Marlon Millner had been waiting three months for his children’s Medicaid applications to be processed when his 11-year-old son EJ busted his lip at basketball practice.

Like any worried father, he rushed his son to the emergency room. But when he got to the hospital, he wasn’t sure how he would pay the bill. The doctors recommended that EJ see a dentist. But Millner didn’t know how he would afford that either.

The Millner children are among tens of thousands of Illinois residents who’ve been waiting months for access to health care as the state slogs through a backlog in determining who’s eligible for Medicaid. As of March 15, more than 112,000 Illinois Medicaid applications remained unprocessed beyond the 45-day limit the federal government puts on those eligibility determinations.

The federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services has warned state officials that Illinois is out of compliance with regulations on timely determinations of eligibility for the federally funded program to provide health coverage for low-income people and asked how they plan to fix that, records show.

If a case is delayed past the federal time limit, Illinois Medicaid applicants are supposed to be able to get cards granting them temporary medical benefits. But those also are backlogged. The state’s Medicaid application-processing delays and failure to issue temporary medical benefits have left some of Illinois’ poorest residents without access to health care, in some cases for more than a year.

Illinois provided no temporary medical benefits at all between June 2016 and September 2017, state Department of Human Services records filed in federal court show.

The state has issued temporary medical cards to some whose cases have been delayed, but that’s been done rarely.

In May 2018, the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, the Legal Council for Health Justice and the law firm Sidley Austin filed a motion in federal court to enforce a 1979 Illinois consent decree that requires the state to provide temporary medical benefits on request to people whose Medicaid cases have been delayed past the federal time limit.

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Stephanie Altman, director of health care justice at the Shriver Center and one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs, said settlement negotiations over the “historic delays” continue. The state has resumed sending notices of possible entitlement to temporary medical assistance, according to Altman. But once people get these notices, they still have to apply for the temporary benefits.

In February, the state issued more than 30,000 notices of what’s called possible entitlement to temporary medical assistance to people whose applications had been delayed 54 days past their application date. But just over 2,000 people actually received temporary medical cards that month — about 7% of those notified they might qualify.

“We’re not seeing the numbers of temporary cards that we think we should see,” Altman said. “And ultimately we want no temporary cards. We want everybody to get determined in 45 days. We want the state to work on the backlog.”

Jordan Abudayyeh, a spokeswoman for Gov. J.B. Pritzker, said: “It is unacceptable that people across the state are waiting for healthcare coverage, and he has directed the administration to take immediate steps to address this problem from the previous administration.”

In a written statement, the heads of the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services and the Department of Human Services said: “Our departments are working together closely to bring on more workers to process applications and redeterminations, as well as training and technical experts to support front-line staff.”

Karyn Britt, an outreach enrollment specialist with TCA Health Clinic in Altgeld Gardens on Chicago’s South Side, said she regularly sees patients with high blood pressure, diabetes and asthma who can’t get the medication they need. Many end up going to a hospital.

“The emergency room will write a prescription, but they won’t be able to get it filled,” Britt said. “If they give them an asthma treatment there, the next day they’ll be back needing another treatment because that’s the only place they can go.”

Millner, 46 and a widower, lives in Evanston, where he’s a doctoral candidate in religious studies at Northwestern University. He said he applied online last September for Medicaid for his two kids and made multiple trips to the state Department of Human Services office in Skokie, bringing his kids’ birth certificates and documents verifying his income. Often, he said, he waited for hours to be seen. He couldn’t get the application processed even when he was able to meet with someone.

“You’re literally throwing documents into a black hole,” he said.

In February, Millner finally received the medical card for his children. That was five months after he applied. And he got results only after contacting his state senator for help.

According to state data, the Medicaid backlog rose steadily through 2017, reaching a critical point that October, when the state began using a new computer system to process applications, according to Carrie Chapman, director of advocacy for the Legal Council for Health Justice. The new computer system had problems with new applications and so-called redeterminations. In some cases, people who were still eligible were cut off during the yearly renewal process and had to reapply, Chapman said.

She said another factor has been the “diminished workforce” to deal with the Medicaid backlog. With Illinois facing chronic budget problems, the human services agency lost staff under former Govs. Bruce Rauner and Pat Quinn, which made it harder to deal with the backlog, according to Chapman.

Iraida Patiño, 25, who works at an immigrant social services organization in Chicago, hasn’t seen a doctor or dentist in two years. Patiño said she applied for Medicaid in November 2017. She got a letter of possible entitlement to temporary medical assistance the following August and a temporary medical card in September after spending a day waiting at the human services office in Skokie.

In October — 11 months after Patiño applied — she got a letter saying her Medicaid application was approved. But before she could go to a doctor, her coverage was canceled. The reason the state gave her was that she hadn’t turned in a redetermination letter.

So she reapplied. And she was given another letter of possible entitlement for temporary medical assistance. But she said that, knowing the wait she’s likely to face, she hasn’t been able to make the time to go back to the state office in Skokie.

“I need to take time out of work to go to the office to fix everything,” Patiño said. “It’s a waste of my time pretty much to sit in an office the whole day.”

Stephanie Castrejon, who has worked as a certified application counselor at Heartland Health Centers on the North Side since January 2018, said processing times have gotten better but that many of her clients still end up waiting more than 90 days for their applications to be dealt with.

“We have had cases here that have been waiting for over a year, and no case worker has touched the application yet,” Castrejon said.

Charlotte Brown, who works for Christopher Rural Health in southern Illinois, said most Medicaid applications in her part of the state are processed within two weeks but that it often takes months to get newborns added to their mothers’ Medicaid cases.

Afton Williams, 25, worked at a tire shop before becoming a stay-at-home mom in downstate Eldorado and has been on Medicaid for two years. She said she didn’t have any problems with her own Medicaid application but that her daughter Wylee was nearly 3 months old before she was approved for coverage.

That meant Williams was left with the bill following the baby’s first post-hospital checkup and couldn’t pay it. So the clinic where she took Wylee wouldn’t see the baby again for her one-month checkup and vaccinations unless Williams paid $300 upfront.

Afton Williams, 25, a stay-at-home mom in downstate Eldorado, spent more than two months trying to get her baby daughter Wylee added to her Medicaid coverage. | Provided photo

 “Literally, I cried in the waiting room,” Williams said.

She said she felt like a “terrible parent” for not being able to afford a doctor’s visit for her baby. Ultimately, she said she took her daughter to the health department for vaccinations and paid out of pocket.

And she kept getting bills she couldn’t pay — including a hospital bill for nearly $8,000.

“My medical card paid for my medical bills while I was in the hospital, but I didn’t even know they billed your baby separately,” Williams said. “I was freaking out.”

With Brown’s help, she got a medical card for Wylee at the end of December, just before the baby turned 3 months old.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends checkups for babies three to five days after birth and then at one month and two months. So Carrie Chapman of the Legal Council for Health Justice says the 45-day federal limit to decide Medicaid eligibility doesn’t make sense.

“Newborns are missing those important early visits because those newborns’ Medicaid isn’t active,” Chapman said.

She said that she has seen newborns remain stuck in costly neonatal intensive care even after a doctor recommends they go home because, without a medical card, they would be without the prescriptions or medical equipment they need.

The Shriver Center and Legal Council for Health Justice is part of a coalition called Protect Our Care Illinois that’s lobbying for a measure in Springfield, Senate Bill 2021, that would make real-time eligibility for Medicaid applications happen by electronically matching data with other government agencies’ records to make it possible to quickly verify identity, income and residency.

“We have tens of thousands of people waiting for an unacceptably long time to receive care while their eligibility determination stalls,” said state Sen. Heather Steans, D-Chicago, who introduced the bill.

State Sen. Heather Steans. | AP

Graciela Guzman of the Protect Our Care Illinois coalition said the proposal would speed processing and “vastly improve the quality of care.”

Guzman has a 4-year-old goddaughter covered by Medicaid who needs seizure medication, but her coverage was temporarily cut off at one point because of a paperwork error.

“For us, even a day without coverage is a really risky situation, and it’s frightening and scary,” Guzman said. “That’s not a situation that our family or any family should have to go through.”

Afton Williams recently took her daughter Wylee back to the doctor for her 6-month appointment. Now that she has her medical card, Wylee is back on the recommended infant checkup schedule.

“I’m often just glad it’s all over because that was a nightmare,” Williams said of how “super-duper stressful” the early months were for her family. “Three months is entirely too long to wait.”

Becky Z. Dernbach is a graduate student at Northwestern University’s Medill School.

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A former Chicago police sergeant who quit under a cloud has been charged with beating two men and leaving them with serious injuries last year outside an Andersonville bar.

The two counts of aggravated battery Eric J. Elkins faces in the Sept. 29 beating came just under three years after the ex-cop pleaded guilty in Michigan to a reduced charge and got probation in a case in which he was accused of drunkenly fondling a teenage boy at a family reunion.

“It sort of shocks the conscience,” Cook County Circuit Judge John F. Lyke Jr. said of the accusations Elkins now faces.

The judge set bail at $250,000 for Elkins, who resigned from the Chicago Police Department in January.

If Elkins is able to post the required 10%, or $25,000, to bond out of the Cook County Jail, Lyke allowed him to go back to Florida, where he now lives in Fort Lauderdale, as long as he wears an electronic monitoring bracelet.

Elkins’ lawyer Joel Brodsky called the bail amount “mind-boggling.”

“That shows me there is an anti-police bias that is flowing,” Brodsky said.

Brodsky said Elkins “vehemently denies” any part in the melee prosecutors say left one man with compound fractures in a leg and another with broken eye sockets outside the @mosphere Bar, 5355 N. Clark St.

Elkins, 45, was off-duty at the bar with friends including another man who was charged with him, 34-year-old Giovanni Rodriguez, when they got into a fight with another group of men around 11 that night, according to Assistant Cook County State’s Attorney Angel Essig, who said everyone was thrown out.

Outside, Elkins and Rodriguez hit a man identified by prosecutors only as “J.S.,” then struck two others who tried to intervene, Essig said, leaving one man with a badly broken leg and another with fractured orbital bones and leaving both hospitalized.

Two of the men — John Sherwood and his partner Tom Stacha — later sued Elkins and his companions, which Brodsky said gives them a “financial motivation” to lie.

Elkins and Rodriguez ran away, according to Essig. The prosecutor said the victims identified Rodriguez after he was stopped nearby by police and that they picked out the off-duty cop’s picture from a photo array.

Brodsky said two witnesses who could vindicate Elkins weren’t brought before a grand jury to testify.

At a news conference Tuesday, Sherwood said: “I am happy this is finally moving forward. I’m wondering why it took seven months to move forward with the investigation.”

John Sherwood: “I am happy this is finally moving forward. I’m wondering why it took seven months to move forward with the investigation.” |  Brian Rich / Sun-Times

Rodriguez’s lawyer Boris Djulabic said his client acted in self-defense after the other group aimed threats and slurs at him inside the bar.

Rodriguez, a North Side resident who is charged with three counts of aggravated battery, is a nurse practitioner with no criminal record, Djulabic said. The judge set his bail at $50,000.

Giovanni Rodriguez. | Chicago police

Sherwood said the self-defense claim is “ridiculous,” saying the fight started when Rodriguez’s intoxicated partner fell on him at the bar, and Sherwood pushed that man off of him. Sherwood said the other men broke his leg within a minute after everyone had to leave the bar.

Elkins had been charged with criminal sexual conduct involving a teenager, accused of touching the boy’s penis during a family reunion near Elkins’ boyhood home in rural Michigan in 2015. He pleaded guilty in 2016 to a lesser charge, avoiding prison and sex-offender registration, and completed a year of probation.

That incident landed Elkins on desk duty and prompted one of the 35 internal investigations he faced in his 19-year police career. He resigned, effective Jan. 31, before officials decided what disciplinary action he should face.

Fifteen years ago, Elkins was charged with having sex with a 16-year-old boy he befriended while moonlighting as a security guard at Amundsen High School on the North Side — a case for which he was cleared by a Cook County judge and never faced any punishment by the police department. In a previous interview with the Sun-Times, he denied the charges.

Despite the investigations and criminal charges, Elkins will be eligible to start drawing a yearly, taxpayer-supported pension of more than $61,000 when he turns 50 in 2024, records show.

He would have gotten a much smaller pension, but he got permission from the Policemen’s Annuity and Benefit Fund to give him credit for more than four years he spent as a Cook County sheriff’s dispatcher and a Cook County Forest Preserve District cop before becoming a Chicago cop in 1999, the Sun-Times previously reported.

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Dexter Saffold took the witness stand more than five years ago and described the chaos he saw at a South Side gas station in 2011.

Saffold told Cook County Circuit Judge Nicholas Ford that he watched a man shoot and kill one man there and badly wound another.

And he pointed out who did it — the defendant, Darien Harris, the man in the courtroom wearing the jail jumpsuit.

There was no physical evidence linking Harris to the shooting that left Rondell Moore dead and Quincy Woulard badly hurt.

Still, the judge, hearing the case without a jury, found Saffold persuasive. Ford called him an “honest witness” and said he’d given “unblemished” testimony. Largely based on that testimony, he found Harris guilty and sent him to prison for 76 years for murder.

But what the judge — and the accused — didn’t know was that Saffold had been deemed legally blind years earlier by his doctors and the U.S. government, the result of advanced glaucoma.

Now, Harris, 26, is trying to get his conviction overturned, citing the eyewitness’s previously unrevealed vision problems and also that, when asked about his vision, Saffold testified he had no problem seeing.

“The mere fact that fact that he lied under oath about his ability to see should alone call his testimony into question,” Harris’s attorney says in a filing that asks the Cook County state’s attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit to review the case.

The application for review notes that another witness, who wasn’t called to testify, has provided a sworn statement saying detectives pressured him to identify someone he didn’t believe was the shooter.

The state’s attorney’s office would only confirm that the case is under review.

A crime-scene photo of the BP gas station at 6600 S. Stony Island Ave. where the shooting occurred. | Cook County court files

The shooting happened around 8:20 p.m. on June 7, 2011, at the BP station at 6600 S. Stony Island Ave. Moore and his brother Ronald Moore pulled in with car trouble. Woulard, a mechanic, was working under the hood when a Lexus pulled up.

According to prosecutors, Harris got out of the car and started shooting. Rondell Moore was shot three times in the back. Woulard was hit in the chest and under his right arm.

Harris had turned 18 three months before the shooting. According to court records, he came from a stable family and had no previous criminal record, and he got his high school equivalency diploma while awaiting trial.

When Harris went on trial in 2014, Saffold testified that he was heading home from a fast-food joint on his motorized scooter and was maybe 18 feet away when the gunfire started. He told the judge the shooter bumped into him, nearly causing him to drop the gun, as he ran off.

The issue of Saffold’s vision came up when Harris’s lawyer asked whether the man had diabetes. Saffold said he did. Asked by the lawyer whether he had any vision problems, Saffold said, “Yes, I do,” then said that, no, he didn’t have any difficulty seeing and continued to testify.

Saffold’s vision problems have been documented in lawsuits he’s filed over a span of 16 years against colleges, a landlord and two employers. He said they discriminated against him because of his visual disability and sight limitations, court records show.

According to the records, Saffold started receiving Social Security disability benefits in 2002 because of his vision, which a doctor diagnosed as 20/400 in both eyes. That means that something a person with normal vision could see 400 feet away, he’d see only if he was just 20 feet away. And his field of vision was measured at 10 degrees in each eye, records show — 20 degrees or less, and a person is legally blind.

One of the doctor’s notes stating that eyewitness Dexter Saffold is legally blind. It was written in 2002 — nine years before Saffold testified that he saw Darien Harris shoot a man to death at a South Side gas station. The note was filed with a request by Harris to the Cook County state’s attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit to review his case.

In one case, Saffold sued the City Colleges of Chicago in federal court in 2012. He said that after he enrolled in an adult education class at Wilbur Wright College on the Northwest Side in 2011 and gave medical documentation of his visual disability, he was to be provided with a note-taker, enlarged-print documents in class, a visual monitor and additional time during test-taking.

But he didn’t get the accommodations, according to his lawsuit, which said he struggled as a result to see the board in class, take notes and participate. Saffold settled out of court for an undisclosed amount about three months before testifying against Harris.

In an interview, Saffold says the shooter was near enough that he could see and identify him.

“I don’t know that man for nothing in the world,” Saffold says of Harris. “All I know is that, on this particular day, he shot somebody.”

Saffold, who says his eyesight has worsened to 20/800 but varies day to day, says he told prosecutors before Harris’s trial about his vision problems.

Neither of them, Jane Sack and Denise Loiterstein, responded to requests for comment.

Judge Nicholas Ford, who convicted Darien Harris and sentenced him to 76 years in prison largely on the testimony of an eyewitness he wasn’t told was legally blind. | Sun-Times files

Harris’s trial lawyer, Donna Rotunno, says the prosecutors didn’t disclose any information about Saffold’s visual impairment.

Jodie Toney, then 53, was working at the gas station and later told police he was about to ask the man whose car had broken down at the pump if he needed antifreeze. Toney said that’s when the shooter got there.

The gas station attendant also told them he recognized the gunman, that about an hour earlier the man had threatened to “blow his head off.” Toney called the police because he thought the man was stealing something.

Lead detectives Isaac Lambert and Devinn Jones had Toney view a lineup including Harris at what was then Area Two police headquarters about a week after the shooting. Toney didn’t identify anyone as the shooter, according to police reports.

In a sworn statement taken last June by Harris’s current lawyer and a defense investigator, Toney said the detectives coached him before the lineup, showing him a mug shot and telling him the main in that photo was the shooter.

Toney said he told them no, that it wasn’t who he saw shoot Moore and Woulard. He said the detectives then had him view the lineup and that the shooter wasn’t there.

Toney said in the affidavit that the detectives got angry and that he thought they were pressuring him. He said they told him that, if he made the identification, “It will be one bad guy off the street.”

Toney wasn’t called to testify in 2014. He said in the statement that he was never contacted by Harris’s attorney prior to trial.

Since 2016, the Chicago Police Department has, under most circumstances, prohibited detectives who are involved in an investigation from overseeing lineups.

In 2011, though, Saffold, Toney and Ronald Moore were shown lineups by one or both of the lead detectives, according to police records.

Saffold says he remembers the identification process well. About a week after the shooting, he says he went to the police station, where he viewed a physical lineup and several photo arrays. Saffold says he can’t remember whether the photo arrays or the physical lineup were shown to him first but that in each instance he was able to identify Harris.

Saffold says he didn’t feel pressured to pick him and that the detectives wanted him to be absolutely sure before he made any identification.

During Harris’s trial, prosecutors entered as evidence the physical lineup that Saffold viewed and said that’s when he identified Harris as the shooter.

They did not mention the photo lineups Saffold says he was shown. Nor were any additional lineups noted in the police reports.

A police spokesman wouldn’t make Jones or Lambert, who both have been promoted to sergeant since the Harris case, available for an interview.

Two other witnesses linked Harris to the shooting, including one who recanted his identification in court, saying detectives had pressured him.

Aaron Jones, who was driving a black Lexus that the police pulled over right after the shooting, testified that he gave Harris a ride to the gas station before the shooting. Near the end of his testimony, though, Jones cursed and recanted the identification he’d made to detectives of Harris, which came after he was held for two days in police custody.

“He wasn’t never in my car. He wasn’t never in my car,” Jones told the judge, who retired April 12. “The detectives told me to say this.”

After being scolded by Ford, Jones testified that detectives told him he could face life in prison and that, as a result of that threat, he told them “whatever they wanted to hear.”

Ronald Moore, the brother of the man killed, identified Harris in a lineup and in court. But he testified that was after friends showed him a music video in which Harris appeared and so did Jones’s black Lexus.

Judge Michael B. Hyman wrote the opinion upholding Darien Harris’s conviction. | Illinois Appellate Court

In 2016, the Illinois Appellate Court upheld Harris’s conviction.

It cited Moore’s “apparent animosity” toward Harris in acknowledging his credibility could be at issue. It also said Jones’s courtroom recantation put his identification of Harris in doubt.

Still, Saffold was a credible witness, Appellate Judge Michael B. Hyman wrote, citing surveillance video he said corroborates the testimony he and Moore gave.

The video showed a man whose thin build and short hairstyle generally fit Harris. But it doesn’t show the shooting or the shooter’s face, which prosecutors acknowledged in their closing argument.

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

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• FBI investigating engagement ring given to ex-Gov. Pat Quinn’s press secretary

A diamond engagement ring that former Gov. Pat Quinn’s campaign manager bought for Quinn’s press secretary has become part of the federal investigation that’s resulted in extortion charges against longtime Chicago Teamsters boss John Coli Sr., the Chicago Sun-Times has learned.

The FBI is trying to determine who paid for the ring, which former Quinn press secretary Brooke Anderson got nearly four years ago from her husband Lou Bertuca, the governor’s 2014 campaign manager.

The key witness against Coli, Alexander S. Pissios, whose Cinespace Chicago Film Studios got millions of dollars in state grants under Quinn’s administration, has told the FBI he contributed $500 towards the purchase of the ring.

Pissios, president of the West Side studio where TV shows including “Chicago P.D.” and “Chicago Fire” are shot, secretly agreed to cooperate with federal investigators to avoid being charged with bankruptcy fraud. He has an unusual “non-prosecution” deal in return for his cooperation.

Pissios told the FBI that he helped pay for the ring at the suggestion of his lobbyist Frank Cortese, who helped convince the Quinn administration to award Cinespace state grants totaling $27.3 million.

The last of those grants — for $10 million — came a few weeks after Quinn lost the November 2014 governor’s race to Bruce Rauner.

But the new governor forced Pissios to give back the money after the Sun-Times reported that the land Cinespace said in its grant application it needed the money to buy wasn’t for sale.

The Sun-Times also has learned that Pissios paid part of the tab for Bertuca’s bachelor party in Miami and said he gave a $1,000 wedding present to Bertuca and Anderson, who were married on Jan 24, 2015, shortly after Quinn left office.

Then-Gov. Pat Quinn speaks at Cinespace Chicago Film Studios in April 2013 as Alexander S. Pissios (second from right) looks on. | Sun-Times

The federal grand jury that indicted Coli issued subpoenas to the governor’s office last August, seeking personnel files for Bertuca, Anderson and John D’Alessandro, another former Quinn official. Pissios has told authorities D’Alessandro was helpful in securing the state grants.

Shortly before Quinn left the governor’s office, he found a new job for Bertuca. Over the objections of Rauner and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Quinn gave Bertuca a two-year, $160,000-a-year appointment as executive director of the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, the city-state agency that owns the home of the Chicago White Sox.

Quinn, who attended the wedding, says he doesn’t know whether anyone helped pay for Anderson’s engagement ring. The former governor says he didn’t know Bertuca had a bachelor party, let alone who paid for it. And he says he didn’t know whether Pissios attended the wedding.

“This is the first time I’m hearing about it,” Quinn told the Sun-Times. “I have no information about this matter.”

But Quinn, who built his reputation by attacking unethical behavior by politicians including former Govs. George Ryan and Rod Blagojevich, says no one who was on his staff should have accepted personal benefits from anyone who had contracts with the state of Illinois.

“My view is this: If you’re in public life, you have a duty to the public, and you should have no private dealing that would cloud your judgment,” Quinn says. “They were very hard workers. I expected each of them to follow the same rules I followed.”

Quinn says he doesn’t believe Bertuca had any role in awarding the grants to Cinespace but also says he didn’t “know all the grant-making process.”

Gov. Pat Quinn and his press secretary Brooke Anderson in March 2014. | Sun-Times

Bertuca, Anderson and D’Alessandro didn’t respond to messages.

Bertuca, 34, is now a registered lobbyist for a California company, Turo, that helps people lease their cars to others. Anderson, 35, is head of global safety communications for Uber in San Francisco. D’Alessandro, 30, of Melrose Park, works for several companies, lobbying Illinois officials.

Quinn, an alumnus of Fenwick High School, was lieutenant governor in 2006 when he hired Bertuca. Bertuca had played on a Fenwick basketball team coached by Quinn’s brother John Quinn. D’Alessandro, also an alum of the Oak Park school, began working for Quinn in 2011 in the governor’s office.

John D’Alessandro. | Illinois secretary of state’s office

Pissios, 46, and Cortese, 55, of LaGrange, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Pissios, who lived for years in the north suburbs, has had a string of financial difficulties. A mortgage company foreclosed on his home in Hawthorn Woods, and the house was sold at a sheriff’s sale last year.

Three years ago, federal authorities threatened to charge Pissios with bankruptcy fraud for failing to disclose a $100,000 bank account. Pissios agreed to cooperate with them, and he secretly recorded conversations with Coli, a Quinn supporter who was indicted in July 2017.

Then-Chicago Teamsters boss John Coli Sr. on Oct. 21, 2011, with Gov. Pat Quinn and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, announcing labor settlements against McCormick Place. | Sun-Times files

Coli is charged with extorting more than $325,000 from Cinespace to prevent labor problems with the Teamsters, which since has booted him from the union. Coli pleaded not guilty, but he’s expected to change his plea next month.

Pissios has told federal agents he hired Cortese at Coli’s suggestion and that Coli, Cortese and D’Alessandro were instrumental in obtaining the state grants starting in 2009.

Frank Cortese. | Illinois secretary of state’s office

Sometime during the summer or fall of 2014, as Quinn was running for re-election, Pissios got in touch with his jeweler, asking her to help find Bertuca an engagement ring for Anderson. Pissios’ jeweler agreed to meet Bertuca in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel on Chicago’s Gold Coast to show him rings. Pissios, D’Alessandro and Cortese were also there, according to sources.

At some point later, the jeweler, who was interviewed by the FBI last August, ended up selling a ring to Bertuca.

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The Coli grand jury also issued a subpoena three months ago for the personnel file and other records of state Sen. Thomas Cullerton, D-Villa Park, a cousin of Illinois Senate President John Cullerton, D-Chicago. The Senate president appointed his cousin, who has worked for the Teamsters, as chairman of the Senate’s committee on labor.

John Cullerton’s son Kyle has been a board member of the not-for-profit organization Stage 18 that Pissios set up at Cinespace to aid young, independent filmmakers.

The Quinn administration gave Cinespace — which had operated a movie studio in Toronto — state grants to set up operations in Chicago in a former Ryerson Steel plant in North Lawndale. The campus now also includes Lagunitas Brewery.

Over the past decade, the state has awarded more than $420 million in tax credits to TV shows and movies, many of them filmed at Cinespace. They got those tax breaks for hiring Illinois residents, including Teamsters union members, and spending money on Illinois businesses.

But Illinois officials have never done an audit to verify the accuracy of the bills and receipts the productions submitted to get those tax breaks. State officials refuse to release those records because the TV shows and movie producers argue they are trade secrets.

Quinn says “there should be no clouds to hide how public money is spent.’’ But he says Cinespace has been a boon to the city and the state.

“It was a closed steel factory,” Quinn says, defending the money he gave the studio. “”It’s proven to be a goldmine for jobs for everyday people.”

A federal grand jury subpoena for personnel files for three former aides to ex-Gov. Pat Quinn: Lou Bertuca, Brooke Anderson and John D’Alessandro.

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• To avoid prison, Chicago movie studio mogul went undercover for feds, June 17, 2018
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• Indicted former Chicago Teamsters boss John T. Coli Sr. booted out by union, Feb. 11, 2018
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“No world-class global city has a failing central business district. It is not in our interest as a city to pit one side of the city against another. Our challenge is to make that central business district work for all parts of . . . Chicago.”

Mayor Rahm Emanuel uttered those words last August before announcing he wouldn’t run for a third term. Perhaps unwittingly he was drafting his closing argument for history.

During the mayor’s eight years, he benefited from a steady march of employers into downtown Chicago, many from the suburbs. Hardly a week passed without the mayor, who loves the role of salesman-in-chief, speaking at a new office or cutting a ribbon on something that promised jobs.

It might have been luck as much as skill. But with a background in investment banking, Emanuel, a fundraiser with few peers, understands business cycles and what it takes to get before a corporate honcho and not leave without a “yes.”

Yet the city’s neighborhoods didn’t flourish during his tenure the way downtown did. For Chicago, the Emanuel years saw population loss, ceaseless violence and a poisoned relationship between the police and the people. All overshadowed good news in economic development.

For his critics, the Rahm Emanuel who closed schools and mental health clinics did far more harm than good. But to most who follow development and job growth in the city, the “Mayor 1 Percent” tag hung on Emanuel is unfair.

“If nothing else, he deserves credit for recognizing the neighborhood disinvestment that has taken place over many years,” said Craig Chico, president and chief executive officer of the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council.

City Hall’s plan for neighborhoods has included a share-the-wealth fund that uses fees from downtown projects to support small businesses in disadvantaged areas. It has tapped tax-increment financing, or TIF, to support local retail and has an affordable-housing ordinance to force builders of market-rate housing to support cheaper new units off-site.

The program for small business, called the Neighborhood Opportunity Bonus, has generated $47 million for about 200 businesses and community organizations since 2016, with $169 million more in the pipeline. Critics have said it falls short because it helps only those enterprises that can get credit elsewhere.

But Chico praised Emanuel for insisting on standards. “You’d be doing these entrepreneurs a disservice if you fund them upfront,” he said.

Emanuel’s neighborhood successes have included manufacturing and distribution projects in Pullman, grocery stores planted in former “food deserts” and housing renovation such as the long-sought reopening of the historic Rosenwald Courts Apartments at 4642 S. Michigan Ave.

“They have come up with very creative and novel ways of doing development,” says Leon Walker, managing partner of DL3 Realty, which was behind the Whole Foods-anchored Englewood Square mall at 63rd & Halsted. | Provided photo

“Whether it is the mayor or his staff, I know that their heart is in doing the right thing,” said Leon Walker, managing partner of DL3 Realty, which was behind a Whole Foods-anchored plaza in Englewood that opened in 2016 and a Jewel-Osco that opened this year in Woodlawn. “They have come up with very creative and novel ways of doing development.”

One of Emanuel’s foremost allies in the Chicago City Council, Ald. Anthony Beale (9th), said he bonded with the mayor early over successful efforts to land a Walmart in Pullman.

“He saw very quickly the opportunities that are here. Nobody else has the kind of land and access to the expressway that we have,“ Beale said. “He saw it. We had a legitimate partnership. If I needed for him to make a phone call, he made it.”

Ald. Anthony A. Beale: “He saw very quickly the opportunities that are here. Nobody else has the kind of land and access to the expressway that we have.“ | Rich Hein / Sun-Times

Beale said communities that lack development need to take an inventory of their assets — including land, labor force and transit — and adopt a “squeaky wheel” approach with whoever occupies the mayor’s office.

The disadvantage in Emanuel’s approach to development is that it’s strictly deals-oriented, said Dan Cooper, director of research for the independent, not-for-profit Metropolitan Planning Council.

“Some of that has been very successful,” Cooper said. “But, for me, it’s been at the expense of a real thoughtful comprehensive plan for the neighborhoods.”

Cooper said some of Emanuel’s initiatives have been tone-deaf, such as the $95 million police academy in West Garfield Park, advanced despite outrage over police brutality.

The Metropolitan Planning Council’s Dan Cooper on Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s deals-oriented development approach: “Some of that has been very successful. But, for me, it’s been at the expense of a real thoughtful comprehensive plan for the neighborhoods.”

Others say planning is best done during the slow times, not amid a long economic boom and that Emanuel can’t be faulted for seizing opportunities where he can.

He’s done it while reducing reliance on TIFs, which have been controversial because they siphon property taxes from local government and can subsidize private development. Under Emanuel, the city has diverted TIF spending to public works, and it also has returned surpluses to local taxing bodies. The mayor also has improved reporting for how TIF money is spent.

David Reifman, Emanuel’s outgoing commissioner of planning and development, said the administration has created tools for economic growth during years when the federal and state governments were little help. “We have been able to leverage our market strength to create opportunities in the neighborhoods,” he said.

Reifman said the neighborhood focus isn’t limited to isolated deals and that it brings in policy initiatives such as transit improvements and work on parks and libraries. “These are community assets that are foundational to our neighborhoods,” he said.

An example is the city’s transfer to Englewood of its North Side fleet-management facility. It added daytime population to support the Whole Foods and other recent retailers. The city also relocated City Colleges of Chicago employees to Kennedy-King College at 63rd and Halsted streets.

Aarti Kotak, the mayor’s deputy chief of staff for neighborhood economic development, said the public investments can “create an artificial momentum” that helps bring private investment to a community. The initiatives often involve fulfilling neighborhood plans written years ago, according to Kotak.

“You can call them deals,” she said. “I call them pulling plans into life.”

It can take time before construction equipment shows up. “Downtown capital flows easily in a strong market,” Reifman said. “It’s harder to get equity and debt into areas with a declining population.”

Downtown, the inflow of business has been spectacular. Emanuel leaves successor Lori Lightfoot with two mega-projects and their $1.6 billion in TIF-related headaches. The Chicago City Council approved TIF subsidies last month for the Lincoln Yards project in the old North Branch Industrial Corridor and a project known as The 78 on  62 acres at Roosevelt Road and Clark Street.

A signature Emanuel program would apply at Lincoln Yards. It takes development fees the city gets from manufacturing zones that are moving to other uses and spends the money to improve other industrial areas. It’s another case of the mayor using central-area success to subsidize work somewhere else. “This will support head-of-household, working family jobs,” Reifman said,

A tally from the real-estate firm CBRE Group has 56 companies moving from the suburbs to central Chicago since Emanuel became mayor. Helping that has been zoning that’s pushed the central business district into the Near West Side and Fulton Market corridor.

Ed Kus, an attorney who as a city employee wrote the last comprehensive revision of city zoning rules, said Emanuel has used money from downtown deals judiciously to help neighborhoods. Kus said there’s no point in waiting for long-term plans in a city that’s established and, in many areas, has little vacant space.

“Growing downtown is the only way the city is going to get out of the financial mess it’s in,” says John O’Donnell, chief executive officer of Riverside Investment & Development, which built the 150 N. Riverside Plaza office tower (above) and is backing two other big projects. | Paul Saltzman / Sun-Times

With mega-developments in the works, there’s evidence the downtown core will keep growing. John O’Donnell, chief executive officer of Riverside Investment & Development, which built an office tower at 150 N. Riverside Plaza and is backing two other projects, said downtown merits the attention because it’s the city’s tax generator.

“Growing downtown is the only way the city is going to get out of the financial mess it’s in,” O’Donnell said.

While the mayor has supported the big projects, O’Donnell said there’s a growing backlash to tapping downtown projects for affordable housing. He said the cost of that is beginning to make some developers rethink deals.

“That will reduce the supply of housing, and that’s not the way to make things more affordable,” he said.

It’s inevitable that an outgoing Chicago mayor would have unfinished business. For Emanuel, a notorious control freak, it might be galling that he can’t write the epilogue for his own administration.

He might have to settle for something like this from Collete English Dixon, executive director of Roosevelt University’s Marshall Bennett Institute of Real Estate and a veteran of development finance.

“Mayors can be catalysts. They can be hurdles,” English Dixon said. ”The city of Chicago has a downtown area with a value to the business community that has manifested itself. And that’s to the mayor’s credit.”

Collete English Dixon, executive director of Roosevelt University’s Marshall Bennett Institute of Real Estate, credits Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s efforts. | Roosevelt University

3 key development wins, 3 whiffs

WINS

• O’Hare Airport: The $8.7 billion modernization should secure Chicago’s global connections. Getting the airlines and other interests together on this enormous investment was no easy feat.

• Riverwalk completion: What many Chicagoans will remember Rahm Emanuel for. Now, they must eat hearty and drink up when they use it because the city needs Riverwalk revenue to pay off a $98.7 million federal loan on the project.

• Historic preservation: Emanuel did what former Mayor Richard M. Daley couldn’t here: He patched together a venture to restore the landmark Uptown Theater, anchor of a possible entertainment district. He also backed refurbishment of the Logan and Congress theaters.

WIN: the Riverwalk. | Colin Boyle / Sun-Times

WHIFFS

• U.S. Steel South Works site: 500-plus acres of lakefront property got city road help, but the huge site is still vacant after all these years. Time to bring back the Dave Matthews Band?

• Amazon HQ2: Why wave rich incentives for a politically fraught project that Chicago realistically had no chance to get? All of the losing cities were just leverage for what Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wanted.

• Tesla-in-a-tunnel: Elon Musk’s plan to whisk travelers between O’Hare Airport and downtown was a pipe dream. Fast transit to and from O’Hare needs to rely on surface rail and find reliable private-sector partners.

WHIFF: Redeveloping the former site of U.S. Steel’s South Works. | Sun-Times files

Cook County Circuit Judge Nicholas Ford, a former prosecutor whose rulings in a police brutality case and other criminal matters have come under fire on appeal, has retired.

Ford, first appointed to the bench in 1997, retired as of April 12, a spokesman for the Illinois Supreme Court confirmed in response to questions. He couldn’t be reached for comment.

The former assistant Cook County state’s attorney’s judicial rulings were reversed in more than a dozen cases, Injustice Watch has reported. Appellate rulings repeatedly criticized him for not properly considering issues raised by defense lawyers.

Injustice Watch and the Sun-Times reported Sunday that Ford found one defendant, Darien Harris, guilty of murder in 2014 and sentenced him to 76 years in prison after a bench trial in a case in which the key eyewitness was legally blind and prosecutors failed to disclose that to the judge or the defense. The witness initially testified that he had vision problems but quickly reversed that statement and continued testifying.

Though the Illinois Appellate Court upheld Harris’s conviction, it noted there were credibility concerns with the two other witnesses’ testimony — including one who recanted while testifying and said the Chicago police had used threats to get him to make a false identification.

In 2013, an Illinois appellate panel reversed Ford’s decision to reject a post-conviction petition by a defendant, Anthony Jakes, who said he had been tortured into falsely confessing by two officers under the command of now-disgraced former Chicago police Commander Jon Burge. Ford dismissed the petition for lack of evidence, the appeals court found, after he had refused to allow Jakes to obtain evidence that the detectives had been accused of torture in other cases.

Burge, who died last September, was sentenced to prison in 2011 for lying under oath in civil cases regarding torture of suspects.

In another case, Ford’s decision to reject a post-conviction petition without a hearing was ordered reassigned to another judge after evidence came out that, before becoming a judge, Ford was involved in prosecuting the case.

In 2011, an Illinois appellate panel found that Ford abused his discretion by challenging a psychiatrist’s testimony about a murder suspect’s sanity. That appeals opinion said Ford abandoned his “role as a neutral and impartial arbiter of fact by adopting a prosecutorial role” and exhibiting a “disregard and unfavorable bias toward the expert’s testimony” in which he included “constantly interrupted the expert, contradicting or questioning many of his answers.”

In 2016, the Illinois Appellate Court, acting at the direction of the Illinois Supreme Court, reversed its earlier decision and reversed a murder conviction that was based largely on eyewitness identification. In that case, Ford had refused to let the defense call an expert on mistaken identification as a witness. The judge had said he believed psychologists studied eyewitness identification “so as to increase their degree of remuneration,” adding, “That’s a way of saying I think they’re in it for the money.” The appellate court found that denying such testimony was an abuse of judicial discretion.

Ford twice dismissed charges against a Park Ridge police officer who was accused of chasing and beating two juveniles who had shot a projectile into his car. The officer was represented by an attorney who was the former law partner of Ford’s wife.

Ford first threw out charges against the officer based on his finding that there was an improper prosecutorial delay. When the appellate court reversed him on that, Ford presided over a 2016 non-jury trial at which he found the juveniles weren’t credible.

Park Ridge settled a lawsuit filed by one of the teenagers for $185,000.

In 2017, a top assistant to Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx engaged in a heated exchange in court with Ford over the judge’s order sending a pregnant woman to jail without bail for more than a month while awaiting trial in a case involving a nonviolent crime.

Rick Tulsky is co-founder and co-editor of Injustice Watch, a nonpartisan, not-for-profit journalism organization that conducts in-depth research to expose institutional failures that obstruct justice and equality.

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