and her adopted and foster children also live with them.

Their rent is $1,938 a month. Parish, who’s a tax preparer, pays a quarter of that — $479. The CHA picks up the rest.

Parish says that although the home on South Artesian isn’t ideal for his huge family, it’s an improvement from the greystone at 37th Street and Indiana where they lived for two years using a voucher.

“Sometimes, you just have to do what you have to do to make it work,” says Parish, who waited more than six years to get one of the coveted vouchers.

Jamaine Parish lives in a crowded bungalow in Marquette Park with 14 relatives and pays $479 toward the $1,938 total monthly rent, with the CHA covering the rest. He pays more than what 85 percent of all households in the voucher program pay. His share is higher than what some one-person voucher households pay to live in downtown high-rises. | Chris Fusco/Sun-Times

Parish pays more in rent than 84 percent of the households in the voucher program. His share is higher than what some one-person voucher households pay to live in high-rises downtown.

“Wow,” Parish says. “Think about how many people are residing there and how many are residing here.”

WHERE HOUSING VOUCHER-HOLDERS LIVE: Click on map below, then arrows at left to see your ward.

The Sun-Times and BGA also found:

• 13 percent of the households in the voucher program citywide — 5,778 — pay no rent, with the CHA picking up the entire tab. That’s because they have no income or their income — from foster-care payments, for instance — doesn’t count toward their rent under HUD rules.

• 467 voucher-holders each pay $1,000 a month or more toward their rents — including a woman whose rent is $2,966 a month for a 32^nd-floor condo in the Loop. She pays $2,002 of that. Taxpayers cover the remaining $964. A check of local rental listings shows there are many one- to three-bedroom apartments available for up to $2,000 a month, including some in opportunity areas.

• 18,157 vouchers are held by one-person households — and at least 1,450 of them pay no rent, including a man who lives on the 15th floor of a Loop high-rise where the $2,260-a-month rent is covered by taxpayers.

• 187 big apartment buildings — some set aside for seniors — have at least 10 voucher-holders. Altogether, those buildings — many of them in Uptown or Edgewater or on the South Side — have 7,542 residents living there with the help of vouchers. A dozen have more than 100 residents living with vouchers.

• The two cheapest apartments in the voucher program — going for just $340 a month — are on North Winthrop in Uptown. One of the single men with a voucher who lives there pays $241 of the cost himself. Another pays $212. Both pay more than some voucher-holders do for high-priced condos downtown.

• Just down the block, 150 voucher-holders — all one-person households — live in a building where rents are $642 to $674 a month. Some pay the entire cost. Both Winthrop buildings are managed by Mercy Housing Lakefront, a not-for-profit agency that provides affordable housing.

To get a voucher, the federal government requires people to meet income guidelines based on household size. To qualify, a single person in Chicago has to make $42,600 or less a year — 80 percent of the area’s median income. A family of four can’t make more than $60,800.

People can use a voucher to lease any house, condo or apartment in the city or elsewhere that meets the rent guidelines set by the CHA, which range from $784 a month for a studio apartment to $2,775 a month for an eight-bedroom home.

The CHA shares the cost of the rent with tenants, who generally are required to pay as much as 30 percent of their income, or at least $75 a month in rent.

Chicago landlords are required, by city ordinance, to accept housing vouchers as payment as long as the full rent gets covered by the CHA and the tenant.

Katie Ludwig, who oversees the CHA voucher program.

“When folks come to us — they’ve found a unit in a certain building, and they want to rent there — as long as it passes our inspection and we can agree on a reasonable rent with that landlord, we can’t turn that down,” says Katie Ludwig, who oversees the voucher program for the CHA.

People have gotten some rich deals as a result of that:

• A single woman is leasing a two-bedroom condominium just north of Trump Tower for $3,000 a month. She pays $248, and taxpayers pay the rest — $2,752.

• A woman, her teenage son and a daughter who’s away at college have a two-bedroom condo in a South Loop high-rise with sweeping views of Lake Michigan for $3,020 a month. She pays $143; taxpayers pay $2,877.

• At North Harbor Drive near Navy Pier, a woman and two other people live on the 45th floor in a three-bedroom condo where the rent is $3,780. She pays $201; taxpayers pick up the remaining $3,579. Another three-bedroom condo in the same building, on the 37th floor, is leased to a woman and four others who pay no rent, with taxpayers covering the entire $3,770-a-month tab.

There are costly deals elsewhere in the city, too.

The CHA’s most-expensive lease is $4,800 a month. That’s for a five-bedroom home on Ohio Street near Ashland Avenue. A family of nine leases the home from Glenn Kahn, an attorney who used to live there and who collects $283 a month in rent from the family and the remaining $4,517 from taxpayers.

“I get to live like a human being,” says Linda Turpin, who pays no rent to live in a five-bedroom house in Bridgeport but will likely have to move because of new voucher rules. | Tim Novak/Sun-Times

The housing authority, whose board is appointed by the mayor, pays the entire rent for two five-bedroom houses in Bridgeport, in the shadow of the shuttered Fisk power plant — $3,000 a month for each house. Five people live in one of the houses. The other is occupied by Linda Turpin, 65, and her two adult daughters, one in college, the other unemployed.

Turpin’s grandchildren went to school with the children of her landlord, Manuel Cuzco, who purchased the home 10 years ago for $404,000, records show.

Turpin moved in two years ago after living in a South Side home where she says her windows got shot out. Now, she’s next door to a retired Chicago cop she says looks out for her.

“When I came here, I felt special,” Turpin says. “It has a little back yard. I don’t have to barricade myself in this house. I get to live like a human being.”

Turpin is among the people who will be moving out of her home soon because the CHA has slashed in half the amount it will spend on rents in the opportunity areas.

“There may be some landlords who might take less rent,” says Ludwig. “There might be some folks who might be able to afford a little bit extra. For the most part, a lot of people are likely going to have to move. And we’re working with them. ”

Turpin, who says she has several health problems, says Cuzco won’t cut the rent to about $1,700 a month — the amount the CHA would pay under its new rules. She says her lease ends in December. She doesn’t know where she’ll end up.

“Where would I go? I have no idea,” Turpin says. “I’m really afraid.”

Tim Novak, Chris Fusco and Mick Dumke are Sun-Times reporters. Brett Chase is a Better Government Association investigator.

Contributing: Data Reporting Lab editor Darnell Little

Under Mayor Richard M. Daley, the city of Chicago chipped in $19 million to build Sky55, a 40-story apartment building that was part of City Hall’s plan to redevelop the South Loop neighborhood where Daley lived.

Now, the city’s taxpayers are paying to help fill the privately owned building.

They’re helping to cover the rent for people in the Chicago Housing Authority’s housing choice voucher program, formerly known as Section 8, to lease 28 apartments in the tower.

Four of those apartments, each with sweeping skyline views, are leased by CHA voucher-holders at rents of $2,730 to $3,199 a month.

Taxpayers pick up the entire tab for two of those apartments because, the CHA says, the tenants have no income. Public funds also cover more than half the rent payments on the other two units.

The other two dozen CHA households at Sky55 have more modest apartments, with monthly rents between $666 and $801. Most of these tenants, primarily single women, pay part of the rent to occupy one of 82 units there, out of 411 total, designated for low-income people, records show.

Sky 55, 1255 S. Michigan Ave. | Rich Hein / Sun-Times

These units were set aside as affordable housing under the developer’s deal with the Daley administration for the $19 million in tax-increment financing — property taxes diverted from police, fire, schools and other government services to boost economic development.

Altogether, FC Central Station, the developer of Sky55, collects $21,078 a month from the CHA for the 28 apartments.

Last year, the CHA spent a total of $49,176 a month to lease 38 homes, condos or apartments in Sky55 and other developments the city has subsidized with TIF money to spur gentrification, according to the findings of a Chicago Sun-Times and Better Government Association investigation that will, over the coming months, examine the effects of the city’s massive “Plan for Transformation” — one of the most ambitious efforts nationwide to shift low-income residents out of crime-ridden, high-rise public housing projects like Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes.

For people who have been unable to sell homes they bought in taxpayer-subsidized neighborhoods, the CHA’s voucher program has been a financial boon — particularly when the authority has been willing to pay “exception rents.”

The CHA says it does so — agreeing to rents that are as much as triple what it normally pays — to help low-income tenants who choose to live in expensive apartments and homes in what the agency calls “opportunity areas.” Those neighborhoods traditionally haven’t welcomed people with public housing subsidies.

RELATED STORY: Part 1, Chicago’s public housing divide

        FOLLOW-UP REPORT: Emanuel blasts CHA voucher program as policy ‘gone awry’

As long as voucher-holders choose homes that meet the program’s criteria, “They can move in there,” says Molly Sullivan, a CHA spokeswoman. “It’s not in the CHA’s purview to see why the landlord is renting.”

The TIF-subsidized developments include:

• Central Station, a mixed-use development begun in 1990 by developer Gerald Fogelson, which has received more than $30 million in TIF money — including the $19 million for Sky55 — to build streets and other infrastructure. The 72-acre project at South Michigan Avenue and Roosevelt Road includes the townhouse where Daley lived, which he sold to his daughter and her husband.

In addition to the 28 apartments in Sky55, the CHA covers part or all of the rent for three other homes built in the city’s Near South TIF district.

That includes a townhouse in Central Station that Chaoshan Lai bought in 2006 for $935,000. The townhouse in the 1400 block of South Prairie has three bedrooms, three and a half baths and a library. Lai tried to sell it, but, after failing to find a buyer, he leased it out in 2013 through the CHA’s voucher program.

Central Station. | Rich Hein / Sun-Times

The CHA pays him $3,911 a month to rent to a household of four that’s headed by a woman who doesn’t pay any of the rent herself because, the agency says, she has no income. It won’t identify voucher-holders, though it did name its landlords.

Lai has collected more than $100,000 in rent from the CHA over the past two and a half years.

But that deal will come to an end soon. That’s because the CHA has decided it will no longer spend so much on rent for Lai’s property and others with “exception rents.” So his tenant will have to move out later this year.

• University Village, a 900-home development that led to the demolition of the old Maxwell Street market. The development has gotten $31 million in city TIF funds for streets, sewers, sidewalks and subsidies for certain “affordable housing” buyers — some who subsequently flipped the properties at a profit, records show.

For the past two years, the CHA has paid $2,479 a month to Joseph Lee, who moved to Park Ridge but couldn’t find anyone to buy his University Village townhouse on 15th Street just east of Halsted. Lee — who did not receive any taxpayer-funded subsidies to buy his home — also gets $721 toward the rent from his tenants, a family of five.

Eastgate Village. | Rich Hein / Sun-Times

• Eastgate Village, another Fogelson development, which was built on a Mercy Hospital parking lot. Daley created a TIF district so all of the property taxes paid by Eastgate’s homeowners — as much as $60 million in all — would be diverted to the hospital for major repairs.

But when the housing market imploded in the late 2000s, the project ran into trouble. The developers unloaded many of the units at cut-rate prices.

Six Eastgate Village homeowners have been leasing their homes under the housing choice voucher program for between $2,300 and $3,406 a month. The cheapest home was sold last fall, forcing the voucher-holder to move.

Garrison Hearst (20) , in 2003, in his playing days with the San Francisco 49ers.  AP photo

The most expensive rent in Eastgate Village under the CHA program goes to Garrison Hearst, a retired running back for the San Francisco 49ers and other NFL teams. He leases his three-story townhouse to a family of four.

Hearst and his wife live in Georgia, but she has family ties to Chicago. He bought the townhome for $565,000 in 2008 and tried to sell it for $499,000 in 2011.

Hearst eventually slashed the asking price to $395,000, real estate listings show, but still couldn’t sell it. He put the townhome on the rental market, initially asking for $3,900 a month, according to real estate listings.

He says he was contacted by a real estate agent who had a prospective tenant with a voucher.

The CHA agreed to $3,406 a month in rent — with the tenant paying $884 and taxpayers picking up the remaining $2,522.

The head of the household had lived in a public housing high-rise when the CHA began its massive “Plan for Transformation” effort in 2000, tearing down housing projects and adding vouchers.

Along with other CHA tenants, she was offered a “right of return” to public housing at any point in the future.

She and her husband ended up buying a condo elsewhere on the South Side in 2008. But it went into foreclosure and was sold at auction in September 2013, records show. Because of the right of return, she was able to bypass the normal waiting list — with about 50,000 names on it — and obtained a voucher.

She, her husband and the two others in her household, including a child under 6, moved in to Hearst’s home in July 2014.

Around the corner from Hearst’s townhouse, the CHA is spending $3,070 a month to lease a townhouse that Dr. Judy Sun had bought for $678,000 in 2007.

Sun moved to Hinsdale but couldn’t sell the South Side condo because, she says, “The market was terrible.”

Her tenant found the townhome two years ago by searching online on Zillow.com and was chosen over other applicants, according to Sun’s property manager.

Sun collects $30 a month from the woman who lives there with three other people. Taxpayers cover the rest of the $3,100-a-month rent.

Another Eastgate Village homeowner, Kenneth W. Vaughan, couldn’t find a buyer for his townhouse either when he moved to Texas a few years ago. Vaughan decided to rent the two-bedroom, three-bath home he’d bought in 2007 for $526,500.

“My property was worth 40 percent less than I paid for it,” Vaughan says. “I’m still losing money on it. I hired a realty group to find a tenant. They had two prospective tenants. I was going to get a little more out of the CHA tenant, so I went with her.”

The CHA pays Vaughan $2,513 to lease to a single woman. She doesn’t pay anything toward the rent.

But the woman is going to have to move because Vaughan says the CHA is cutting the rents it will pay in opportunity areas.

Tim Novak, Mick Dumke and Chris Fusco are Sun-Times reporters. Brett Chase is a Better Government Association investigator.

Contributing: Data Reporting Lab editor Darnell Little

The Chicago police officer who killed Quintonio LeGrier and Bettie Jones offered different accounts of what happened in interviews with police detectives in the two days after the shootings, police reports obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times suggest.

In the first interview, Officer Robert Rialmo stated that LeGrier, 19, approached him wielding an aluminum bat above his head, according to the reports. But in Rialmo’s second interview two days later, he said the teen took two swings at him with the bat — swings that Rialmo’s partner told detectives he never saw.

Separately, City Hall on Thursday released several hours of video and audio recordings related to the Dec. 26 shootings in response to Freedom of Information Act requests from the Sun-Times.

Those new records don’t include video of the incident itself, but they do provide more details about what occurred. Rialmo and his partner, Anthony LaPalermo, took about 10 minutes to respond to the West Side domestic dispute, according to the recordings. After they arrived, no more than three minutes had passed before Rialmo fatally shot LeGrier and Jones.

LaPalermo and Rialmo arrived at the home of Antonio LeGrier, Quintonio LeGrier’s father, around 4:38 a.m. after he and his son had both placed calls to 911. The cops were driving a police van that wasn’t equipped with a GPS tracking device or dashcam when they pulled up to the two-flat at 4710 W. Erie, the newly obtained records show.

Jones — Antonio LeGrier’s downstairs neighbor — let police in. Police have said she was accidentally killed when Rialmo opened fire.

The police reports provide the public with both Rialmo’s and his partner’s version of events for the first time. Rialmo is on administrative leave from the department.

According to Rialmo’s interview less than two hours after the shooting, he said he rang the doorbell, and Jones motioned that there was trouble upstairs. Jones, 55, “turned to walk back into her apartment” when “Quintonio LeGrier pulled the front door all the way open” with the bat above his head. He’d been staying with his dad while on break from Northern Illinois University.

“Rialmo started to back up as LeGrier started onto the front porch” and drew his gun while ordering LeGrier to drop the bat. “Rialmo in fear of his life discharged his weapon three to four times. … Rialmo stated he was stepping backwards down the stairs while discharging his service weapon and stopped at the bottom of the [porch] stairs on the walkway leading to the house.”

The Cook County medical examiner later determined that LeGrier was shot six times and Bettie Jones once.

Antonio LeGrier had come down from the apartment upstairs, and Rialmo yelled “Dad, what the f—” at him. He said he heard Antonio LeGrier respond, “Hey, you did what you had to do.”

Basileios “Bill” Foutris, an attorney for Antonio LeGrier, said the comment attributed to his client is “absolutely not” true. “It defies words,” Foutris said. “He’s there watching his son bleed to death.”

LaPalermo, first interviewed at 6:22 a.m. the morning of the shooting, told detectives he was just behind Rialmo to the right and that “Jones turned back towards her apartment.” LaPalermo said he saw LeGrier holding the bat and told Rialmo to “look out” before Rialmo fired “six to eight times.” LaPalermo also said he’d drawn his gun while going down the porch stairs but never fired.

The officers were interviewed separately again on Dec. 28. This time, Rialmo said he “heard someone charging down the stairs from the second floor” and that “Quintonio LeGrier opened the door leading from the second floor apartment and stepped into the vestibule.”

Rialmo told detectives he started backing out the door when LeGrier stepped in between Jones and him. Moments later, he said, LeGrier began swinging the bat.

“Rialmo started to back up as LeGrier started onto the front porch. Quintonio LeGrier swung the baseball bat at P.O. Rialmo with an overhand downward swing and then a half backwards swing,” according to the police report.

In his second interview, LaPalermo replied that he was “looking down as he backed down the stairs and did not see Quintonio LeGrier swing the bat.”

Joel Brodsky, an attorney for Rialmo, said his client had not changed his story. The police reports are summaries of detectives’ interviews with Rialmo, Brodsky said, and might leave out details that the officer provided.

“They could both be fully accurate,” Brodsky said. “I don’t see anything different.”

But Foutris, the attorney for Antonio LeGrier, said Rialmo’s accounts strain credibility. “The longer in time you go, the more dangerous Quintonio appears,” he said.

Relatives of Quintonio LeGrier and Jones have sued the city, and Rialmo responded with his own lawsuit against the LeGriers. The four-year officer alleges he has experienced emotional distress, pain and suffering.

The batch of recordings and other records released by City Hall show how quickly the incident turned deadly.

At 4:18 a.m., Quintonio LeGrier called 911 and told the dispatcher “someone’s threatening my life.” The dispatcher hung up when LeGrier declined to give his name, as did another dispatcher when LeGrier called back about two minutes later.

Finally, after LeGrier called a third time, at 4:21 a.m., a 911 dispatcher promised to send police. LeGrier’s father called 911 three minutes later.

At 4:26 a.m., a dispatcher called over police radio for vehicle 1172R, a marked police van that was taken out that night by Rialmo and LaPalermo.

The records do not reveal where the officers were before the call.

The dispatcher told Rialmo and LaPalermo they needed to make a “well being” check at 4710 W. Erie. “A male caller said someone is threatening his life,” she said, adding it was a “domestic” incident involving a 19-year-old “with a baseball bat.”

There were no radio communications for more than 10 minutes after that.

But a street-corner surveillance camera recorded the van turning east onto Erie from Cicero Avenue at 4:37, according to the time stamp on the video. The two-flat where LeGrier and Jones lived was half a block away.

A street-corner police camera captured this image of Officers Robert Rialmo and Anthony LaPalermo responding in a police van (bottom right corner) to a domestic dispute in the 4700 block of West Erie on Dec. 26. The officers turned onto Erie shortly after 4:37 a.m., according to the timestamp. Quintonio LeGrier and Bettie Jones were shot around 4:40 a.m., according to police radio recordings. Source: City of Chicago

Less than three minutes later, LaPalermo made a frantic call over the radio. “Shots fired!” he said. “We got two down, two down.”

The dispatcher asked if the cops were all right. One officer said yes. “F—-’ step up on the cars and the ambo right now!”

Seconds later, firefighters were also sent. By 4:43, other police were arriving on the scene. Nine squad cars with lights flashing sped around the corner of Cicero and Erie, according to the video recording there, and within minutes 11 more police cars parked on Cicero.

Brodsky, Rialmo’s attorney, said the video time stamps may not be precise. “It’s not like they’re tied into one central clock.”

Rialmo and LaPalermo sat in their car for “a few minutes” upon arriving at the two-flat, Brodsky said, but “Everything else happens really fast after that.”

The entire incident — from the time the cops stepped out of their car to the time Rialmo fired his gun — took “anywhere from three to four minutes,” Brodsky said.

The owner of a luxury high-rise apartment complex in the West Loop is suing to evict a wheelchair-bound tenant, subsidized by the Chicago Housing Authority, who allegedly shot and killed another tenant while the man was on a stationary bike in the building’s gym.

And the CHA says it “has begun the process of terminating” the financial assistance — worth $22,608 a year — that Reggie L. Daniel has been receiving so he could live in the one-bedroom apartment on the 15th floor at Alta at K Station, 555 W. Kinzie.

Police say Daniel quarreled with Darrin A. Joss, a commodities trader, at the gym around 7 p.m. on March 2, left, came back with a gun and shot Joss in the head and chest. Joss, 45, was pronounced dead less than an hour later at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

Others in the gym saw the shooting, which also was recorded on surveillance video.

About 12 hours later, Daniel, 48, drove to police headquarters to turn himself in and was charged with first-degree murder. He’s being held at the Cook County Jail on $1 million bail.

Daniel — who has used a wheelchair since being shot 30 years ago — has been arrested a dozen times, records show. His most recent prior arrest was by the Dolton police in 1997 for battery and resisting arrest. He pleaded guilty and was given court supervision. He was convicted of a felony for selling drugs in 1989 and was sentenced to probation.

Records show he’s been living alone in the luxury high-rise with the help of a housing choice voucher, one of nearly 45,000 issued by the CHA to help low-income people lease apartments and houses from private landlords. In Chicago, the CHA administers the program, formerly known as Section 8, for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Daniel is among 298 CHA voucher-holders whose rents exceed $2,000 a month, according to a Chicago Sun-Times and Better Government Association investigation published earlier this month.

He lives in a CHA “opportunity area,” a neighborhood where the CHA has agreed to pay higher rents — up to three times its normal rates — enabling 3,584 people in 1,332 households to afford homes in neighborhoods that have few poor people and little subsidized housing.

Daniel — who is unemployed, according to police reports — is leasing a $2,055-a-month apartment. CHA records show he pays $171 a month toward the rent, and taxpayers pay the remaining $1,884.

He moved to Alta at K Station — which is west of the Chicago River near the Merchandise Mart and includes two high-rise towers, a theater, an indoor sports court and a sprawling outdoor pool with cabanas — in June 2014.

Two months later, the CHA announced it would scale back its exception rents from 300 percent of what it normally allows to 150 percent. Those voucher-holders would have at least a year to renegotiate their rents or find somewhere less expensive to live.

RELATED STORIES: Part 1, Chicago’s public housing divide

Part 2, You paid to build them, now you pay to lease them

FOLLOW-UP: Emanuel blasts CHA voucher program as policy ‘gone awry’

But Daniel renewed his lease in June 2015, court records show. He was within his rights to do so, according to CHA spokeswoman Molly Sullivan, because his voucher isn’t due to expire until 2017.

“The lease was renewed in 2015 because the recertification for that voucher-holder was not due until January 2017,” Sullivan says. “Per HUD regulations, public housing agencies can only lower the payment standard at the time of recertification.”

Darrin Joss

CHA officials have said that all tenants with rents above 150 percent of the normal rates will have to move by the spring of 2018.

Citing federal privacy rules, Sullivan wouldn’t confirm Daniel’s identity, wouldn’t discuss how Daniel was screened before he was given a housing choice voucher or say how long he has had one. Daniel is the only voucher-holder in the complex, according to CHA records.

The CHA hires two private companies to screen all voucher applicants. Most voucher-holders are recertified every two years, according to the agency.

Voucher-holders and their family members 18 or older must undergo criminal background checks, according to Sullivan. The results of those aren’t shared with landlords, who “are encouraged to do their own screening to determine if they will rent their unit to a given household,” Sullivan says.

HUD requires the CHA to deny housing assistance if a background check finds that “any household member is currently engaged in illegal use of drugs . . . including the sale and use of medical marijuana,” Sullivan says. HUD rules also call for housing aid to be denied to anyone convicted of a violent or gun-related crime within the previous five years.

According to Cook County court records, Daniel had no such arrests or convictions the past five years.

Darrin Joss was shot to death March 2 while using the gym at the Alta at K Station apartment complex on Kinzie Street west of the Chicago River. | Sam Charles / Sun-Times file photo

After Daniel turned himself in, the manager of Alta at K Station tried to reach a CHA contractor by phone and email regarding Daniel’s lease but had gotten no response from the contractor or the CHA by the evening of March 7, court records show.

The next day, the company that owns the complex, Morguard Alta LLC, filed suit to evict Daniel. It said he violated his lease by “engaging in or threatening violence; possessing a weapon prohibited by state law; discharging a firearm in the apartment community” and “displaying or possessing a gun, knife or other weapon in the common area.”

The building manager and its attorney declined to comment.

Joss, the shooting victim, had an economics degree from the University of Iowa. He moved to Chicago and was a trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade before starting his own company, Joss Group Trading.

“Darrin has successfully traded millions of contracts in over 50 products,” the firm’s website says.

Tim Novak and Chris Fusco are Sun-Times reporters. Brett Chase is an investigator for the Better Government Association.

A rape suspect remained on the streets for years after being identified through DNA because a south suburban police department failed to act after being informed by the Illinois State Police there was a DNA match, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.

As a result of the botched handling of his case by the Robbins Police Department, the man remained free for years despite being linked to the rape of a mentally disabled 15-year-old girl, according to the records and interviews.

He was finally charged last year — after officials in the south suburb, citing Robbins’ precarious finances, called in the Cook County sheriff’s department to begin aiding the police in 2013.

“Robbins didn’t care,” says the victim’s grandmother, who asked that her name not be published to keep her granddaughter from being identified. “They didn’t get up and do their job. That’s what our tax money goes for?”

The man now accused of raping her granddaughter is Javariee Reed, a 27-year-old former Harvey resident with a criminal record that includes convictions for theft, illegal gun possession and burglary, court records show.

Reed is one of five people who have been charged with sex crimes in cases dating to 2006 since Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart’s office was called in by Robbins officials in 2013 following the resignation of then-police Chief Johnny Holmes after the chief’s second drunken-driving arrest.

Sheriff’s officials found that evidence collected from 55 rapes dating back as far as 1986 was never submitted to the Illinois State Police for testing.

Another 121 rape kits — essential evidence in sexual assault cases — had been tested, with the results and evidence sent back to the Robbins police, but the department never did anything with them.

The Robbins police evidence room in a state of disarray in May 2013. | Robbins Police Department photo

And the state police hadn’t done anything to track what was done with the notifications.

Asked why his agency doesn’t follow up with local police departments when it gets a DNA hit on a rape suspect, Master Sgt. Matthew Boerwinkle, a spokesman for the state police, says, “It is merely an investigative lead, the significance of which can only be determined by the local law enforcement agency and may require additional investigation on their part.”

Reed’s case was one of those in which the evidence was tested, and there was a DNA hit but no follow-up.

The case was no whodunit. The girl didn’t know the man who attacked her, but a rape kit was submitted to the state crime lab. It got a hit on Reed, whose DNA was already in a state police database after Cook County probation officers collected a sample in an unrelated case in 2007, sheriff’s officials say.

On Jan. 16, 2009, the crime lab sent a letter to the Robbins police, saying semen found on the girl’s underwear matched Reed’s DNA.

“The search detected an association to the following individual, Javariee Reed,” the state police said in the letter.

For confirmation, the letter said, the police should submit a blood sample from Reed or a swab taken from his mouth.

A letter like that, with a DNA hit, is “usually a high-five moment” for police investigating a case, says Cook County sheriff’s Detective Sgt. Jim Davis, who reinvestigated the attack on the teenager.

But the Robbins police did nothing more with the case, records and interviews show.

“This was a case where we couldn’t even find a police report,” Davis says. “All we had was [the victim] and her grandmother.”

Cook County sheriff’s Detective Judith Powe and Detective Sgt. James Davis. Frank Main / Sun-Times

Last year, after Davis and Detective Judith Powe were assigned to investigate the Robbins cases, they obtained a DNA sample from Reed — who was in jail, awaiting trial on a 2014 burglary charge — for confirmation linking him to the rape.

Reed, who’s now serving a five-year sentence for the burglary, was charged Aug. 4 with aggravated criminal sexual assault in the 2007 attack on the mentally disabled teenager. He’s awaiting trial.

“It took a long time, but the truth came out,” says the grandmother of the 15-year-old victim, who was from nearby Harvey. “He couldn’t hide.”

But the 64-year-old grandmother remains bitter toward the Robbins Police Department.

“Do your job. Keep track of what’s going on. Get on the streets, and do what you are supposed to do,” she says. “I have no idea why they didn’t do any of that.”

She remembers how frantic the family was when her granddaughter didn’t come home the night she was attacked, how they searched for her and called anyone they could think of who might know where she was, to no avail.

The next day, a man dropped the girl off at a gas station in Harvey, and she walked home. She told her family she’d been taken to a man’s home in Robbins and raped.

“It was devastating,” her grandmother says.

The girl and her family drove around Robbins, hoping to spot her attacker. When they came to a home just a block from the police station, she pointed him out sitting on the porch, her grandmother says.

The Robbins police interviewed the girl. And she went to a hospital, where a rape kit was collected.

But the grandmother says she never heard from the Robbins police or anyone else until sheriff’s detectives contacted the family last year with the news there was a DNA hit on a suspect and he was finally going to be charged.

“When those sheriffs finally got in touch with us, I knew everything would heal for me and my granddaughter,” says the grandmother.

The arrest came after Powe and Davis were assigned last May to look through Robbins’ dormant sexual assault cases. They set up a makeshift office at Oak Forest Hospital, put up a cardboard chart with names and photos of victims and began focusing on cases in which the statute of limitations hadn’t expired.

George Henderson, 78, who’s now charged with criminal sexual assault in connection with a 2006 rape in Robbins. | Cook County sheriff’s arrest mug shot

One of the other men who’s been charged as a result of their work is George Henderson, now 78. A 40-year-old woman told the Robbins police in 2007 that Henderson sexually assaulted her.

The Illinois State Police told Robbins detectives to ask Henderson to provide a DNA sample and to send it to the state crime lab to confirm he was the attacker. But the Robbins police never followed through, and the case languished, according to Davis.

The sheriff’s detectives took a swab from Henderson’s mouth and sent it to the Northeastern Illinois Regional Crime Laboratory, which confirmed a DNA match between the rape kit and Henderson on Aug. 18, 2015.

The following month, Henderson was charged with criminal sexual assault. Awaiting trial, he’s now in a nursing home because he is “infirm,” sheriff’s officials say.

Johnny Holmes III, 24. | DuPage County Sheriff’s Office mug shot

In another case, sheriff’s officials say they were flabbergasted to learn the former police chief’s grandson, Johnny Holmes III, had been suspected in the sexual assault of a 9-year-old girl in 2007, but there was no DNA evidence, and Robbins detectives didn’t pursue criminal charges.

The grandson — who was 15 at the time of the attack — was finally charged last November, after sheriff’s detectives interviewed the victim and a nurse who had examined her.

Holmes had contacted a juvenile crimes detective in his department, and a rape kit was submitted to the state police.

Dart says the former police chief never should have even allowed his own department to handle the case and that he should have referred his grandson’s case to an outside police agency because of the conflict of interest.

“How could you not bring in the state police or the sheriff?” Dart says.

The former police chief says he did what he thought was right and never so much as asked his detectives about his grandson’s case.

“I did not want to be involved at all,” Holmes says. “I feared people would think I was trying to run interference. I didn’t know anything about the investigation.”

Holmes says the victim’s mother recently told him she asked Robbins detectives not to pursue charges against Johnny Holmes III “in the best interests of her daughter.”

But Johnny Holmes III ended up being charged Nov. 18 with aggravated criminal sexual abuse and aggravated kidnapping after sheriff’s detectives interviewed the victim, who they say told them she did, in fact, want to pursue criminal charges.

Holmes III, now 24, was already behind bars in DuPage County, accused in the armed robbery of a 7-Eleven in Carol Stream and also of taking part in other holdups in the west suburbs in 2014 and 2015.

Asked why his detectives didn’t follow up on requests by the state police for additional DNA evidence in other Robbins rape cases, the former police chief says he’s puzzled by that.

Former Robbins police Chief Johnny Holmes in 2011.

“I cannot imagine that we would intentionally not respond to a request by the state,” says Holmes, who was found guilty in February 2014 of his second DUI. “For the life of me, I can’t imagine an officer not following up.

“If there was correspondence, certainly there should have been a response,” he says.

But he also says it was a shock that sheriff’s detectives found 176 rape kits in the Robbins police evidence room that hadn’t been properly pursued: “I was surprised that there were so many kits on the shelves that were not followed up to close them out.”

Dart’s response: “For decades, the town of Robbins was not investigating rapes. People can’t believe something like that can happen. But it did.”

In addition to the five sexual assault cases in Robbins in which his office has now charged someone, Dart’s detectives have closed another dozen cases “exceptionally.” That means they believe they know who committed the crimes, but the suspect is dead, the victim wouldn’t testify, the statute of limitations — which varies, depending on the age of the victim and the circumstances — expired, or the suspect already had been charged with a lesser crime for the same offense.

One of the cases the sheriff’s office closed exceptionally involved the rapes of three women — in 2002 in Robbins, 2005 in Chicago and 2008 in Robbins. The state police tested the victims’ rape kits and found a DNA link to a single, unknown suspect in the three cases.

The sheriff’s detectives got a lead that the man was a tow-truck driver who operated in Robbins. They came up with a name: Daniel Thompson, 35. But Thompson was dead. He’d run naked into traffic on the Tri-State Tollway in Worth in 2011 and was killed.

The detectives obtained blood samples from Thompson’s autopsy, and DNA tests confirmed he was the attacker in all three rapes.

Thompson’s DNA hadn’t been in the state police database because he didn’t have a serious criminal record and never went to prison. The Illinois Department of Corrections takes DNA samples from every inmate, and they are entered into CODIS, the DNA database.

Though Thompson was never brought to justice, Davis says the news provided the women Thompson raped some peace of mind.

“We were happy to tell them, ‘The guy who brutally assaulted you is dead,’ ” Davis says.

In another case, a man was a suspect in the rape of a 12-year-old girl on Christmas Eve 2007, but Robbins detectives never gave the state police the approval to test semen found in the girl’s underwear. Powe tracked down the victim in Indiana.

“She was shocked we were looking at her case,” says Powe.

The sheriff’s office sent the eight-year-old rape kit to an independent crime lab and got a DNA hit on a suspect. Arrested a week ago in California, he is now charged with predatory criminal sexual assault and is awaiting extradition.

Sheriff Tom Dart. | Brian Jackson / Sun-Times file photo

Dart says he feels a deep obligation to the women raped in Robbins whose cases weren’t properly pursued by the police.

“We should be apologizing to these victims over and over and asking for their forgiveness,” he says.

He also says he’s worried that it’s not just Robbins, that other police departments also are failing to follow up on DNA hits. Small, financially strapped departments tend to have a lot of turnover, he says, and detectives’ knowledge of cases goes with them when they leave.

“It would be stunning for me to learn these kinds of cases don’t happen in other towns,” the sheriff says.

As a backstop, he’s pursuing legislation to try to help keep cases like those in Robbins from falling through the cracks.

The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Bill Cunningham, D-Chicago, would require the Illinois State Police to follow up on DNA hits to ensure that local police get back to the state crime lab with a second DNA sample for confirmation.

“A tracking mechanism by a responsible entity like the state police would prevent victims from being re-victimized because a town has problems with incompetence or turnover,” says Dart. “It is not much to ask in a small town for the chief to have a handle on these things.”

Illinois crime lab correspondence on Javariee Reed

A government watchdog group is urging a Cook County judge to make public all records that special prosecutor Dan K. Webb gathered in his investigation of David Koschman’s death, but Webb’s trying to keep them secret.

Webb says none of the records should ever be made public. They include former Mayor Richard M. Daley’s statement to a grand jury about his actions during the time the Chicago Police Department was investigating his nephew, Richard J. “R.J.” Vanecko, in Koschman’s death.

But the Better Government Association “questions what legitimate purpose is served by any further secrecy surrounding this matter,” BGA attorney Matthew Topic said in a court filing this week that notes the case is now closed and Vanecko has done jail time.

“The public interest in full disclosure of these records is tremendous, especially in the present environment, in which instances of police misconduct have been so graphically exposed,” Topic wrote.

He argued in the motion filed with Cook County Circuit Judge Michael P. Toomin that the special prosecutor’s office “has no good-faith basis to keep secret information about its work here and should be asking this court to allow [it] to release all of its records. The investigation and prosecution are over. The public deserves to know every detail.”

Toomin appointed Webb special prosecutor in 2012, leading to Vanecko’s guilty plea to a charge of involuntary manslaughter.

The judge now is weighing whether the city of Chicago can give the BGA subpoenas and emails that Webb exchanged with city officials during the Koschman investigation.

Toomin previously ruled the subpoenas couldn’t be released to the Chicago Sun-Times, saying Illinois law prevents grand jury material from being made public.

The BGA challenged that finding in a lawsuit seeking the subpoenas and other documents, and another Cook County judge, Mary Mikva, ruled in December that, under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act, the city must produce the records.

Because Mikva’s ruling is at odds with Toomin’s order, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s law department is asking Toomin for permission to give the BGA the subpoenas and emails.

Before making a decision, Toomin asked Webb and the BGA to weigh in.

Matthew Topic.

In his response filed Monday, Topic went beyond asking for the records that Mikva said should be released, asking that all records involving the Koschman grand jury be made public. He noted that Webb already has released portions of the records in a 162-page report about the case he released under orders from Toomin.

Beyond the statements from the former mayor and other Daley family members, the grand jury records also include reports of interviews with police and prosecutors, including former Supt. Phil Cline and Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, and Vanecko’s cellphone records. Webb’s team interviewed 146 witnesses and amassed 300,000 pages of documents.

It’s unclear when Judge Michael Toomin will rule. I Brian Jackson~Sun-Times file photo

Webb — now working under contract with City Hall to review how the city law department handles police misconduct cases — urged Toomin to keep the records secret, citing the need to preserve grand jury secrecy.

“Nothing presented to this court . . . trumps the importance of maintaining grand jury secrecy,” two deputy special prosecutors, Daniel D. Rubinstein and Sean G. Wieber, wrote in their filing Monday. “The city’s interest in avoiding a contempt filing related to Judge Mikva’s 2015 order compelling the city to produce certain grand jury materials simply does not tip the ‘equities’ in favor of disclosing the grand jury materials . . . because the enduring interest in secrecy is so great.”

It’s unclear when Toomin will rule.

The lawyers who successfully petitioned Toomin to appoint a special prosecutor, based on a Sun-Times investigation, also have called on the judge to release all grand jury records regarding Webb’s investigation.

“We strongly support any and all efforts to obtain the public release of the records from the long-completed grand jury investigation into the unjustified killing of David Koschman and the coverup that followed,” said G. Flint Taylor and Locke Bowman, attorneys for David Koschman’s mother, Nanci Koschman.

Usually, grand jury material gets released when a case goes to trial. But there was no trial in Koschman’s death because Vanecko pleaded guilty in January 2014.

That was nearly 10 years after he punched Koschman outside the late-night bars along Division Street, causing Koschman to crack his head on the pavement, resulting in his death.

David Koschman.

While Daley was mayor, police and prosecutors twice investigated the case, both times declining to charge Vanecko.

Though unusual, there are cases in which grand jury material has been released even when no charges are filed — notably the St. Louis County prosecutor’s decision to release records in the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager killed by a white cop in Ferguson, Mo.

Even as they ran a network of charter schools for thousands of students in low-income neighborhoods across Chicago, United Neighborhood Organization leader Juan Rangel and other UNO officials were piling up big bills at fancy restaurants and for travel on the taxpayers’ dime, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.

In the year before a contracting scandal led to Rangel’s forced resignation, the clout-heavy Hispanic community organization and charter-school operator spent more than $60,000 for restaurants on his American Express “business platinum” card, according to the records, which UNO fought for nearly three years to keep secret.

The spending spree included $1,000-or-higher tabs at Gene & Georgetti, Carmichaels, Vivo Chicago, Rosebud Prime, the East Bank Club, Carnivale, a downtown hotel’s rooftop bar and Soldier Field’s concessions during a soccer game featuring Mexico’s men’s national team.

And UNO spent more than $60,000 a year on travel in 2010 and 2011, the internal records show. Rangel alone flew out of town 31 times in four years.

Juan Rangel with Mayor Rahm Emanuel in July 2012. | Sun-Times file photo

In 2010, Rangel traveled at the organization’s expense to Managua, Nicaragua, the records show. Rangel and two aides, Miguel d’Escoto and Francisco “Pancho” d’Escoto, met during that trip with the d’Escotos’ uncle, a former diplomat advising them on possible expansion.

Rangel’s and UNO’s fortunes took a downturn after the Sun-Times reported in February 2013 that the organization paid millions of dollars from a $98 million state school-construction grant to companies owned by two brothers of Miguel d’Escoto, who was Rangel’s top deputy, and to other contractors with close ties to the group.

As federal and state authorities began investigating, the newly obtained records show, UNO officials spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to contain the scandal, which cost the organization millions of dollars in state funding and resulted in a federal consent decree requiring outside oversight of the group’s contracting practices.

UNO has paid more than $962,000 since the start of 2013 to the firm of Mary Patricia Burns, who became the group’s primary lawyer shortly after the scandal broke.

Her law firm, Burke Burns & Pinelli Ltd., has been a major campaign contributor to Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan. The state Democratic Party boss from the Southwest Side sponsored UNO’s state grant — which was the biggest government subsidy given to charter schools in the country. Burns didn’t return calls seeking comment.

The organization also paid more than $307,000 to retired federal judge Wayne Andersen and others who aided him in an investigation of UNO’s contracting practices.

The spending took place as UNO was operating a government-funded charter schools serving about 8,000 predominantly Hispanic students, largely from low-income families. About 96 percent of students at UNO’s 16 campuses qualify for free or reduced lunches, records show.

Despite being almost entirely government-funded, UNO leaders fought to keep the spending records secret, arguing that they didn’t have to comply with the state’s Freedom of Information Act because UNO is a private organization. But they ultimately released the records in a recent legal settlement with the Sun-Times.

Since UNO founded the charter-school chain in 1998, the Chicago Public Schools system has given the privately run schools hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding, in addition to the state funding the organization got for school construction. Until less than a year ago, the UNO Charter School Network — which is separately incorporated — passed along much of the CPS funding to UNO, which managed the schools.

The charter network cut ties with its former parent organization last year. Before then, it was paying UNO millions of dollars a year for management fees, rent for school buildings owned by the community group and janitorial services.

The records obtained by the Sun-Times also show that UNO paid:

Victor Reyes, in 2003. Sun-Times file photo

• More than $600,000 to the Roosevelt Group, a lobbying firm that worked for UNO to get the grant from Springfield in 2009. The Roosevelt Group is headed by onetime Hispanic Democratic Organization leader Victor Reyes and former Madigan aide Mike Noonan.

• More than $88,000 to Disney Resort Destinations, which hosted UNO employees who traveled to Florida for training.

• More than $72,000 for board insurance from Mesirow Insurance Services Inc. Mesirow, hired in 2013, has employed the House speaker’s son Andrew Madigan, who made a $2,500 contribution to UNO in November 2012.

• More than $65,000 to ASGK Public Strategies, a Chicago public-relations firm that helped UNO to respond to the crony contracting scandal.

• Nearly $150,000 for the grand opening of a new charter school on the Northwest Side in 2012. The cost covered fireworks, a laser-light show and a mariachi band to entertain a crowd that included Mayor Rahm Emanuel and then-Gov. Pat Quinn. UNO spent another $738.40 the next year to fly a son of baseball legend Roberto Clemente from Puerto Rico for an event naming the new school after Clemente.

• More than $11,600 for 42 buses that brought parents of UNO students to a September 2011 rally at the University of Illinois at Chicago for increased public funding of charter schools. The group also bused parents to demonstrate at City Hall, the Chicago Board of Education and the Thompson Center.

• $480 at the spa at the luxurious Peninsula Hotel. UNO officials say the organization bought gift cards for staff.

Rangel said in a written statement that the spending “must be put in the right context.

“Expenses were incurred to advance UNO’s mission and to be a world-class organization that supported our students, our schools and the Hispanic community,” Rangel said.

UNO began more than 30 years ago as a Hispanic community group on the Southeast Side but grew to be a major force in politics in all of the city’s fast-growing Hispanic neighborhoods. Rangel forged alliances with politicians including Madigan, former Mayor Richard M. Daley and Ald. Edward Burke (14^th). He also served as co-chairman of Emanuel’s first campaign for mayor in 2011.

Fueling UNO’s growing clout was its entry into the charter business — and the government funding the schools brought. CPS funding to the UNO schools for the 12 months ending last June topped $85 million, out of the charter network’s total revenues of about $91 million, records show.

In 2014, the charter network paid the parent organization nearly $7.5 million in management fees, about $2.5 million in rent and more than $3 million for janitorial services. Those payments accounted for 87 percent of UNO’s income, records show.

In Illinois, as in many states, the law allowing for the creation of public financed but privately run charter schools requires them to hold open board meetings and make their records public. But UNO officials argued they didn’t have to open their books, saying the community group was only a contractor working for the charter network and didn’t deal directly with CPS.

The Sun-Times challenged that stance in 2013, citing UNO’s handling of all management functions for the schools. The newspaper also noted that UNO and the charter network at the time had the same leaders and also shared the same offices and record-keeping system.

Attorney General Lisa Madigan. | Rich Hein / Sun-Times file photo

The Illinois attorney general’s office, which referees Freedom of Information Act disputes, sided with the Sun-Times.

“For purposes of governing the charter schools, UNO and [its charter network] are inextricably intertwined and act as the same entity,” Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan wrote in July 2013, ordering UNO to turn over the financial records.

UNO challenged the attorney general’s “binding opinion” in Cook County circuit court. A judge upheld the attorney general’s decision in February 2015, but UNO appealed.

Under new leadership, UNO eventually settled the case, providing the news organization with all of the previously disputed documents.

Those records detail how the organization’s leaders enjoyed perks that many of the working-class families served by the charter schools could only imagine.

Rangel — whose annual salary was $275,000 — and other UNO executives were regulars at some of the city’s most upscale restaurants. In 2012 and 2013, they incurred nearly 600 charges for meals, totaling more than $80,000.

The single biggest tab was on Aug. 15, 2012, for $2,387.81 at Roof, on the 27^th floor of the Wit Hotel downtown.

There was also a $2,328 bill on March 13, 2012, at the East Bank Club, where UNO held meetings of its Metropolitan Leadership Institute for young Latino professionals.

Another big night was at Carnivale, where Rangel charged $1,867.13 in October 2012. UNO officials say the event was a celebration for staff and board members with October birthdays.

The largest single vendor among restaurants was Tio Luis Tacos on Archer Avenue on the Southwest Side. UNO spent more than $12,000 there in 2012 and 2013 for “community outreach events, staff meetings and board meetings.”

Rangel also used his UNO credit card to pay hundreds of dollars on concessions at Toyota Park in Bridgeview during Chicago Fire soccer matches. He said UNO “expressed its appreciation” to teachers, staff and parent volunteers at the soccer games and other events.

UNO’s travel spending eclipsed the in-town dining bills. The organization spent more than $68,000 on travel costs in 2011 and about $63,000 in 2010.

Records show Rangel’s travels included 10 trips to Washington, D.C., seven to New York, three to New Orleans, two to Boston and one each to Memphis and San Francisco. UNO officials said their records indicate outside organizations paid for only a few of those trips.

Cuauhtemoc Blanco waves to fans at the Azteca stadium in Mexico City on March 5. AFP / Getty Images

UNO paid for Rangel to fly to Mexico in 2010 and China in 2012. Organization officials said Rangel visited soccer academies operated by former Chicago Fire star Cuauhtemoc Blanco and the Pachuca professional club. He and three other UNO leaders accompanied students who made a trip to Beijing and Shanghai, according to the group’s records.

“I and others at UNO sought out partnerships to bring additional resources and funding from a number of organizations and institutions in New York, Washington, D.C., and many other cities and countries,” Rangel said.

Twenty of the organization’s employees, including Rangel, flew to Orlando in April 2012. The costs for those plane tickets totaled more than $8,400. That was in addition to the costs for the training sessions at the Magic Kingdom and a Disney event here.

“UNO always sought out the best training for its staff, including the Disney Institute, to make sure that our students got the best education experience that the Hispanic community deserves,” Rangel said.

Besides the trip to Nicaragua with Rangel and his cousin Francisco d’Escoto, Miguel d’Escoto made two more trips at UNO’s expense to the Central American country in 2010. His uncle Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann is a Catholic priest who was president of the United Nations General Assembly in 2008 and 2009 and previously was Nicaragua’s foreign minister.

Miguel D’Escoto said he and Rangel met with his uncle to try to form a group that could provide education “in areas or conditions of crisis.”

Miguel d’Escoto quit his $200,000-a-year post at UNO eight days after the first of the Sun-Times’ reports on the group’s spending were published.

Andersen, the retired judge, was then hired by UNO at a rate of $800 an hour — altogether being paid more than $59,000.

UNO also paid for two lawyers ($148,264.62), a real-estate development expert ($60,182.50) and a licensed private investigator ($8,667.50) to aid Andersen.

After Rangel promised to institute reforms suggested by Andersen, state officials lifted a suspension of UNO’s grant in June 2013. But the state funding was frozen again after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission launched a probe that resulted in civil fraud charges against UNO. In June 2014, the group settled the charges, which accused UNO of misleading bond investors about the insider deals.

In the end, the scandal cost UNO $15 million of the promised $98 million state grant.

UNO had paid $604,500 to the Roosevelt Group lobbyists between December 2006 and August 2013, records show.

The lobbyists at first charged UNO $3,000 a month, raising that to $7,500 in June 2009 — when the Illinois General Assembly approved the grant for new school buildings.

The Roosevelt Group billed an extra $25,000 the day after the law approving the grant took effect. That was for “consulting services for charter capital campaign.” There also was a $110,000 “additional payment” to the lobbyists in July 2010, six weeks after the state wired the first payment from the grant, for $25 million.

In a resignation letter in October 2013, Reyes wrote to Rangel that the two large, additional payments to the Roosevelt Group were to compensate his firm for having given UNO a discount during the early years of their dealings.

Noonan declined to comment.

Rangel, now 50, resigned under fire in December 2013 and was given a severance payout of $206,250. He had started at UNO in 1992, becoming CEO in 1996.

The board of the UNO Charter School Network declined to extend its management deal with the parent organization, which ended last June. In November, UNO officials said the organization was “on the brink of insolvency.”

Key dates in UNO schools saga

1998 — United Neighborhood Organization opens its first government-funded charter school.

2005 — The group begins expansion that eventually has it operating 16 schools across the city of Chicago.

2009 — Spearheaded by House Speaker Michael Madigan, the Illinois Legislature approves a $98 million school-construction grant for UNO schools — a record public subsidy to charter schools.

2011 — UNO CEO Juan Rangel co-chairs Rahm Emanuel’s first campaign for mayor.

Feb. 4, 2013 — First stories in Sun-Times investigation expose how contractors with insider ties are profiting from the state grant — including companies owned by two brothers of top Rangel aide Miguel d’Escoto that were paid millions of dollars.

Feb. 12, 2013 — D’Escoto resigns under pressure from $200,000-a-year post.

October 2013 — Gov. Pat Quinn’s administration cuts off remaining $15 million in funding from $98 million state grant.

June 3, 2014 — U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission files and immediately settles civil charges against UNO, accusing it of defrauding bond investors. UNO promises never again to hand out insider deals and agrees to oversight by a federal monitor.

July 14, 2015 — Sun-Times reports Rangel got secret $206,250 severance payout.

SOME KEY EARLIER STORIES:

Feb. 4, 2013 — For insiders, charter schools pay

Feb. 13, 2013 — UNO exec quits after questions raised

Feb. 25, 2013 — House Speaker Mike Madigan is No. 1 with UNO

March 21, 2013 — UNO’s family ties; charter school boss has 3 relatives on payroll

Dec. 7, 2013 — Leader of clout-heavy UNO quits

June 3, 2014 — SEC charges UNO with defrauding investors

July 14, 2015 — Ousted UNO chief Rangel got secret $206,250 payout

A Chicago businessman accused four years ago of “large-scale fraud” by the state executive inspector general’s office unexpectedly pleaded guilty in federal court Tuesday, admitting he cajoled two state agencies into giving him separate, six-figure government grants to perform nearly identical services.

Social service provider George E. Smith “converted the duplicate funding to his personal and business use,” according to a news release from the U.S. attorney’s office in Springfield, where Smith was charged, appeared in court and pleaded guilty within a matter of hours.

Additionally, Smith admitted to submitting “false and fraudulent documentation” to the state’s human services department that caused him to be paid nearly $140,000 that he shouldn’t have gotten. That paperwork overstated the services that his not-for-profit, Diversified Behavioral Comprehensive Care, provided under a grant for drug- and alcohol-treatment services.

Smith’s fraud cost taxpayers between $400,000 and $550,000, according to his plea deal. U.S. Magistrate Judge Tom Schanzle-Haskins allowed him to remain free on bail pending sentencing, which is set for July 25.

Smith, 66, faces up to 20 years in prison. But prosecutors agreed to recommend far less time — no more than 30 months — in exchange for Smith’s plea to money-laundering and two counts of mail fraud.

Between 2005 and 2011, Smith received grants from state agencies including the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services and the Illinois tate Board of Education. In 2008, he “induced DCFS and ISBE to issue two separate, but nearly identical grants” to help at-risk children and families in which the “sources of referral, services to be provided and the goals for each grant were essentially identical,” according to prosecutors.

In 2011, Ricardo Meza, at the time the state’s executive inspector general, put out a 201-page report questioning millions in state deals that Smith had gotten.

Attorney General Lisa Madigan sued Smith in 2013 to recover $8 million she says he misspent on sports tickets, trips, concerts and payments to himself and to a consultant. That case is still pending, court records show.

Sgt. Samuel Cirone is fighting a one-year suspension from the Chicago Police Department over his role in the creation of a bogus police report that shielded former Mayor Richard M. Daley’s nephew from criminal charges in the death of David Koschman.

Lt. Denis P. Walsh — who was once accused of sexually assaulting a gas station clerk in Michigan and ended up pleading guilty to lesser charges — admitted stashing Koschman case files at his Northwest Side bungalow. That blunder led him to retire in February rather than be fired.

Yet over the past three years, the police department repeatedly tapped Walsh and Cirone to lead one-day training courses for detectives on “interviews and interrogations,” “homicide/death investigations” and “police-involved shootings,” records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.

And they kept being called on to teach detectives even after special prosecutor Dan K. Webb said he considered charging them with obstructing justice or official misconduct in the Koschman case. Webb ultimately decided he didn’t have enough evidence to convict them and left it to City Hall to discipline them.

Under the watch of former Supt. Garry McCarthy, Walsh and Cirone jointly taught 11 “pre-service” and “refresher training” classes at the police academy for detectives. The refresher classes were all for “lead homicide investigators.” Cirone also taught two additional classes by himself.

All but two of the classes were held while John Escalante headed the detective bureau, which oversaw the training sessions. Escalante is now the department’s second-in-command after serving as Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s interim police superintendent following McCarthy’s Dec. 1 firing.

Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi had no explanation as to why Walsh and Cirone were allowed to teach while under investigation, other than to say, “Supervisors within the entire bureau of detectives rotated through as class presenters.”

Walsh and Cirone both carried clout in the police department. Each had received so-called merit promotions, based on recommendations from a higher-ranking official, rather than test scores. And both men’s fathers also were Chicago cops.

Walsh and Cirone got involved in the Koschman case in January 2011. That was after the Sun-Times asked to see files on Koschman’s killing, which had gone unsolved for nearly seven years.

Walsh told his commander he couldn’t find the original files — many of which turned up six months later.

Then-Supt. Jody Weis ordered a reinvestigation, and the case was assigned to detectives under Cirone’s supervision.

On Feb. 28, 2011, the Sun-Times published the first of dozens of stories about the police department’s handling of the case, which Cirone’s detectives closed the following day, wrongly asserting that Daley nephew Richard J. “R.J.” Vanecko had punched Koschman in self-defense.

The Sun-Times investigation led to Webb’s appointment as special prosecutor and Vanecko’s indictment for involuntary manslaughter, guilty plea and 60-day jail term.

Webb also focused his investigation on the police officers and prosecutors who failed to charge Daley’s nephew.

During Webb’s investigation, Walsh and Cirone teamed up as “class presenters,” starting with a “pre-service” detective training session on Jan. 9, 2013 — about a month after Vanecko’s indictment.

Two months later, the Sun-Times published a story detailing Walsh’s 2004 arrest on a charge of criminal sexual conduct. He’d been accused of groping and licking a female gas station clerk near Kalamazoo, Michigan, in an incident caught on security surveillance video.

Walsh could have faced up to 15 years in prison if convicted of that felony charge. But the victim stopped cooperating with authorities, and Walsh ended up pleading guilty to two misdemeanors. He also was handed a 30-day suspension by then-Supt. Phil Cline.

Walsh and Cirone taught four classes together between October 2013 and Jan. 31, 2014 — the date Vanecko pleaded guilty, admitting he killed the 21-year-old Koschman.

They taught another five classes between February and June 2014 — all after Webb released a 162-page report on his investigation that cited Walsh four times as being involved with missing files from the Koschman case.

Webb’s report also detailed late-night messages that Cirone exchanged from a personal email account with his boss, then-deputy Chief of Detectives Constantine “Dean” Andrews. Those emails said Koschman yelled “F— you! I’ll kick your ass!” before “breaking away from his group of friends and aggressively going after Vanecko” in the early morning hours of April 25, 2004. That statement ended up verbatim in the final police report, approved by both Cirone and Andrews, who closed the case without charging Vanecko.

Webb found no evidence Koschman said that.

After Webb decided not to charge Walsh, Cirone, Andrews or anyone else from the police department involved in the 2004 and 2011 investigations of Koschman’s killing, McCarthy asked City Hall Inspector General Joseph Ferguson to determine whether any cops should be disciplined.

Ferguson’s investigation began in September 2014. At that point, Walsh and Cirone stopped teaching, according to the department.

“While Lt. Walsh and Sgt. Cirone were among the supervisors that initially rotated through this training, the bureau of detectives advises they voluntarily recused themselves as presenters during the inspector general’s investigation,” Guglielmi says.

But Walsh and Cirone did teach one more class, on March 27, 2015, as Ferguson was still investigating them, the records obtained by the Sun-Times show. It’s unclear why.

After finishing his investigation in December, Ferguson recommended that six cops be punished, including Cirone and Walsh.

In February, Escalante moved to fire Walsh, who decided to retire at 52 and begin collecting his pension.

Escalante also recommended a one-year suspension for Cirone, 47, who’s challenging that before the Chicago Police Board and remains on the payroll.

HEFTY EXIT PAYOUTS FOR KOSCHMAN COPS

City Hall’s inspector general urged that six cops involved in the 2011 reinvestigation of David Koschman’s death face departmental discipline. Four of them retired, avoiding punishment. The other two — Sgt. Samuel Cirone and Detective Nicholas Spanos — have been stripped of their police powers and are facing one-year suspensions but remain on the city payroll. A look at the payouts to the cops who retired:

Chief of detectives Constantine “Dean” Andrews, 51

Final salary: $185,364 a year

Final paycheck: $165,504 — including $133,336 for unused compensatory time off

Pension: $106,934 a year

Cmdr. Joseph P. Salemme, 56

Final salary: $162,684 a year

Final payout: $99,450 — including $89,387 for unused comp time

Pension: $117,704 a year

Lt. Denis P. Walsh, 53

Final salary: $125,190 a year

Final paycheck: $46,459 — including $20,813 in salary and $12,037 for unused comp time

Pension: $93,396 a year

Detective James G. Gilger, 58

Final salary: $100,884

Final paycheck: $45,925 — including $12,569 in salary, $10,000 for unused comp time and $9,700 for unused vacation pay

Pension: $72,704

Since Mayor Rahm Emanuel abruptly fired him four months ago, former police Supt. Garry McCarthy has pined for the glamorous top-cop job at Scotland Yard, telling the British press he’d “fix London’s police the way I sorted Chicago’s.”

But the next chapter of his career apparently will be more V.I. Warshawski than Sherlock Holmes.

According to Trade Show Executive magazine, a South Loop firm led by Richard Simon — a former police sergeant and major Emanuel administration contractor — has provided a soft landing for McCarthy and his longtime aide Robert Tracy.

“Garry McCarthy will work . . . with United on various industry-based projects through his new private-sector venture, GFM-Strategies,” the magazine reported on Feb. 18.

Tracy has become senior vice president of Simon’s United Security Services Inc. He previously worked with McCarthy at the New York Police Department and as the chief of crime control strategy at the Chicago police, which he left in January.

McCarthy didn’t want to talk about his new venture and its client when I emailed him Tuesday.

“Your understanding is wrong,” he wrote in response to questions about his work for Simon. “I have my own company. Now go away.”

McCarthy’s new outfit is based at the same building in the 1500 block of Indiana Avenue where Simon’s companies are headquartered, according to the web site of GFM-Strategies. State records show McCarthy’s wife, Chicago lawyer Kristin Barnette, incorporated GFM-Strategies on Jan. 19.

Simon was excited about what McCarthy and Tracy can do for him, Trade Show Executive reported.

“Robert Tracy is a distinguished member of both the public law enforcement sector and the private corporate sector,” the magazine quoted Simon as saying. “His leadership, along with the ability to partner with Garry McCarthy and GFM-Strategies, gives us a significant advantage as we ramp up our next generation security at public facilities.”

Reached by phone Tuesday, Simon declined to comment.

One of Simon’s firms has been paid more than $70 million by the Emanuel administration under a 2012 deal to perform janitorial services at O’Hare Airport, city records show.

At the time his United Maintenance Inc. won the O’Hare deal, Simon claimed to city officials he was the firm’s 100 percent owner. But the Sun-Times revealed Simon had sold a 50 percent stake to a local investment group.

City officials said they could have nixed the deal but decided not to do so, despite criticism from some aldermen.

Back then, Simon employed a man who had served in prison after being indicted along with the late mob boss Anthony “Big Tuna” Accardo.

Simon has also been a business partner in a heavy equipment company with a man who has been described by law enforcement as a member of the mob.

Simon joined the Chicago police 40 years ago and moonlighted at the company of the Ben Stein, Chicago’s “King of Janitors.” Stein, a convicted felon, also was a mob associate.

According to a 1983 police file obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times, Simon refused to testify before a grand jury investigating the disappearance of Karen Lee Koppel, a “close female friend and companion” of Stein.

Simon “had been conducting negotiations” on Stein’s behalf with Koppel, offering “a posh Lake Shore Drive apartment” and new cars for her to get out of Stein’s life. The CPD document also says Simon met Koppel at a bar on the night of her disappearance. Koppel hasn’t been seen since.

Investigators again approached Simon in 1988, to ask about the attempted mob hit on labor leader Dominic Senese. According to an FBI report, Simon “stated that he had known Dominic Senese and his family for so long that he could not remember how long” but told agents he did not know who tried to kill Senese.

After Stein died, Simon bought out his family. The company has thousands of employees working at convention centers, airports, hotels and hospitals across the country.

Still, the Rivers Casino in Des Plaines got rid of Simon’s company last year after the Better Government Association reported it was working there.

McCarthy began socializing with Simon — whose company also cleans the lakefront police memorial for free — since arriving in Chicago as Emanuel’s first CPD head in 2011.

McCarthy was the city’s highest-paid employee, with an annual salary of $260,000. Tracy was paid more than $194,000 a year.

Despite boasting that the mayor had his back, McCarthy was fired after officials released the dash-cam video of an officer shooting 16 bullets into 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.

At the time of Tracy’s departure, then-Interim Supt. John Escalante said only that Tracy was retiring “to accept an executive-level security position in the private sector.”

By Casey Toner

When the Rich Township High School District 227 board was deciding in 2014 whether to award more than $140,000 in back pay and attorney’s fees to a former associate principal to resolve a retirement dispute, then-board member Emmanuel Imoukhuede sided with the 4-3 majority to approve the payout.

The former administrator getting the money? Imoukhuede’s wife, Bridget Imoukhuede.

Now, both are embroiled in another dispute — a lawsuit filed by District 227 to recover the money paid to Bridget Imoukhuede. The suit accuses Emmanuel Imoukhuede of violating the district’s nepotism policy, which says board members “will not participate” in employment decisions concerning their relatives.

Emmanuel Imoukhuede, 69, who lost his reelection bid last year, declined to comment. His wife, 66, didn’t return calls.

Their attorney says the school board was to blame because it counted Emmanuel Imoukhuede’s vote.

The financially struggling district — which so far has spent more than $51,000 on the suit and a related case — serves more than 3,000 students in Chicago Heights, Country Club Hills, Matteson, Olympia Fields, Park Forest, Richton Park, Tinley Park and University Park. It lost 728 students from 2011 to 2015 and has seen its yearly state funding decline by $5.4 million over the past six years.

On Aug. 6, 2013, the District 227 board suspended Bridget Imoukhuede without pay and moved to fire her for suspending and expelling students at the district’s alternative school, which she helped run, without authorization, records show.

The following day, she resigned and applied for her pension, which she began receiving a few months later.

But she also challenged her dismissal, and an Illinois State Board of Education hearing officer recommended overturning the District 227 board’s decision.

The district’s lawsuit contends that Bridget Imoukhuede wasn’t entitled to the hearing in the first place because she had retired. It also says she didn’t tell the hearing officer about her retirement.

Still, after getting the hearing officer’s recommendation, the District 227 board voted June 9, 2014, that Bridget Imoukhuede should get back pay and attorney’s fees, with Emmanuel Imoukhuede part of the 4-3 majority.

According to the board’s minutes of the meeting, Emmanuel Imoukhuede said he was just “following the recommendation from the hearing officer.”

The following month, the board voted along the same lines to pay Bridget Imoukhuede $109,792 in back salary for the 2013-2014 school year and $34,932 for attorney’s fees.

In July 2014, Olympia Fields resident Fred Veazy sued the district to rescind the votes and get the money back, citing the nepotism policy. After a Cook County judge ruled against him, he appealed, and the matter is now before the Illinois Appellate Court.

Veazy’s attorney, Clinton Krislov, says Emmanuel Imoukhuede “should have abstained from voting on his wife’s matter” even if the board otherwise would have been deadlocked.

At a school board meeting in October 2014, District 227 attorney John Relias raised concerns about Bridget Imoukhuede’s payout, according to interviews.

Bridget Imoukhuede later epaid about $55,000 in pension money to the state.

The following month, the District 227 board — with Emmanuel Imoukhuede voting with the majority — fired Relias’ law firm, Franczek Radelet.

But after Emmanuel Imoukhuede was voted out of office in April 2015, the District 227 board rehired Franczek Radelet and decided to sue the Imoukhuedes. The suit says Bridget Imoukhuede was ineligible to receive the payout because she was retired and collecting a pension.

“We have to hold people accountable,” says Antoine Bass, the school board president, who opposed the payout to Bridget Imoukhuede in the prior votes. “We can’t let $100,000 go unchecked because it’s taxpayer dollars at the end of the day.”

The district also reversed its opposition to the Veazy lawsuit and decided to back his appeal.

District 227 has spent $51,248 in legal fees on the Imoukhuede lawsuit and the Veazy case, records show.

Casey Toner is an investigator for the Better Government Association.

As Mayor Rahm Emanuel faced growing criticism last fall over the city’s handling of police shootings, Chicago Police Department officials laid plans to have undercover officers spy on protest groups, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.

The police department already had been monitoring the actions and online postings of protest groups in the aftermath of the 2014 shooting of a black teenager by a white cop in Ferguson, Missouri.

Then, in October, the records show Ralph Price, the police department’s top lawyer, signed off on a plan to send undercover cops to “monitor” meetings of four additional groups. They included Black Lives Matter activists, as well as churches and philanthropic organizations.

Ralph Price, left, with then-interim Supt. John Escalante at a Chicago Police Board meeting on Dec. 9. | Getty Images

A month later — after the court-ordered release of police dashcam video showing a white Chicago cop, Officer Jason Van Dyke, shooting and killing a black teenager, Laquan McDonald — a top Emanuel aide went to the command center of the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications to keep tabs on protests organized by the Black Youth Project 100, one of the groups spied on by the police.

Joe Deal, deputy chief of staff for the mayor, relayed information gathered by public safety officials to mayoral chief of staff Eileen Mitchell and the City Hall press team. That’s according to emails that were buried amid a trove of records released by the city in late December amid outrage over the video, which showed the teenager, who had a knife, being shot 16 times as he appeared to walk away from Van Dyke.

It was the seventh investigation opened by the police department since 2009 to monitor groups exercising their free-speech rights. The department requires investigators to justify such investigations in a “First Amendment Worksheet” outlining each proposed inquiry, which are supposed to be allowed only when there’s a “reasonable law enforcement purpose.”

The Sun-Times previously has reported that, over the past seven years, the police have spied on anti-Olympics protesters, the Service Employees International Union, critics of the visiting Chinese premier, the Occupy movement and NATO Summit demonstrators.

Also, in late 2014 and early 2015, following nationwide protests over the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, the police here monitored black demonstrators and kept logs of events led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and other groups.

In each case, members of the groups being investigated had spoken out against City Hall or its allies.

Since 2009, only one police request to investigate protesters has been rejected by department lawyers, records show. That was in 2012, when a commander proposed using undercover officers for “infiltration” of activists planning a march during the NATO Summit, held in Chicago. The police already had a separate investigation into NATO protesters underway.

For decades, the police department had a unit, known as the Red Squad, that spied on dissidents and City Hall foes. It was disbanded in the 1970s.

But those targeted by the recent investigations say little really has changed.

“I always operate under the assumption that someone is looking at us,” says DeAngelo Bester, co-executive director of the Workers Center for Racial Justice, one of the groups the police investigated last fall.

Bester, whose group’s main focus is access to jobs, says it’s “ridiculous” and wasteful to spy on law-abiding protesters.

“The Chicago Police Department and Emanuel administration try to justify the harsh treatment [by cops] in black communities by saying there’s so much violence,” he says. “Meanwhile, they’re spending the time and resources to surveil groups exercising their First Amendment rights.”

Organizers for the Black Youth Project 100 — a leading voice in the Black Lives Matter movement that had been demonstrating against police shootings — say they aren’t surprised the police spied on them.

Johnae Strong, left. Brian Jackson / Sun-Times

“There’s just a history of knowing we are organizing in a very hostile environment,” says Johnae Strong, a Chicago leader of the group. “The Chicago Police Department does exactly what it wants to do and finds ways to make it bureaucratically valid.”

Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi says the investigation was “routine,” legal and “documented to ensure transparency with the public.”

“These protective actions — which happen in limited circumstances — are conducted to protect public safety and people’s First Amendment rights,” Guglielmi says.

The undercover police operations last fall stemmed from plans announced by the Black Youth Project, the Workers Center and Southsiders Organized for Unity and Liberation — a coalition of churches and neighborhood groups known as SOUL — to protest the annual conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, held Oct. 24-27 at McCormick Place.

Funders for Justice — a nationwide network of philanthropic groups that includes the Ford Foundation, one of the country’s biggest and best-known charitable organizations — posted an announcement of the “counter-conference” on its website. The Funders group had been formed to support discussions of police practices post-Ferguson.

On Oct. 19, police Cmdr. Leo Panepinto asked for departmental approval to investigate Funders for Justice and the three activist groups for the next nine days, according to the First Amendment Worksheet he filed.

Panepinto is the commanding officer of the Crime Prevention Information Center, where the police gather intelligence with agents from the FBI and the federal Department of Homeland Security. The center had also collected information on African-American protesters in 2014 and early 2015, records show.

According to Panepinto, the chiefs’ association had learned demonstrators planned to “disrupt” the conference. He wrote that “the methods, scale and actions such groups intend to take to cause their disruptions are not identified and may include unlawful conduct.”

He didn’t explain why the four organizations listed were chosen but got permission to send undercover officers to their meetings.

On Oct. 22, Black Youth Project, the Workers Center for Racial Justice and SOUL demanded that City Hall and the federal government spend more money investing in black communities and less on policing. Two days later, some demonstrators marched from police headquarters at 35^th and Michigan to McCormick Place, while others chained themselves together to block an entrance to the police chiefs’ convention.

“Social media was monitored,” police records show. “There were discussions of civil disobedience.”

After several hours, 66 protesters were arrested outside McCormick Place.

A month later, a judge ordered the release of the McDonald shooting video. Before the city complied, aides to Emanuel asked black elected officials, pastors and organizers to meet with him at City Hall on Nov. 23 in an attempt to minimize the fallout.

Black Youth Project leaders turned him down. Then, they held a news conference outside the South Side courthouse where the arrested McCormick Place protesters were appearing before a judge. Mayoral spokesman Adam Collins emailed the group’s press release to other top Emanuel aides.

Later, on Facebook, the organization announced plans for a protest at 5:30 p.m. the following day — after the city released the McDonald video. Several mayoral aides were tracking protesters on social media, and one forwarded the rally information to other Emanuel staffers, according to the emails released by the mayor’s office.

City officials made the McDonald video public the afternoon of Nov. 24, as Emanuel called on demonstrators to remain peaceful.

Michael Sacks, | Sun-Times file photo

At 6:22 p.m. that day, Deal emailed the first in a series of updates on the Black Youth Project protest to Collins, chief of staff Mitchell, Guglielmi and others, including Michael Sacks, chairman of the investment firm GCM Grosvenor and one of Emanuel’s closest advisers and biggest campaign contributors.

Protesters march down Roosevelt Road last Nov. 24 after the release of a police dashcam video showing the fatal shooting by a cop of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

About 30 demonstrators were marching in the street down Roosevelt Road, Deal wrote, citing information from OEMC, which coordinates the city’s public-safety efforts.

Joe Deal

“I will be at OEMC this evening and will report any significant activity,” he wrote.

An hour later, Deal reported the group had grown to 150 people and had moved to Balbo and Michigan, where some protesters were sitting in the street. Guglielmi forwarded the message to then-Supt. Garry McCarthy and other police officials.

“Any sign it’s growing?” emailed David Spielfogel, then one of Emanuel’s top advisers.

“It definitely grew in the last hour,” Deal replied, and minutes later he emailed a photo. “It looks like mostly college kids. They are trying to antagonize the line of cpd.”

Protesters faced off with police near Columbus and Balbo last Nov. 24 after the release of a police dashcam video showing the fatal shooting by a cop of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

At 10:12 p.m., Deal reported a “minor skirmish” between protesters and police and at 12:45 a.m. wrote that protesters had surrounded a squad car: “They aren’t doing anything. Just surrounding it.”

Just before 1 a.m., he wrote that the protest was over.

According to Collins, the mayor’s “office has no involvement in the investigatory decision-making of the police department.”

Collins says Deal “frequently” oversees city operations out of OEMC “to manage street closures, to protect people’s first amendment rights and to ensure the safety of people gathering.”

He didn’t respond to questions about why other top aides and press staff were tracking protesters.

Past stories

Spy cops: Chicago police routinely spied on protesters, Sept. 26, 2015

Chicago police monitored black groups, activists after Ferguson, Oct. 11, 2015

Chicago cops conducted unauthorized spying on protesters, Nov. 15, 2015

A judge denied City Hall permission Wednesday to release subpoenas and other documents related to the grand jury investigation that led to a nephew of former Mayor Richard M. Daley pleading guilty to killing David Koschman.

In a 21-page ruling, Cook County Circuit Judge Michael P. Toomin said the city of Chicago law department had no “compelling authority or argument” to release the records to the Better Government Association — even though another Cook County judge, Mary Mikva, ordered the city to do so last year.

The BGA has been seeking subpoenas and emails that city officials exchanged with Dan K. Webb, the special prosecutor in the Koschman case, under Illinois’ open-records law. When the city rejected that request, the government watchdog group sued, and Mikva ruled the documents should be made public.

Mikva’s ruling forced City Hall’s lawyers to turn to Toomin for permission to release the records, which he ordered remain under seal in 2012 at the request of Webb. The special prosecutor opposed the city’s request to release the records, citing state law that preserves grand-jury secrecy.

In denying the city’s request, Toomin said, “A dangerous precedent could be set — a precedent that would threaten to erode the integrity of more than 800 years of well-settled grand jury traditions.”

David Koschman.

Toomin also denied the BGA’s request for him to make public all grand jury materials in the Koschman case, not just the limited set of records covered by Mikva’s ruling.

Daley nephew Richard J. “R.J.” Vanecko pleaded guilty in January 2014 to involuntary manslaughter. That was nearly 10 years after he punched Koschman outside the late-night bars along Division Street, causing Koschman to fall and crack his head on the pavement.

While Daley was mayor, police and prosecutors twice investigated the case, both times declining to charge Vanecko. Webb didn’t charge any law-enforcement officials with  wrongdoing in their handling of the case, but City Hall Inspector General Joseph Ferguson recommended discipline against six police officers. Four retired. Two are fighting suspensions.

Security was on heightened alert as 62,483 fans packed Soldier Field to see the Bears play the Denver Broncos last Nov. 22 — nine days after a series of deadly terrorist attacks in Paris claimed 130 lives.

At the stadium gates, the Chicago Police Department made two arrests that a Cook County judge now says exposed “the possibility of a massive tragedy.”

The incident involved three undercover police officers deployed to prevent potential “homeland security issues” and two employees of Monterrey Security Consultants Inc., the clout-heavy security company that guards Soldier Field.

Judge Anthony John Calabrese’s comments last week came as he acquitted one of the two Monterrey Security employees accused of being involved in a scheme to sell access to the stadium to the plainclothes cops, saying there was insufficient evidence against him.

But the other employee of the Chicago security company in the case didn’t show up in court, and authorities have now issued a warrant for his arrest. Prosecutors say Isaac Williams, 19, of Chicago, offered to sell the undercover cops three neon-green security wristbands to get into the game for a total of $80.

Beyond the misdemeanor criminal cases, the arrests at the Bears game raise questions about stadium safety and put a spotlight on Monterrey Security, a prominent security firm at most major venues in Chicago.

Owned by Juan Gaytan, a former Chicago cop, Monterrey Security handles crowd security at Wrigley Field, Toyota Park in Bridgeview and Rosemont’s Allstate Arena. It also has provided security for the Lincoln Park Zoo, Walmart stores, Wintrust Bank, the Shedd Aquarium and the Chicago Marathon.

Neither of the employees arrested at Soldier Field in November had a security guard license from the state. Both had records for drug arrests. One had gone to prison for selling drugs.

Juan Gaytan, owner of Monterrey Security.

Gaytan says the two men didn’t need to be licensed as security guards because they — like many of his employees — instead provide what his company calls “guest services.” About two-thirds of his employees assigned to Soldier Field for any given event are licensed guards or off-duty police officers, but the rest don’t have security-guard licenses, according to Gaytan.

Gaytan says Monterrey Security — which he says has yearly revenues of $29 million — tries to offer opportunities in such positions to people from disadvantaged communities, including ex-convicts.

A spokeswoman for the Chicago Park District, which owns the lakefront stadium, declined to comment, referring questions to SMG, the company that has managed Soldier Field since 1994.

In 2013, SMG won a 10-year deal to manage Soldier Field and two smaller park district venues. Monterrey’s subcontract with SMG will pay the company more than $2.6 million, records show.

Tim LeFevour, who is general manager of Soldier Field for SMG, says Monterrey Security supervisors stopped the undercover cops before they made it inside the stadium at the Bears game, despite sworn testimony from the police officers that they were allowed through a gate.

“There are some terrific people at Monterrey who did their job that day,” LeFevour says.

He says the two Monterrey Security employees who were arrested had been “entrusted with additional wristbands to assist in identifying employees as they arrived for work” at the stadium on game day.

After the arrests, LeFevour says, “All wristbands were taken away from guest relations employees — and, for the remainder of the year, Monterrey supervisors were the only ones allowed to give out a wristband.”

Here’s what police and prosecutors say happened on Nov. 22 at Soldier Field:

At about 2 p.m., the three officers were walking near the south end of the stadium as part of the ramped-up measures taken in response to the deadly Nov. 13 attacks in Paris.

“We were assigned to a covert, undercover mission regarding homeland security issues,” George Gass of the CPD’s intelligence unit told the judge last week.

Gass testified that the officers were looking to thwart any “major incidents, if they occurred,” including the possibility there might be an “active shooter.”

Isaac Williams, 19, is accused of letting undercover cops in to a Bears game at Soldier Field in exchange for $80 while working for Monterrey Security Consultants Inc.  Arrest photo

Williams — who was dressed in a red Monterrey Security windbreaker — approached the officers and “said $80 will get you in to the game,” according to Gass. Williams then gave the cops three plastic wristbands, which stadium vendors’ employees are given on game days, and directed them to enter through Gate 3.

While Williams waited near the entrance to the stadium, Gass said, another Monterrey Security employee, David L. Glover, told co-workers, “They’re OK. Let them in.”

Gass said that, after entering the stadium, he and the other officers revealed they were cops and arrested Glover and Williams, who were charged with theft of labor / services.

Calabrese, who issued the verdict in Glover’s bench trial, said the incident might seem like a small-stakes case, given that so little money was involved. But the judge recalled the suicide bomber who was kept from entering the Stade de France during an international soccer game while the other terrorist attacks raged across Paris last year.

“The possibility of a massive tragedy is not lost upon the court,” Calabrese said from the bench at the branch Cook County courthouse at Belmont and Western. “By giving these wristbands or selling those bands to any individual for profit, it allows any dangerous individual to gain access and puts the citizens of this community at danger, and it has to be viewed in the context of this dangerous world.”

Calabrese said he heard enough evidence at Glover’s trial to prove Williams’ guilt but that he found Glover “not guilty” because the state’s attorney’s office failed to show Glover conspired with Williams.

A spokeswoman for State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez declined to comment.

After his acquittal, Glover, 34, thanked his public defender and said, “I didn’t have nothing to do with this at all. This was crazy. I lost my job because of this. And I lost my apartment because I lost my job.”

Cook County court records show Glover’s arrest at Soldier Field in November was the ninth time he has been charged with a crime in 16 years, including busts for selling heroin and cocaine on the West Side. He also was convicted of felony possession of a stolen motor vehicle in Lansing in 2001 and sentenced to a year in state prison in 2004 after a felony conviction for possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver, records show.

Williams was arrested last June 14, after officers said they observed him in what they “believed to be a hand-to-hand transaction,” court records show. The cops who arrested him found he had failed to appear in court on a prior charge of possession of cannabis. According to their police report, Williams was a “documented Black P-Stone gang member.”

Gaytan, the Monterrey Security owner, says both Glover and Williams have been fired and that he plans to continue hiring ex-convicts for guest services jobs such as theirs.

“We are giving people second chances and going in to communities that are being disenfranchised,” Gaytan says.

He started the company with Santiago Solis, brother of 25^th Ward Ald. Danny Solis, as his business partner. Gaytan bought out his partner in 2008 and became sole owner.

Monterrey Security landed its first deal to provide security at Soldier Field while it was being renovated in 2002, despite having been fined and put on probation by state regulators for infractions that included operating without a license and employing an armed guard who wasn’t licensed to use a firearm.

Before Monterrey Security landed the Soldier Field deal, city officials had yanked a $2.9 million contract to guard salt piles and equipment from the company because Gaytan and Santiago Solis were city employees at the time, so they were barred from doing business with the city.

Monterrey Security and Gaytan have been frequent contributors to a host of politicians, having given a total of more than $140,000, according to campaign-finance records.

Two months ago, then-interim Chicago police Supt. John Escalante handed down a one-year suspension to a detective involved in the botched investigation that cleared former Mayor Richard M. Daley’s nephew in David Koschman’s death.

But Escalante later signed off on a deal that will allow the detective, Nicholas Spanos, to shave as much as 10 months from that suspension, according to a city inspector general’s report released Monday.

Spanos “has exercised an ‘options’ discipline approved by” Escalante, Inspector General Joseph Ferguson wrote under which the detective “will be taking two calendar months of the suspension as unpaid leave and forfeiting accrued paid leave time . . . to, in essence, buy back the remaining 10 months of the one-year suspension.”

Ferguson said in the report he recommended that Escalante fire Spanos, but, instead, Spanos will be back on the job “shortly.”

Escalante is now new police Supt. Eddie Johnson’s first deputy, the second highest-ranking position in the department.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Police Accountability Task Force recommended last week that Johnson develop a policy on when cops can use “options” discipline, which allows them to cash in accrued time to lessen their unpaid suspensions. Ferguson was on that task force.

Reacting to Spanos’ deal, Johnson “has directed a full review” of the policy that allows police officers to effectively buy their way out of suspensions, police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said. Under that policy, Spanos — a 20-year veteran — will be off without pay for 60 days and is cashing in 1,400 hours of accrued compensation.

“As part of the department’s continued commitment to restoring public trust and accountability, Supt. Johnson believes it is critically important to strengthen CPD’s system of accountability so it has the rigor to effectively discipline officers when wrongdoing occurs,” Guglielmi said.

Spanos and his partner, Detective James Gilger, reinvestigated the Koschman case, which was closed in March 2011 without charges being brought against Daley nephew Richard J. “R.J.” Vanecko. A Chicago Sun-Times investigation prompted the appointment of a special prosecutor, Dan K. Webb, which led to Vanecko pleading guilty in January 2014 to involuntary manslaughter.

Webb said he considered charging six officers, including Spanos, with obstruction of justice or official misconduct but decided he didn’t have enough evidence to convict them. Former Supt. Garry McCarthy and Emanuel directed Ferguson to investigate whether any police officers should face departmental discipline.

In December, Ferguson recommended that Escalante fire three officers — Gilger, Spanos and Lt. Denis P. Walsh — and “impose discipline up to and including discharge” against the others: Chief of Detectives Constantine “Dean” Andrews, Cmdr. Joseph Salemme and Sgt. Sam Cirone.

Under city ordinance, Ferguson can’t identify the officers by name. The Sun-Times is identifying them based on details in Ferguson’s report and other documents.

Escalante agreed to fire Gilger and Walsh, according to Ferguson, but both retired, avoiding termination.

Escalante planned to impose one-year suspensions against Andrews, Salemme, Cirone and Spanos, Ferguson wrote. But Andrews and Salemme retired days after Ferguson made his recommendations. Cirone, who is fighting his suspension, and Spanos aren’t old enough to retire.

Ferguson found that Gilger and Spanos, along with their supervisors Cirone, Salemme and Andrews:

• “Failed to perform a competent investigation” and “failed to draft a truthful and accurate closing supplementary report,” which omitted “a witness account of events that was in direct conflict with the officers’ view of the case” and failed to mention that original 2004 Koschman homicide file had gone missing.  The report also contained a statement that Koschman yelled “F— you! I’ll kick your ass!” at Vanecko when, in fact, “there was no support for this quote.”

• “Improperly recommended and approved closure of the case” even though “there was sufficient information to support Vanecko’s arrest.”

• “Failed to seek a charging decision” from the Cook County state’s attorney despite “having, for the first time, identified Vanecko as the offender.”

Additionally, Ferguson criticized Andrews and Cirone for discussing the Koschman investigation using their personal emails, which “do not have the security required for the conduct of official CPD business.”

Andrews also “provided evasive or misleading statements” to Ferguson’s staff, according to the report, which doesn’t explain those statements.

Ferguson said he recommended firing Walsh in part because he didn’t file a report with the department’s Internal Affairs Division in January 2011 when Walsh discovered “that the original Koschman homicide file was missing.” Walsh also “failed to timely report to IAD the later discovery of the missing Koschman homicide file” in June 2011. Walsh later took the file to his home “with no legitimate work purpose.”

Ferguson also noted that Walsh remained involved in the 2011 reinvestigation “despite a superior’s directive” that he play no role in the case, which had been reassigned to Gilger and Spanos, who weren’t under his supervision.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Tuesday condemned what he called a well-intentioned policy “gone awry” that has allowed the Chicago Housing Authority to rent luxury apartments at extravagant rents for some needy families while leaving others out in the cold.

Emanuel stressed that the policy “pre-dates my tenure.” The only way to get rid of it is to phase it out, even though he would prefer to go cold turkey, he said.

“The problem I have is, because you’re spending so much on one [family], you could have actually helped two or three more families. That, to me, is what’s wrong,” the mayor said.

“I understand the principle and I support the principle of taking families, most importantly their children, out of the geographic confines of poverty. But it’s been executed in a way where, rather than helping more families, you’re helping fewer families. That’s the problem.”

The CHA provides housing vouchers to more than 107,000 people in nearly 45,000 households in Chicago. The aim is to give these individuals and families a financial hand in leasing an apartment or house in any neighborhood they choose.

Chicago’s public housing divide, a Watchdogs / BGA special report

The standard allowable rent is based on a “fair market rent” formula for the Chicago region calculated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. This year, the rate is $980 for a one-bedroom apartment, $1,139 for a two-bedroom, $1,372 for a three-bedroom.

But, according to Watchdogs/BGA special report in the Chicago Sun-Times, the CHA has been willing to pay up to triple the standard rent in so-called “opportunity areas” that are a good distance from old public housing clusters.

At the moment, 1,332 households benefit from that extra help. The CHA told the Sun-Times and Better Government Association Watchdog reporters that it has been scaling back on such rents, and in the future will not pay more than 1 ½ times a standard rent. But, until then, the excesses continue.

Downtown, a single woman lives in a two-bedroom condo for which she pays $248 a month. Federal taxpayers, via the Chicago Housing Authority, pay the rest: $2,752.

In the South Loop, a family of four lives rent free in a townhouse for which the CHA pays $3,911 a month. Near Navy Pier, a woman and two other people live in a three-bedroom condo for which they pay $201 a month, with the CHA kicking in the remaining $3,579.

Emanuel’s disgust with how the policy was executed stems from the long CHA waiting list and that the need for housing vouchers far exceeds the $36 million in federal funding spent on the program each month.

“The purpose of the policy is correct. [But] it’s been executed poorly. Getting families housing outside of the context of poverty is not only an admirable goal, it’s an essential goal because we know, based on a lot of research, that children raised in a different context have a different value system. So that’s a good thing,” the mayor said.

“How it got executed to the point that you’re buying unbelievably, incredibly expensive housing — which means that the dollars you try to stretch to more families is limited — is wrong. It’s a bad story, good story. One thing is right. It’s a policy that is trying to solve a problem correctly so poorly administered, it went awry.”

Also on Tuesday, Emanuel vowed to collect $15 million in unpaid parking tickets, red-light and speed camera fines and overdue water bills owed by Uber and Lyft drivers without requiring them to obtain chauffeurs licenses, just like cabdrivers are required to do.

“As we put in our budget, we have a debt check. By May, they’ve got to be clear [of debt to the city] or they’re out of that job,” the mayor said.

“Even before anybody had even identified this problem, we put a system in place to identify drivers who are running up parking tickets, other types of tickets and not paying them. If they have not paid their bills by May, they cannot drive for the company.”

Emboldened by the $15 million debt, the taxicab industry’s City Council allies are making a renewed push for licensing ride-hailing drivers. Some aldermen view the move as a pivotal step to saving a taxicab industry “on the verge of collapse.”

Emanuel has resisted such a move as a competition-killer, but aldermen insist they have the votes to approve the licensing ordinance over the mayor’s objections.

Preckwinkle’s administration picked the Reyes Kurson Ltd. law firm to serve among advisers for a $334 million bond refinancing, according to a measure the president introduced at last Wednesday’s County Board meeting.

Reyes’ law firm and his lobbying company, the Roosevelt Group, were supporters of incumbent State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez for years.

In last month’s primary, though, Reyes backed challenger Kim Foxx, the former Preckwinkle chief of staff who defeated Alvarez.

The Roosevelt Group gave Foxx $4,750 and picked up the $965 tab for a campaign event at BJ’s Market & Bakery, records show. Kurson Reyes contributed another $3,500 to Foxx — though she returned $2,750 of it because lobbyists at the county can’t legally chip in more than $750.

Now, Kurson Reyes is Preckwinkle’s pick to serve as “co-disclosure counsel” on the bond deal. Asked Tuesday if there was any connection between Reyes’ support for Foxx and his new county gig, Preckwinkle spokesman Frank Shuftan said, “No. Period.”

OPINION

Although Reyes’ firm has never been involved in a county bond deal, Shuftan said Reyes Kurson was put on a list of pre-qualified firms three years ago and Lauren Mack, now a lawyer with the firm, did county bond work in the past.

Reyes attributed the firm’s selection for the new deal to his recent hiring of Mack.

“The reason we were selected is we recruited one of the top bond lawyers in the city,” he said. “There’s no reward [for political favors] or anything like that. I know what your thesis is. I get it. But it’s incorrect.”

Shuftan said county officials don’t yet know exactly how much the advisers on the deal will get paid. Reyes said he would be “stunned if it’s in excess of $30,000” for Reyes Kurson.

The firm will be working alongside Katten Muchen Rosenman LLP, where former Mayor Richard M. Daley has been “of counsel” since leaving office five years ago.

Reyes was a top aide to Daley and ran the corrupt, pro-Daley Hispanic Democratic Organization. He was not criminally charged, though his name surfaced repeatedly in the federal cases of Daley aides who rigged city hiring in favor of HDO members and other loyal campaign workers.

These days, the Roosevelt Group — which has contributed $6,000 to Preckwinkle’s campaign committee — represents clients in Springfield, while Reyes Kurson is listed as lobbying at the county and City Hall. Reyes is president of both companies.

The law firm’s deal with the county comes as the City Council’s Latino Caucus is debating whether to cut ties with Reyes Kurson, sources said.

No law is broken when Reyes’ firm simultaneously lobbies at City Hall and gives free legal aid to aldermen, Ethics Board Executive Director Steve Berlin said in an email to the caucus last month. But Berlin said the situation creates “an appearance of impropriety.”

The firm’s pro bono work for the caucus, he wrote, suggests it has “special access” to aldermen and that Latino Council members “will be more apt to make city decisions” in favor of Reyes Kurson clients.

“This perception . . . would be removed altogether if the caucus receives legal advice from an attorney or firm that has no other client matters pending before its individual members,” Berlin concluded.

Preckwinkle easily could apply this same sort of thinking now. She has carefully crafted an image as another reformer from the 4^th Ward cradle of President Barack Obama’s career.

So she surely knows what perception is created when she gives business to someone who lobbies her administration — and who supported her ally.