By Robert Herguth

With embattled Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez soon out the door after losing the March Democratic primary to Kim Foxx, Alvarez’s top deputy, Daniel Kirk, is finding rough going in his quest to be appointed a Cook County judge.

Not only was he bypassed in a recent round of 13 associate judge appointments made by sitting circuit judges, but he also lost a “recommended” rating he’d been given by a bar group.

The Cook County Bar Association — among the lawyers’ groups that gauge the suitability of candidates for the bench — took the unusual step of rescinding its positive rating of Kirk.

Last year, it found Kirk “recommended” for judge. But now it’s changed its assessment of Alvarez’s first assistant state’s attorney to “not recommended.” Its top designation is “highly recommended.”

The bar group is largely comprised of black lawyers in the Chicago area.

Alvarez has come under fire for her agency’s handling of excessive-force cases involving police officers and for not filing charges sooner in the shooting death of Laquan McDonald, a black 17-year-old, by a white Chicago cop who was charged with first-degree murder only after a video of the shooting was ordered released.

Arlene Coleman, president of the Cook County Bar Association, would say only that the group reconsidered its rating after “there were concerns” expressed by her group’s judicial evaluation committee about Kirk, who also has served as Alvarez’s chief of staff and campaign chairman.

“I’m not going to say what all those concerns were,” Coleman says. “I don’t think we have to give a reason why. We have a right to change our minds.”

She says the about-face was unusual and that Kirk has appealed the “not recommended” label.

The bar association board — which includes two Cook County prosecutors, several sitting or retired judges and political and governmental figures including Cook County Board of Review Commissioner Larry Rogers Jr. — will soon consider his appeal, Coleman says.

Kirk says he hasn’t been told what the concerns about him are.

He’s submitting letters of support with his appeal, including one from the incoming president of the Cook County Bar Association, Natalie Howse, who is a current board member and works as an assistant state’s attorney under Kirk.

Kirk says that, like the bar group, he is committed to diversity and “anti-bias.”

He says he doesn’t know why he was bypassed for an appointment as an associate judge but says there were many excellent candidates.

Kirk was one of more than 280 people who applied last year for associate judge, which pays $181,220 a year.

A panel consisting of Chief Cook County Judge Timothy Evans and eight presiding judges interviewed applicants, reviewed work histories and checked ratings from bar groups. Just after the primary, the panel announced a “short list” of 26 candidates for 13 slots in an election in which nearly 250 sitting circuit judges were eligible to vote.

“The majority had excellent credentials,” Cook County Circuit Judge Marjorie Laws, a member of Evans’ panel, says of the applicants, declining to discuss the nominating process, saying it’s confidential.

Coleman says her group rescinded Kirk’s rating after the short list came out.

Evans wouldn’t comment.

All 26 short-listed applicants got “positive ratings from the bar associations,” according to an announcement from Evans’ office.

He wouldn’t release bar group evaluations for other applicants, who were vetted by a dozen lawyers’ organizations.

Others who didn’t make the short list included: Mary Melchor, the inspector general for Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Dorothy Brown, whose agency is being investigated by the FBI for alleged job-selling, and Alexander Vroustouris, who was former Mayor Richard M. Daley’s first inspector general.

Kirk has other options to get on the bench. He can seek election as a judge, wait for other associate judge openings and reapply or seek an appointment through the Illinois Supreme Court to fill an opening.

Supreme Court Justice Mary Jane Theis is in the process of helping fill two Cook County judge vacancies, but court officials won’t say whether Kirk has applied or is under consideration.

Kirk won’t say, either, saying that process is confidential.

Robert Herguth is an investigator with the Better Government Association.

After moving around the city for years, Taura Willhite is glad to now be in a comfortable apartment, with a landlord who’s prompt to respond when she calls with a maintenance request.

What she doesn’t like, though, is the area around the three-story greystone in the 1600 block of South Homan in North Lawndale where she lives. It’s bad enough that she wants to move out.

“The neighborhood is trouble,” says Willhite, 40, a disabled mother who lives there with the help of a Section 8 voucher from the Chicago Housing Authority. “There’s a lot of drug sales and gun violence.”

Under its “Plan for Transformation,” the CHA demolished badly managed, high-rise housing projects in “the largest, most ambitious redevelopment effort of public housing in the United States.” The aim was to help people find better housing options and, with that, to improve their prospects for work, education and quality of life.

“We want to rebuild their souls,” former Mayor Richard M. Daley said of the city’s public housing residents.

More than a decade and a half later, Willhite lives on a trashed-out block that includes 76 CHA-subsidized residents — among them former tenants of the long-gone high-rises. Amid vacant lots and boarded-up homes, they live in 14 buildings, some of them with a history of code violations.

In 1966, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. lived just a short walk away from here while waging his Chicago campaign “to help eradicate a vicious system which seeks to further colonize thousands of Negroes within a slum environment.’’

Fifty years later, vacant lots dot the block where Willhite lives. The buildings there include a century-old single-family home and four three-flats built during the housing boom of the early 2000s.

In the past year, the police have logged 67 crimes on this block — including drug dealing, armed robbery and aggravated battery. Shootings, sexual assaults and other violent crimes have been reported on neighboring blocks.

The CHA provides Taura Willhite with a housing voucher to live in this six-flat, center, on South Homan Avenue. Her landlord plans to rehab the abandoned building next door. | Brian Jackson / Sun-Times

Yet landlords have bought clusters of buildings there and elsewhere on the South Side and the West Side at very low prices, often leasing them to Section 8 tenants, whose rents are subsidized by the government. In many cases, they’re hoping the neighborhoods will improve so they can sell at a profit.

“Part of my motive is financial,” says Marcin Kania, who leases an apartment to Willhite in a redeveloped a six-unit building and plans to rehab an abandoned building next door. “Right now, it is a great time to purchase the property. I’m hoping that this area in 20 or 30 years will turn into Logan Square or Humboldt Park.”

Willhite says she moved here because she’d been a victim of domestic violence and needed a place to live. She uses a cane because of a disability and has struggled to find housing that’s accessible, affordable and safe. As a result, Willhite has lived in a number of apartments in the 15 years she’s participated in the voucher program.

Willhite found her current apartment through a newspaper ad last year.

“I didn’t know the neighborhood was like this,” she says.

Willhite has sent her 12-year-old son — the only one of her three kids still at home — to live with her brother in the suburbs. She told a housing counselor, hired by the CHA, she wants to move as well.

“I said I don’t feel safe,” she says. “They said I had to wait until my lease is up.”

That’s not until August, when Willhite says she hopes to be moving “somewhere that’s nice.”

Taura Willhite, outside her apartment on South Homan in North Lawndale. Brian Jackson / Sun-Times

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

From her 49th-floor condo at Lake Point Tower, Diane L. Gottlieb oversees a public housing empire that brings her nearly $1 million a year in government-subsidized rent.

Gottlieb, 55, has a growing portfolio of apartments — from swanky digs in a Gold Coast high-rise to rundown buildings on the South Side and the West Side — that she leases to dozens of tenants whose rent is covered in full or in part by the Chicago Housing Authority.

The buildings include a brick three-flat in the 1600 block of South Homan in North Lawndale, one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods, that Gottlieb bought three years ago for $30,000 after the property went into foreclosure.

Today, she gets back more than a tenth of her purchase price every month — $3,032 — in rent from that building, with two-thirds of that coming out of federal tax dollars managed by the CHA.

Diane Gottlieb leaves housing court at the Daley Center on April 13. | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

Gottlieb owns seven of the 30 residential buildings on this block, which is littered with trash, vacant lots and boarded-up homes. Her tenants on South Homan include 21 people who live in 10 apartments with rent subsidies provided by the CHA’s Housing Choice Voucher Program, commonly known as Section 8.

Six of her buildings on South Homan have a history of building-code violations.

That’s not unusual for landlords renting to CHA voucher-holders, according to a Chicago Sun-Times and Better Government Association investigation that found that thousands of voucher tenants are living in buildings that have been cited by City Hall inspectors over the past five years for code violations.

The Sun-Times and BGA also found that, despite the CHA’s massive “Plan for Transformation” of public housing, most of the more than 44,000 voucher tenants continue to live in high-crime, poverty-riddled neighborhoods on the South Side and the West Side where the bulk of the housing agency’s tenants lived in the days of the old CHA high-rise projects.

The CHA began demolishing Cabrini-Green, the Robert Taylor Homes and other projects 16 years ago, aiming to help people find better housing options. Since then, providing housing for poor people has become a growth industry for private landlords that lap up government funding by catering to the need for low-income housing.

And the CHA’s largest landlord is a company whose investors include Gov. Bruce Rauner.

RELATED STORY: Comfortable apartment, but ‘neighborhood is trouble’

Since 2000, there has been a 40 percent drop in the number of people living in buildings owned by the CHA — and a 40 percent rise in the number of poor people living in privately owned apartments and houses leased with the help of vouchers.

Four of every 10 voucher tenants live in buildings that have had at least one code violation in the past five years, the Sun-Times and BGA found. Some of the citations were issued while the buildings were vacant, but many occurred while CHA tenants lived in them.

The problems have ranged from no heat, to rodent and structural problems, to minor issues such as landlords failing to post their names and addresses or those of a management company on buildings.

EARLIER STORIES

Chicago’s public housing divide — March 13, 2016

How housing choice aid program works — March 13, 2016

You paid to build them, now you pay to lease them — March 14, 2016

Emanuel blasts CHA voucher program as policy ‘gone awry’ — March 16, 2016

CHA moves to strip aid from suspect in gym murder — March 20, 2016

The Chicago Department of Buildings doesn’t routinely notify the CHA about code violations.

“The city and CHA are working to coordinate information and develop a process that will address building-code violation information when necessary,” says Molly Sullivan, a CHA spokeswoman. “CHA receives notification from the city when violations are so serious that they require . . . tenants to be vacated.”

Private landlords collectively are paid more than $560 million a year for voucher households, according to CHA records. More than 76 percent of that — $430 million — is covered by the CHA using money from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

***

Gary R. Carlson is among the landlords with the most units in the housing voucher program.

“I’ve been called a slumlord,” Carlson says. “That’s not really nice for me. Anything the public don’t like, we’re slumlords.”

Carlson, 64, a former auto mechanic, began buying apartment buildings on the Northwest Side in the early 1980s. Today, he owns about 60 buildings with more than 500 apartments in and around Albany Park and Irving Park.

Carlson takes in $364,150 a month from renting 333 apartments to 627 CHA voucher-holders, records show. The CHA covers 75 percent of his rents, which range from $820 to $1,550 a month.

Over the past five years, city inspectors have found 589 code violations at 47 of Carlson’s buildings where CHA tenants live. Most of the violations — including citations for rodents, roaches and a lack of smoke detectors — were quickly resolved.

“I don’t rent no garbage,” Carlson says. “You’re not gonna see any granite countertops or jacuzzis in my buildings. But you’re not gonna see any squalor, either.

“Nobody deserves to live in substandard or dangerous conditions, that kind of stuff.”

Carlson says he’s frustrated with the CHA, which pays two companies to manage the voucher program.

“We have no interaction with the CHA,” Carlson says. “None. Zero. There’s no rhyme or reason as to how they determine rent.”

Carlson — who has made $9,250 in political contributions since 2001, mostly to Ald. Margaret Laurino (39th) — manages his apartments with a small staff. Carlson sets his own rules for his tenants. Key among them: He insists on visiting prospective tenants before he’ll rent to them.

“No home visit, no rent,” he says. “If you don’t feel comfortable, don’t rent to them.’’

And Carlson isn’t afraid to evict problem tenants. Last year, he sued to evict 17 of his tenants, about half of them voucher-holders.

“You’ve got to pay your rent on time and live in peace,” he says. “I don’t like the police coming to my buildings.”

Sometimes, CHA voucher-holders have more people living in an apartment than authorized, Carlson says — often a boyfriend staying with the woman who has the voucher. He has a name for the boyfriends.

“They’re always going to lie because there’s going to be a ‘man pet,’ ” Carlson says. “You deal with all kinds of people — crazies, lazies.”

Still, he says, “They all deserve a place to live.”

***

Steve Joung is chief executive officer of Pangea Properties, the largest landlord in the CHA’s voucher program. | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

Amid the housing market crash and three years after selling an online payday-loan company for millions of dollars, Steve Joung and Al Goldstein — Chicago tech entrepreneurs — formed Pangea Properties and began buying up hundreds of distressed buildings on the South Side and the West Side.

“We don’t buy bad buildings here and there,” says Joung, the company’s chief executive officer. “We buy an entire block.”

Pangea, whose investors include Rauner, owns and manages more than 8,000 apartments in Chicago and the suburbs — 1,200 of them rented by CHA voucher-holders whose households have a total of 2,111 people, as of January.

The largest landlord in the voucher program, Pangea collects nearly $1.1 million a month from voucher tenants, with the CHA covering 77 percent of that.

“Our mission was to provide investment in underserved neighborhoods,” Joung says. “So, by definition, we’re going to be attractive to the Section 8 clientele.”

The typical apartment in a Pangea building rents for about $800, according to Joung, who describes the company’s properties as “workforce housing.”

Over the past five years, city building inspectors have found 3,597 code violations at 300 addresses Pangea now leases to voucher tenants.

Joung says Pangea often buys buildings that have problems, then fixes them up.

To address code violations and tenants’ complaints, the company has its own call center, data analysis system and crews.

The CHA covers 95 percent of the $2,530 a month Pangea Properties collects for three apartments leased to voucher-holders in this building in the 1700 block of East 71st Street. Gov. Bruce Rauner is among Pangea’s investors. | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

Showing off Pangea properties in South Shore, Joung points out new security cameras in the courtyards, free Wi-Fi for tenants, fresh paint and contact information for his company that’s posted in vestibules so tenants know where to go with complaints. Pangea also has offices in six different “zones” in the city.

“Our residents know exactly where to find us,” he says. “We don’t drive in once a month to collect rents.”

Since 2008, Pangea, Joung and the company’s board members have made campaign contributions totaling more than $59,000 in local and state races, including $19,000 to Mayor Rahm Emanuel, $11,000 to Ald. Michelle Harris and her 8th Ward Democratic organization and $6,300 to Rauner.

“I give to both sides of the aisle,” Joung says,“to those who improve the lives of people of Illinois.”

Gov. Bruce Rauner. AP file photo

Rauner owns stock worth more than $5,000 in Pangea and made income in excess of $1,200 in 2014, according to a financial disclosure statement the governor filed last May.

The governor’s stake in Pangea is less than 5 percent, Rauner press secretary Lance Trover says. “He has always been a small, passive investor and has never had any involvement in the management or operation of” the company, Trover says.

***

The CHA gets an average of 570 complaints a month from its 44,000-plus voucher-holders, according to Sullivan.

Those complaints go to CVR Associates of Tampa, Fla., one of the two companies the CHA contracts with to run the voucher program.

Last year, CVR billed the CHA $16.7 million to administer the voucher program in ZIP codes running in an arc from Rogers Park to Beverly. That includes inspecting apartments, certifying tenants’ income, running a call center and marketing the program.

A second company, Nan McKay & Associates of El Cajon, Calif., billed the agency $10.3 million to oversee vouchers on the West Side, the Northwest Side and the Southwest Side, as well as to administer the wait list citywide for the program.

Another contractor — Screening Reports Inc., of Wood Dale — screens credit histories and runs criminal background checks on tenants. The CHA gave the company a three-year contract last fall worth $2.4 million. Those reports aren’t shared with landlords.

Over the past four years, the CHA also has paid two other entities — a company and a not-for-profit — nearly $4.1 million to help 1,115 voucher-holders rent homes in low-poverty neighborhoods, where less than 5 percent of the population lives in subsidized housing. These “opportunity areas” include downtown, Lincoln Park and other middle- and upper-income neighborhoods.

Housing Opportunities Unlimited of Boston got nearly $1.1 million to provide “mobility counseling services” between July 2012 and the end of 2014, when CHA officials determined it didn’t meet contract goals.

Housing Choice Partners of Illinois, a not-for-profit, has been paid nearly $3 million since July 2012 and has exceeded its mobility services goals, Sullivan says.

Its duties include making follow-up visits with tenants and promoting a property-tax savings program for “opportunity-area” landlords. That program, administered by the Cook County clerk’s office, typically saves landlords between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars in property taxes.

Two years ago, the CHA came under fire for paying extravagant rents — as high as $57,600 a year — to lease in these opportunity areas and agreed to slash those rents in half. Last year, HUD blasted the program, urging the CHA to end it within a year.

The CHA says it’s phasing out the costliest of those “exception-rent” deals by the spring of 2018.

***

Diane Gottlieb paid $30,000 for this three-flat in the 1600 block of South Homan Avenue, which she rents to three CHA voucher-holders for a total of $3,032 a month. The CHA covers 66 percent of that.| Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

Gottlieb is among the landlords cashing in on exception rents.

She bought five condos at 21 E. Chestnut, near Water Tower Place, in the 1990s for a total of $532,500.

CHA voucher-holders lease those condos — three of which are in the exception-rent program — at a total monthly rent of $10,169. The CHA pays 90 percent of that.

The condo association of the building on Chestnut has sued Gottlieb for failing to pay more than $50,000 in monthly assessments on four of the condos she has leased to CHA tenants, court records show. A judge ruled against her in each case, most recently in December.

In all, Gottlieb collects a total of $81,078 a month in rent for leasing 68 apartments, condominiums and houses to voucher-holders whose households total 190 people, records show. The CHA pays 80 percent of that.

In the past year alone, she has bought 11 houses and buildings, most of them in North Lawndale and Roseland. Seven of those properties cost her less than $20,000 each.

“I like the Lawndale area,” Gottlieb says. “I think it’s going to come back.”

One CHA voucher-holder pays Diane Gottlieb $37 a month to live in this house in the 1600 block of South Homan Avenue. Gottlieb gets the remaining $904 in rent from the CHA. | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

Gottlieb also manages properties for other landlords. In 2014, state regulators suspended her real estate license, saying she had collected four months’ rent from the CHA but failed to turn over that money to the building’s owner. Gottlieb agreed last summer to have her license placed on probation for two years, ending the suspension.

Over the past five years, city building inspectors have issued 342 code violations at 22 of her properties that have tenants leasing with CHA vouchers.

Last summer, a judge ordered her to pay $10,560 after city inspectors cited her for having a buckling brick wall, rotting window frames, a crumbling chimney and other code violations at a three-story building in the 1600 block of South Homan that has two voucher tenants. That case has been pending since July 2014.

Gottlieb points out that each building with voucher tenants was inspected by the CHA’s contractors and deemed safe.

“They’re inspecting different things, different guidelines,” Gottlieb says of the building department and CHA inspectors. “The CHA tenant could have been in there a few years, and the city comes out and finds something wrong.

“You can find a city code violation on every property.”

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

Contributing: Data Reporting Lab editor Darnell Little

Eighty-seven-year-old Ernestine Davis says she spent most of January wrapped in a quilted robe and huddled near her gas oven because the heat was out at the South Side apartment she leases with the help of a Chicago Housing Authority voucher.

It was 29 degrees outside on Jan. 13 when city building inspectors showed up and found the temperature inside her South Shore apartment was just 54 degrees.

Davis, who lives alone, had been relying on her stove, an electric space heater and extra clothing to try to stay warm.

“I had a long quilted robe, jogging pants, socks and pajamas,” she says. “I was running my little heater and my stove. I never came up in the front part of the house.”

City Hall sued her landlord for violating Chicago’s heat ordinance, which requires landlords to keep apartments at a minimum of 68 degrees during the day and 66 degrees at night between Sept. 15 and June 1.

The lawsuit was one of 209 that city lawyers have filed against landlords this year over a lack of heat.

Thirty-four of those heat cases involved buildings where the CHA subsidizes rents through “housing choice vouchers,” commonly known as Section 8, a Chicago Sun-Times and Better Government Association investigation found. Those suits involved 94 voucher households with a total of 207 tenants, CHA records show.

“We take these complaints seriously, and our inspection process is designed to ensure properties are in compliance with program guidelines,” says Molly Sullivan, a spokeswoman for the CHA.

Sullivan says the agency “inspects every occupied . . . unit on an annual basis and conducts special complaint inspections when a complaint is received. If a unit repeatedly fails a series of inspections, CHA will suspend payment to the owner and give the tenant the opportunity to move to a new unit.”

EARLIER STORIES

Sunday: Cashing in on the CHA

Chicago’s public housing divide — March 13, 2016

How housing choice aid program works — March 13, 2016

You paid to build them, now you pay to lease them — March 14, 2016

Emanuel blasts CHA voucher program as policy ‘gone awry’ — March 16, 2016

CHA moves to strip aid from suspect in gym murder — March 20, 2016

A week after City Hall building inspectors visited Davis’ first-floor apartment in the 7400 block of South Chappel Avenue, city lawyers sued her landlord, Randolph Lewis. As a result, a Cook County judge appointed a third-party receiver, Globetrotters Engineering Corp., to put in a new boiler, as well as smoke and carbon-monoxide detectors.

The heat was out for several weeks last winter at this building, center, in the 7400 block of South Chappel Avenue, forcing 87-year-old Ernestine Davis to use her oven to try to stay warm. | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

Lewis, 88, doesn’t live in the building, where two of the three apartments were occupied. Davis’ upstairs neighbor also was without heat.

Davis says the heat didn’t come back on until sometime in February.

“They got everything new,” says Davis. “It stays warm now.”

Still, after 24 years in the apartment on South Chappel, she says, “I’m ready to move. But it’s hard to move. I just had two hip replacements.”

Lewis, who couldn’t be reached for comment, paid $58,000 for the building in 1992, records show. He charges Davis $821 a month in rent, with the CHA covering 83 percent of that through the voucher program.

In another case, the CHA cut off the rent for 28 days on a second-floor apartment in a three-flat in the 1500 block of South Hamlin Avenue where all the tenants had vouchers. The heat was out when city inspectors showed up on Dec. 29. They found the voucher tenant on the second floor using her stove to heat her apartment and another voucher-holder, on the third floor, relying on a portable space heater, records show.

A voucher-holder who lives on the first floor, Luisa Torres, says she had no heat for Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Luisa Torres at her home in the 1500 block of South Hamlin Avenue. | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

“We basically slept in the kitchen, with the oven on, with the kids,” says Torres, the mother of two teenagers.

All of the tenants pay for their own heat. But Torres says the furnace wasn’t working because of an electrical problem.

Preston Letts, whose company manages the building, says the problems with the heat began shortly before Christmas and repairs kept failing because of an electrical problem with Commonwealth Edison. Letts says the heat was fixed by mid-January.

Still, the city sued the building owner, Vision Home Sales II of Las Vegas, on Feb. 11. The case was dismissed March 3.

Sullivan says Torres’ apartment failed several CHA inspections before passing on March 22, though Torres says she still has roaches in her kitchen and bedbugs.

“I don’t know how this passed inspection,” Torres says.

Sullivan says the CHA cut off the rent for 28 days for the second-floor apartment over heating and other issues, including roaches. The apartment, which remains occupied by three people, has yet to pass inspection “due to deficiencies on behalf of the landlord and the tenant,” according to Sullivan.

As of January, Vision Home Sales II of Las Vegas had been collecting $3,235 a month in rent from the building, with the CHA covering 88 percent of that.

Shortly after Christmas, the heat went out in the Englewood six-flat where Mileissa Weddle, 25, lives with her parents and siblings. They are one of four voucher households living there.

“The landlord put a sign on the door that the heat was going to be off for a couple of days, but it was longer than that,” Weddle says. “No hot water either. The landlord provided us with space heaters. It was cold. It almost felt like we were outside.”

When city inspectors showed up on Jan. 12, they found it was 58 degrees inside the building. Two days later, city lawyers sued the owner. A judge dismissed the heat case on Feb. 11.

“The heat was out because we were in the process of installing the gas meters,” says Dimitre Dragotchev, a Glenview resident whose company owns the building near 66^th and Stewart. “I thought it was going to last one day. It turned out it lasted a week. It was the coldest time of the year.”

Dragotchev paid $47,500 for the building in May 2014 and has rehabbed it. He collects $4,052 a month from his voucher tenants, with the CHA covering 91 percent of that.

Six CHA voucher-holders living in another six-flat on the South Side had to use stoves and electrical heaters for heat for several days in January when the boiler went out at their South Shore building, according to the city’s lawsuit.

It was 54 degrees in a first-floor apartment when city inspectors arrived at the building on Jan. 21. City Hall sued four days later. A judge dismissed the case on Feb. 9.

The Chicago Housing Authority cut off rent payments this year for three of the six units in this building in the 6800 of South East End Avenue after failed inspections over issues including no heat. | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

Richard Jardine’s Good Energy Holdings LLC bought the building in the 6800 block of South East End in November 2014 for $300,000. A year later, the Miami Beach company took out a $909,660 mortgage on the property. The landlord collects $6,972 a month from the six voucher households, with the CHA paying 75 percent of that.

“The crew looked at everything and said we needed a new boiler,” says Jardine, 38. “The boiler, which cost $25,000, was paid for all within a day of the issue. It took two days to install the boiler. The heat was out four days.

“If you can actually find a better Section 8 owner than me, I’d be surprised. Don’t ever call me again.”

The CHA says it suspended rental payments for a month earlier this year for three of the six units in Jardine’s building after they failed inspections over issues including no heat. Another unit failed its latest CHA inspection March 24.

Contributing: Brett Chase of the Better Government Association, Mick Dumke, Data Reporting Lab editor Darnell Little

A law firm headed by Ald. Edward M. Burke, one of Chicago’s most powerful Democrats, has helped Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and investors in his luxury downtown hotel cut their property taxes by 39 percent over seven years, saving them $11.7 million, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis has found.

Burke — one of 47 Chicago aldermen who voted to approve development of Trump International Hotel & Tower in 2002 — won reductions in six of the seven years for the hotel, retail and other commercial space in the skyscraper, records show.

Now, Burke’s law firm, Klafter & Burke, is trying to get partial refunds of those taxes for the billionaire and his investors. The firm has filed appeals in court and to a state agency, arguing the taxes paid were too high in some years.

Burke is among an elite group of current and former Chicago politicians working for law firms that specialize in helping property owners navigate Cook County’s arcane property-tax system. These clout-heavy lawyers try to persuade other elected officials — the Cook County assessor, the Cook County Board of Review’s commissioners and judges — to lower the estimated values of buildings and other real estate.

When they succeed, that means lower property taxes for their clients — and higher bills for other property owners to make up the difference. The attorneys generally work for a percentage of the savings.

Trump first hired Burke’s law firm in 2006, according to a spokeswoman for Trump Hotels.

Trump Tower, 401 N. Wabash Ave. | Rich Hein / Sun-Times

Trump didn’t respond to questions about how much he pays the Southwest Side ward boss or why he chose him over other property-tax lawyers.

Burke declined to comment.

Burke — a law school classmate of former Mayor Richard M. Daley and a former Chicago cop — replaced his late father as 14th Ward alderman in 1969.

Representing a predominantly Hispanic ward at City Hall, he has amassed a $10.4 million political war chest. He’s used that to bankroll the campaigns of politicians including former Gov. Pat Quinn and Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez — whose office ends up working against Burke when he sues county officials seeking lower property taxes for Trump and other clients.

Burke, 72, also is a powerful member of the Cook County Democratic Party, overseeing the committee that decides which lawyers the party endorses for judge.

In 2001, Trump decided to redevelop a coveted site on the Chicago River where the Sun-Times had operated in a seven-floor building since 1958. Originally, he was an equal partner with Hollinger International, the newspaper’s owner at the time. Trump eventually bought full control of the site amid a federal Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of Hollinger chairman Conrad Black, who ended up in prison for looting the company.

The 92-story residential and commercial skyscraper was under construction when Burke began handling property-tax appeals for Trump, county records show.

The alderman contested the values that then-county Assessor James Houlihan placed on the entire property in 2006, 2007 and 2008. Burke’s appeals were rejected by the Board of Review, a panel of three elected commissioners — two Democrats and a Republican — that decided Houlihan’s property assessments were correct.

In six of the following seven years, Burke was successful in persuading the assessor, the Board of Review or both to lower the assessments — and ultimately the tax bills — for commercial space including 339 hotel condominiums owned by Trump and his investors.

Burke also has filed separate appeals challenging the assessments on the tower’s 480-plus residential condos — when Trump owned them and after he sold them to buyers including Chicago Blackhawks star Patrick Kane. In addition to the money Burke has saved Trump and his investors on the commercial space, he has won tax reductions for Trump, Kane and hundreds of other residential condo owners.

To calculate the savings Burke got for Trump, the Sun-Times obtained county records showing the initial values the assessor assigned to each property in the tower and compared them to the final property values set by the Board of Review. The newspaper then calculated the tax cuts Burke won from the assessor and the Board of Review on the hundreds of tax bills for commercial property that county officials sent to Trump’s company — 401 North Wabash Ventures LLC — and to investors who bought dozens of hotel condos Trump operates.

In 2009, Burke saved Trump’s company almost $1.1 million when he got the Board of Review to slash the assessor’s estimated $141 million market value by 21 percent for the entire tower, which had yet to be subdivided into individual commercial spaces and residential condos. Trump paid $2.7 million in taxes that year.

Burke later went to court, seeking tax refunds from the Chicago Public Schools, City Hall, Cook County and other governments, arguing Trump’s taxes were “erroneous, excessive, illegal and void” because the assessor and Board of Review overvalued the skyscraper. Alvarez is fighting the suit. City Hall has intervened in the case. Because that created a conflict of interest for the alderman, Burke handed it off to another law firm.

In 2010, Burke saved Trump’s company almost $3.5 million by convincing Houlihan he’d overvalued the entire skyscraper. Houlihan lowered his $432 million estimation of the value to $122 million after Burke argued that most of the residential condos hadn’t been sold, the tower’s storefronts along the river were vacant, the hotel had largely been unoccupied and sales of hotel condos hadn’t worked out as planned. Burke’s law firm even called the concept of selling hotel rooms to investors a “failed business model.”

Trump ended up paying $3.9 million in taxes that year on the commercial space and hundreds of residential condos he had yet to sell.

In 2011, Burke saved Trump and his growing group of hotel investors $1.7 million by convincing Houlihan’s successor, Joseph Berrios, another powerful Democratic Party leader, that Houlihan had been overvaluing the commercial space, which was now taxed separately from the residential property.

“The hotel is NOT located in the prime Michigan Avenue hotel area, yet it is being valued greater than those established and better located hotels,” attorney Kelly Keeling Hahn of Burke’s firm wrote, adding, “The entire retail space of the building is un-leasable.”

Initially, Houlihan decided the commercial space owned by Trump and his investors was worth $75 million. Burke got that cut by 65 percent.

“Upon taking office, assessor Berrios realized that the previous administration had erred very significantly by over-assessing some of the property,” Berrios spokesman Tom Shaer says, explaining the retail space not only has gone unoccupied but hasn’t even been finished.

The Board of Review rejected Burke’s efforts to win Trump additional savings.

Trump and his investors paid $1.3 million in taxes on the commercial space in 2011 — less than half the taxes it had been facing.

In 2012, Burke saved Trump and his investors $1.7 million by getting Berrios to lower their property values, then persuading the Board of Review to lower them more. Initially, Berrios valued Trump’s properties at $103 million. Burke got that cut by 40 percent, resulting in Trump’s group paying $2.5 million in property taxes.

Burke is now appealing those payments before the Illinois Property Tax Appeal Board, seeking a partial refund.

Trump Tower, 401 N. Wabash Ave. | Rich Hein / Sun-Times

In 2013, Burke won his largest savings for the Trump group — more than $3.5 million — after the assessor recalculated the skyscraper’s value as part of the every-three-year reassessment of all property in Chicago. Initially, Berrios valued the Trump properties at $129.3 million. Burke got the assessor to cut that by 60 percent. So the group’s tax bills totaled almost $2.3 million. Again, Burke has filed a lawsuit hoping to get a partial refund of the taxes paid.

In 2014, Burke lost his attempts to cut the taxes on the commercial space. Trump and his group paid $2.3 million in taxes that year.

Last year, Burke shaved $242,545 off the Trump tax bills by persuading Berrios to lower the latest assessments by 9 percent, cutting the market value of the commercial space from $56.4 million to $51.1 million. The Board of Review refused to cut further. Trump’s group ended up paying $2.3 million in property taxes. Burke again has filed suit seeking a partial refund.

This year, Burke’s firm appealed the Trump taxes again, seeking a 20 percent cut in the value of the commercial space.

“Having 80,000 square feet of vacant river walk space is an enormous detriment to the hotel,” Keeling Hahn of Burke’s firm wrote. “While the retail is at the bottom of one of Chicago’s luxury hotels, there is no market for retail space which has no direct access to major foot or car traffic.”

The Board of Review rejected Burke’s request, keeping the market value at $62.7 million.

Contributing: Data Reporting Lab editor Darnell Little

TRUMP’S ILLINOIS CAMPAIGN GIVING

Donald Trump and his businesses have made $92,294 in political contributions to Illinois candidates and political action committees since 2001, the year he announced plans for Trump Tower. The recipients:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel: $50,000

Cook County Democratic Party: $12,500

Former Gov. Rod Blagojevich: $9,000

Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd): $5,500

Illinois Hotel & Motel PAC: $5,085

Former Gov. George Ryan: $5,000

Former governor candidate Edwin Eisendrath: $4,359

Green Industry PAC: $850

SOURCE: Illinois State Board of Elections

By Chuck Neubauer and Sandy Bergo

Of Illinois’ 10 casinos, none is as lucrative as Rivers Casino in Des Plaines. Since 2012, it’s reported revenues of more than $400 million a year after winnings — twice as much as any other casino in Illinois.

That success makes its property quite valuable, according to Cook County Assessor Joseph Berrios.

But, year after year, Rivers’ owners have argued that profits shouldn’t matter when calculating how much the casino is worth. And each year they’ve gotten an appeals panel to override Berrios, giving them more than $4 million in property-tax cuts since the casino opened nearly five years ago.

Figuring the value of the casino property should be “based upon what this property would be worth if we weren’t operating a casino there,” says Neil Bluhm, the politically active billionaire real estate developer who chairs the casino’s owner, Midwest Gaming & Entertainment.

Nor should the value be what Midwest Gaming paid to buy and build on the Rivers property along River Road north of Devon Avenue, Bluhm and his business partners argue. According to them, the property has declined in value and is worth tens of millions of dollars less than it cost them to buy and build on it.

They paid $117 million to buy the land and build the casino, according to records they provided to Cook County government officials.

But they’ve argued that the value of the casino and its parking garage is worth no more than $80 million. Most recently, they put the figure at $62.9 million — about 54 percent of what they spent on it.

Berrios’ office disagrees. The assessor has pegged the “fair-market value” of Rivers’ property at about $104 million each of the past four years.

But, as every property owner is entitled to do, Midwest Gaming & Entertainment has appealed every year, asking the Cook County Board of Review to override Berrios.

And every year it has. The agency — run by three elected officials who hear appeals of property assessments, which are used to calculate property taxes — has consistently cut the estimated value of the Rivers property to $88 million. That’s resulted in savings of $1 million a year on property taxes for the casino’s owners, records show.

Last year, Rivers paid $6.5 million in property taxes, money that went to school systems and other taxing bodies.

But, arguing that the Board of Review still overvalued the property, the casino’s owners have gone to court, suing to seek refunds of taxes they paid for three previous years.

When Rivers — or any other property owner — gets a cut in its assessment, other property owners have to make up for the loss in taxes to fund public schools, parks and other government functions. Similarly, if the casino’s owners prevail in their ongoing court appeals, taxing bodies would have to issue refunds and figure out how to make up that loss elsewhere.

Bluhm and his family also own or operate casinos in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Niagara Falls, Ontario. Bluhm’s group also is building a casino in Schenectady, N.Y., scheduled to open in 2017. Late last month, the Massachusetts Gaming Commission rejected Bluhm’s proposal to put a $677 million casino in Brockton, Mass.

Neil Bluhm, seen in 2012. | Sun-Times file photo

Bluhm has been politically active, most notably as a “bundler” who helped President Barack Obama raise money for both of his runs for the White House. Bluhm hasn’t made any campaign contributions to Cook County officials who handle property assessments, though his tax lawyers and appraisal firm have.

Since 2011, Bluhm tax lawyer Terry Newman, Newman’s law firm Katten Muchin Rosenman and Madison Appraisal gave a total of $16,750 to Board of Review Commissioner Larry Rogers Jr., $15,150 to Commissioner Michael Cabonargi and $6,750 to Commissioner Dan Patlak. Newman, the law firm and Madison contributed a total of $31,700 to Berrios — who chairs the Cook County Democratic Party — and his personal political organizations.

Berrios’ spokesman says the contributions play no role in the assessor’s decisions: “That is clearly shown by the consistency of [the assessor’s] valuation figures of this property and the integrity of the proven and impartial methods used by this office.”

Newman, his firm and Madison Appraisal couldn’t be reached or declined to comment.

After years of reviewing potential owners and sites for Cook County’s first casino, the Illinois Gaming Board in 2008 selected Bluhm’s company and Des Plaines.

One of the lenders bankrolling the project called the Des Plaines location “superior,” being just across the street from Rosemont and only a mile from O’Hare Airport, with easy highway access.

Rivers’ revenues have exceeded expectations since it opened in July 2011. Based on corporate records, the owners already have recouped their original $150 million investment and paid themselves more than $300 million.

“Obviously, it’s been a successful investment, I’m not going to BS you,” says Bluhm, who points out that the casino also pays the state of Illinois $180 million a year in gaming taxes.

Before the casino opened, Thomas Jaconetty — the deputy Cook County assessor for valuation and appeals — says he gathered information about casino assessments from professional groups and seminars and from court decisions around the country. Jaconetty says he didn’t consider the property “unique.” Rather, he says he saw parallels with valuations of other commercial properties — like racetracks and hotels.

Assessments of commercial properties differ from single-family home assessments in several ways, chief among them that they produce income, which the assessor’s staff says is key to determining their worth. Assessors typically consider three key factors in deciding the value of commercial properties, experts say — income, comparable sales and the cost of construction and land.

With Rivers Casino, there were no comparable sales of casinos, so Jaconetty says he evaluated the income and cost, placing greater weight on income as the strongest measure of what a property would be worth in the eyes of a potential buyer.

Starting with 2012, the assessor’s office pegged the value of Rivers around $104 million, and the casino’s owners appealed, arguing that the money the casino brings in shouldn’t be considered in making the assessment.

“Their position is: It is not relevant, and we shouldn’t be looking at it,” Jaconetty says.

Each year, the Board of Review reduced the estimated value of the property to $88 million. And the following year, the assessor again put the value at around $104 million, leading again to appeals and cuts by the Board of Review.

The casino’s owners and their appraisers argued the property should have been valued at $80 million in 2014 and $62.9 million in 2015.

Pointing to that latest appraisal, Jaconetty questions how the casino could drop in value by 21 percent when gross receipts rose to $425 million that year from $418 million.

The Board of Review, though, calls the casino a “one-of-a-kind property” and says its commissioners based their most recent decision only on the owners’ appraisal and not on revenues.

The Rivers appraisals started with the original $117 million cost — $34 million for the land and $83 million for construction — and then deducted from that several factors. Among them: Rivers owners claimed the land was really worth only half what they paid, saying it was inflated because land owners knew of plans for a casino and jacked up their prices.

They also argued for deductions for the cost of an underground pond to comply with a state law that says casinos must be on water, the cost of upgraded interior finishes and physical deterioration.

Jaconetty says the rate of deterioration Rivers claimed was “a bit aggressive” and that the other costs were business decisions or factors inherent in opening a casino in Illinois, none of them warranting a lower assessment.

He also questions how spending more on the interior merits a cut in the value of the property.

“Looking good and being a classy place enhances your ability to draw customers,” Jaconetty says. “One could easily argue that enhances your value.”

Rivers also cited the possibility of future competition from a Chicago casino as a reason its assessment, and taxes, should be lower.

“My reaction was: We were not allowed to value on speculation,” Jaconetty says.

The next-most profitable casino in Illinois is Harrah’s Joliet, which paid about $3.1 million last year for 2014 property taxes on its hotel, restaurants and parking garages, records show.

It and the three other Chicago-area casinos all pay less in property taxes than Rivers in large part because they are on riverboats. Boats are considered personal property in Illinois and aren’t taxable as real estate. Those owners still pay real estate taxes on adjacent properties they own — parking garages, hotels and restaurants.

Chuck Neubauer and Sandy Bergo are Better Government Association investigators.

The Chicago law firm headed by Illinois House Speaker Michael J. Madigan, D-Chicago, has been hired to win property-tax cuts for two companies in which his nemesis, Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, has a financial stake.

That’s among a wide range of personal business interests disclosed by the two powerful politicians, who are at the center of a 10-month state budget impasse that’s hurt social service agencies, universities, homeless shelters and state vendors waiting to be paid, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis found.

The political enemies also have had business dealings with companies receiving taxpayer money through state contracts or grants, as well as with companies and individuals contributing to their campaign funds, state and Cook County records show.

Take the Chicago Board Options Exchange, which has contributed $20,000 to Madigan’s main political campaign committee since 2012 and whose executives have given $8,000 to Rauner’s campaign since 2013.

In his state financial disclosure statement filed April 29, Rauner reported receiving income last year from his investment in CBOE Holdings, the exchange’s holding company. This year, Madigan’s firm, Madigan & Getzendanner, won a 23 percent reduction on the property assessment for the CBOE building at 400 S. La Salle St., records show. The amount of tax savings the exchange will realize won’t be known until late this summer, after tax rates are calculated.

Then, there’s The PrivateBank. Rauner reported he earned income from the bank’s parent company, PrivateBancorp Inc., in 2015. Madigan’s firm won property-tax reductions last year on PrivateBank locations throughout Cook County, including $48,907 in savings for an Orland Park branch.

In all, Rauner disclosed financial interests in more than 120 companies and investment funds in 2015. His income totaled $58 million in 2014, according to IRS documents he released last fall.

Madigan’s law firm, Madigan & Getzendanner, has won property-tax reductions — some reaching six figures — for hundreds of properties, according to his financial disclosure statement and data from the Cook County assessor’s office. Firms like Madigan’s typically are paid a percentage of the savings they win. The speaker doesn’t disclose his tax returns.

The statements filed by Rauner, Madigan and other state legislators and officials don’t require them to reveal how much money they make. Rather, they disclose entities in which they hold ownership “in excess of $5,000,” receive a “capital gain of $5,000 or more” or get dividends or income “in excess of $1,200.”

Rauner spokeswoman Catherine Kelly said the governor doesn’t know how his investments perform because such “decisions are made pursuant to blind-trust procedures adopted when the governor took office. We are purposely screened from such information.”

Madigan spokesman Steve Brown said the speaker “has imposed requirements on the law firm and himself, beyond what is required by the law, to ensure ethical conduct,” rejecting “any potential client seeking a state benefit” and refusing to intercede with any state agency on behalf of clients.

Among the two state leaders’ other holdings:

• Rauner received income through his investment in Digital GreenSigns, a billboard company that got a permit in February from the Illinois Department of Transportation — run by one of the governor’s cabinet members — for a billboard along the Tri-State Tollway / Interstate 294 just south of Lake Street in Northlake.

Digital GreenSigns provided Rauner with $263,943 worth of free campaign advertising in 2014, including ads that appeared on 90-square-foot digital signs the company put up around Chicago before Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration imposed strict regulations limiting where the signs can go and how big and bright they can be. Many of those free ads attacked Rauner’s opponent, former Gov. Pat Quinn.

Digital GreenSigns also has digital billboards in the suburbs, including a 20-year deal to operate a sign on the public works building in Oakbrook Terrace.

Kelly said Rauner is “a passive, minority investor in companies like Digital GreenSigns. . . . He has not contacted and would not contact IDOT or any other state agency on behalf of any of the companies in which he is invested.”

• Madigan’s clients include Bickerdike development and Senior Lifestyle Corp. Each has gotten grants from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity to install energy-efficient equipment in developments with low-income residents.

Senior Lifestyle has gotten a total of $825,136 from the state agency since 2010, including $91,960 for the Senior Suites of Midway Village in Chicago. Madigan saved that development, at 6800 S. Keating, a total of $113,156 in property taxes last year by getting its assessed value cut by 72 percent, records show.

Bickerdike — among the developers set to transform the Lathrop Homes under a deal with the Chicago Housing Authority — has gotten nearly $1.3 million from the state commerce department since 2008. This year, Madigan & Getzendanner has gotten cuts totaling 13 percent in its assessments on more than two dozen properties in Chicago. Bickerdike’s exact savings won’t be known until the final tax bills are mailed this summer.

• Rauner owns stock in and received income from GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis, both which have been selling pharmaceuticals to the state for years. In the 2015 budget year, the state’s public health department paid GlaxoSmithKline $3.1 million and Novartis $410,600.

Rauner also has membership and partnership interests in 11 investment funds operated by the financial firm he formerly headed, GTCR, which has long managed state pension money.

• One of the speaker’s biggest campaign contributors — printing magnate Fred Eychaner — regularly hires Madigan’s law firm to help him get cuts in property taxes on a Streeterville parking garage, part of which operates beneath Ogden Plaza Park under what had been a $10-a-year lease with the Chicago Park District.

Then-Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration sued to break the deal in 2010, saying it was costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. But a Cook County judge sided with Eychaner in 2013, ruling the park district struck the deal with a previous owner who agreed to donate acres of land to the city. The judge also decided Eychaner doesn’t have to pay the park district anything. Madigan’s law firm didn’t represent Eychaner in the park district case.

Charley Gross, who oversees Eychaner’s business ventures, said the previous garage owner had hired Madigan’s firm to handle property-tax appeals, and Eychaner didn’t change attorneys. This year, Madigan won a 44 percent cut in the garage’s assessed value. In 2014, he won a $61,091 property-tax refund for the garage stemming from a lawsuit he filed over tax payments for 2009.

Eychaner has contributed more than $400,000 to Madigan-controlled campaign funds since the start of 2010.

• Rauner’s holdings include investments with several companies whose executives have become top political contributors. Among them: Chicago hedge-fund magnate Ken Griffin and other top executives in his firm, Citadel LLC, who have contributed $13.6 million to his campaign.

• Rauner and Madigan both have business dealings with Chicago-area newspaper owners.

Rauner reported receiving a capital gain from an investment in Merge Healthcare, which IBM bought last year for more than $1 billion. Merge’s chairman, Michael W. Ferro Jr., has since become the largest shareholder in Tribune Publishing, owner of the Chicago Tribune. Ferro and other investors bought the Chicago Sun-Times in 2011. He has since given his shares to an unnamed charitable trust, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Ferro’s wife, Jacky Ferro, contributed $5,300 to Rauner’s campaign in 2013.

Madigan’s law firm for years has handled property-tax appeals for Paddock Publications, which publishes the Daily Herald. Last year, Madigan’s firm won cuts in the assessment on the company’s printing plant in Schaumburg of 18 percent, saving it $46,194 on its property taxes.

• Both have financial ties to well-known companies. Rauner is an investor in the Chicago Bulls, Pittsburgh Steelers and Nestle. Madigan’s clients include the Palmer House Hilton and Aqua skyscraper.

• Rauner is an investor in Pangea Properties, which the Sun-Times and Better Government Association reported last month is the largest landlord in Chicago of low-income Section 8 voucher-holders. Pangea also leases office space to state Rep. Ken Dunkin, a South Side Democrat who, after siding with Rauner in disputes with Madigan, lost the Democratic primary in March to Juliana Stratton. Over the past two years, the state has paid Pangea $11,777 to lease Dunkin’s offices.

Des Plaines-based Concept Schools applied for and was awarded a nearly $340,000 federal grant for a new school on the Southwest Side despite being under investigation over allegations the clout-heavy charter-school operator was involved in defrauding a federal grant program, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation has found.

Concept — whose privately run, publicly financed schools include four campuses in Chicago — applied to the U.S. Department of Education for the money five weeks after the FBI and other federal agencies raided Concept locations across the Midwest on June 4, 2014.

Those 19 locations included its headquarters and Chicago Math and Science Academy in Rogers Park, the Sun-Times has reported.

The Department of Education approved the grant last year for Concept’s Horizon Science Academy-Southwest Chicago Charter School, 5401 S. Western Ave., awarding nearly all the money Concept asked for — $337,138 over three years. Concept had asked for more than $343,000 over two years, noting that most of the students at the school come from low-income families.

They were to receive about $200,000 of that last year, though an Education Department spokeswoman said Friday the money is now on hold.

In its grant application, Concept said the money would cover expenses including textbooks for 450 students, furniture, laptops and printers for administrators, supplies and travel to conferences.

Concept didn’t mention the raids — carried out as part of what an FBI spokeswoman told the Sun-Times remains an ongoing investigation.

But the charter operator did mention its board of directors included a Cook County circuit judge, Dominique Ross, and that its advisory board included G.A. Finch, former chief of staff to Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle.

Finch, a lawyer in private practice, said Concept vice president Salim Ucan offered him a spot on the advisory panel four or five years ago.

“I was asked to be on it and never heard anything further,” Finch said Friday.

The Department of Education awarded the money even though the agency’s own inspector general’s office was involved in the investigation.

Geoffrey Wood, a special agent with that office, filed the “application for a search warrant” that convinced a federal judge in Chicago to approve the June 2014 raids, which sought records concerning Concept’s involvement in the government’s “E-Rate” program. That program provides money to extend Internet access to schools serving low-income students.

According to a sworn statement from Wood, Concept violated government open-bidding rules by steering more than $5 million in grant money to companies with insider ties to the charter operator. Those “related vendors” did work for Concept under the E-Rate program, according to Wood.

He testified he had reason to suspect Concept and many of its taxpayer-financed charter schools had “engaged in a scheme to defraud a federal program” for at least seven years.

Concept’s president, Sedat Duman, signed the certification forms for the E-Rate grants and also signed the application for the latest grant, records show.

A spokeswoman for the Cleveland office of the FBI, which is leading the probe, declined to comment because, she said, “It is an ongoing investigation.”

Catherine Grant, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General, said Friday, “Our investigation is ongoing, and, per our policy, we do not discuss our ongoing work.”

Asked whether the inspector general’s office let other agency officials know it was looking into Concept, Grant said, “It is our normal practice to inform the department when we open an investigation.”

Dorie Nolt, the Department of Education’s press secretary, said Friday: “We are monitoring this situation, and we have restricted Concept charter schools’ access to federal grant funds. As we learn more details about this matter, we will take additional steps, as necessary.”

She would not say when the agency moved to freeze the grant to Concept.

Concept Schools’ headquarters in Des Plaines. | Tim Boyle / Sun-Times

All that Concept officials would say was that they were “gratified” and “proud” to win the grant, “awarded to only five schools in 2015,” according to a company spokesman.

Founded in 1999 by Turkish immigrants, Concept is one of several charter chains nationwide with ties to Fethullah Gulen, an influential Muslim cleric from Turkey who has lived for years in Pennsylvania. After falling out with Turkey’s leader, he faces charges of trying to overthrow the government.

From Des Plaines, Concept oversees more than 30 campuses in seven states, including four schools in Chicago with a total of about 2,200 students.

Its Chicago Math and Science Academy and Horizon Science Academy-Southwest Chicago Charter School were awarded their charters by the Chicago Board of Education, which provides most of their funding.

Two other Concept campuses in Chicago were granted charters by the Illinois State Charter School Commission, which ordered CPS to fund them over Chicago school officials’ objections.

Concept has close ties with political figures including Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, who visited the Rogers Park campus and filmed a video testimonial.

His son, Andrew Madigan, also has visited CMSA. And the company where younger Madigan works — Mesirow Insurance Services Inc. — has had business with Concept in Chicago.

When police and paramedics arrived at her aunt’s apartment in Carol Stream, Adrianna Diana told them she and her friend Christopher Houdek had cooked and shot up heroin the night before.

Diana, 20, said she awoke covered in vomit, with Houdek, 21, next to her, unresponsive and “cool to the touch.” Her aunt called 911.

Paramedics rushed Houdek to a hospital, where he died. The DuPage County coroner ruled his 2013 death an accident by “heroin intoxication.” But prosecutors decided it was homicide — and charged Diana and two heroin dealers.

Adrianna Diana in 2014 arrest photo. DuPage County sheriff’s office

Diana never made it to trial. While free on bail, she overdosed on heroin and died.

Diana and Houdek’s deaths were among 2,112 fatal overdoses involving heroin in Illinois between 2013 and 2015, 132 of them in DuPage County, a Chicago Sun-Times examination found. Another 2,935 people across the state died from toxic doses of other drugs, amid what federal officials say is a growing national overdose epidemic.

The toll is prompting intense debate about the nation’s long war on drugs. Even many tough-on-crime cops are calling for sending users to treatment rather than prison. At the same time, some police and prosecutors say the dealers supplying deadly illegal drugs should be treated like killers.

In Illinois, prosecutors increasingly are filing drug-induced homicide charges against those who provide illegal drugs that result in fatal overdoses. In 2003, the first full year the law was on the books, no one was sent to prison on that charge. In 2015, 13 people were.

Chicago’s collar counties have taken the lead in charging people with that crime. And now the Chicago Police Department is considering expanding its so-far limited use of the charge.

But the deaths of Diana and Houdek illustrate the complexity of sorting out, after a fatal OD, who’s a criminal who should be prosecuted and who’s an addict who should get treatment, not a jail cell.

Houdek’s mother, Tina, told authorities he’d been drinking and possibly abusing prescription drugs after his father’s death months before his overdose. In addition to heroin, his body also tested positive for Xanax, Valium, marijuana and Ecstasy, records show.

Diana told the police she’d bought the heroin from two brothers, Christopher and Brandon Kanehl. Police found Christopher Kanehl, 26, shooting up in his car in the parking lot of a Meijer’s store.

He told them he’d sold Diana 10 packets of heroin for $100 — what he’d paid for 14 packets on the West Side. Kanehl said he typically bought 70 packets a day from his supplier he called D-Rush — for “dope rush.” Some was to sell, he said, but most was to use with his brother. He described himself as an addict and agreed to cooperate with the police.

Over the next three months, a drug task force targeted D-Rush — real name: Ricardo Bryant, 33, who’d served prison time on gun and drug convictions.

In 2014, DuPage County prosecutors charged Bryant, Christopher Kanehl and Diana with drug-induced homicide. Along with Kanehl’s brother, they also were charged with criminal drug conspiracy.

Diana posted $5,000 bail to remain free while awaiting trial. A judge ordered her to get treatment and attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings. She cooperated with investigators, who were prepared to seek a sentence of probation.

But the morning of March 25, 2014, Diana wouldn’t wake up. Three days later, she died, when her parents took her off life support. She’d suffered irreversible brain damage from a heroin overdose.

Her father “felt that this was intentional because of the trouble with the police and the fact that she was informing on her friends,” the coroner’s report said.

That July, prosecutors dropped the drug-induced homicide charge against Kanehl in return for his cooperation against Bryant, and Kanehl was sentenced to five years in prison for drug conspiracy.

But while working with DuPage County prosecutors, Kanehl was arrested again, this time for dealing heroin in Kane County. That got him a nine-year prison sentence.

It also helped Bryant’s lawyer, Mark Lyon, an assistant public defender, challenge Kanehl’s credibility as a witness. In July 2014, a judge found Bryant not guilty of all charges.

Illinois legislators passed the state’s first drug-induced homicide law in 1988, saying they wanted to crack down on drugs by targeting dealers. But in 2002 — after the death of a Naperville teenager who took a synthetic drug she mistakenly thought was Ecstasy — legislators broadened the law. It now applies to anyone who delivers drugs involved in an overdose, including someone using the drugs with an overdose victim.

Since that law took effect, Chicago-area law enforcement agencies have used it only sparingly, considering that hundreds of people here die of overdoses each year.

Cook County prosecutors have approved drug-induced homicide charges just nine times since 2002, court records show. Eighteen cases have been brought in DuPage County and 40 in Lake County — counties with far fewer deadly overdoses.

The Chicago Police Department investigated the first four Cook County cases, between 2004 and 2006. Suburban departments handled the rest of the Cook County cases, all filed between 2008 and 2014.

But Eugene Roy, Chicago’s chief of detectives, says he’s now looking at whether the department should broaden its use of the drug-induced homicide charge to target drug traffickers who provide heroin that leads to fatal overdoses. Roy plans to meet with prosecutors in Will and DuPage counties “to talk about lessons learned and best practices.”

Corey Crump

In one of the highest-profile cases in Chicago, Corey Crump got 10 years in prison for supplying fentanyl-laced heroin to the 17-year-old son of a Franklin Park deputy police chief. The teenager, Joseph Krecker, was found dead just two days after graduating from Maine South High School in 2006. Crump, 35, is due for parole on June 5.

In another Chicago case, a taxi driver found a prostitute for a California man and sold him eight bags of heroin for $100. The 35-year-old buyer died in a downtown hotel room in 2005. The cabbie, Eric White, now 53, was sentenced to seven years for drug-induced homicide.

Suburban police and the sheriff’s office have investigated five other overdose deaths that resulted in drug-induced homicide charges in Cook County.

Of those, only one person — Cary Cohen — went to prison for drug-induced homicide. Three others went to prison for drug convictions after the homicide charge was dropped. One got probation on a drug conviction.

Cohen got a seven-year sentence for giving Laura Grace Riley the heroin that killed her in 2009 in Glenview. Cohen bought “bad heroin” and gave it to Riley, an acquaintance from high school who fell into a coma and died six days later, according to prosecutors.

“She could only see the good in people, never the bad, and it proved to be her undoing,” her father, James Burke, told the judge.

Kathie Kane-Willis

Kathie Kane-Willis, director of the Illinois Consortium on Drug Policy at Roosevelt University, views the drug-induced homicide law as dangerous, saying it could scare away heroin users from seeking help. And the line between user and supplier is often unclear, Kane-Willis says.

“When someone dies from a drug overdose, it’s very sad,” says Kane-Willis, a former heroin user. “But it might not be criminal.”

Nolan McMahon, 21, now in prison after pleading guilty to drug-induced homicide, says, “I think it’s ridiculous how something that most people would consider an accident is viewed as the highest form of felony and is considered a violent crime.”

Nolan McMahon

In January 2015, McMahon, of Hanover Park, was sentenced to eight years. He’d been charged with selling heroin twice to John Dudek in the hours before the 15-year-old fatally overdosed at his Bartlett home in 2013.

In a letter to the Chicago Sun-Times in response to questions, McMahon says he didn’t have any “malice when hooking up” people with drugs.

“If anything, you’re doing them a favor by saving them a trip to the ghetto,” he wrote. “You’re also not forcing them to ingest. They do it by their own choice.”

McMahon also sees the law as needlessly punitive. “By it being classified in such a way, it makes me ineligible for a lot of programs. I can’t get into treatment programs because inmates who get ‘good time’ are first priority. I also cannot get ‘work release,’ meaning when I have two years or less I could join a program where I’m set up with a job during the day but go back to prison at night.”

John Roberts lost his son Billy to a heroin overdose. File photo

But some parents who’ve lost children to heroin embrace the tough law. John Roberts, a retired Chicago Police Department captain, lost his 19-year-old son Billy to a heroin overdose in 2009. He and another father whose son died of an overdose formed the Heroin Epidemic Relief Organization to help addicts and their families.

“It still hurts bad that I lost a son,” Roberts says, choking up. “I can’t run from this problem.”

Like Kane-Willis, Roberts thinks users should get treatment, not prison sentences.

“We fill our prisons with people caught with small amounts of drugs,” he says.

Roberts says he worked with Kane-Willis to get the state’s Good Samaritan law passed in 2011. The law provides limited immunity from criminal charges for people who seek medical assistance for themselves or others after an overdose. If the person dies, though, the supplier can still be charged with drug-induced homicide.

Unlike Kane-Willis, Roberts supports that exception. And he thinks suppliers should be charged with drug-induced homicide more often — even in situations in which the person who dies got the drug from a friend who called 911. But he says that can be “mitigating factor” a judge can consider at sentencing.

Wider use of the law would send a strong message to traffickers, says Roberts, who points out that some dealers in Chicago have even marketed fentanyl-laced heroin with names that recognize how lethal they are, like “Drop Dead.”

“We still have to recognize that anyone who puts poison on the street is criminally responsible,” he says. “If they face a 20-year sentence, maybe we can reverse the trend.”

DuPage County State’s Attorney Robert Berlin speaking in 2014 about the heroin epidemic. | Sun-Times file photo

DuPage County State’s Attorney Robert Berlin says the heroin epidemic has prompted law enforcement to become “very aggressive in trying to find the source of the drugs killing our citizens” and to “work up the chain.

“There’s a difficulty in doing that,” he says, “because your witnesses are going to be drug users or small-time drug dealers, and they come with credibility issues. But that doesn’t deter us from trying to get the bigger fish.”

DuPage County’s drug court aims to divert users to treatment, Berlin says.

“We’re close to a 50 percent graduation rate, which is an excellent return,” he says. “It’s a better way of handling those drug-possession cases.”

Lyon, the assistant DuPage County public defender, says he understands why people want “severe consequences” for anyone who sells illegal drugs that prove deadly. Still, he says the drug-induced homicide charge should be used carefully.

“If the prosecutors want to go after these cases,” he says, “the law allows them to sweep up fellow drug users. I’m not sure that’s altogether fair.”

Eugene Roy, chief of detectives. Brian Jackson / Sun-Times

In Chicago, Roy, the chief of detectives, says that if the department expands its use of the drug-induced homicide law, it will be to target traffickers.

“We have to go after the higher-level people who are facilitating the delivery and overseeing the process where the drugs are contaminated with an adulterant like fentanyl,” Roy says. “Those are the people who are truly responsible for drug-induced homicides.”

It’s been 18 months since the Chicago Housing Authority closed its wait list for coveted housing choice vouchers, which pay all or part of the rent for poor people to live in homes leased by private landlords.

But since then, the agency has added 1,035 households to the list — and handed them vouchers — ahead of about 45,000 households already on the list, many of who have been waiting several years, according to CHA records.

All but eight of the 1,035 got their vouchers in less than a year. Four in 10 got them in a week or less.

It’s part of the maddening and unpredictable bureaucracy that often confuses people seeking housing assistance, the Chicago Sun-Times and Better Government Association found. Consider:

• The last time the voucher wait list was open, CHA officials say some 260,000 people applied, so the CHA held a random lottery to decide which people to add to the list. About four of every five didn’t make it.
• While awaiting a voucher or other housing aid, there’s no way for people who end up on the wait lists to monitor their places in line.
• The housing authority also won’t divulge the names of the people waiting — or how long they’ve been waiting.

The average household waits 4.3 years to obtain a housing choice voucher, commonly known as Section 8, CHA records show. As for the 1,035 households who jumped to the front, the CHA says all have “special circumstances” that entitled them to quickly obtain a voucher.

The special cases included homeless veterans, families who moved to Chicago with vouchers issued in other cities, as well as former residents of the CHA’s demolished high-rise housing projects who exercised their “rights of return” for housing aid.

“Although the general wait lists are closed, the wait lists . . . remain open to accommodate households facing special circumstances,” CHA spokeswoman Molly Sullivan says. Federal housing regulations “and CHA policy allow these special admissions because they enable us to serve some of the most vulnerable households in Chicago — households who might otherwise be homeless without CHA assistance.”

One of those special cases involves Roosevelt Hughes, 62, a disabled Vietnam veteran.

“I was homeless,” says Hughes, who said he learned about the voucher program last year from his drug-abuse counselor.

The CHA added Hughes to the voucher wait list on Aug. 28. Five months later, he’d obtained a voucher, and he and his wife moved into a first-floor apartment of an eight-year-old three-flat in Auburn Gresham.

The monthly rent is $1,000. Hughes pays his landlord $456 a month, while taxpayers cover the rest.

“I love my apartment. It’s decent,” says Hughes, a grandfather of two who walks with a cane because “my feet got messed up in the service.”

A special program for homeless veterans allowed Roosevelt Hughes, 62, a disabled Vietnam veteran, to get a Section 8 housing choice voucher in five months. The average-voucher holder waits 4.3 years. | Chris Fusco/Sun-Times

The demand for vouchers has soared over the past 16 years since the CHA launched its “Plan for Transformation,” which tore down high-rise housing projects and increased the number of vouchers, so poor people can lease apartments, condominiums and houses from private landlords. In Chicago, those landlords collect $560 million a year in rent, 76 percent of that covered by federal taxpayers, the Sun-Times and BGA have reported.

People also can be on multiple housing wait lists at the same time. In all, there are 122,613 names on those lists waiting for a voucher or an apartment that the CHA owns and manages. The voucher list is the largest, with 44,816 names — nearly five times the number of names that were on it 10 years ago.

The lists are rarely open to new applicants; the last time was in late 2014 for only a month. The CHA says it “has not determined” when the wait lists will be reopened.

The CHA also has been criticized by housing advocates who claim the agency has received federal funding to issue thousands of additional housing choice vouchers it has yet to hand out.

The authority says it has issued an additional 9,000 vouchers over the past two years and is now providing vouchers to nearly 46,000 households. Sullivan says the CHA spends all but 10 percent of the federal funding it gets for the voucher program, so it can “maintain the flexibility to address other needs at the agency.”

Hughes is among dozens of veterans whom the CHA moved to the front of the voucher waiting line over the past six months through the Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing program, CHA records show. That program is overseen by the federal departments of Veterans Affairs and Housing and Urban Development, which funds Section 8 housing programs.

In the past six months, CHA records show Hughes’ household and 44 others quickly received vouchers through the program, called VASH. Several of those households were issued a voucher on the same day they were put on the wait list; others waited a day.

Others who received vouchers in only a few days or weeks over the past six months include 27 households who moved to Chicago after being issued vouchers by other housing authorities, a situation referred to as “porting.”

Dozens of other households who had been tenants in large taxpayer-subsidized developments also were quickly issued vouchers for a variety of reasons, records show. Sometimes, they needed vouchers so they could continue living in buildings that were converted to market-rate apartments after the landlord repaid government loans. Others got vouchers so they could lease market-rate housing and move out of subsidized apartment buildings.

Others jumped the line because they exercised their “right of return,” a promise allowing them first crack at subsidized housing programs because they’d lived in one of the CHA’s demolished high rises.

EARLIER STORIES

Chicago’s public housing divide — March 13, 2016

How housing choice aid program works — March 13, 2016

You paid to build them, now you pay to lease them — March 14, 2016

Emanuel blasts CHA voucher program as policy ‘gone awry’ — March 16, 2016

CHA moves to strip aid from suspect in gym murder — March 20, 2016

Cashing in on the CHA — April 23, 2016

CHA tenants shivered until city sued landlords over heat — April 25, 2016

While some households have been issued a voucher in one day, many have waited a lot longer.

Charvette Gregory was a 19-year-old single mom when she applied to the CHA for a voucher. She went on the wait list on July 24, 2008.

By the time the CHA gave her the voucher last spring — nearly seven years later — she’d had three more children and was eager to move out of her parents’ home.

She ended up in a rundown bungalow on a busy stretch of Halsted Street in Auburn Gresham. Her landlord collects $1,215 a month in rent, all of it covered by taxpayers.

“When I filled it out, my son was 1. When I moved in, he was 10,” Gregory says. “I was calling, maybe every couple of months just to see. I wasn’t told why it took so long to get a place.”

Tim Novak, Chris Fusco and Mick Dumke are Sun-Times reporters. Brett Chase writes for the Better Government Association.

The botched investigation of a homicide involving a nephew of former Mayor Richard M. Daley has become part of a federal whistleblower lawsuit filed by two Chicago police officers who claim a “code of silence” permeates the Chicago Police Department.

The two cops argued in a court filing Monday that former police Cmdr. Joseph Salemme, a defendant in their case, should have to testify about his role in the reinvestigation of the death of David Koschman, who was killed by Daley’s nephew, Richard J. “R.J.” Vanecko. The city opposes jurors hearing such details.

Salemme retired last December, escaping a one-year suspension over his handling of the Koschman case five years ago.

He was one of six cops singled out by Special Prosecutor Dan K. Webb, who said he didn’t have enough evidence to convict any of them of official misconduct or obstruction of justice over the case involving Daley’s nephew, who escaped criminal charges for nearly a decade after the police twice refused to charge him. Detectives under Salemme’s command erroneously concluded in 2011 that Vanecko had punched Koschman in self-defense after including a fabricated witness statement in their final report. Salemme has denied any wrongdoing in the Koschman case.

Salemme is among a dozen former and current officers being sued by Officers Shannon Spalding and Daniel Echeverria, who claim their bosses retaliated against them for violating the code of silence by cooperating with the FBI in a criminal case involving other Chicago cops.

Webb’s report on the Koschman case “implicates Salemme as part of the cover-up, consistent with the code of silence, regarding the misconduct of the investigating officers involved in fabricating a self-defense determination for refusing to arrest Mayor Daley’s nephew for murder,” according to their motion, filed Monday.

Spalding and Echeverria sued the city four years ago after helping federal investigators convict two cops of stealing money from drug dealers. After Spalding and Echeverria returned to their jobs, they claim they were punished by their superiors, including being assigned to night shifts and spending entire shifts in a windowless room. Fellow officers told them police commanders had warned them not to respond if Spalding or Echeverria called for backup.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel might also be called to testify in their case because he has acknowledged a code of silence exists within the police department.

After Webb declined to charge any cops in the Koschman case, Emanuel and former police superintendent Garry McCarthy directed city Inspector General Joseph Ferguson to investigate the officers for potential disciplinary action.

In December, Ferguson urged acting police superintendent John Escalante to impose discipline up to and including termination for Salemme and five other cops. Escalante moved to fire three officers, while Salemme and two others faced yearlong suspensions. Salemme, a 30-year veteran, decided to retire. His pension is $162,684 a year.

Koschman died in May 2004, 11 days after he was punched in the face by Daley’s nephew during a drunken argument on Division Street at Dearborn. The case remained an unsolved homicide until the Chicago Sun-Times asked to review the files in January 2011, prompting the police to order a new investigation headed by the detectives under Salemme’s command.

Webb was appointed special prosecutor in 2012. A grand jury indicted Vanecko, who pleaded guilty to manslaughter in January 2014.

As Americans wait in ever-longer security screening lines inside airport terminals, newly obtained records show dozens more instances of breaches of airports’ outer defenses are happening than officials have disclosed.

In Chicago, people climbed over or crashed cars through security fencing around O’Hare Airport and Midway Airport 12 times from 2004 through mid-February, more than authorities previously have acknowledged, an Associated Press investigation has found.

Last year, when first asked by reporters about breaches, Chicago’s Department of Aviation cited five of them. Federal records revealed another four. A spokeswoman for the aviation department — which operates O’Hare and Midway — would not explain the discrepancy. In all, there were four intruder breaches in 2015 — the most for any year since 2006.

Airports say their outer defenses are strong, that the miles of fences, gates and guardhouses protecting their properties are secure and that many intruders who get through anyway are quickly caught. They also note that none of the 345 breaches AP documented involved a known terrorist plot.

Nationally, though, breaches remain as frequent as ever, with someone hopping over, crawling under, driving cars through or using fake credentials to get past perimeter gates and fences and reaching a secure area, on average, once every 9.5 days at one of the nation’s 31 major U.S. airports.

That’s despite some investments to fortify airfields to prevent people from sneaking onto runways and planes since an AP investigation last year documented incidents including a man who tossed a bike over a fence at O’Hare and made it inside a passenger terminal and an intruder in Phoenix who was nearly hit by a plane preparing to take off.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration says some incidents shouldn’t count as breaches, even when intruders got deep into secure areas. Was it a perimeter security breach in March 2015 when a woman walked past a vehicle exit gate at San Francisco International Airport and onto the tarmac and tried to flag down a jet for a trip home to Guatemala? No, according to airport and TSA officials, who tried to suppress information on the case.

Nor did they label it a breach when a man, following voices only he could hear, drove through a San Francisco security gate and asked a worker fueling a plane: When’s the next flight?

After initially discussing intrusions openly, the TSA started withholding details, arguing their release could expose vulnerabilities.

But following a two-year legal struggle with the TSA, AP used newly released information to create the most comprehensive public tally of breaches. The count shows an intruder broke through security surrounding one of 31 major U.S. airports, on average, every 13 days from 2004 through mid-February. Since 2012, though, the average is once every 9.5 days.

Many scaled barbed-wired fences or walked past vehicle checkpoints. Others crashed cars into fences and barriers.

The tally covers breaches at airports that handle three-quarters of U.S. passengers. It’s sure to be an undercount because several airports refused to provide complete information.

It’s impossible for airports and law enforcement to keep everyone out, TSA Administrator Peter Neffenger said.

“The question is: What’s your ability to detect it?” Neffenger said. “And … what might you do to mitigate that happening in the future?”

Perimeters are not “a gaping vulnerability,” said Christopher Bidwell, vice president of security for the Airports Council International-North America.

The problem isn’t even as bad as records suggest, according to Bidwell, because some people were detected immediately.

But video cameras and guards don’t always spot intruders.

For instance, after eluding security and reaching parked planes at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, a man warned an airport worker in December that he “better not say” anything. Authorities never found the man, though they did arrest three others in 2015 — including one who drove his vehicle in with a convoy entering the airfield during Pope Francis’s visit. The four intrusions were the most at JFK in any year.

Altogether, there were at least 39 breaches nationwide in 2015 — also the annual average from 2012 through 2015. The low was 34 in 2013 and the high 42 in 2012, when incidents spiked after years hovering around 20 breaches.

Police reports suggest many trespassers were disoriented, drunk or delusional. Some were caught immediately, others not for hours. Five had knives, one a loaded gun.

Aviation security consultant Jeff Price said the TSA and airports haven’t done enough to address gaps in perimeter security.

“The straight-up honest answer as to why it’s not being vigorously addressed?” Price said. “Nothing bad’s happened — yet.”

Police across Illinois will soon be required to record vastly more interrogations under a law intended to help ensure that confessions aren’t coerced and that the right people go to prison for committing violent crimes.

But will prosecutors have the time to view all of what’s expected to be an ocean of new interrogation videos before deciding whether to charge someone? Fabio Valentini, chief of criminal prosecutions for Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, doesn’t think so.

Starting Wednesday, under a law passed in 2013, police statewide must record all questioning of suspects in rapes, armed robberies and shootings. Those offenses will be added to a list of six other crimes — including murder — for which police already are required to record suspects’ statements.

The amount of video resulting from that could be overwhelming. Consider the city of Chicago alone. Last year, the Chicago Police Department arrested 246 people for murder and the other five crimes that required recording interrogations.

The crimes being added Wednesday could present Cook County prosecutors with at least 40 percent more Chicago cases in which videos are required, according to a Chicago Sun-Times analysis of 2015 arrest figures.

Prosecutors also will be asked to review additional videos from police agencies in more than 130 other municipalities in Cook County.

“It’s nearly impossible,” Valentini says when asked whether prosecutors will be able to review every recording before deciding whether to file criminal charges.

He says that with 48 hours to file charges against detained suspects or release them, prosecutors might not get the chance to even see some of the videos before having to make a decision on whether to approve charges.

“We will have to make charging decisions, then go back and review the videos and hope we don’t learn something new,” Valentini says.

The Chicago Police Department voluntarily began videotaping murder confessions in 1999 in response to allegations of coerced confessions in cases such as the 1998 killing of 11-year-old Ryan Harris, in which two boys were wrongly charged with murder.

In 2005, police across the state started recording all interrogations in murder cases under a law that was among the reforms put in place after former Gov. George Ryan declared Illinois’ capital punishment system to be “broken” and cleared Death Row.

In 2013, eight other violent crimes — predatory criminal sexual assault of a child, aggravated arson, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated vehicular hijacking, home invasion, aggravated criminal sexual assaults, armed robberies with a handgun and aggravated batteries with a handgun — were added to the list of offenses for which interrogations have to be recorded.

Over the past two years, the police have begun recording interrogations for the first five crimes on that list.

Starting Wednesday, they are also required to record interrogations for the other three: aggravated criminal sexual assault, armed robbery and aggravated battery with a firearm. Last year, 150 people were arrested in Chicago for those crimes.

Under the law, judges are required to consider any statements by suspects inadmissible as evidence if they haven’t been recorded on audio or video.

The Chicago Police Department has upgraded its equipment and is ready to handle the additional recordings, says Anthony Guglielmi, chief spokesman for Supt. Eddie Johnson. New cameras and recording equipment have been installed at the department’s North, Central and South detective headquarters and in two other police facilities on the West Side, according to Guglielmi.

“This is a welcome change,” Eugene Roy, the city’s chief of detectives, says of the additional recordings being required. “There will be an impact on the bureau of detectives, but we are confident it will be manageable.

“Of course, there will be some increased burden to comply with the law,” Roy says. “But we recognize the value in providing documentation of confessions, statements and interviews, as well as the conduct of detectives and officers.”

Lt. Marty Ryczek shows off a Chicago Police Department video control room in 2005, when Illinois law began requiring the recording of homicide interrogations. AP file photo

Before the law was passed in 2013, state Rep. Scott Drury, D-Highwood, originally proposed that police be required to record interrogations in all felony cases. The Cook County state’s attorney’s office opposed that as too broad.

Sen. Kwame Raoul, D-Chicago, championed the narrower version of the law that was passed, which expanded recording of interrogations to eight other crimes in addition to murder. The new requirements have been phased in.

At the time the law was approved, Alvarez, head of the state’s busiest prosecutors’ office, said she was worried about the financial burden it would place on her office and on police departments. She ended up supporting the politically popular measure, though.

Valentini says the state’s attorney’s office has asked for money for additional prosecutors but was denied by the Cook County Board. The president of the board is Toni Preckwinkle, who backed her former aide Kim Foxx in her successful bid this spring to unseat Alvarez as the Democrats’ candidate for state’s attorney this fall.

Kim Foxx, the Democratic candidate for Cook County state’s attorney. | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times file photo

Foxx says she doesn’t know whether she’ll seek money for more prosecutors. “I am not saying you don’t ask,” she says. “But you have to look at all your existing resources and how they are used.”

Foxx says more recordings “will create more work for the state’s attorney’s office to do.

“When this was expanded to homicide cases, there were concerns about getting it done, and it worked,” Foxx says. “We have to make it work.”

Valentini calls the requirement for additional recordings “a great idea.”

“We are always imposing on police departments to make further investigations and run down every lead — those that might incriminate a suspect and those that do the opposite,” he says. “We need to know everything they say.”

He says he worries that prosecutors might not know that as soon as they should, with the flood of new videos.

“It’s life-altering,” Valentini says of the decision to approve filing criminal charges. “You want to make sure you are familiarizing yourself with a totality of the evidence. If a suspect makes video or audio statements, you want to make sure you listen to those, if you can, before a charging decision.”

Contributing: Mick Dumke

By Robert Herguth 

The pilots of a United Airlines plane that slid off the end of an O’Hare Airport runway last December had been awake for 23 hours or more and had spoken of feeling “fatigued” even before departing Seattle for Chicago with more than 160 passengers on board, newly obtained Federal Aviation Administration records show.

The pilots of the Boeing 737 also thought they were landing on a different, longer runway at O’Hare and might have made a series of braking errors while trying to bring the jetliner to a stop on a landing strip “obscured by snow,” according to a two-page FAA document.

The paperwork — released by the federal agency in response to a public records request — doesn’t cite a cause for the runway “overrun,” which United says could be the result of a number of factors, including “runway conditions.”

“It is a very small piece of a larger investigation,” FAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory says, describing the document as “non-decisional.”

The FAA says the incident, which didn’t result in any injuries or major damage to the plane, remains under investigation.

The incident was one of three similar overruns at O’Hare on the same runway last winter. There have been at least nine “excursions” from O’Hare runways and taxiways since 2010, city records show.

It was a snowy morning, with temperatures in the 20s, when United Flight 1977 touched down on Runway 9 Left/27 Right a little after 7:30 a.m. Dec. 30. The runway, which stretches 7,500 feet, opened in 2008 as part of O’Hare’s ongoing expansion and reconfiguration.

An FAA air-traffic controller had cleared the United jetliner for landing and said “braking action” was reported as “good” — meaning not too slippery, according to a copy of radio transmissions.

But soon one of the pilots reported, “Be advised, braking action was nil” — meaning the jet’s tires weren’t catching on the pavement very well.

The aircraft slid off the end of the runway, according to records from Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s city Department of Aviation, which operates O’Hare and Midway airports.

City crews had been standing by to conduct a “friction” test and, if necessary, clear snow and ice.

The FAA record says the captain of Flight 1977 was awake for 25 hours “at the time of the incident,” and the first officer — the second pilot — had been awake for 23 hours.

“Crew discussed being fatigued at length prior to departure from [Seattle] but felt compelled to complete the mission,” the document says. “Crew discussed napping as a fatigue-mitigation strategy en route.”

Also, according to the FAA document:

• The pilots “thought they were landing on the longer of the parallels [runways] but in fact were landing on the shorter.”

• The pilots might have “inadvertently selected” a less-powerful brake setting and did not account for the runway being “obscured by snow.”

• “Despite being fatigued, [the] Captain decided to hand fly” the plane from 10,000 feet to arrival, rather than rely on the autopilot.

Crews work after a United Airlines Boeing 737 went off a runway at O’Hare Airport on Dec. 30. Chicago Department of Aviation photo

The FAA requires pilots to have a “10-hour minimum rest period prior to the flight duty period,” with “an opportunity for eight hours of uninterrupted sleep within the 10-hour rest period.”

“Rest” doesn’t have to mean “sleep,” though, aviation experts say, and an “opportunity” for sleep also doesn’t necessarily mean actual snoozing.

Bill Waldock. Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

FAA rules put great responsibility on pilots to not fly if they’re overly tired, according to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Bill Waldock, a pilot who created the university’s aviation safety programs and teaches accident investigation.

Before takeoff, pilots “have to positively affirm that they are fit for duty,” Waldock says.

The FAA document doesn’t say what rest the United pilots got. But it does say that one or both of the United pilots “will receive” training in, among other things, “cold-weather ops” and “fatigue risk management.”

United spokesman Charles Hobart declined to discuss that. He would say only that the airline is still conducting its own “internal review” and that “there may be other contributing factors involved,” including “possible runway conditions,” the weather and air-traffic control.

Chicago Aviation Commissioner Ginger Evans wouldn’t comment.

Robert Herguth is an investigator for the Better Government Association.

A United Airlines Boeing 737 after it went off a runway at O’Hare Airport on Dec. 30. Chicago Department of Aviation photo

A private foundation started by the late Walmart mogul Sam Walton and his wife has contributed heavily to the Illinois State Charter School Commission and to two charter operators whose schools the state agency has blocked the Chicago Board of Education from closing over poor student performance, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.

Even in the complex history of public education in Chicago, the situation involving the two charters, the Chicago Public Schools, the charter commission and the Arkansas-based Walton Family Foundation is unusual.

For years, CPS has faced criticism for allowing the expansion and taxpayer-financed funding of privately run charters even as it shut down traditional public schools over low enrollment and bad test scores.

Aiming to show it expects charters to meet the same standards as CPS schools, the Board of Ed moved last November to cut off funding for three schools — including the Amandla Charter School in Englewood and Lighthouse Academies’ school in Bronzeville — over poor student performance. The charter commission overruled the Board of Ed and, in March, blocked CPS from closing the schools.

Beside Amandla and the Bronzeville Lighthouse Charter School, the commission also saved the Betty Shabazz International Charter School’s Barbara A. Sizemore Campus in Englewood from being closed. The Walton foundation hasn’t donated to Shabazz.

CPS responded later in March by suing the state agency over its ruling, which Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s schools chief, Forrest Claypool, called “ill-advised and destructive.”

Over the past 20 years, the Walton foundation has given more than $45 million to educational groups in Illinois, including charter schools and the state commission that regulates them, records examined by the Sun-Times show.

The biggest recipients were the Chicago-based IFF — which helps charter schools finance construction projects and got more than $9 million — and the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, an advocacy group that’s received about $8 million.

The Illinois charter operator that benefited most from Walton grants was the UNO Charter School Network, which got more than $3.5 million from the foundation. Its last grant was in 2012 — a year before Sun-Times reports exposed a contracting scandal involving the politically connected charter operator.

Though the commission is a government agency, its initial funding came from private organizations and individuals, including the Walton foundation. Current and former commission leaders say they sought grants because state lawmakers didn’t provide funding when they created the agency.

Greg Richmond. Sun-Times file photo

“In no way did the Walton Family Foundation influence, seek to influence or even communicate to the commission about its decisions,” says Greg Richmond, chairman of the state commission when it got the Walton grant.

Richmond is the chief executive of the Chicago-based National Association for Charter School Authorizers, which got $2.15 million from the Walton foundation in 2015, according to the foundation’s website.

Anyone who wants to open a charter — and get the taxpayer funding available to operate a campus, thanks to government provisions for “school choice” — first must apply to the local school district. It isn’t necessarily a fatal blow, though, to be rejected or to have a district later move to pull a charter.

When they created the charter commission, Illinois lawmakers gave it the authority to hear appeals from charter applicants and overrule local districts.

The foundation gave $50,000 to the Illinois Network of Charter Schools for the launch of the Illinois charter agency in 2011. The Walton organization gave $300,000 more directly to the state commission the following three years. That $350,000 represented the majority of the start-up funding the commission received.

The Walton foundation has given $500,000 to Amandla, 6800 S. Stewart Ave., according to the foundation’s public filings with the Internal Revenue Service and records from the charter operator.

Walton’s first $250,000 to Amandla came during the Englewood school’s first year in operation, 2007-08. More than $205,000 of that went to “administrative wages” for Amandla’s executive director, dean of students and office manager, school records show. The foundation gave the school another $250,000 in 2012 when it expanded into high school grades.

Amandla goes from fifth grade through high school and has 320 students this school year. It got a total of $3.81 million in funding via CPS for the budget year that ended June 30, 2015.

Bronzeville Lighthouse Charter School, 8 W. Root. | Leslie Adkins / Sun-Times

Walton also was a major contributor to Lighthouse Academies, which manages 19 schools in seven states from its base in Wesley Chapel, Florida, including the Bronzeville Lighthouse Charter School at 8 W. Root St. Administrators of the high school in Bronzeville say they have no record of receiving money directly from the Walton foundation. But the foundation’s IRS filings show it gave nearly $3.4 million to the parent Lighthouse Academies from 2005 to 2013.

Lighthouse’s Bronzeville school had 441 students this year, from grades 9 through 12. It got a total of $4.15 million through CPS for the last budget year.

Hosanna Mahaley-Jones. | LinkedIn photo

Hosanna Mahaley-Jones, the executive director of the state charter commission, says the Walton foundation funding played no role in the decisions to override CPS and keep the Walton-supported schools open this year. In fact, Mahaley-Jones says, she wasn’t even aware of the contributions from Walton to Amandla and Lighthouse Academies until told by a Sun-Times reporter.

“As part of the commission’s process for looking at appeals, we don’t look at past funding sources, so it wouldn’t necessarily be a conflict for us,” says Mahaley-Jones, who was Arne Duncan’s chief of staff when Duncan was CPS’ chief executive officer.

She says the commission blocked the school closings because CPS “did not follow the agreements they had with the charter schools. The recent decisions were fact-based, not based on relationships and not based on politics.”

CPS officials declined to comment

The state agency’s $600,000 yearly budget comes entirely from fees paid by schools it approved and regulates, according to Mahaley-Jones, who says there are no plans to seek further grants from the Walton foundation or any other private sources beyond the charter schools.

The Walton foundation has funded charter schools since 1997 and has been involved with hundreds of schools in about two dozen states, though it’s said it plans to curtail donations for new charters in Illinois, citing unfriendly political conditions.

A Walton official who oversees school grants for the foundation says it took no position on the Illinois commission’s action to save the two Walton-funded schools from the threatened CPS ax. “There’s no Walton conspiracy here,” Marc Sternberg says.

Sternberg says the Walton foundation funded the commission “so educators who want to start great schools — who are prohibited for bad reasons — have a way to rise above politics and start high-quality schools.”

The lawsuit over the CPS decision to close the charters isn’t the first time the Chicago school system and the state charter commission have been at odds. In 2012, the commission overrode CPS’ rejection of charter applications for two new campuses from Des Plaines-based Concept Schools. The FBI has said it has an ongoing investigation into allegations of grant fraud involving Concept.

To help evaluate proposals from would-be charter operators, the commission has occasionally hired officials of local schools — including two Lighthouse Academies employees.

Phyllis Goodson, a regional vice president for Lighthouse, was among the most passionate voices supporting the Bronzeville school at the commission meeting at which the campus was spared from closing. The commission employed Goodson as a part-time consultant in 2014 and 2015 to evaluate charter schools appeals, renewals and applications, paying her a total of $22,250, according to state records.

Goodson says she sees no conflict of interest because there’s been great turnover at the commission since she did most of her consulting work for it.

Mahaley-Jones, the state agency’s director, says, “I don’t think anybody would be precluded from appealing to the commission because they have done some consulting for the commission.”

The Chicago Housing Authority is considering taking back control of management of the agency’s biggest public housing program — Section 8 apartment and home rentals — from the two private contractors now overseeing the housing voucher program.

That follows a Chicago Sun-Times and the Better Government Association investigation that found four of every 10 housing-voucher program tenants are living in places that have been cited in the past five years for city building code violations.

Even getting into the program can be difficult. Poor people trying to obtain a housing voucher to rent a privately owned apartment or house face a daunting bureaucracy, the Sun-Times and BGA have reported, as well as a wait that can be years.

The CHA says the review is part of a larger analysis of its operations and contracts ordered by Eugene Jones Jr., who was named chief executive officer of the agency by Mayor Rahm Emanuel a year ago, becoming the housing authority’s fifth CEO in four years.

This year, the CHA stands to pay CVR Associates of Florida and Nan McKay of California more than $27 million to run the Section 8 housing choice voucher program.

Currently, CHA housing vouchers cover some or all of the rent — depending on income and family size — for people to lease nearly 46,000 privately owned apartments and single-family homes.

The two private contractors’ jobs include managing the wait list for the coveted vouchers, helping place people in housing, inspecting the apartments and homes and operating a call center for tenants to take complaints and answer questions about the program.

The CHA turned over the voucher program to private contractors 20 years ago. Taking back management of the program would mark a dramatic reversal of policy for a public housing body that, like government housing agencies elsewhere, has privatized much of its operations over the past two decades.

“It is counter to the trend,” says Robert Whitfield, an attorney who has represented public housing residents and tenant leaders and was the CHA’s chief operating officer in the 1990s.

Jones arrived last year at an agency that’s faced criticism for holding onto hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding even as thousands of people remain on waiting lists for housing assistance.

“We believe it is good for us to look at how well the program is working and what, if anything, can be changed or improved,” Jones says of the voucher program.

The CHA is seeking bids, due Friday, for a contractor to analyze the costs and benefits of managing the program with the agency’s own staff vs. continuing to outsource that job.

“I don’t think anyone should be under the illusion that any one way is going to solve every problem,” Whitfield says. “If you ask me if bringing it in-house will solve every problem, I would doubt it.”

Nan McKay, who founded the firm that bears her name, declined to comment. CVR executives didn’t respond to interview requests.

Under its current one-year contract, which runs through March, CVR stands to be paid as much as $16.2 million and Nan McKay up to $11.2 million.

CVR has helped run the Section 8 program since 2011 with Nan McKay and, before that, with another firm, Quadel Consulting, since 2008. CVR and Nan McKay have collected tens of millions of dollars to manage the program over the past eight years.

“Anything that standardizes and streamlines the voucher program and inspections is welcome,” Leah Levinger, executive director of the Chicago Housing Initiative, a coalition of housing activists, says of the study. “It is baffling to have two contractors.”

Before the CHA first brought in CVR, Quadel was the sole private manager of the voucher program. When the CHA hired Quadel in the mid-1990s, the agency acknowledged that its handling of the program was plagued with problems.

“After years of agency mismanagement, the Section 8 program was transferred to private management in 1996, and, since that time, administration of the program has improved tremendously,” CHA officials said in a 2000 report to the U.S. Housing and Urban Development, which provides the lion’s share of funding to the CHA and other public housing agencies nationwide.

Brett Chase is an investigator for the Better Government Association.

Contributing: Tim Novak, Chris Fusco and Mick Dumke

EARLIER STORIES

Chicago’s public housing divide — March 13, 2016

How housing choice aid program works — March 13, 2016

You paid to build them, now you pay to lease them — March 14, 2016

Emanuel blasts CHA voucher program as policy ‘gone awry’ — March 16, 2016

CHA moves to strip aid from suspect in gym murder — March 20, 2016

Cashing in on the CHA — April 23, 2016

CHA tenants shivered until city sued landlords over heat — April 25, 2016

The CHA’s waiting game — May 22, 2016

For the past six years, Cook County tax officials mistakenly believed billionaire Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, didn’t pay all the property taxes owed on his namesake Chicago skyscraper, shorting schools and other government agencies.

They were wrong.

They thought Trump had failed to pay a nearly $2.4 million tax bill in 2010 — a bill that had ballooned to nearly $4.7 million this year, including penalties and interest.

But property-tax records for the Trump International Hotel & Tower examined by the Chicago Sun-Times showed county tax officials had miscalculated Trump’s 2010 bill.

The main reason? A last-minute tax cut Trump got after his attorney, Ald. Edward M. Burke (14th), persuaded the county assessor to slash the tower’s value by more than 70 percent, the Sun-Times found.

In fact, county tax officials now agree, Trump paid all of his property taxes in full. They are moving to erase the erroneous tax delinquency that has been on their books for years.

But the Sun-Times also found that county officials mistakenly gave Trump a $23,649 refund on taxes he paid in 2010. They say Trump needs to repay that.

“This error was only discovered last week when a local reporter submitted a . . . request for all the tax records for the property,” according to a written statement from Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas’ office.

Trump’s tax mess illustrates the complexities of a Cook County property tax system that’s overseen by political leaders and influenced by insiders like Burke, the powerful alderman and Democratic Party ward boss.

Among the complicating factors in this case were:

• An Illinois Supreme Court ruling regarding downtown property taxes for a proposed light-rail transportation line dubbed the “central area circulator” — a plan that was killed years earlier by Burke and the Chicago City Council.

• The court ruling made it difficult for county officials to collect taxes from a few dozen buildings that normally would have received one tax bill for their combined commercial and residential space — including the Trump Tower while it was under construction.

The errors in Trump’s tax bills came to light as the Sun-Times was examining how much Burke’s law firm had saved the New York developer.

The newspaper reported last month that Burke saved Trump $11.7 million between 2009 and 2015 by convincing the county assessor and a second group of tax officials — the Cook County Board of Review — to lower the assessments on Trump’s skyscraper. The newly obtained records show the figure is actually higher: The alderman has saved Trump more than $14.1 million altogether.

And it could end up higher yet. Burke is now asking Cook County judges to cut Trump’s property taxes even more.

The never-built central area circulator light-rail system that played a key role in county officials’ confusion over Trump’s taxes dates to the administration of Mayor Harold Washington. The plans continued to move along under Mayor Richard M. Daley.

Trump International Hotel & Tower, 401 N. Wabash. | Rich Hein / Sun-Times

In 1991 — a decade before Trump decided to build in Chicago — the City Council created what it called “Special Service Area 12” so it could collect additional property taxes from landowners there to help finance a rail line that would operate from Oak Street to McCormick Place between Lake Michigan and the Chicago River.

But a property owner sued the city, arguing that those who own residential property shouldn’t have to pay the so-called circulator tax because businesses would be the main beneficiaries of the rail system.

The Illinois Supreme Court agreed — prompting Cook County tax officials to set up a separate billing system for the few dozen buildings that had been getting a single property tax bill covering their commercial and residential space.

After the court ruling, the owners of those buildings got two tax bills: a “circulator bill” for their commercial space and a separate tax bill for residential space that couldn’t be charged the circulator tax.

The city of Chicago collected the circulator tax between 1991 and 1994, when the Daley administration derailed the project.

In 1997, the City Council voted to refund all of the unspent money in the circulator fund. But aldermen have never killed Special Service Area 12 — so county tax officials continue to list it on property tax bills even though no money for that has been collected in more than two decades.

“There was no need for two different bills,” according to Pappas’ office. “Nevertheless, each billing cycle, the circulator properties continued to receive two tax bills, the sum of which was exactly the same as it would have been had only one bill been sent combining the two.”

The circulator territory included the Chicago Sun-Times’ old building at 401 N. Wabash. Trump announced plans in 2001 to redevelop the site, tearing down the building and replacing it with a soaring skyscraper that would include a hotel, restaurants, stores and residential condos.

As the skyscraper was rising, Trump had the property subdivided for tax purposes so each hotel room would get a separate tax bill, while the residential condos and remaining retail space would be taxed together, as one parcel.

That prompted county officials to split his 2010 taxes for the condos and retail space into two bills — a residential bill and a circulator bill — even though the city no longer was collecting any taxes for the circulator.

After then-Cook County Assessor James Houlihan issued his assessment for Trump’s residential condos and retail space in 2010, Burke appealed to the Board of Review, which slightly lowered those figures.

With the assessment — which is used to calculate property taxes — set, Cook County Clerk David Orr calculated how much Trump had to pay.

Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas. | Better Government Association photo

Then, in early November 2010, Pappas sent Trump two bills: $5.8 million for the residential condos and $2.4 million for the retail areas.

A few days after the bills were mailed, Houlihan agreed to slash the value of the residential condos and the retail space by 70 percent, based on Burke’s argument that most of the space had yet to be occupied. And Houlihan issued a “certificate of error,” saving Trump $5.8 million on his 2010 property taxes.

Trump had to pay $2,375,080.56 in property taxes — $1,589,650.83 for the residential condos and $785,429.73 for the circulator bill on the retail space.

“But the split was not done correctly,” according to Pappas’ statement. “When a clerk at the assessor’s office entered the . . . reduction [resulting from Houlihan’s decision] into the county’s computer system, the assessor’s office made a scrivener’s error. Consequently, two bills were produced: one for $2,351,432.01 and another for $2,375,080.56.”

Trump paid the higher amount — the correct figure, which covered both the residential and retail space. But county officials recorded him paying taxes only on the residential space and not the retail space.

So even though Trump’s taxes were paid in full, for years county records have shown that he paid no taxes on the retail space. And, according to that erroneous reckoning, the interest was mounting — an additional $35,626 every month.

The 2010 bill was the only circulator bill Trump ever got because the following year the county began issuing separate tax bills for each individual condo. Trump has continued to receive a separate bill covering all the retail space.

The county didn’t stop issuing separate circulator tax bills until 2013 — though all of the commercial tax bills still contain a line item for Special Service Area 12. Which collects no money.

“This antiquated billing practice has led to considerable confusion over the years — for taxpayers and Cook County property tax administrators alike,” according to the statement from Pappas’ office.

Trump apparently never even knew the county considered him a delinquent taxpayer. County officials never pursued him to pay the supposedly delinquent taxes. Nor did they ever include them in their annual tax sale.

A year after Trump paid the 2010 taxes, county officials made another mistake. The county’s computer system erroneously determined that Trump had overpaid his 2010 taxes on the residential condos by $23,649.

The county sent him a refund application for that — even though it still had him on its books as owing nearly $2.4 million in circulator taxes.

Once Trump’s company — 401 N. Wabash LLC — completed the application, Pappas issued a refund check on Dec. 23, 2011.

Now, county officials acknowledge the refund was issued in error, and they are seeking repayment from Trump.

Paramedics and firefighters got to the scene only minutes after Quintonio LeGrier and Bettie Jones were fatally shot on the West Side the day after Christmas — but police officers there never told them the shooter was a cop, according to city records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.

After the incident, the Chicago Fire Department responders filed four separate reports stressing that they didn’t learn of police involvement in the shooting until long after they’d transported LeGrier, 19, and Jones, 55, to hospitals, where both were pronounced dead.

Three paramedics who were dispatched to the scene of the shooting, in the 4700 block of West Erie Street, said they found out only from news coverage hours later.

“At no time was there a conversation between CFD responders, including myself, and CPD to the circumstances or facts relating to this active incident,” fire Lt. James W. Davis said in a report to his supervisors on Dec. 30, four days after the shooting.

Basileios “Bill” Foutris, an attorney for Antonio LeGrier, Quintonio LeGrier’s father, said the records suggest “something wasn’t on the up and up from the beginning.”

“Why keep that from the paramedics?” Foutris said of the police involvement. “What’s the reason unless you’re hiding something?”

The fire department reports are the latest official accounts raising questions about the incident, including the response to it by the police and, later, the Independent Police Review Authority, the city agency that investigates shootings by cops.

The Cook County medical examiner’s office has said the police waited more than three hours before notifying that agency that an officer had fired the fatal shots, the Sun-Times has previously reported. By then, “too much time had elapsed” for an investigator from the medical examiner’s office to visit the scene, according to an agency spokeswoman.

Quintonio LeGrier. | Provided photo

Joel Brodsky, a lawyer for Officer Robert Rialmo — who shot LeGrier and Jones after he responded to calls about a domestic disturbance — said he wasn’t surprised about the fire department memos. Brodsky noted that the Dec. 26 shooting occurred just weeks after the city made public the 2014 video of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald being shot 16 times by another police officer, prompting widespread outrage.

In that environment, Brodsky said, “Everybody was watching their ass.”

Larry Langford, a fire department spokesman, said the memos were written “to make sure we knew all aspects of the response and patient treatment as we reviewed the incident.”

The department’s emergency responders don’t always need details of a shooting, Langford said, because they “only want to know that a scene is safe and that they can get to and administer to a patient.”

The fire department memos were among a trove of documents released to the Sun-Times in response to a public records request. They offer new details about what happened.

According to a police report, Quintonio LeGrier’s father told a detective that the teenager, who was staying with him while on break from Northern Illinois University, “had been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and was on medication” but wasn’t taking it.

A little after 4 a.m. the next day, each of the LeGriers called 911. The detective wrote that the father said he did so after Quintonio LeGrier banged on his bedroom door. Antonio LeGrier next called Jones, who lived downstairs, and asked her to open the building’s front door when the police arrived.

Rialmo and his partner, Anthony LaPalermo, said Jones did — and that Quintonio LeGrier then appeared.

Initially Rialmo told detectives the teenager was holding a baseball bat above his head. But in another interview two days later, he added that Quintonio LeGrier swung the bat at him twice, according to police reports. LaPalermo said he did not see LeGrier swing the bat.

Quintonio LeGrier ignored a warning to drop the bat, according to Rialmo, who fired six to eight times as he stepped down the front stairs. Both LeGrier and Jones were hit.

The newly released records show investigators found multiple bullet casings on the sidewalk in front of the building and the home next door — and one on a sidewalk across the street. Brodsky said that’s not surprising given the chaos as first responders arrived. “It’s really easy for it to get kicked and moved,” he said of the casings.

But Foutris and Larry Rogers, a lawyer for Jones’s family, said the way the casings were clustered on the front sidewalk casts doubt on Rialmo’s statements that he fired while stepping down from the porch.

Though police detectives have interviewed Rialmo twice, according to the records, IPRA investigators haven’t spoken with him.

“They haven’t asked,” Brodsky said.

Despite decades of legal battles and special efforts to increase the number of minorities and women promoted to high-ranking jobs in the Chicago Police Department, white men have gotten more than half of those promotions since 2006.

White men got more than 61 percent of the 913 promotions that were based strictly on test scores to fill the positions of detective, sergeant or lieutenant over the past 10 years, department records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.

During the same period, police superintendents also filled 396 detective, sergeant, lieutenant and captain slots with so-called merit promotions — a system Mayor Richard M. Daley created two decades ago to promote more minorities and women. And white men got 40 percent of those promotions, more than any other racial or gender group, the records show.

Altogether, the police department has filled more than 55 percent of these vacancies since 2006 by promoting white men, a pattern that began under Daley and has continued under Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

As is true in many cities, Chicago’s police department doesn’t mirror the city’s population. Blacks and Hispanics make up two-thirds of the city’s population, while 57 percent of the sworn police officers are white men and women.

The lack of diversity has been an issue for more than 40 years. It erupted again after video showing the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by a white police officer, Jason Van Dyke, led Emanuel to dump his white police superintendent, Garry McCarthy, on Dec. 1, later replacing him with Eddie Johnson, an African American who was one of McCarthy’s top deputies.

The McDonald video led to an ongoing investigation of the police department’s practices and policies by the U.S. Department of Justice, which has asked the city for “all policies concerning the recruitment, hiring and promotion of CPD employees.”

“Too often, white cops are sent in to neighborhoods they don’t understand,” says Patricia L. Hill, a retired Chicago cop who served as president of the African American Police League until it disbanded in 2012 and now teaches criminal justice at Northeastern Illinois University. “So many white police officers had never come in contact with black people until they became police officers. They don’t know the culture.

“The promotional issue has been an issue for a very long time,” Hill says. “We’ve always had to fight for our jobs. No one has the will to say, ‘OK, white folks, we know it’s not this generation’s fault, but we’re going to have to hire less white folks.’ It’s not going to happen.

“It’s virtually impossible for us to reach parity because there’s nothing to enforce it.”

Johnson believes the department “should reflect the city that it serves and, as a result, promote diversity throughout the ranks,” police spokesman Frank Giacamilli says, pointing out the city has recently seen a 13 percent increase in minority job applicants to become a patrol officer. The new superintendent has also ordered “a review of our promotion procedures and policies to ensure that those promoted are held to the highest standards,” Giacamilli says.

The Sun-Times obtained police department data on so-called rank-order promotions based on test scores, as well as merit promotions, to examine how many minorities and women are advancing to four key positions: detective, sergeant, lieutenant and captain.

The records show that the higher the position, the more likely it’s been that it would be filled by a white man.

“It indicates what I think is a bigger, more general problem the Chicago Police Department has: It doesn’t have the kind of career tracking . . . to identify potential leaders,” says Wesley Skogan, a Northwestern University professor who specializes in police issues. “They’re not grooming anybody, much less people who may need a hand up in the grooming department.”

Other key Sun-Times findings regarding promotions since 2006:

• The percentage of white police officers has fallen from 54 percent to 50 percent as the department has shrunk 11 percent. But white officers still get six of every 10 promotions to detective, sergeant, lieutenant and captain.

• Blacks make up 23 percent of all Chicago cops — a number that has steadily declined, leaving the city with 758 fewer black officers than there were in 2006. But African-American officers get only 18 percent of the promotions, most of those through the merit system. Most black women have been promoted on the basis of their test scores, while most black men got merit promotions, following a recommendation from a superior officer.

• Hispanics also hold 23 percent of the department’s jobs, with 319 more Hispanic cops than a decade ago. But Hispanics got slightly fewer than 16 percent of the promotions.

• Women hold slightly more than 22 percent of all police jobs in Chicago but landed only about 17 percent of the promotions during the past decade, mostly based on their test scores. More than half of the women promoted are white.

“CPD is committed to promoting qualified women at all ranks throughout the department,” Giancamilli says. “Recently, CPD announced the appointment of three women to command staff positions, including Anne Kirkpatrick to serve as chief of the Bureau of Professional Standards. The selection of these women builds on the appointment of Acting Chief Barbara West, who oversees the Bureau of Support Services, which is responsible for the merit promotion process.”

Appointments to such command positions, including deputy chiefs, are made directly by the superintendent and don’t come under the same promotion system for the lower ranks.

Here’s how the promotions since 2006 break down by rank:

• Sergeants made up the bulk of the promotions examined by the Sun-Times. White men got nearly 55 percent of the 659 promotions to sergeant, primarily based on their test scores. Black men got 14 percent, most often by merit promotions, and Hispanic men 12 percent, usually by test scores.

• Detectives accounted for 352 of the promotions, with white men getting 55 percent of those jobs and black and Hispanic men getting 14 percent each.

• Lieutenants — the next step up for sergeants — accounted for 220 promotions. White men landed 56 percent of them, black men 13 percent and Hispanic men 11 percent.

Fourteen black women have been promoted to lieutenant over the past 10 years, including three promoted this year based on test scores. Those three women — including Johnson’s fiancee Nakia Fenner — took part in a study group that is the focus of an investigation by City Hall Inspector General Joseph Ferguson after someone accused the women of cheating. The other women are Lt. Davina Ward and Lt. Maryet Hall, whose husband Al Wysinger is retired from the department’s No. 2 post — first deputy superintendent.

• Captains slots are filled based on applications from lieutenants, which are reviewed by the department’s merit selection board, with the final decision made by the superintendent. No test is required for these promotions. Of the 78 promotions to captain, 46 went to white men, nine to black men and one to a Hispanic man. There were 14 women made captain, half of them white.

The quest for racial parity in the police department dates back generations. In 1973, the Afro-American Police League sued the city in federal court, which resulted in more jobs and promotions for black officers. But the victory was short-lived, Hill says.

Daley tried to address the dearth of minority police officers in 1997 when he created the merit selection system.

The city’s largest police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, opposed merit selection, warning it would become a patronage system allowing high-ranking police officials and City Hall politicians to promote their cronies.

“They created merit so there would be promotions at the discretion of management,” says Skogan. “There’s powerful politicians angling for their favorites. There’s multigenerational police families angling for a relative to get a promotion.

“They will say there are people who don’t do well on tests but are charismatic leaders . . . and we need them, too,” Skogan says. “There are plenty of police departments that don’t have them at all.”

In Chicago, applicants for detective, sergeant and lieutenant must take a basic test to qualify for any promotion. Many also take a second test, required for the rank-order promotions based on scores.

All applicants for detective, sergeant and lieutenant must take a test to qualify for a promotion based on their rank order. The police superintendent can fill 30 percent of the sergeant and lieutenant vacancies and 20 percent of the detective spots through merit selection. Applicants who passed the basic promotion exam and were nominated by a superior officer are eligible for these promotions.

Many top Chicago police officials have gotten merit promotions, among them several current district commanders, including Austin District Commander Dwayne Betts, an African American who got a promotion to lieutenant from McCarthy in 2012 after being nominated by Johnson.

Two years ago, Sgt. Matthew Cline, the son of former Supt. Phil Cline, landed a merit promotion to lieutenant from McCarthy based on a recommendation from Cmdr. Joseph Salemme. Six other cops also got merit promotions based on recommendations from Salemme, who retired last December, avoiding a one-year suspension for his role in the botched homicide case involving David Koschman, who died after he was punched by a Daley nephew, Richard J. “R.J.” Vanecko.

Former Chief of Detectives Constantine “Dean” Andrews — who also retired in December to avoid being fired over the Koschman case — nominated four officers for merit promotions. They included Sgt. Paul Zogg, a white cop who served in the now-disbanded Special Operations Section, some of whose members were accused of kidnapping, robbery and other crimes.

Two years ago, a federal jury ordered Zogg and four other SOS cops to pay $96,000 in punitive damages out of their own pockets to a man who sued them and the city, saying he was framed for cocaine possession. The city was ordered to pay the man an additional $796,000.

Five months ago, interim Supt. John Escalante gave Zogg a merit promotion to detective.

“Sgt. Zogg was cleared . . . of wrongdoing, and he is a decorated member of the U.S. military,” according to Giancamilli, the police spokesman. “All of this information was taken into account during the merit-promotion process.”

Anthony R. Blake, a black officer, got a merit promotion from McCarthy to detective in February 2013 — six years after the city paid $5.2 million to settle a lawsuit that accused Blake of fatally shooting Cornelius Ware, a paraplegic who the police said aimed a gun at him and refused to get out of the car during a traffic stop in 2003.

Blake, who apparently wasn’t charged or disciplined in Ware’s death, had been nominated for a promotion by then-Cmdr. Glenn Evans, who has a lengthy record of abuse complaints. A Cook County judge acquitted Evans in December of aggravated battery and official misconduct after he was accused of shoving a gun into a suspect’s mouth.

The city’s Independent Police Review Authority later recommended that Evans be fired after he was accused of breaking a woman’s eye socket when she refused to be fingerprinted in 2011. Johnson wanted to suspend Evans for 30 days, but the matter was dismissed a few days ago when IPRA determined that the statute of limitations had run out on punishing Evans over that incident.

The police department wouldn’t comment on Blake’s promotion. But Giacamilli said officers “nominated for a merit promotion are done so based upon their supervisors’ belief that they have demonstrated professional leadership skills and abilities that qualify them to be considered for a promotion.

“When officers are being considered for merit, their disciplinary history is reviewed by the [merit] board, where they are reviewed for substantiated instances of misconduct.”

Juan Rangel — the former $275,000-a-year leader of the United Neighborhood Organization and its charter-school network — will pay a $10,000 fine to settle civil securities fraud charges without admitting wrongdoing, the federal Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday.

As the head of UNO and its taxpayer-funded charter schools, Rangel became perhaps the most powerful Latino political player in Chicago. He served as co-chairman of Rahm Emanuel’s 2011 mayoral campaign and had ties to other powerful politicians including Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, former Mayor Richard M. Daley and Ald. Edward M. Burke (14th.)

But UNO came under federal scrutiny and Rangel resigned in 2013 after the Chicago Sun-Times reported that the Hispanic community group and charter-management organization had paid millions of dollars out of a Madigan-backed state grant to companies owned by two brothers of a high-ranking UNO executive, Miguel d’Escoto.

The SEC said Tuesday that Rangel broke the law when he approved and signed documents related to an UNO bond sale in 2011 because those documents for potential bond buyers didn’t disclose the “conflicted transactions” revealed by the Sun-Times.

In 2009, UNO won legislative approval for the $98 million state grant for new school buildings. The grant — sponsored by Madigan, D-Chicago — is believed to have been the largest government subsidy in the country to publicly funded, privately run charter schools.

Under the grant deal, UNO was required to disclose any conflicts of interest with companies involved in the state-funded construction work. But the clout-heavy group didn’t tell state officials Rangel had directed his nonprofit group to enter into lucrative contracts with Reflection Windows, owned by Rodrigo d’Escoto, and d’Escoto Inc., headed by Federico d’Escoto. At the time, Miguel d’Escoto was the $200,000-a-year chief operating officer of UNO — Rangel’s top deputy.

The SEC said that documents filed in connection with UNO’s $37.5 million bond deal should have disclosed all of the contracts with the d’Escoto companies. Only the $1.9 million in UNO business with d’Escoto Inc. was disclosed. UNO did not tell potential bond buyers about its Reflection Windows contracts — worth about $11 million.

“We allege that Juan Rangel signed off on the offering document without even reading it,” said David Glockner, regional director of the SEC’s Chicago office. “This kind of negligent behavior is unacceptable in the securities markets.”

In a statement, Rangel appeared to blame unnamed others.

“I take full responsibility for not reading the document and should have done more than rely upon others to brief me on its contents,” Rangel said. “Although questions were raised about UNO’s overall school construction and contracting processes, it is important to note that new schools were indeed built for our community.”

Because of the contracting scandal, the state froze the final $15 million of the $98 million grant.

In 2014, the SEC settled civil securities-fraud charges against UNO and its UNO Charter Schools Network.

On Tuesday, agency officials said they were bringing a civil case against Rangel and, at the same time, that he had “settled without admitting or denying the SEC’s charges.”

In addition to agreeing to pay the $10,000 penalty in four quarterly installments of $2,500 over the next year, Rangel will be “barred from participating in any future municipal bond offerings,” according to the SEC.

The settlement is subject to approval by a federal judge. Glockner, the SEC official, declined to comment further on the case.

Now 50 years old, Rangel was forced to step down from his position as chief executive of UNO in December 2013 and received a $206,250 severance.

He had been the group’s chief executive since 1996, leading it into the charter business with help from Daley, Emanuel and Chicago Public Schools officials. The charter chain has grown to serve more than 8,000 students at 16 campuses across Chicago. Almost all of the students at the UNO network’s schools are Latino.

The separately incorporated charter school board severed ties with its parent community organization last year.

In March, the Sun-Times reported that, even as UNO ran the network of charter schools for students in low-income neighborhoods across the city, Rangel and other UNO officials were piling up big bills for restaurant meals and travel at taxpayers’ expense. In the year before Rangel’s forced resignation, UNO spent more than $60,000 for restaurants on his American Express “business platinum” card, according to records that UNO fought for nearly three years to keep secret. That 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.

UNO also spent more than $60,000 a year on travel in 2010 and 2011, the internal records showed, with Rangel himself flying out of town 31 times in four years on taxpayers’ dime.

Rangel has kept a low profile since his resignation. Federal court records show he now runs a “consulting business that assists nonprofit organizations with public affairs and growth strategies.”