The not-for-profit association that oversees high school sports in Illinois can continue to keep details about its contracts, sponsorships and other financial matters secret under a court ruling that comes in the wake of it reporting a six-figure increase in payouts related to retirees.

The Illinois High School Association paid $888,425 out of its two retirement funds in the 2014-15 school year, according to financial statements it filed with the Illinois attorney general’s office. That’s up $259,876, or 41 percent, from the previous year.

The organization’s contributions into its main pension plan and the second retirement plan went up by 48 percent over the previous year, to $592,710, the records show.

If the IHSA were a public agency, it would have to reveal the names of the retirees getting the money, how much they’re paid and who’s managing the organization’s retirement accounts.

But a three-judge panel of the first district Illinois Appellate Court unanimously ruled in June that the IHSA isn’t a government body and thus isn’t subject to disclosure requirements under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. That case has since been appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court, which hasn’t decided yet whether to hear it.

The IHSA has refused to say what it pays individual pensioners out of its main pension fund, which it closed to new employees in 2008 because of cost concerns. It also hasn’t made public details about the separate “nonqualified deferred compensation plan” it created in 2009 to provide “supplemental retirement benefits to certain employees.”

“The only outcome I foresee occurring by releasing the individual pension benefits of past employees is for them to be scrutinized for accepting a pension they were promised and worked hard to earn,” says Craig Anderson, the IHSA’s executive director.

The steep increases in retirement-related costs happened because “additional individuals became eligible to draw benefits,” and also because of “a one-time lump sum tax liability payment that was paid directly to the IRS,” Anderson says.

The Better Government Association sued the association in 2014 after the Chicago Sun-Times reported its costs for salaries and benefits had gone up as revenues and profits from its marquee event, the state boys’ basketball tournament, declined. The BGA argued the IHSA should be treated like a government body because it “performs a governmental function” and generates income “from events involving predominantly public schools.”

But the appellate court ruled that “any school can decide to forego participation in the IHSA.” Justices also noted the association doesn’t get money directly from taxpayers, generating most of its income through revenue-sharing agreements on ticket sales at school playoff sporting events.

Attorneys Matt Topic and Joshua Burday filed the watchdog group’s appeal to the state’s high court on July 29.

“This is an issue of significant public interest,” they wrote. “Government is increasingly privatizing a wide array of its functions. Without a broader and more sensible test for ‘governmental function,’ crucial government business could be privatized in a way that leaves the public in the dark and without the ability to hold anyone accountable.”

As a not-for-profit, the IHSA must file yearly reports with the IRS and provide audited financial statements to the state attorney general. Those documents give an overview of its finances but few details.

The IHSA’s most recent filings, for the 2014-15 school year, show:

• It reported paying $1.75 million in salaries to 30 employees, including four paid more than $100,000. That’s a $102,755 decrease from the previous year’s payroll.

• Its former executive director, Marty Hickman, who retired in January, had a base salary of $107,673 — down from $202,676 the year before. But Hickman’s “W-2 wages” also “included $473,771 of non-cash taxable benefit from the nonqualified deferred-compensation plan . . . related to his retirement.”

“This item has been misconstrued in the past as being a cash benefit,” Anderson said. “The $473,771 is an actuarial figure that estimates the potential value of a pension benefit over its lifetime.”

The IHSA told the IRS the “normal form of benefit” for Hickman is an “annuity payable over the life of the participant with a 50 percent spouse survivorship.”

• The IHSA paid $400,000 into its $9.2 million pension fund, which paid $644,909 to pensioners, up nearly 9 percent. It anticipates paying $400,000 into the fund in 2015-16 and making about $676,000 in payouts.

• It paid $192,710 into the nonqualified deferred compensation plan, whose payouts went up sevenfold, from $35,170 to $243,516. The association anticipates paying $54,147 from that plan for 2015-16.

• Profits from the boys’ basketball tournament in 2015 rose by $29,000, to just over $1.1 million. But that’s still down about 30 percent from 2006.

• The association, headquartered in Bloomington, took in and spent about $11 million.

The Chicago Public Schools’ inspector general has opened an investigation into the hiring of a law firm with ties to CPS chief executive officer Forrest Claypool and his general counsel.

Inspector General Nick Schuler said Monday his office started an investigation after the Chicago Sun-Times reported last month on the Chicago Board of Education’s deal with Jenner & Block LLP. The firm is in the midst of a years-long process of paying out $1 million in severance to Ron Marmer, CPS’ top attorney.

Schuler declined to comment further.

Acting in closed session on July 27, the school board voted to pay as much as $250,000 to Jenner & Block, which spent months preparing a never-filed lawsuit against the state seeking increased funding.

The Sun-Times reported Marmer left the law firm in 2013 but has continued to receive yearly payments of $200,000, which are to end in 2018.

Under CPS’ code of ethics, school officials can’t have any “contract management authority” over any deal with a contractor “with whom the employee has a business relationship” — defined as any transaction worth at least $2,500 in a calendar year to the school system employee.

According to Claypool, Marmer wasn’t involved in hiring Jenner & Block, which he said “was my decision” along with Frank Clark, the board president.

A CPS spokeswoman declined to comment Monday.

The lawsuit Jenner & Block was preparing didn’t get filed because legislators and Gov. Bruce Rauner agreed on a stopgap budget deal on June 30 that’s to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding to CPS.

Marmer and Claypool once worked together at Jenner & Block. Claypool worked there in 1982 — his first job out of law school. Marmer was at the firm from 1978 to 1993 and 1997 until 2013.

Marmer — who had a solo law practice after leaving Jenner & Block and started his $185,000-a-year job at CPS on Nov. 2, 2015 — has made $29,000 in campaign contributions to Claypool’s bids for elected office since 2003. That includes $10,000 toward Claypool’s unsuccessful run for Cook County assessor in 2010. Marmer also gave $5,000 to Rahm Emanuel’s first campaign for mayor in 2011.

Jenner & Block began working for CPS on March 3, though the contract with the firm that Claypool’s administration released last month was dated June 20.

Through June 30, the firm had billed the school system for more than $182,000.

CPS had refused to release any of the firm’s invoices for more than two months after the Sun-Times filed a public records request seeking them in May.

The Jenner & Block lawyer who signed the deal with CPS was Randall Mehrberg, who worked for the Chicago Park District in the 1990s when Claypool was parks chief under then-Mayor Richard M. Daley. State election board records show Mehrberg contributed a total of $30,500 to Claypool’s campaigns and $10,000 to Emanuel.

Violence in Chicago again is making national news, with the nine people killed Monday marking the city’s highest single-day toll of shooting deaths in years.

But the Chicago Police Department and City Hall are grappling with more than a rise in shootings and killings. Citywide, other violent crimes — sexual assaults, robberies and aggravated batteries — also are up this year compared with year-to-date totals for the same period in 2015.

Some parts of the city also are facing particular issues with certain types of violent crimes — robberies on the far North Side, for one, and sexual assaults in lakefront police districts, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis of police department crime data found.

On a weekly basis, the police department reports the numbers of murders, sexual assaults, robberies, aggravated batteries, burglaries, thefts, auto thefts and shootings.

Citywide, each of those categories saw an increase in the department’s latest report, through Aug. 7, with murders up 43 percent over last year, shootings up 48 percent, robberies 27 percent and sexual assaults 20 percent.

The statistics don’t paint a complete picture of crime in the city. They can include complaints that might not always be substantiated. And the department’s murder count doesn’t include cases handled by the Illinois State Police.

The Sun-Times had tallied 425 homicides in Chicago as of Friday morning.

“You are correct that other crime categories are up year over year,” police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi says. “And while that is unacceptable, it is also not the whole story. Taking a broader look citywide when looking at total crime, Chicago is actually down 24 percent over the last four years. Robberies, aggravated battery, burglary and theft are also down over that period.”

Still, the year-to-year rise in crime citywide and this latest bloody week — which saw 84 people shot, 19 of them killed as of Friday — are signs that criminals have become emboldened as cops “stand down” amid heightened attention over the police shootings of Laquan McDonald, Paul O’Neal and other young, black men, says Eugene O’Donnell, a professor of police studies at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

“I think what you have now is the worst of all worlds,” says O’Donnell, a former New York City police officer. “Cops have just checked out physically or physiologically. And the bad guys know this. . . . It’s a national phenomenon.”

Dean Angelo, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, the union that represents most Chicago cops, rejects the idea that his members aren’t protecting people.

But he says officers aren’t “as proactive as they used to be,” in part because of concerns they’ll be branded racially insensitive at a time when the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating the Chicago Police Department over issues including possible racial bias.

“I don’t believe they’re out there driving and looking for groups like they used to,” Angelo says of Chicago cops. “In the old gang-crime days, we would go out, search them, take their names, identify them and tell them we would be back.

“I’ve been saying this for two years now, that we’ll be seeing upticks” in crime, Angelo says. “We have a much more emboldened criminal population out there.”

The police statistics show traditionally high-crime areas in Chicago have grown even more dangerous.

Three West Side police districts that include the Austin, Garfield Park and Lawndale neighborhoods all have seen the number of shootings more than double. Two of those three districts also have seen a doubling in the number of murders.

In the police department’s Englewood district, shootings are up 30 percent, to 213 so far this year. The South Side district has seen an even bigger increase — 168 percent — in the number of murders this year, from 19 killings at this point in 2015 to 51. That’s the biggest percentage increase in murders among the city’s 22 police districts.

“This year, we are seeing unacceptable increases caused by a variety of factors and driven by violent repeat gun offenders who often fail to be held accountable for their crimes,” Guglielmi says. “Of the increase in gun violence happening this year, we know that there are only five districts on the South and West Sides of the city that account for 64 percent of the year-over-year increase in shootings and 82 percent of the increase in homicides.”

Police Supt. Eddie Johnson is formulating strategies to deal with those areas, including Englewood, where organized-crime officers on Friday “executed a series of targeted gang raids . . . where individuals are being sought on drugs and weapons charges,” according to Guglielmi. “Operations to disrupt gang activity will be continuing over the next several weeks.”

As for other crime, the number of robberies went up from 61 percent to 93 percent in each of three far North Side police districts that include the Portage Park, Irving Park, Rogers Park and West Ridge neighborhoods.

In the Town Hall district — which includes Lake View, North Center and part of Uptown — robberies were up 40 percent and burglaries 55 percent.

The Lincoln district — which includes parts of Lincoln Square, Uptown and Edgewater — saw a 146 percent rise in the number of sexual assaults, to 32 this year.

Other lakefront police districts also saw big increases in sexual assaults, including the Wentworth district, which saw the number nearly double, to 48. That district includes Douglas, Oakland, Washington Park and Hyde Park.

The Central district — which includes the Loop and the Near South Side — saw a 77 percent increase in sexual assaults, to 39. The number of property crimes downtown increased, too, with robberies up 47 percent, to 241, and thefts up 38 percent, to 686.

• • •

CRIME TRENDS BY POLICE DISTRICT

Crime in virtually every category in Chicago is up citywide so far this year compared to the same time last year, according to Chicago Police Department data. The following shows the type of crime that has increased the most in each police district, along with the number of cases last year and this year.

District 1 – Central

Murder

Up 150%

2016: 5 cases

2015: 2 cases

2 – Wentworth

Sexual assault

Up 92%

2016: 48 cases

2015: 25 cases

3 – Grand Crossing

Murder

Up 57%

2016: 22 cases

2015: 14 cases

4 – South Chicago

Sexual assault

Up 30%

2016: 61

2015: 47

5 – Calumet

Sexual assault

Up 82%

2016: 60 cases

2015: 33 cases

6 – Gresham

Sexual assault

Up 50%

2016: 69 cases

2015: 46 cases

7 – Englewood

Murder

Up 168%

2016: 51 cases

2015: 19 cases

8 – Chicago Lawn

Murder

Up 76%

2016: 30 cases

2015: 17 cases

9 – Deering

Murder

Up 100%

2016: 32 cases

2015: 16 cases

10 – Ogden

Aggravated Battery

Up 41 percent

2016: 338 cases

2015: 239 cases

11 – Harrison

Murder

Up 100%

2016: 48 cases

2015: 24 cases

12 – Near West

Robbery

Up 37%

2016: 270 cases

2015: 197 cases

14 – Shakespeare

Robbery

Up 71%

2016: 252 cases

2015: 147 cases

15 – Austin

Murder

Up 150%

2016: 35 cases

2015: 14 cases

16 – Jefferson Park

Robbery

Up 61%

2016: 119 cases

2015: 74 cases

17 – Albany Park

Robbery

Up 64%

2016: 195 cases

2015: 119 cases

18 – Near North

Aggravated battery

Up 77%

2016: 124

2015: 70

19 – Town Hall

Burglary

Up 55%

2016: 497 cases

2015: 321 cases

20 – Lincoln

Sexual assault

Up 146%

2016: 32 cases

2015: 13 cases

22 – Morgan Park

Robbery

Up 16%

2016: 168

2015: 145

24 – Rogers Park

Robbery

Up 93%

2016: 191 cases

2015: 99 cases

25 – Grand Central

Auto theft

Up 12%

2016: 525 cases

2015: 467 cases

Two off-duty Chicago cops caught on video pummeling an ex-con at 4 a.m. inside a crowded Northwest Side taco joint more than a decade ago remain on the police payroll but have been stripped of their police powers following a state appellate court ruling last week.

The ruling, which overturned a Cook County judge’s decision to bar the city from firing the officers, is the latest example of just how slowly police-discipline cases can move through the Chicago Police Department’s disciplinary process and the courts — an issue the Chicago Sun-Times examined in the 2013 series “Tarnished Badges.”

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration, responding to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Sun-Times, released security surveillance videos Wednesday of the March 24, 2006, assault at the Taco Burrito King restaurant near Harlem Avenue, Higgins Road and the Kennedy Expressway.

They show Officer Brian D. Murphy, then 24, jumping up from his table with his gun drawn on Obed DeLeon, and ramming DeLeon into a wall.

Officer Jason M. Orsa, then 26, joins Murphy and Murphy’s friend Matthew Walsh, a Marine, in repeatedly punching and kicking DeLeon, then 22, according to the videos and court records.

A third off-duty cop who was eating with them, Daniel McNamara, then 28, appears to be trying to keep others in the restaurant away from the altercation.

At the time, DeLeon, who later filed a complaint with the department, had multiple felony convictions, as well as gang tattoos, court records show.

It took nearly five years for the officers to be investigated and punished — and more than five more years for the ensuing court challenges to play out.

The police department’s now-defunct Office of Professional Standards began investigating DeLeon’s complaint within days and later turned over the case to the Independent Police Review Authority, which replaced OPS.

IPRA finished investigating in October 2009, prompting police Supt. Jody Weis to move to fire Murphy and Orsa in July 2010. The Chicago Police Board agreed with Weis’ decision in January 2011, but Cook County Circuit Judge Kathleen Pantle overturned it in March 2012, saying, “The videotape and other evidence clearly support Murphy and Orsa and their witnesses’ recollection of events.”

Pantle also criticized the police department for taking so long to investigate, saying the delay made it harder to contact witnesses who might have supported the officers’ claims DeLeon had threatened them.

The three cops and Walsh had been at a bar down the street from Taco Burrito King before arriving there, according to court records, and were eating or getting their food as DeLeon walked in.

The video doesn’t have sound. The police officers and Walsh said DeLeon yelled “cobra love,” a reference to the Spanish Cobras street gang, and said he was a “cop killer” ready to “cap someone,” according to the records.

In sworn testimony supported by two restaurant patrons, DeLeon said he never threatened the cops but just walked in complaining about whoever left a car blocking the entrance to the restaurant’s parking lot.

“What if I’m that a—–e?” Orsa replied, according to the court ruling.

In seconds, Murphy jumps up, and the scuffle is on.

Afterward, Murphy, Orsa and McNamara left without talking to responding police officers, according to court records.

Ruling Aug. 9, the Illinois Appellate Court rejected what the three cops told internal police investigators and the police board.

Appellate Justice Michael B. Hyman.

“Our careful and close review of the video leaves us puzzled by the circuit court’s rejection of the board’s . . . true and correct findings,” Justice Michael B. Hyman wrote. “We cannot ignore an even more troubling aspect of this case — the inherently improbable character of the officers’ defense, which largely relied on stirring prejudices by suggesting that DeLeon’s conduct was gang-related.”

The police board fired Murphy and Orsa, whose father was a cop, in 2011. McNamara — whose father also was a cop, as is his brother — got an 18-month suspension because the city was unable to prove he punched or kicked DeLeon, according to last week’s ruling. McNamara has served that suspension.

An officer who responded to the restaurant, Sgt. Louis Danielson, got a 180-day suspension for conducting an insufficient investigation that resulted in the two bystanders being arrested — charges that were dropped. One of the bystanders told the police board he heard Danielson, say, “Put this gangbanger in the paddy wagon,” referring to DeLeon, and “arrest these two for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Danielson’s suspension was overturned by Pantle, and he was reimbursed for lost pay. City officials did not appeal that part of Pantle’s ruling, only her findings regarding Murphy and Orsa.

Neither Murphy and Orsa nor their attorneys could be reached Wednesday.

TARNISHED BADGES — A SUN-TIMES WATCHDOGS INVESTIGATION

Tarnished Badges: They break rules, commit crimes but remain cops, June 23, 2013

Fired as Chicago cops but getting city pensions — Tarnished Badges, June 24, 2013

Arrested again and again but still a Chicago cop — Tarnished Badges, June 25, 2013

Four years after the Chicago City Council decriminalized the possession of small amounts of marijuana, African-American neighborhoods continue to bear the brunt of enforcement, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation has found.

As anticipated, the Chicago Police Department is making a fraction of the arrests for misdemeanor marijuana possession it made in 2011 — the last full year before cops were given the option of ticketing, rather than locking up, people caught with about half an ounce or less.

But 18 of the city’s 20 community areas with the highest rates of pot possession arrests and 17 of the 20 with the highest rates of ticketing are majority African-American, city records show.

Twelve of the 20 neighborhoods with the lowest rates are mostly white. The others are predominantly Hispanic or don’t have a majority population group.

That’s all despite the fact that academic studies have found marijuana usage is similar across racial and ethnic boundaries.

Among the Sun-Times’ other findings:

• Largely black East Garfield Park on the West Side has the highest rate of arrests and ticketing for misdemeanor possession — 72 times greater than in predominantly white Edison Park, which ranks lowest.

• The 19 blocks with the most arrests for marijuana possession are all on the West Side, and the 20th is on the South Side — all in African-American neighborhoods.

• Among the 20 blocks where the most tickets have been issued for misdemeanor possession, 11 are on the West Side, seven are on the South Side, and two are on the North Side.

• Since August 2012, the 5100 block of West Madison Street in Austin has seen more arrests (362) and tickets (91) for pot possession than any other single block in Chicago. That’s the result of police flooding that block in response to concerns about violence between factions of two street gangs, according to a West Side police supervisor.

• Since 2013, more than 4,600 of those the police chose to arrest, rather than ticket, have been convicted — and 89 percent of them were black, 8 percent Hispanic and 2 percent white, court records show.

• Even with decriminalization, seven of every 10 convicted of having small amounts of marijuana ended up doing jail time.

• Through the first four months of this year alone, 72 misdemeanor possession cases resulted in a jail sentence. During that same period, lawmakers were debating and passing legislation in Springfield to lessen marijuana penalties statewide. The measure was signed into law last month by Gov. Bruce Rauner.

• Among those arrested was a 21-year-old man the police said they caught with only the burnt end of a single joint. Its estimated street value: just $2. The police said they pulled the man over after he rolled through a stop sign in West Garfield Park. They impounded his car, and he spent two days in jail before going in front of a judge and pleading guilty.

The new state law, which took effect at the end of July, is aimed at addressing such disparities, says state Sen. Heather Steans, D-Chicago, its chief sponsor. Police statewide will no longer have the option of making an arrest for possession of less than 10 grams, which is about a third of an ounce.

State Sen. Heather Steans, D-Chicago. | AP photo

“It really does allow us to focus our attention where problems really are,” says Steans, who says she hopes the change will free police to spend time instead on more serious offenses and on crime prevention.

But some Chicago cops say decriminalization has taken away a tool they’ve used to combat street dealing and press suspected gang members for information.

“It was an easy way to get access to these guys,” says a veteran officer who often works on the West Side. “You have to be able to hold something over somebody’s head. That’s just the way it works. It doesn’t sound right, but it’s a fact of life.”

The officer, who spoke on the condition he not be named, says cops in Chicago have now been told not to make arrests for marijuana possession unless the quantity involved is at least 100 grams — more than 3.5 ounces.

The rate of both arrests and ticketing has plummeted since the court-ordered release last November of police dashcam video showing 17-year-old Laquan McDonald shot to death by a Chicago cop, Officer Jason Van Dyke, who’s now charged with first-degree murder.

In 2015, the department issued about 7,000 tickets for marijuana possession. This year, through April, the number was just over 1,200 — on pace for 3,700 by year’s end.

That reflects a trend across the nation of moving away from the “broken-windows” policing strategy, which called for making street stops and busts for even minor infractions in hopes that would also help prevent more serious crimes.

According to some officers interviewed, that’s one reason crime has risen in Chicago and other cities over the past year. One longtime police supervisor says it’s also confusing. “After 30 years on the job, I don’t understand how to enforce the laws any more,” he says.

In recent years, the police suspected that many of those they busted for possession were dealing but couldn’t prove it, he says: “The officer doesn’t hear the conversation between the person allegedly selling and the buyer. So it’s a possession case. And possession is now not a crime.”

Most of those convicted of low-level marijuana possession in Chicago since 2012 had been arrested before, court and police records show.

For example, that 21-year-old who was arrested on the West Side with just the burnt end of a joint? He’d previously gotten probation for a drug charge and has a case from 2013 pending for possession of an illegal gun.

In another case, a 27-year-old man was pulled over in March 2014 for driving through a stop sign in West Humboldt Park. His driver’s license was suspended, and police searched him and said they found four baggies with marijuana they estimated were worth only $40 total. But all were labeled with blue stars or green dollar signs — apparently denoting sales brands, according to the police.

He spent five days in the Cook County Jail before pleading guilty and being released. A year later, he was arrested and convicted again for marijuana possession. Altogether since 2004, the same man has been charged with marijuana possession or soliciting drug business 27 times, and he’s been convicted five times.

Richard Dickinson, a Chicago defense lawyer, sees the handling of marijuana-possession cases as a sign of how policing went wrong years ago.

“They’re nickel-and-dime cases that police use to conduct what would otherwise be illegal searches and seizures,” Dickinson says. “It’s a law enforcement tool to do investigations they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.”

He started out as a lawyer four decades ago. Back then, he says, if police caught someone with a joint, “They confiscated it and told the person to go home.”

With the advent of broken-windows policing in the late 1990s and early 2000s, possession arrests soared, police data show.

Ald. Chris Taliaferro (29th). | Sun-Times files

Ald. Chris Taliaferro (29th) says police in his West Side ward often make arrests to disrupt open-air drug markets that can be “catalysts” for violence.

“But they have to do so lawfully,” says Taliaferro, a former police officer. “And that means without profiling.”

Taliaferro says he supports the use of tickets whenever possible because they usually don’t take cops off the street as long as arrests.

It’s unclear how effective ticketing statewide will be. So far in Chicago:

• Just 1 percent of the marijuana possession tickets issued have resulted in full payments of fines of $250 or $500. Another 24 percent have yielded partial payments, sometimes as low as a few dollars. About 29 percent of the tickets were dismissed or dropped. And the other tickets — thousands of them — have been blown off or remain in limbo.

• Beside lessening the burden on police and the courts, ticketing people for misdemeanor possession also was touted as a source of revenue. But fines have brought in a total of less than $679,000 in four years.

Marijuana is legal for recreational use in two states — Colorado and Washington. In November, voters will be asked to sign off on legalization in five more states — Arizona, California, Maine, Massachusetts and Nevada.

Steans says Illinois lawmakers are watching states with legal marijuana. “I do think that’s the direction we should be heading,” she says.

Click here to see detailed data for all Chicago neighborhoods.

Click here to see the top blocks for arrests and tickets.

Contributing: Data Reporting Lab editor Darnell Little

Nearly four years after Chicago aldermen crafted a new law regulating food trucks, an investigation by the Chicago Sun-Times and ABC7 Chicago’s I-Team has found the rules are frequently broken with violators seldom facing any consequences because enforcement by Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration is so lax.

Under the ordinance Emanuel proposed and the Chicago City Council approved in 2012, the city designated 37 “mobile food vehicle stands” across the city. The stands are supposed to be about 40 feet long — enough space for about two trucks. No other trucks are allowed to park in the same block outside of a stand. And the food trucks aren’t allowed to operate at the same location for more than two hours at a time.

But food-truck operators routinely violate those rules, the Sun-Times and ABC7 found. And the Emanuel administration rarely punishes them.

For instance, in the 100 block of South Clark Street, a short walk from City Hall, reporters found the law is ignored virtually every weekday, with as many as a 13 food trucks lined up between Adams Street and Monroe Street.

The signs marking the food-truck stand there are 105 feet apart. In addition to the four trucks operating in the stand on Clark, the Sun-Times/ABC7 investigation found food trucks frequently are doing business in tow zones and closer to the intersections than allowed. And reporters saw food trucks there operating from the same spots from 8 a.m. or 9 a.m. until 2 p.m. or later.

Reporters found the city’s rules for food trucks are routinely ignored on Clark Street between Monroe Street and Adams Street, seen here at lunchtime. | Rich Hein / Sun-Times

Food-truck operators complain the city’s rules are too restrictive, particularly that two hours isn’t long enough to be worth their cost to operate.

One day last month, the Sun-Times and ABC7 found The Corner Farmacy food truck opened before 9 a.m. and remained open into the afternoon in a tow zone on Clark Street in front of the entrance to a brick-and-mortar restaurant.

The owner of that truck, Emily Darland, 31, said she ignored a request to move from the manager of the restaurant, said she was “well aware we are in a tow zone” and acknowledged she stays far beyond the time limit.

“Nobody moves after two hours,” Darland said. “No one does.

“The people making the rules have no idea what it’s like to be out here in business.”

Asked why she didn’t go to another food-truck stand after finding competitors had filled the zone on Clark before she arrived, Darland said, “You know where you can actually go to turn a profit? Only four or five of [the stands] have enough foot traffic.”

She and other food-truck operators also complain that their options are limited by the city’s longstanding ban on them doing business within 200 feet of restaurants.

The Illinois Food Truck Owners Association says Chicago’s rules are too restrictive, far more so than those in other cities, acknowledging, “This has led to some members of our community parking in inappropriate locations and acting in a desperate fashion.”

“The rules are so blatantly crazy it would be impossible for a small food-truck business to succeed if it abided by the ordinance,” said Gabriel Wiesen, the owner of the Beavers Donuts food truck and interim head of the Illinois Food Truck Owners Association.

Wiesen said the “vast majority” of new food trucks in Chicago fail within a couple of years because of the city’s rules.

The chances of getting in trouble for violating the law, though, are slim, according to city records obtained by the Sun-Times and ABC7. The Chicago Department of Transportation and the city’s Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection were given the authority to enforce the ordinance but have done little to ensure the rules are followed, records show.

Transportation Department officials said they have no record of ever having issued a single citation under the ordinance. And the business and consumer agency has levied $1,000 fines — the minimum penalty under the 2012 food-truck law —  just five times since the ordinance was passed. All of those cases were three years ago.

“As with any new license type, we work with the food-truck licensees to ensure they are compliant and give them time to acclimate to the license structure, although we take violations of any ordinance seriously,” said Mika Stambaugh, a spokeswoman for the Business Affairs Department.

City officials say they also have collected a total of more than $37,000 in fines stemming from 62 cases the police and the city health department have filed against food-truck operators in the past five years.

The ordinance says food trucks must be equipped with Global Positioning System devices that track their location — information the city can demand. But the city has never asked for such data, records show.

“We haven’t received enough complaints warranting a GPS search,” Stambaugh said.

The 100 block of South Wacker Drive has emerged as a major downtown hub of the food-truck industry, even though there’s no designated mobile food vendor stand there. Reporters witnessed trucks using metered spaces and parking in tow zones all along the west side of the block for several hours every weekday.

A Chicago Cupcake food truck parked in a right-turn lane on Clark Street near Adams Street. | Rich Hein / Sun-Times

Sam Svita, who works for the Chicago Cupcake food truck, had it parked and open for business in a tow zone near Wacker Drive and Adams Street one day last month. A police officer chased away a food truck parked at the end of the block, but Svita said the officer “passed right by me” and said it was OK to remain in the tow zone.

At the other end of the block that same day, CheSa’s Gluten Tootin Free Food Truck was parked in a CTA bus stop a few feet from Wacker Drive and Monroe Street from before 9 a.m. until after the lunchtime rush. A woman at the truck’s window said she recently bought the truck but wouldn’t answer any questions.

Ald. Brendan Reilly, whose 42nd Ward includes the Wacker Drive and Clark Street sites, said his office “receives a lot of complaints” about food trucks and that enforcement is “sporadic.”

There are between 11 and 14 trucks in the 100 block of South Wacker Drive from about 11 a.m. until 4 p.m. “on any given day,” meaning no one else can find a parking spot, the operator of Chicago-area Subway restaurants complained to Reilly in November.

The Subway operator said the trucks ignore the two-hour limit every day and that garbage from the trucks and their patrons leave waste bins overflowing.

“The food trucks show a complete disregard for the food-truck ordinance, a complete disregard for parking regulations, a complete disregard for cleanliness and pest issues and no sense of fairness to other businesses in the area,” wrote an official for Subway Development of Chicagoland, which didn’t return messages seeking comment.

Someone from the property-management company for an office building on Wacker Drive also wrote to Reilly about garbage from food trucks but expressed fear that complaining would bring a backlash from the tech-savvy food truck operators: “If we or the restaurants that pay city real estate taxes call, we are blasted on social media.”

In the 100 block of South Clark Street, the owner of GRK Greek Kitchen asked City Hall to move the food-truck stand further down the block. Reilly introduced a measure in the City Council in 2014 to do that and wrote Emanuel seeking his backing, but the change was never approved.

“During council debate on the matter of food trucks [in 2012], I predicted that the creation of mobile food truck stands would negatively impact nearby brick-and-mortar food licensees,” Reilly told the mayor in a June 2014 letter.

GRK Greek Kitchen’s owner — who wrote the alderman again last year, asking the city “to ensure that the number of food spaces is being respected” — declined to comment this week.

A Department of Transportation spokesman said officials determined that the food-truck stand in the 100 block of South Clark Street was supposed to be about 40 feet long. Officials had no explanation this week when asked why signs designating the stand are 105 feet apart.

They said they are working with Reilly to move the stand on Clark Street but had no specific plans yet. Reilly, though, said he hasn’t heard anything about the matter in months.

Reilly said city officials need to step up enforcement — and that if the food-truck owners obey the rules, there could be a financial benefit for them.

“If the food-truck industry will start to comply with the rules, I see a real opportunity for us to expand these zones throughout downtown, so the industry can do even better,” he said. “But it’s hard for us to do that when we know they’re not playing by the rules today.”

Currently, about 60 food trucks are licensed by the city.

The 2012 ordinance expanded the hours food trucks can operate and repealed a previous ban on cooking on food trucks. Under the old law, the trucks could serve only prepackaged items.

Weeks after the ordinance was passed, two food-truck operators sued the city in Cook County circuit court to try to overturn it.

The still-pending lawsuit — filed by the owners of the Schnitzel King and Cupcakes for Courage food trucks — challenges the rule that’s supposed to keep food trucks at least 200 feet from restaurants, calls the GPS requirement an unconstitutional invasion of privacy and says too few food-truck stands are allowed downtown.

“The city believes the laws and regulations strike the right balance between the interests of food trucks and those of restaurants,” city Law Department spokesman Bill McCaffrey said.

Food trucks parked in tow zones on Wacker Drive between Monroe Street and Adams Street. | Rich Hein / Sun-Times

Contributing: Jason Knowles, ABC7

A bus company the Chicago Public Schools fired more than two years ago, accusing it of overbilling taxpayers at least $1.5 million, has since gotten deals worth more than $500,000 from another city agency, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.

Chicago Park District officials signed two contracts with Jewel’s Bus Co. totaling more than $541,000 to bus students to and from camps at dozens of parks this summer.

The park district hired the company — which has found support from the Rev. Jesse Jackson — even after receiving letters from a school official warning about the problems CPS had with the company.

“We uncovered a great deal of illegal activity by Jewel’s Bus Co,” Paul Osland, who recently left his post as CPS’ chief facilities officer, wrote in March. “I anticipate that the issues with Jewel’s will end up in the public eye and I would hate to see [the park district] embarrassed.”

CPS Inspector General Nick Schuler says his office has an ongoing investigation into Jewel’s.

“We are aware of the matter and are investigating,” Schuler says, declining to comment further.

Park district officials say they have known of the CPS investigation since June 2015.

But parks spokeswoman Jessica Maxey-Faulkner says officials decided they had “reasonable assurance that the CPD is paying only for services completed in compliance with the contract requirements.

“The payment terms of the CPS contract were substantially different and did not apply to the park district’s payment structure,” she says.

CPS records show Osland wrote in 2014 that he found Jewel’s “did not own or operate sufficient buses, nor did it employ a sufficient number of drivers that would be required to operate all of the alleged first routes for which it billed the board.”

Jewel’s, based on the Far South Side, had been one of CPS’ major contractors for student bus services, paid more than $75 million by the Chicago Board of Education during the 11 years before being dumped in July 2014.

Carshena Ross, general manager of Jewel’s Bus Co. and daughter of owner Jewel Lockhart.

Carshena Ross, the company’s general manager, declined to comment. Ross is the daughter of the company’s sole owner and president, Jewel Lockhart.

When CPS fired Jewel’s, officials informed the company they were considering banning it from ever again getting schools business and planned to sue over lost money.

“JBC’s acts of overbilling are to the detriment of the students and families and ultimately to the detriment of Chicago’s taxpayers,” Osland, then executive director of transportation, wrote in a termination letter obtained by the Sun-Times. “It is not in the board’s best interest to continue its relationship with JBC.”

CPS officials haven’t carried out their threat to bar Jewel’s from ever doing business with the district, nor have they sued for the “immediate restitution” they demanded 25 months ago.

CPS spokeswoman Emily Bittner says, “Jewel’s owes the Board of Education at least $1.5 million.”

But she says, “CPS will make a determination on additional actions after we receive the I.G.’s report, and we will take aggressive action to recover lost funds after the investigations concludes, when we can make the strongest possible legal case.”

The company, located at 1035 W. 111th St., was founded in 1992 as Jewel’s Transportation Inc. Lockhart started as a bus driver at another CPS bus vendor, Art’s Transportation, where she rose to become its president, according to city records.

She started her own business after Art’s Transportation was sold to investors. Jewel’s became a certified women-owned and minority-owned business, giving it preference in bidding for government contracts.

The company had a rocky relationship with CPS long before the overbilling allegations. In 2010, CPS officials accused Jewel’s of using vans, rather than buses, to transport children, even though its contract didn’t allow that.

Rev. Jesse Jackson. | AP photo

Jackson wrote a letter praising Jewel’s and asking for a meeting with a top CPS transportation official in November 2010 — one day after the company had been told it was “still operating the vans in violation of your school bus contract and our directives.”

Jewel’s was the sort of “small and emerging business” that his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition tried to help succeed, Jackson wrote.

“They have overcome all of the obstacles and provided services and now their survival and growth is jeopardized by late payment on services already rendered,” Jackson wrote. “I appeal to you today to immediately pay this company.”

Jackson says he called CPS chief Forrest Claypool on Jewel’s behalf last year because Lockhart has been an outstanding “community servant” that’s offered her company’s buses at no cost to transport seniors and community groups.

“I certainly gave a recommendation based on my knowledge,” Jackson says, noting he has known Lockhart “a long time.”

“What I know of them is very high and uplifting,” he says. “They hired a lot of people who were second-chance people, people who otherwise would not have a job had a job, stabilizing our families.”

In an email in September 2015 to Claypool’s assistant, Osland wrote that he heard about Jackson’s call to Claypool and also said Jewel’s “has a relationship” with Ald. Carrie Austin (34th), a top Chicago City Council ally of Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Brian Jackson / Sun-Times

Jewel’s contributed $10,500 to political funds controlled by Austin from 2010 through 2014, state records show. Ross, the company manager, made a $500 campaign contribution to Austin on June 2.

CPS officials won’t say whether Claypool has spoken with Jackson or Austin regarding Jewel’s.

Osland would not comment. Austin did not return calls.

This February, shortly before leaving CPS, Osland tried to contact Jesse Ruiz, the park board president, writing: “I understand a vendor who we ‘defaulted’ here at CPS is pursuing” park district bus business. “I feel strongly that the park district should not do business with the company: Jewel’s.”

But Osland’s email was sent to an incorrect address for Ruiz, records show.

Weeks later, Osland forwarded the same message to a procurement official. Records show it got passed on to higher-ups, who checked whether Jewel’s had been placed on the list of companies barred from getting city business “but did not find Jewel’s Bus Co. there.”

Parks officials didn’t tell Ruiz they received the email from Osland that was intended for him, according to Maxey-Faulkner.

For the past four years, Jack Schaller didn’t have to pay a dime in property taxes on the two-story building where he lived until his death in May above Schaller’s Pump, the Bridgeport bar his family founded in 1881.

Fred Pegelow, 67, doesn’t have to pay any property taxes this year on his six-flat in North Center — a far cry from last year, when he paid $12,448 in real estate taxes.

Katherine Kent, 80, hasn’t had to pay property taxes either on her condo along Lake Shore Drive for at least five years, and she’s grateful because “I don’t have that kind of money any more.”

They are among 4,188 senior citizens across Chicago who didn’t have to pay property taxes on their homes this year, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis of more than 880,000 tax bills and property assessments in the city has found.

The tax breaks those seniors got meant higher taxes for everyone else, shifting $9.6 million in property taxes to other homeowners and businesses, most of whom have been socked with soaring tax bills this year caused by a combination of new, higher property values set by Cook County Assessor Joseph Berrios and Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s tax hike to fund pensions for police and firefighters.

Another 1,692 seniors living in the Cook County suburbs also received tax bills showing they owed no taxes on their homes this year, the Sun-Times found. It’s difficult to determine how much those breaks cost others in those suburbs since tax rates vary by community and school district.

All of these seniors are benefitting from a program called the senior citizen assessment freeze, which the state of Illinois created two decades ago as a lifeline for older people who feared they’d be forced out of their homes when their neighborhoods became hot and real estate taxes skyrocketed. Under the program, the longer seniors stay in their homes, the more they can save on their property taxes, often ending up paying nothing at all.

This year, some seniors, like Pegelow, also benefited from a new program the Illinois Legislature and Gov. Bruce Rauner approved last year that eliminates all property taxes on the primary residences of any veteran who’s at least 70 percent disabled, as certified by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

State Rep. Deb Conroy.

The new law eliminated property taxes this year for 2,470 disabled vets in Cook County, including 857 homeowners in Chicago, among them two doctors living on Lake Shore Drive and a popular radio broadcaster whose husband is a disabled veteran. By exempting these veterans, another $3.1 million in taxes got shifted to other property owners.

“Property taxes are so astronomical in the state of Illinois,” says state Rep. Deb Conroy, D-Villa Park, who sponsored the legislation exempting disabled vets. “People are being priced out of their homes . . . because the taxes are too high.”

Asked about others having to make up for those veterans exempted from taxes, even some with high-paying jobs, Conroy says: “I may have to pay a few more dollars on my property taxes because somebody defended the country for me. I’m OK with that.”

These tax breaks further complicate the state’s property-tax system by providing deals for some homeowners and businesses at the expense of everyone else, says Carol Portman, president of the Taxpayers Federation of Illinois, a Springfield advocacy group.

Carol Portman.

“It’s one of the problems of these exemptions that legislators push through to help a particular group of people like seniors or veterans,” Portman says. “They don’t cut taxes. They just shift the burden onto others.”

This latest tax break for disabled veterans has no restrictions on age or income, unlike the senior assessment freeze, available only to people 65 or older whose yearly income is $55,000 or less.

The seniors and veterans alike have to apply for the tax breaks every year, attesting that they live in and own the building — whether it’s a single-family home, a small apartment building or a storefront with apartments upstairs, like Schaller’s Pump and dozens of other buildings across Cook County that have gotten the exemptions.

Schaller’s Pump has been operated by Jack Schaller’s family for five generations. Schaller, who died three months ago at the age of 92, owned three properties: the two-story building that houses the bar and his apartment and two adjacent parking lots, across the street from the headquarters of the 11th Ward Democratic Party, the Daley family’s political power base.

Five years ago, Schaller got a bill for $56.46 from Cook County officials to cover the taxes for his apartment and bar. It was the last time Schaller had to pay any property taxes at all on the 5,336-square-foot building, though he still had to pay them on the parking lots. The taxes on the parking lots this year totaled $6,063.

Over the past four years, Schaller saved thousands of dollars in taxes by qualifying for three exemptions provided under state law — the homeowner exemption, which knocks $7,000 off a property’s assessed value; the senior exemption, worth as much as $5,000; and the senior assessment freeze, which provides the owner with a cut based on the difference between the home’s assessment when it was frozen and the current assessment.

Without those, Schaller would have owed $6,128.66 in taxes this year on his bar and apartment. Instead, the bill Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas sent him showed he owed nothing.

Now that Schaller has died, his family expects Berrios will terminate the two senior exemptions — which means the bar will resume paying taxes next year for the first time since 2012.

“I was told we’ll be hammered,” says Schaller’s daughter, Kimberly Shinnick, the executor of her father’s estate who now runs the family bar.

The Sun-Times analysis found that the senior assessment freeze has eliminated property taxes for many homeowners, while others got nominal tax bills this year:

• 18 seniors in Cook County ended up with tax bills of $1 or less.

• One Chicagoan owed just seven cents.

• 1,886 seniors got tax bills of between $1 and $100 this year, most of them in suburban Cook County.

While tax bills have been eliminated for thousands of seniors across the city and most suburbs, no one living in some of Cook County’s wealthiest suburbs, including Kenilworth, Winnetka and Wilmette, got these tax breaks.

Like many senior citizens, Pegelow, 67, has benefited from multiple tax breaks the past few years on his six-flat at Cuyler Avenue and Wolcott Avenue, records show. His property-tax bill totaled $12,447.61 last year. And he was facing a bill of $16,394.48 this year because Berrios found that the value of his building in the booming North Center neighborhood on the city’s North Side has risen.

But Pegelow reduced his tax bill this year to zero by using four tax breaks, including the disabled veterans exemption available to those with a 70 percent disability. It was one of the steepest drops among all of those in Chicago getting the senior citizen assessment freeze or the tax break for disabled vets.

Pegelow and his tax attorney, Christopher G. Walsh Jr., declined to talk about his tax bill.

An attorney for Berrios, whose office administers these tax breaks, says the agency is barred by law from releasing the applications filed by seniors because they contain financial information and can’t make public applications from veterans because they contain the letter certifying they are disabled.

Daniel Hefner, president of an insurance agency, and his wife Mary paid $21,911.35 in property taxes last year on their 3,600-square-foot home on an 11,850-square-foot lot in Oak Park. This year, they were facing a tax bill of $25,167.80. But they ended up having to pay nothing because Hefner got the new disabled veterans tax break. Hefner declined to comment, other than to say of his disability, “It’s over 70 percent” so he’ll never have to pay property taxes on his home.

WBBM radio newscaster Felicia Middlebrooks and her husband, Anthony Hill, paid $3,806.28 in property taxes last year on their condo on North Lake Shore Drive in Streeterville. This year, they didn’t have to pay anything because her husband qualified for the new disabled veteran’s exemption. Middlebrooks declined to comment.

Dr. Roger Perry, 72, a retired Mercy Hospital radiologist, and his wife Bonnie paid $7,915.25 in property taxes last year on their condo in a 16-story vintage building along North Lake Shore Drive in Belmont Harbor. This year, they didn’t have to pay anything because of the exemption for vets with a disability of at least 70 percent. He says that’s the result of a heart ailment dating from his Army service during the Vietnam War, when he was stationed at bases in Texas and elsewhere in the southern United States.

“It’s worked very well,” Perry says. “I got a zero tax bill. It was a pleasant surprise.”

Contributing: Data Reporting Lab editor Darnell Little

 TAX-FREE HOMES

Among Cook County residents who didn’t have to pay property taxes thanks to exemptions:

Jack Schaller, 92, owner of a two-story building that includes Schaller’s Pump, one of the city’s oldest bars.

3700 block of S. Halsted St., Bridgeport

County’s estimated value of property: $334,450

Estimated tax bill: $6,128.66

Actual tax bill: $0 after Schaller, who died earlier this year, received three exemptions — homeowner, senior citizen and senior assessment freeze — wiping out his tax bill for the fourth straight year

Schaller’s Pump. | Leslie Adkins / Sun-Times

Fred Pegelow, 67, owner of a six-flat

4000 block of N. Wolcott Ave., North Center

County’s estimated value of property: $894,670

Estimated tax bill: $16,394.48

Actual tax bill: $0 after Pegelow received four exemptions — homeowner, senior citizen, senior assessment freeze, disabled veterans — wiping out his tax bill, which totaled $12,447.61 last year

Fred Pegelow’s six-flat. | Kevin Tanaka / Sun Times

Elizabeth Martinez, 87, owner of a small brick home

1700 block of W. LeMoyne St., Wicker Park

County’s estimated value of property: $585,430

Estimated tax bill: $10,727.76

Actual tax bill: $0 after Martinez received three exemptions — homeowner, senior citizen and senior assessment freeze — wiping out her tax bill for the fourth straight year. A developer bought the home for $455,000 last September, demolished it, and put up a new home.

The home, since torn down, where Elizabeth Martinez lived.

Paul Bastida, 61, who has a financial stake in a two-story home owned by his mother Esther

1700 block of N. Wood St., Bucktown

County’s estimated value of property: $525,860

Estimated tax bill: $9,636.19

Actual tax bill: $0 after Bastida’s mother received three exemptions — homeowner, senior citizens and senior assessment freeze — wiping out her tax bill for at least the fifth straight year.

She and her son co-signed two loans on the home, which she signed over to her son last year.

Paul Bastida home. | Kevin Tanaka / Sun Times

Katherine Kent, 80, owner of a condo

2900 block of N. Lake Shore Drive, Lake View

County’s estimated value of property: $229,120

Estimated tax bill: $4,198.55

Actual tax bill: $0 after Kent received three exemptions — homeowner, senior citizen and senior freeze — wiping out her tax bill for at least the fifth straight year

Katherine Kent’s condo building. | Kevin Tanaka / Sun Times

Joanne Bartelt, 86, owner of a condo

700 block of N. Michigan Ave., Near North Side

County’s estimated value of property: $122,580

Estimated tax bill: $2,246.20

Actual tax bill: $0 after Bartelt received three exemptions — homeowner, senior citizen and senior assessment freeze — wiping out her tax bill for the fourth straight year

Joanne Bartelt’s condo building. | Rich Hein / Sun-Times

Joseph Kasper, 91, owner of a building including Delta Lounge and apartments

5600 block of 87th St., Burbank

County’s estimated value of property: $317,260

Estimated tax bill: $10,762.11

Actual tax bill: $0 after Kasper received three exemptions — homeowner, senior citizen and senior assessment freeze — wiping out his tax bill for at least the fifth straight year

Joseph Kasper bar and home. | Leslie Adkins / Sun-Times

John Gill, 68, owner of a two-story home

7300 block of Holly Court, River Forest

County’s estimated value of property: $461,310

Estimated tax bill: $14,578.85

Actual tax bill: $0 after Gill received four exemptions — homeowner, senior citizen, senior assessment freeze and disabled veterans — wiping out his tax bill, which totaled $10,785.05 last year

John Gill’s home. | Kevin Tanaka / Sun Times

Eileen Bartels, 90, owner of a two-story home on eight acres

5500 block of W. Steger Rd., Monee

County’s estimated value: $263,770

Estimated tax bill: $11,077.63

Actual tax bill: $0 after Bartels received three exemptions — homeowner, senior citizen and senior assessment freeze — wiping out her tax bill for the fourth straight year

Eileen Bartels’ home and property. | Bill Ruminski / Sun-Times

Paul and Linda Calabrese, owners of storefront with apartment

8900 block of W. Grand Ave., River Grove

County’s estimated value: $151,780

Estimated tax bill: $5,119.86

Actual tax bill: $0 after the Calabreses received four exemptions — homeowner, senior citizen, senior assessment freeze and disabled veterans — wiping out their tax bill, which had been $3,175.43.

The Calabreses’ home and storefront. | Kevin Tanaka / Sun Times

TOP NO-TAX NEIGHBORHOODS, SUBURBS

Across Chicago and suburban Cook County, 8,350 senior citizens and disabled veterans, including doctors and business people, don’t have to property taxes on their residences because of two state programs — the senior citizen assessment freeze and the disabled veterans homestead exemption for those with a 70 percent disability. Here are the top dozen Chicago community areas and 12 suburbs with the most residents whose tax bills have been wiped out by these two programs. To view the complete list, click here.

Chicago community area       No. of homeowners

West Englewood                445

Roseland                             321

Englewood                          284

Austin                                  254

North Lawndale                218

Auburn Gresham              205

West Pullman                    178

West Garfield Park           174

Greater Grand Crossing  154

Washington Heights        143

New City                             137

Humboldt Park                 133

Cook County suburb               No. of homeowners

Harvey                                     273

Markham                                259

Chicago Heights                    170

Robbins                                   140

Calumet City                          125

Orland Park                             92

Dolton                                       87

Country Club Hills                 82

South Holland                         77

Oak Lawn                                 67

Matteson                                  66

Phoenix                                    66

SOURCE: Sun-Times analysis of Cook County property assessments, tax bills

On the South Side, a 22-year-old Chicago man the police said was a gang member was shot to death May 27 inside a Washington Park apartment described as “a known gang hangout.”

At another South Side apartment, a 25-year-old man was gunned down along with another man on Valentine’s Day.

At a house in Englewood, three people were shot and killed May 12.

These killings — part of the surge in violence in Chicago this year — all occurred at a home or apartment whose rent was covered totally or in part by the federal government through Section 8 “housing choice” vouchers issued by the Chicago Housing Authority.

When the CHA began tearing down crime-ridden high-rise public housing projects like Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes under its massive “Plan for Transformation,” residents were promised a better life. But 20 years later, many of the people receiving housing vouchers from the CHA are living in privately owned homes and apartments on blocks plagued by violence, drug dealing and gangs.

The CHA says that’s their “choice.”

That’s a word CHA officials have used repeatedly in responding to a series of stories by the Chicago Sun-Times and the Better Government Association since April that have found the Section 8 housing program in Chicago is riddled with problems and inequities and has enriched some landlords even as most recipients continue to live in largely segregated neighborhoods.

Most CHA residents — more than 107,000 people — are now living in privately owned apartments and houses, with their rent subsidized through Section 8 “housing choice” vouchers that cost taxpayers more than $430 million a year. Those admitted to the program find their own place to live and use the vouchers to pay some or all of the rent, with the amount depending on factors including income and family size.

But the housing authority, whose board is appointed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, has done little to inform tenants’ choice regarding crime and safety.

Before someone with a voucher can move in to a house or apartment, the CHA requires an inspection to help ensure that tenants aren’t living in a building that’s physically unsafe, paying millions of dollars a year to two companies to do those inspections and to conduct yearly checks once a voucher-holder moves in.

The CHA does nothing, though, to warn those with Section 8 subsidies about crime on their block or even in their buildings. The agency doesn’t alert voucher-holders when they’re seeking to move in to a building that’s on the Chicago Police Department’s “troubled buildings” list. Nor are they notified if their building is added to the list.

The police department has 19 officers in its troubled buildings unit. They work with City Hall’s legal and building departments to resolve problems at buildings deemed to pose a danger because of criminal activity, including drug dealing or gangs, as well as building-code violations.

They share information with the CHA on the troubled buildings, according to Molly Sullivan, a spokeswoman for the agency, which administers public housing in Chicago for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

But Sullivan says the agency can’t prevent voucher-holders from renting in such buildings because the federal Section 8 program allows people to live anywhere they want as long as a property passes  inspection.

“There’s nothing that would preclude people from moving” to a so-called troubled building, Sullivan says.

In just the first four months of this year, the police added 237 properties to the list that are home to 350 Section 8 voucher households — about 1,000 people in all, records show.

Over the past five years, the police have placed 30,700 buildings on the list, including 17 of the 19 buildings in the 2700 block of West Lexington Street in East Garfield Park. Taxpayers are subsidizing the rents of 17 voucher households — a total of 50 people — living on that block, all of them in troubled buildings, including six buildings added to the list this year.

In a drive-by shooting Monday night, five people were shot, two of them killed, on the sidewalk in front of 2714 W. Lexington — a two-flat that’s home to a voucher-holder.

Lakesha Mack wishes the CHA had warned her about crime in the area when she and her four children moved, with the help of Section 8 assistance, to a brick bungalow in Humboldt Park in August 2015. She says she thought the West Side neighborhood was on the rebound.

Instead, her family has been faced with drug dealing in the vacant lot across the street. A dozen or so small plastic bags, laid out on the grass in front of the home, offer evidence of that.

Altogether, 48 families with vouchers — a total of 150 people, including Mack’s family — live within two blocks of the 3400 block of West Chicago Avenue, which saw four murders in three months earlier this year, all of the victims between 16 and 23 years old.

Mack, 37, says she grew up in a since-demolished high-rise at the CHA’s Henry Horner Homes on the Near West Side.

How does her neighborhood compare to Horner?

“It’s no different,” she says.

She considers for a moment, then says there is one difference: A tall metal fence wraps around her home and a huge gate blocks the driveway.

Like others who get rental assistance with Section 8 vouchers, Mack found the bungalow on her own.

“Yes, we choose to move where we want,” she says. “But what they could do better is advise us.

“When we looked at this place, it was a nice, quiet block. A day after we moved in, it was like, ‘Holy hell!’ ”

Ald. Walter Burnett Jr. (27th), who grew up in Cabrini-Green and represents the area where Mack lives, says he’s heard similar stories from others.

Ald. Walter Burnett (27th). | Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

“I talk to some people with vouchers who say they felt safer in the projects than some of the neighborhoods they’re in now,” Burnett says.

To try to assess how much violent crime is happening around homes the CHA is subsidizing, the Sun-Times and the BGA matched the addresses of Section 8 housing in Chicago against the city’s online crime database.

The analysis found that, during the first six months of this year, the police responded to reported crimes — from thefts to homicides — at 7,379 addresses where at least one voucher-holder lived.

The data also show voucher-holders live at addresses where 30 people were killed.

Some crimes took place on the sidewalk or the street in front of a building where a voucher-holder lived. For others, it’s not clear in which apartment a crime took place. The police database doesn’t give the names of the victims, and the CHA, citing federal privacy restrictions, won’t identify Section 8 voucher-holders. So it’s impossible to determine exactly how many of the victims — or those charged in their deaths — were getting government housing assistance.

But the Sun-Times and the BGA used police and court records to determine that two voucher-holders were killed, along with five others who were at the homes of voucher-holders. The other 23 victims were killed elsewhere in an apartment building where at least one voucher-holder lived or outside the building.

And one voucher-holder was charged with murder.

The CHA says that when it learns that Section 8 voucher-holders have been charged with crimes, it can revoke their taxpayer-subsidized assistance.

But communication between the CHA and the police department is inconsistent. The police sometimes send the CHA detailed reports about crimes that occur on blocks where voucher-holders live, records show, but other times they send just a one-line summary. CHA officials say they haven’t been notified by the police in some instances even after killings at Section 8 properties.

“CPD and the Chicago Housing Authority are in daily communication to ensure that CHA is aware of incidents that may involve the voucher program and can take immediate steps to uphold the rules and regulations of the program,” police spokesman Frank Giancamilli says.

During the first half of this year, the CHA revoked vouchers from 719 households with a total of 1,389 people. Nearly 300 of those were revoked because recipients left their housing, relinquished their vouchers or died. Thirty-four lost their vouchers because of criminal activity.

The Sun-Times and the BGA found other cases in which voucher-holders kept their rent subsidies after members of their household were arrested or convicted of crimes. Some of the offenses appear to have violated federal housing rules, which give the CHA broad latitude to revoke Section 8 vouchers.

Last summer, for instance, Antwon Sifore, 22, was charged with dealing PCP out of a North Lawndale apartment that his mother leases with the help of a voucher, according to court and CHA records.

“I don’t want to violate my Section 8,” the police said Sifore told them after they found drugs in a basement refrigerator inside the home.

CHA officials say they never received the police report on that arrest.

A week after Sifore’s arrest, the police were back at the same building in the 1600 block of South Homan Avenue, where they arrested his older brother Robert Sifore on a warrant in another drug case.

In November, while free on bail, Robert Sifore was arrested again. This time, the police said he was dealing crack cocaine in front of the building while on home confinement and wearing an electronic ankle bracelet as a result of the prior arrest.

Robert Sifore, 23, is now in prison on a drug conviction from his July 2015 arrest. His younger brother is on probation as a result of his arrest.

CHA officials sent their mother, Aletha Cooper, three letters in the past two years to warn her she could lose her voucher because of criminal activity on the premises and for having an unauthorized tenant in her apartment. Under the agency’s rules and federal guidelines, a voucher can be revoked “if any household member is currently engaged in or has engaged in” drug-related criminal activity within the past five years.

Cooper says her son Antwon no longer is living with her, allowing her to keep her voucher.

CHA officials won’t discuss any tenant by name but confirm that the voucher-holder for the apartment where Cooper lives has passed a criminal-background check and now has only one other person living with her. Cooper says that’s her 6-year-old child.

In other cases, the CHA has moved swiftly to revoke vouchers.

That’s what happened to Sonja Wallace, who was arrested in September 2015, accused of selling crack cocaine from her Auburn-Gresham apartment. About two weeks later, the CHA sent her a letter saying her voucher would be terminated by Halloween. She pleaded guilty earlier this year and no longer has a voucher.

A criminal history doesn’t necessarily preclude someone from receiving Section 8 assistance.

Jeremy D. Hunter. | Facebook

Jeremy Hunter put his name on a CHA waiting list for a voucher in 2008, when he turned 18. Hunter was still waiting for a voucher in 2013 when he was arrested twice for misdemeanor possession of marijuana. He pleaded guilty, was sentenced to court supervision and got his voucher in 2014.

Last year, he moved to an apartment at 50th Street and South Champlain Avenue. Hunter, who reported that he had a job as a home health-care worker, paid $401 toward the monthly rent, while taxpayers covered the rest.

In May 2015, Hunter was a passenger in a car the police pulled over, saying it didn’t have working taillights. They then found it had been stolen. Hunter was charged with possession of about an ounce of marijuana — a felony.

Before the case went to court, Hunter told drug-treatment specialists he had a substance-abuse problem and needed help.

The building at 50th and South Champlain Avenue where Jeremy Hunter and Steven Tate were killed. | Kevin Tanaka / Sun-Times

The court case hadn’t been decided by Feb. 14, when Hunter and another man, 26-year-old Steven Tate, were found dead at Hunter’s apartment. Hunter had been shot once. Tate, who’d been convicted in 2015 of threatening to kill an ex-girlfriend and her family, was shot 17 times.

CHA officials say Hunter had complied with the rules for his voucher and that they weren’t notified by police of the two shooting deaths at the Section 8 property.

Hunter’s landlord, Anthony Oyefeso, says he had asked him to move out because Hunter had let others live with him in violation of his lease.

Hunter and Tate’s murders remain unsolved.

Kevin Larry. | Facebook

Among the other murder cases at Section 8 properties this year:

• Kevin Larry, identified by the police as a gang member, was found dead May 27 on the living-room floor of an apartment in the 5600 block of South Wabash Avenue in Washington Park that was being leased by another man, who had a CHA voucher. He’d been shot in the chest.

A man and two women who were sleeping in the apartment when the police were called couldn’t tell them why Larry was in the apartment, which an investigator for the Cook County medical examiner’s office called “a known gang hangout spot.”

Larry’s death later attracted attention when the police arrested Dominiq Greer in the case June 13 shortly after Greer had held a news conference at his lawyer’s office to discuss his lawsuit against the police department seeking $15 million. Greer said he was shot seven times when he ran from a police officer in July 2014.

The building in the 5600 block of South Wabash Avenue where Kevin Larry was killed. | Kevin Tanaka / Sun-Times

Before Larry was shot to death, the police say Greer had been playing dice outside the home and got into an argument over money. Greer, 25, is being held without bail at the Cook County Jail.

CHA officials say they hadn’t received a report from the police on Larry’s killing.

They say the voucher-holder for the apartment where Larry was shot has since moved out — and that he’d passed a recent criminal background check and remains eligible for a voucher.

The Englewood home in the 1500 block of West 71st Street where Jerome T. Wright, Makeesha Starks and Kiara Kinard were killed. | Kevin Tanaka / Sun-Times

• Elsewhere on the South Side, three people — Jerome T. Wright, 50, his 26-year-old stepdaughter Makeesha Starks and Kiara Kinard, also 26 — were shot to death May 12 at a house in Englewood where a voucher-holder lived.

Makeesha Starks. | Facebook

Starks’ boyfriend, Jerome Robinson, 29, had burst in to the home in the 1500 block of West 71st Street looking for her, according to police reports. They say Robinson marched Wright, Kinard and Starks’ mother Carolyn at gunpoint into the basement, where he found Starks, with whom he had a child.

As they headed back upstairs, Carolyn Starks and Wright ran out of the house, and Robinson shot Kinard in the back, killing her, according to the police. Makeesha Starks and Wright also were killed. Carolyn Starks survived.

The police say Robinson drove off and barricaded himself inside a home in the 10300 block of South Union Avenue for 10 hours, exchanging gunfire with SWAT officers before shooting himself in the head.

Robert Howard Jr. | Facebook

The building in the 1000 block of West Maxwell Street where Robert Howard Jr. was killed. | Kevin Tanaka / Sun-Times

• A voucher-holder and Vietnam War veteran named Robert Howard Jr. was shot in the head Jan. 30 in the stairwell of his apartment building in the 1000 block of West Maxwell Street near the University of Illinois at Chicago, after he complained about a loud party, according to police reports.

Charneise Silas. | Booking photo

Kevin Mason. | Arrest photo

Kevin Mason, 22, has been charged with killing Howard, 62. A neighbor, Charneise Silas, 45, has been charged with aggravated battery, accused of hitting him.

In another case, a Section 8 voucher-holder named Reggie L. Daniel is charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death March 2 of another man at his luxury apartment building at 555 W. Kinzie St.

The victim, Darrin Joss, a commodities trader, was killed while working out in the apartment complex’s gym after an argument with Daniel, according to the police.

They say Daniel left the gym, came back with a gun and killed Joss in a shooting caught on surveillance video.

Daniel, 48, had a lengthy criminal record, including a felony conviction in 1989 for selling drugs and a conviction for a 1997 arrest for battery and resisting arrest. Daniel  is a paraplegic as the result of being shot 30 years ago and gets around in a wheelchair.

The West Loop high-rise where the police say Reggie L. Daniel killed Darrin Joss. | Santiago Covarrubias / Sun-Times

Daniel had used his voucher to lease a one-bedroom apartment on the 15th floor of the building west of the Loop in June 2014 for $2,055 a month, with taxpayers covering $1,884 of that through Section 8.

At the time, he was among 298 voucher-holders whose monthly rent topped $2,000 but received additional help under a CHA program that helps Section 8 recipients move to neighborhoods where there are few poor people, little subsidized housing and a low crime rate.

Again citing privacy restrictions, CHA officials have refused to discuss Daniel, including when he first received his voucher or the results of his criminal background check. Those background checks aren’t shared with landlords.

Contributing: Data Reporting Lab editor Darnell Little

Brett Chase is an investigator for the Better Government Association.

ABOUT THIS SERIES

In 2000, the Chicago Housing Authority embarked on the largest public housing makeover in the country. The Chicago Sun-Times and Better Government Association have been examining the effects of the city’s massive “Plan for Transformation.” Click below to read earlier stories.

Chicago’s public housing divide — 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 24, 2016

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

CHA might take over Section 8 from contractors in wake of reports — June 12, 2016

The CHA’s great upheaval — June 25, 2016

Food-truck operators in Chicago — facing a crackdown by City Hall on a business that’s found big support among the young and hip — are getting backing from groups financed by staunch conservatives including the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers and Gov. Bruce Rauner.

Lawyers from the Institute for Justice, based in Arlington, Va., are pressing a long-running lawsuit to overturn the city’s rules, which bar food trucks from doing business within 200 feet of restaurants.

The Institute for Justice says it got “initial seed funding” from Charles G. Koch of Wichita, Kansas, and recognizes the “generous” financial support of David H. Koch, who lives in New York. The octogenarian brothers control Koch Industries, the country’s second-biggest privately held company, and are among the largest financiers of Republican politicians and right-wing causes nationally.

Another conservative organization, the Illinois Policy Institute, which ramped up its campaign on behalf of Chicago’s food trucks in recent weeks, has received funding from the Charles Koch Institute and Rauner’s family foundation, according to publicly available tax returns those groups have filed with the Internal Revenue Service as not-for-profit organizations.

Food-truck operators have come under increased scrutiny by City Hall since Mayor Rahm Emanuel vowed to increase enforcement of the food-truck ordinance last month after a joint investigation by the Chicago Sun-Times and ABC7 Chicago found city rules were widely ignored and rarely enforced. The Sun-Times and ABC7 found food trucks routinely staying far longer than the two-hour limit on doing business in the same spot and often parking in tow zones, turn lanes or bus stops.

A spokeswoman for the city Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection says the agency has issued 34 citations since Emanuel’s comments on Aug. 29 — nearly six times as many as it issued in the nearly four years since the Chicago City Council approved the food-truck ordinance in October 2012. Inspectors also have given a dozen warnings in recent weeks.

City inspectors check licenses of food trucks on Clark Street in the Loop. | Rich Hein / Sun-Times

City Hall’s new efforts have drawn criticism from the Illinois Policy Institute.

“I love the smell of citations in the morning,” the institute has Emanuel saying in a cartoon posted on its Facebook page.

The cartoon depicts the mayor, who studied ballet, in a pink tutu, standing with an inspector writing tickets.

The institute has started an online “save Chicago food trucks” petition drive, saying, “Rahm’s crackdown could force the city’s food trucks out of business.”

“Chicagoans clearly want food trucks,” says the Illinois Policy Institute’s Austin Berg. “The people of Chicago don’t want these rules.”

When a reader on the group’s Facebook page wrote that he would be angry if a food truck opened outside his restaurant, an institute staffer replied, “If your restaurant doesn’t suck, you don’t have to worry about losing customers.”

The organization, which has offices in Chicago and Springfield, doesn’t disclose its financial supporters. But tax records show it got a $60,516 grant from the Charles Koch Institute in 2014 and larger amounts from groups that have received millions of dollars from a Koch family foundation.

Rauner’s foundation gave the institute more than $625,000 in the five years before he was elected governor, records show.

The Institute for Justice — which has many of the same funding sources as the Illinois Policy Institute — has made Chicago one of the key battlegrounds in its “National Street Vending Initiative,” which seeks the repeal of food-truck laws.

Robert Frommer. | Institute for Justice

Chicago’s rule barring food trucks from doing business within 200 feet of brick-and-mortar restaurants was designed solely with those restaurants’ interests in mind, says Robert Frommer, the Institute for Justice attorney who has represented food-truck owners free of charge in their court fight against the Emanuel administration.

“Competition is the American way,” Frommer says. “We want people to decide who makes their lunch, not politicians.”

As food trucks grew in popularity across the country, especially among millennials, the Chicago City Council for the first time agreed in 2012 to allow them to prepare food on site. Previously, they were allowed only to sell prepackaged food.

The 2012 law also allowed the city to establish 37 “mobile food-vendor stands.”

Within weeks, two food-truck operators sued to overturn it. In court filings, Frommer has argued the 200-foot rule is unconstitutional and that there are too few food-truck stands downtown.

The original plaintiffs in the case were the owners of the Schnitzel King and Cupcakes for Courage food trucks. But Frommer says Schnitzel King owner Greg Burke went out of business, and he moved out-of-state.

Laura Pekarik, the owner of the Cupcakes for Courage truck, had quit her job to care for a sick sister and perfected her cupcake recipes by baking to make her sister feel better. After her sister’s cancer went into remission, Pekarik “originally thought about returning to her previous job but instead decided that she wanted to go into business for herself,” according to the lawsuit. “Laura didn’t have the money to open a storefront location, so she instead chose to sell cupcakes out of a food truck.”

Frommer says the city’s lax enforcement of the 200-foot rule wasn’t causing any problems and that Chicago’s fines for food-truck infractions — which start at $1,000 — are too high.

The group also has intervened, on behalf of Chicago rideshare drivers, in a lawsuit brought by cab companies, records show.

Frommer says the Institute for Justice has thousands of individual contributors besides the Kochs and that donors don’t dictate what he does.

Beyond their involvement in national politics, the Kochs might be best known in Chicago for the piles of petroleum coke they stored on property owned by one of their companies on the Southeast Side. Dust from there fouled surrounding working-class neighborhoods last year.

The Koch brothers also poured tens of millions of dollars into efforts to defeat President Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012.

The Institute for Justice and the Illinois Policy Institute are listed as “partner organizations” by the Charles Koch Institute.

Facing the onslaught of city inspections, many food-truck owners — who until recently were defiant of the rules — appear to be abiding by them.

Under the city’s rules, no food trucks are supposed to be doing business outside a designated food-truck stand within the same block. But the Sun-Times and ABC7 found as many as 13 of them — packed bumper to bumper, from intersection to intersection — in the 100 block of South Clark Street, most of them outside the food-truck stand.

Since Emanuel announced the crackdown, the trucks are staying in the food-truck stand and not parking on the rest of that block, reporters found.

City officials couldn’t explain why signs mark that food-truck stand as being 105 feet long, though they initially said the zone is supposed to be about 40 feet long.

Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd), who says his office has gotten complaints about food trucks from restaurants for years, introduced an ordinance Wednesday to reduce the South Clark Street food-truck stand to 40 feet. He also is proposing to create a new stand on Franklin Street.

The day after Emanuel called for increased enforcement, food-truck owners met and decided to “self-regulate,” calling out colleagues who break the rules, says Louis Dourlain, co-owner of the Boo Coo Roux Cajun food truck.

After Boo Coo Roux had parked for two hours on Clark Street on a recent afternoon, the alarm on Dourlain’s cell phone went off, and he shut the truck’s curbside window and service counter. Boo Coo Roux then moved to another downtown food-truck stand, even though Dourain says he does only 30 percent as much business there as on Clark Street.

An association of food-truck owners says most of the citations issued to its members in the past three weeks were for operating in the same spot for more than two hours.

Dourlain says most food-truck owners “are more on the liberal side,” and he was unaware of the politically conservative financial backing for the groups that have taken up their fight with City Hall.

Dourlain also says he hopes the city will create more spaces for trucks downtown.

“We all know what the frustration is,” Dourlain says. “But we don’t want to make the situation worse than it is. The city is going around giving big, big citations.”

Boo Coo Roux’s paperwork was in order when two inspectors visited the trucks on Clark and in the 100 block of South Wacker Drive during a recent lunch hour.

City inspectors question Francesco Abate of Da Pizza Dude. | Rich Hein / Sun-Times

Francesco Abate, owner of Da Pizza Dude food truck, says he dreams of owning a brick-and-mortar restaurant someday. Waving toward restaurants along Wacker Drive, he says: “We have to understand there are people paying big rent here.”

He says he plans to stick to the rules because food-truck owners “cannot battle with the city.”

“The problem is that we like to bend the rules, and now the city, all of a sudden, says, ‘You know what? We let you slide, we let you slide — time’s up,’ ” Abate says. “A lot of food truck owners are not so smart. And the not-so-smart ones can possibly ruin it for all of us. Or the city is going to probably give them a pounding that they can’t handle, and they’re going to force them out.”

Contributing: Jason Knowles and Ann Pistone of ABC7 Chicago

A Chicago Police Department sergeant who’s facing a one-year suspension over a falsified report that cleared a nephew of former Mayor Richard M. Daley of wrongdoing in the killing of David Koschman says the city waited too long to punish him, in violation of his union’s contract, and can’t discipline him now.

Sgt. Samuel Cirone — one of six cops who faced firing or suspension over the handling of the Koschman investigation — is also asking a Cook County judge to stop the Chicago Police Board from hearing his case because an arbitrator has ruled that he has the authority to determine whether Cirone should be punished.

The city’s law department plans to proceed with the police board case, saying the arbitrator has no authority to decide Cirone’s fate. The city also says the disciplinary investigation of Cirone was, in fact, done in a timely manner and didn’t violate the sergeants union’s contract.

Cook County Circuit Judge Anna Helen Demacopoulos has scheduled a Dec. 30 hearing on Cirone’s motion to dismiss the police board case, which is set to come before the board on Oct. 18.

After the police department closed the Koschman case in 2011 without filing charges against Daley nephew Richard J. “R.J.” Vanecko, Koschman’s mother convinced a Cook County judge to appoint a special prosecutor, Dan K. Webb, to reopen the case. Webb’s investigation led to Vanecko’s indictment, guilty plea to involuntary manslaughter and two-month jail sentence.

Webb has said he considered filing criminal charges against Cirone and the five other cops but decided he didn’t have enough evidence to convict them. Instead, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and then-police Supt. Garry McCarthy directed City Hall Inspector General Joseph Ferguson to determine whether the cops should be punished.

David Koschman. | File photo

Ferguson recommended the city fire Chief of Detectives Constantine “Dean” Andrews, Lt. Denis P. Walsh and Detective James Gilger and that the three others — Cirone, Cmdr. Joseph Salemme and Detective Nick Spanos — also face punishments and possibly firing over the Koschman case.

But Andrews, Gilger, Salemme and Walsh retired before they could face punishment.

Spanos and Cirone, who each got one-year suspensions, aren’t old enough to retire. Spanos served his suspension primarily by cashing in vacation time and unused compensatory time off. Cirone remains on the police payroll in an administrative position.

The flap over Cirone’s suspension comes amid a U.S. Justice Department investigation over Chicago Police Department practices.

The city’s disciplinary system for officers has come under fire for being too slow and for the fraction of complaints that result in disciplinary cases against cops.

The Chicago Housing Authority has been paying more than $34,000 a year in rent for three Section 8 voucher-holders to lease apartments from an alleged gang leader who’s been in jail the past two years awaiting trial on charges he ran a heroin-trafficking ring in West Garfield Park, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times and Better Government Association show.

Johnny “Goo” Herndon is accused of operating the drug ring since the early 1990s and using the profits to buy and rehab dozens of apartment buildings, including buildings where some rents are subsidized through the Section 8 program, according to court records.

Federal authorities described Herndon, 57, as the “alleged patriarch” of a faction of the Gangster Disciples, one of the city’s most notorious gangs.

Federal agents and the Chicago Police Department arrested him in August 2014, along with 34 of his alleged subordinates. He’s been held at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in the Loop ever since.

Johnny “Goo” Herndon. | ABC7 Chicago

Herndon has been one of the CHA’s Section 8 landlords since at least 2005, when the agency began keeping computerized records. The CHA says it’s unable to say whether he was getting Section 8 payments prior to that. Over the past 10 years, he has leased apartments to 12 households in the federally funded Section 8 “housing-choice voucher” program, the CHA says.

Though Herndon’s arrest was widely reported, CHA officials say they didn’t know about it until last fall.

“CHA took steps immediately to suspend Mr. Herndon from further participation in the HCV program in October 2015 after learning through a tip to our fraud hotline that he was incarcerated related to drug charges,” CHA spokeswoman Molly Sullivan says. “The federal government has never notified CHA of the pending charges against Mr. Herndon.”

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago declined to comment.

The CHA has placed Herndon on its “do not lease” list, one of 10 landlords added last year. All are barred from getting any new Section 8 tenants, though the CHA says it can’t force their current tenants to leave until their leases expire.

Records show that as of the beginning of this year the CHA was paying Herndon $2,888 a month to help cover the rents for four voucher-holders.

The CHA pays Johnny Herndon $662 a month for an apartment leased by a woman and two other people at this building in the 1400 block of South Komensky Avenue. She pays another $688 under her Section 8 lease. | Kevin Tanaka / Sun-Times

One voucher-holder has since died, and payments for another apartment have been suspended because of building-code violations. Those payments will resume if repairs are made, according to Sullivan. Otherwise, the CHA will require the tenant to move.

“CHA sends the monthly [payment] for these units via EFT [electronic funds transfer] to the account specified by Mr. Herndon,” Sullivan says.

The CHA ran background checks on Herndon in June 2012 and July 2014, when Section 8 tenants told the agency they wanted to lease apartments from him, according to Sullivan.

“Nothing showed up on either of these background checks that would have prevented him from remaining in the program or to cause CHA to suspend Mr. Herndon,” Sullivan says.

The most recent background check came a month before law enforcement officers finished their undercover investigation of Herndon and his drug ring, which authorities say operated in a two-square-block area surrounding Herndon’s home in the 4500 block of West Jackson Boulevard on the West Side.

Herndon had been arrested on drug charges by the Chicago Police Department in June 2006 and pleaded guilty to cocaine possession in February 2008, according to court records. He was sentenced to three years of probation but was twice accused of violating his probation — in April 2008 and January 2011. It’s unclear what those violations involved or what became of them. Herndon completed his probation in April 2011.

The CHA was paying Johnny Herndon $838 a month for an apartment leased by a woman and two others at this building in the 4900 block of West Erie Street that’s on the Chicago Police Department’s “troubled buildings” list. She paid another $215 under her Section 8 lease. The CHA has suspended payments until code violations are corrected. | Kevin Tanaka / Sun-Times

His lawyer didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Federal authorities and the police began investigating Herndon and the drug-trafficking operation, which they say included “open-air drug markets,” in late 2012, according to his indictment.

Herndon, who played high school basketball, told a government source he got into the drug trade after his dreams of playing professionally didn’t pan out. “I went back home and started selling some drugs,” authorities say Herndon told the source, who was secretly recording the conversation. “I’ve been doing this s— for 25 years. . . .

“I was selling bags [of narcotics], so I didn’t give a f—, make about $15,000 a day and put $2,000 into buildings,” Herndon told the source, according to his indictment. “That’s how I got started.”

Since 1993, Herndon has spent more than $1 million buying 31 properties in Chicago, the suburbs and northwest Indiana, according to the indictment. There are no mortgages on any of those buildings, which authorities plan to seize if Herndon is convicted.

Herndon collected more than $20,000 a month through his apartments, including the Section 8 units, according to the indictment. Authorities say he used drug proceeds to buy and rehabilitate some of the buildings.

Five of Herndon’s buildings are on the police department’s list of “troubled buildings,” deemed to pose a danger because of criminal activity, including drug dealing or gangs, as well as building-code violations. Two CHA voucher-holders lived in two of those buildings.

The CHA was paying Johnny Herndon $684 a month for an apartment leased by a man at this building in the 4500 block of West Congress Parkway, which is on the police department’s “troubled buildings” list. He paid another $116 under his Section 8 lease. The CHA terminated the payments because the man died. | Kevin Tanaka / Sun-Times

Contributing: Mick Dumke, Brett Chase of the Better Government Association

ABOUT THIS SERIES

In 2000, the Chicago Housing Authority embarked on the largest public housing makeover in the country. The Chicago Sun-Times and Better Government Association have been examining the effects of the city’s massive “Plan for Transformation.” Click below to read earlier stories.

Chicago’s public housing divide — 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 24, 2016

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

CHA might take over Section 8 from contractors in wake of reports — June 12, 2016

The CHA’s great upheaval — June 25, 2016

CHA danger zones — Sept. 11, 2016

Dr. Charles S. Dehaan’s specialty was house calls. Building his practice around patients too old or infirm to go to a doctor’s office for routine care, Dehaan for years traveled to see them at home and in assisted-living facilities across the northwest suburbs and Rockford area.

It was a lucrative business: From 2009 to 2014, Dehaan billed Medicaid alone for a total of $22 million, records show.

It also provided ample opportunity to prey on patients, according to federal and state prosecutors, police in two counties and a string of patients suing him, who say the former Des Plaines physician sexually assaulted vulnerable women with little capacity to rebuff his advances.

Dehaan, 62, has been charged with sexually assaulting four female patients in Cook County and Winnebago County, including a wheelchair-bound 80-year-old. In one case, Cook County prosecutors have charged Dehaan with repeatedly sexually assaulting a bedridden 60-year-old Des Plaines woman over a span of four years.

Before the sexual assault cases go to trial, Dehaan is due in federal court Wednesday in Rockford, where he faces a possible 10-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to Medicare fraud.

Dehaan was charged with 23 counts of Medicare fraud. But, in a deal with prosecutors, he pleaded guilty in March to just two of the charges — one for billing for a house call to a man who said he never saw Dehaan and another for a bill for seeing a patient who was already dead for months at the time of the supposed visit.

Prosecutors plan to offer evidence at his sentencing that, for years, Dehaan billed Medicaid for appointments during which he sexually assaulted patients.

They’re also seeking to recover millions of dollars they say Dehaan fraudulently billed the government for.

Dehaan, who has pleaded “not guilty” to all of the sex charges, who would not talk with a reporter after a court hearing Tuesday in Skokie or over the weekend at his home in Belvidere. He denies molesting any patients, according to Debra Schafer, one of his lawyers.

“He did not sexually assault any of his patients, and he intends to vigorously defend the charges,” Schafer said.

Dehaan is charged in the four cases with aggravated criminal sexual assault and aggravated criminal sexual abuse. He’s also facing 12 lawsuits filed by patients who say he assaulted them.

The oldest of the women who say he assaulted them was 84.

“He’s a predator is what he is,” said Judith Kohl, 57, of Rockford, who’s among the women suing Dehaan.

Judith Kohl, on the front porch of a nursing home in Rockford, is  suing Dr. Charles Dehaan, accusing him of molesting her during a house call. | Andrew Grimm / Sun-Times

Kohl said she was homebound because of a congenital bone disorder when Dehaan first saw her in 2013 and helped her get a motorized wheelchair. She said Dehaan told her during that first visit to her apartment she was beautiful and began molesting her.

“He said he was attracted to all women, whether they were disabled or not,” Kohl said. “I’m not used to having all these compliments. The next thing, he’s whipping his privates out and rubbing them all over my arms, my hands.”

In police reports filed by other women, the accusations against followed a similar pattern: compliments and come-ons followed by groping or more. In two cases, records show the patients told police they had intercourse with Dehaan. In one case, a 69-year-old woman said he squeezed her breasts and buttocks while fitting her for a wheelchair “and said something like he wanted to make sure they fit in the chair.”

Records show patients started complaining as early as 2009 to the police and state authorities.

The Department of Professional Regulation, now seeking to ban Dehaan from practicing medicine, didn’t take action against him until January 2014, when it temporarily suspended his medical license shortly before his federal indictment.

A spokesman for the state agency said the “citizen complaint” that led to Dehaan having his license suspended was filed in November 2013.

The first sexual assault case filed against Dehaan was filed in 2014 in Cook County after the Des Plaines woman saw news reports about his license being suspended and called the police, according to state’s attorney’s spokeswoman Sally Daly.

Dehaan was charged last year with assaulting three female patients in Winnebago County. According to Rockford police reports, detectives first brought two of those cases to the Winnebago County state’s attorney’s office in 2011, but it initially declined to file charges.

In one of the cases in which Dehaan is charged, a 70-year-old, wheelchair-bound woman could not identify Dehaan in a photo lineup. In another Rockford case that resulted in charges, the 69-year-old woman who said Dehaan groped her during the wheelchair fitting picked him out in a photo lineup and said, “That’s the son of a bitch.”

Winnebago County State’s Attorney’s spokeswoman Katie Zimmerman wouldn’t comment on Dehaan.

In all, 10 police reports filed with the Rockford police involved claims of sexual assault by Dehaan between 2009 and 2013, when his license was suspended.

Asked whether complaints were passed on to state regulators, Kimberly R. Bruce, a Rockford police spokeswoman, said, “In general, it is the department’s practice and policy to notify the appropriate state regulatory agencies.”

Michael Gravlin, a Chicago lawyer who represents 11 women who have sued Dehaan in Cook County circuit court for medical malpractice, said one complicating factor is that some women who complained they were victimized might not be good witnesses because of age, severe illness or mental infirmity.

“He was a home-care doctor,” Gravlin said. “To qualify for a visit from him, by definition, you have to be in pretty bad health. They’re vulnerable. They’re lonely. They depend on him for medications.”

Tim Freiberg, a Rockford attorney, represents a mentally disabled woman who has accused Dehaan in a malpractice suit of assaulting her multiple times during visits to her home in Rockford. When DeHaan’s license was suspended, the woman saw a new doctor, who, at her first appointment, diagnosed breast cancer that required a double mastectomy, Freiberg said.

“It’s something that, if he had been doing his job, he would have caught right away,” Frieberg said.

“She basically has the mentality, the ability, of a 10-year-old,” he said, “and he is making her do these things and telling her he’s going to cut off her medications or cancel her Social Security payments if she tells anyone.”

Dehaan is also facing criminal charges in that case.

“He took advantage of the elderly or mentally handicapped individuals who were not likely to turn him in, or, if they did, were unlikely to be believed,” Freiberg said. “And that’s how he was able to get away with it for so long.”

Leaning on canes or rolling through the courtroom on motorized wheelchairs, former patients of Dr. Charles Dehaan took to the witness stand Wednesday to recount sexual assaults they claim the Rockford doctor committed during house call visits.

Dehaan faces 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to charges for Medicare fraud. Federal prosecutors on Wednesday sought to build a case that the 62-year-old doctor deserves prison time because he often submitted bills for visits where he molested his patients.

Along with dry testimony about Medicare billing codes, four women appeared in court to recount assaults they say were committed by Dehaan during visits to their homes or nursing facilities. A fifth woman, who suffers from an anxiety disorder so severe she cannot leave her home, testified on video. After more than eight hours of testimony, the hearing was continued to Oct. 12.

Dehaan, who sat glumly in his seat during the testimony Thursday, has denied assaulting his patients. In a deal with federal prosecutors, Dehaan has pleaded guilty only to two fraud counts that are unrelated to alleged sexual assaults.

In addition to the federal fraud case, Dehaan also faces aggravated sexual assault charges in state courts in Cook and Winnebago counties tied to assaults of four women. The doctor has pleaded not guilty to those charges.

RELATED: WATCHDOGS: Doctor, accused in sex cases, faces fraud sentencing

Early in Wednesday’s testimony, U.S. District Judge Frederick Kapala cautioned attorneys not to turn the sentencing hearing into a sexual assault trial. Prosecutors are seeking to recover some of the $22 million Dehaan collected from Medicaid billings from 2009 to 2014, when state regulators pulled Dehaan’s physician license.

“The defendant is not being prosecuted in this court for sexual behavior,” Kapala said. “That’s not what he pleaded guilty to . . . that’s not what he’s being sentenced for.”

In an interview videotaped by investigators earlier this year, a bedridden Des Plaines woman tearfully told investigators that Dehaan fondled her, masturbated in front of her and performed oral sex on her during visits to her home that spanned nearly four years.

Her face framed by the stack of pillows behind her head, the 63-year-old woman said the abuse began after she was confined to bed following surgery for a broken hip in 2009. The woman, who suffered from an anxiety disorder that left her unable to leave the house without suffering crippling panic attacks, said Dehaan began assaulting her behind the closed doors of her bedroom during monthly, and eventually biweekly appointments, often while her boyfriend sat unaware in another room.

“I’d start to cry, and every time I started to cry, [Dehaan] told me to whisper,” said the woman, whose case has prompted sexual assault charges in Cook County.

The woman said Dehaan shut the doors to her room and made lewd remarks, then pulled down his surgical scrubs and masturbated in front of her.

“He told me, ‘That’s my love I feel for you.’ I go, ‘That’s not love.’ And I would cry.”

The woman said she never told anyone about the abuse, which continued into 2013, because Dehaan threatened her and said no one would believe her. But she marked a calendar with notations, such as sad faces or “sicko,” on the dates Dehaan had molested her.

The woman said she told police about the abuse in 2014, only after seeing a news report that Dehaan’s license had been suspended by state regulators based on sexual assault allegations by other patients.

A Chicago Sun-Times review of police reports and lawsuits filed against Dehaan showed that, from 2009 until his license was suspended in 2014, nearly 30 women have either complained to police or sued the doctor, alleging medical malpractice related to sexual advances or assault.

Police in Rockford investigated 10 cases in which patients claimed they had been assaulted by Dehaan prior to 2014, with four reports noting that prosecutors in Winnebago County declined to bring charges against Dehaan. The Winnebago County state’s attorney filed aggravated sexual assault charges against Dehaan in 2015, alleging he assaulted three women, including two women whose cases were first brought to prosecutors by Rockford detectives in 2011.

Under cross-examination by Dehaan’s lawyer on Wednesday, the four women who appeared in court struggled at times to recall details of their assault, and of medical treatment they received from Dehaan.

A 69-year-old woman, who claimed Dehaan groped her during visits after fitting her for a motorized wheelchair, was flustered as Dehaan’s lawyer pointed out the changing versions of her allegations in statements she gave to Rockford police, a detective and FBI investigators.

Dehaan’s attorney, Debra Schafer, asked the woman why she gave a different accounting of the dates of the assaults or added details in each interview.

“I don’t know. I’m saying it now, anyway. Because it all comes back. Yes it does,” the woman said, anxiously shuffling a copy of a written statement she gave to Rockford police in 2011.

“The fact is, you can’t keep your story straight because you made it all up,” Schafer said.

Schafer also pointed to numerous occasions where Dehaan had ordered medical tests and provided treatment to the women testifying against him. One patient, a mentally disabled Rockford woman, testified she suffered from breast cancer that went undiagnosed because Dehaan was preoccupied with making sexual advances on her. But Schafer noted that Dehaan had ordered X-rays for the woman, but was unable to provide follow-up treatment because his doctor’s license was suspended.

James Jones, an investigator from the state Department of Professional Regulation, said he interviewed Dehaan in 2013 during an investigation of claims that Dehaan had molested his patients; prescribed medications to people he hadn’t evaluated; and committed billing violations.

Jones said a former employee of Dehaan’s home health care company said she had fielded complaints about Dehaan from patients who claimed he had made inappropriate remarks or sexual advances, and that he repeatedly overcharged Medicare for services or submitted bills for patients he hadn’t treated.

Jones said he asked Dehaan why numerous patients, most of them strangers to each other, would make allegations about the doctor that repeated similar details. Dehaan, Jones said, dismissed the allegations, noting his patients often suffered from dementia or other mental illness.

“He said he didn’t know why they would make those allegations,” Jones said.

As the only Republican legislator from the city of Chicago, state Rep. Michael McAuliffe has known for the past year he’s a target.

“Democratic colleagues and lobbyists came up to me and said, ‘You better get ready because they’re coming after your seat,’” McAuliffe, whose district includes the far Northwest Side and adjacent suburbs, recently told the Chicago Sun-Times editorial board.

McAuliffe has won re-election by comfortable margins since taking office in 1997 following the death of his father, Roger, who served in the Legislature for 23 years.

But this time, Democrats — led by House Speaker Michael Madigan — are marshalling far more resources to defeat him. And state Republican organizations — bankrolled largely by Gov. Bruce Rauner — are helping him fight back: More than $2 million has been pumped into the race between McAuliffe and Democratic challenger Merry Marwig.

It’s a big-money trend playing out in a number of legislative districts statewide.

McAuliffe vs. Marwig is one of three House races where $2 million-plus is being invested to try to win control of a single legislative district, according to the non-partisan Illinois Campaign for Political Reform.

State Rep. Michael McAuliffe, left, and challenger Merry Marwig before the Sun-Times Editorial Board. | Rich Hein/Sun-Times

At the same time, Illinois comptroller Leslie Munger, a Rauner appointee, received $5.3 million in donations last week alone, and Democrats are expected to respond with help for challenger Susana Mendoza, who’s backed by Madigan.

Both sides are capitalizing on loose campaign finance laws for the proxy war between Madigan, who wants to keep Democrats in control of the General Assembly, and Rauner, who has vowed to break Madigan’s lock on power so he can institute a pro-business, anti-union agenda.

The millions of dollars are moving through a web of candidate committees, political parties and super PACs, which are allowed to accept unlimited sums of money that they can use to campaign for or against candidates — as long as they don’t coordinate with candidates themselves.

Thanks to hefty infusions of cash from multimillionaire Rauner and his wealthy supporters, the Illinois Republican Party topped the Democrats by taking in about $21 million since July 2015, state records show. Liberty Principles, a super PAC supporting Republicans, took in another $10 million.

“I’ve witnessed and been part of campaigns where we’ve been outspent by two or three times by the House Democrats,” said Jim Durkin, the House Republican leader. “Now we’re competing dollar for dollar statewide.”

Over the same period, the four political committees that Madigan controls — including the state Democratic Party, which he chairs — have collected more than $14 million. The top donors, as in years past, are unions and their political action committees.

All that money is funding a political showdown over the future of state government.

Democrats currently hold veto-proof majorities in both the House and Senate, limiting Rauner’s power. The focus of both Madigan and Rauner for now is primarily on the House, where a Republican pick-up of one seat could end the veto-proof majority there and demonstrate a weakening of Madigan’s grip.

“I think there’s a real opportunity for some surprises this year,” said Republican activist and radio personality Dan Proft, who heads the Liberty Principles super PAC.

Despite the state’s deep financial problems, many Democratic legislators “go to Springfield and they’re just a roll call vote for Mike Madigan,” Proft said. “People are increasingly getting hip to that, and they’re disgusted by it.”

Democrats say their funding comes from unions and lawyers who represent “working families.”

“How the 1 percenters make their money, we’re not even sure how,” said Madigan spokesman Steve Brown. “But we know that the funding for Democratic candidates is raised pretty much on a grassroots level.”

Madigan entered the House in 1971 and has served as speaker for all but two of the last 33 years. A leading source of his longevity — and the perception that he can’t be defeated — is his potent campaign fundraising operation.

By using multiple political committees, Madigan and his allies are able to gather more money from donors than would be allowed for a single committee under state campaign finance laws. Funds also are being moved from one committee to another.

That’s been the case with the campaign war chest of Rep. Kate Cloonen, D-Kankakee. Cloonen, who won re-election two years ago by just 122 votes, is on the Republican hit list.

As her race grows more heated and expensive — at $1.7 million and counting — her challenger, attorney Lindsay Parkhurst, has received support from Liberty Principles, Proft’s Republican super PAC.

While she fights for her political life, Cloonen’s committee also has become a piggy bank for others. In the last week, more than $300,000 in contributions to her have been redistributed to Madigan’s committees and other campaign funds, including those of several legislators in tough races.

Among the recipients: Marwig, who is challenging McAuliffe for the House seat in and just outside Chicago’s Northwest Side.

“They’re able to transfer money from one candidate committee to another, and that allows the candidates to sort of raise their max this election cycle from their regular contributors — and to get that money distributed to where the party thinks it should go,” said Sarah Brune, executive director of the Campaign for Political Reform.

The dizzying money transfers are happening on the Republican side, too.

During his run for governor, Rauner was the chief donor to his own campaign committee, Citizens for Rauner, giving $27.5 million. Since winning office, he’s poured another $17.8 million into that committee, including $5 million last week.

Since July 2015, Citizens for Rauner has transferred $21 million to the Illinois Republican Party. The party then gave $12.3 million to the House Republican Organization and $2.8 million to the Republican Senate Campaign Committee. All three committees subsequently used that money to support McAuliffe and other legislative candidates.

Additionally, Rauner has sent $2.5 million to Proft’s Liberty Principles group and $2 million to the Turnaround Illinois PAC, a super PAC led by allies of Rauner.

Turnaournd Illinois then transferred $2.3 million to Liberty Principles to support GOP House candidates including Parkhurst.

Through a spokesman, Rauner declined to comment. The governor has travelled the state campaigning for legislative candidates, but he has repeatedly refused to discuss his involvement.

The seeds of the Rauner and Madigan money trees contrast sharply, records show:

• Since July 2015, 20 of the top 25 donors to Madigan’s committees were unions or their political action committees. The top overall contributor was the Chicago Regional Council of Carpenters PAC, giving $410,000 altogether.

• Madigan’s four committees sent money or other assistance to 64 political funds or campaigns, not including his own committees or those of unions.

• Madigan doesn’t just send money to other candidates – he also dispatches staff. For example, Kylie Kelly is listed on a recent state payroll as a program specialist for the General Assembly. She was paid $42,006 from July 2015 through July of this year by two Madigan-controlled campaign committees to work on 20 different legislative campaigns.

To compete with Madigan, Rauner has tapped his personal wealth and turned to other wealthy donors. They include:

Citadel hedge fund founder and billionaire Ken Griffin. | AP file photo

• Billionaire hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin, who gave $5.6 million to Citizens for Rauner during the governor’s campaign and $8 million after Rauner was elected. In August, Griffin donated $1 million to Liberty Principles. Last week, he gave $3 million to Comptroller Munger, the Rauner appointee who’s trying to stave off Mendoza.

• Richard Uihlein, the founder and CEO of a shipping supply firm who’s a prolific contributor to Tea Party groups and other conservative causes around the country. He gave $630,000 to Citizens for Rauner during the 2014 campaign and $2 million following that election. In June he sent $4 million to Liberty Principles, and last week he gave $2 million to Munger’s campaign fund.

Proft said Republicans don’t need to apologize for being funded by millionaires. “It’s an environment where people are afraid to put themselves on the line because of the culture of reprisal in politics in Illinois,” he said. “There are some people with substantial resources who, to borrow a phrase, want to turn around Illinois. There’s no shame in that.”

Contributing: Jacqueline Campbell

The top attorney for the Chicago Public Schools supervised work done for CPS by a law firm that’s still making $200,000-a-year severance payments to him, email records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.

When the Sun-Times first reported in July that CPS had hired Jenner & Block LLP, schools CEO Forrest Claypool said his hand-picked general counsel, Ronald Marmer, “recused himself” and had no role in choosing the firm.

But the newly obtained documents show Marmer reviewed drafts of a lawsuit the firm was preparing to file on behalf of CPS and sent revisions of the planned suit to Jenner & Block lawyers.

The records also show Claypool knew Marmer was communicating with Jenner & Block about the case.

Both Marmer and Claypool previously worked for Jenner & Block.

Marmer is getting $1 million in severance from the firm in five yearly installments due to end in 2018.

Under CPS’ ethics code, employees are barred from exercising any sort of “contract management authority” over a schools contractor “with whom the employee has a business relationship.”

The ethics code defines a business relationship as a transaction worth at least $2,500 in a calendar year to a schools’ official. And the code’s definition of contract management authority includes “supervision of contract performance.”

CPS spokeswoman Emily Bittner says officials “concluded that Mr. Marmer’s participation on substantive issues was consistent with the board’s ethics policy.”

“Ron Marmer’s business relationship with Jenner & Block ended on Dec. 31, 2013,” when he left the firm, Bittner said.

Bittner also says Marmer “doesn’t own an economic interest in Jenner & Block” and is entitled to the fixed severance payments from the firm.

CPS officials hired the firm earlier this year to prepare a civil rights lawsuit against the state of Illinois seeking increased funding for the state’s largest public school district. The suit has not been filed.

“The Board of Education wanted to ensure that the best possible resources and minds were dedicated to crafting a winning lawsuit so that we could end the racially discriminatory state education-funding formula,” Bittner says.

The Sun-Times report in July revealing the firm’s ongoing financial payments to Marmer prompted CPS Inspector General Nicholas Schuler to open an investigation. Schuler says the investigation is ongoing but declined to comment further.

Under the CPS ethics code, violations could result in punishment as severe as suspension or firing.

Sarah Brune, executive director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, says the involvement of Marmer in supervising Jenner & Block “definitely is not in keeping with the spirit of the law.”

“The employee is engaging with a contractor who is paying him,” she says. “CPS parents and taxpayers don’t want to see any relationship between contractors and employees.”

Because of CPS’ deep financial problems and the corruption conviction last year of former CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett, schools officials “have to be really careful not to even give the impression of impropriety,” Brune says.

Marmer disclosed the severance deal he’s getting as a former partner at Jenner & Block in an “ethics questionnaire” he completed before CPS hired him last year and in his “statement of business and financial interests” filed in March.

Emails show Marmer sought guidance from the school system’s in-house ethics adviser in filling out the form, which requires officials to report annually whether “you or a relative have an economic interest” in a company doing business with the schools.

CPS officials declined to disclose what the adviser, Andra Gomberg, told Marmer.

CPS officials did, however, give the Sun-Times a copy of an opinion issued in June by another law firm they hired, Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP. According to Taft, it was OK for Marmer to be involved in overseeing Jenner & Block’s work for the schools because he “does not ‘own’ any economic interest in Jenner.”

But the opinion from Taft — which also is representing CPS in the inspector general’s investigation — did not address whether Marmer had a business relationship with Jenner & Block.

The ethics code outlines six exceptions to its definition of a business relationship as being paid $2,500 a year or more by a CPS contractor. None of those exceptions covers arrangements such as Marmer’s severance deal.

The Taft lawyer who wrote the opinion for CPS, J. Timothy Eaton, has contributed $5,000 to the political campaigns of Claypool, a former Cook County Board commissioner.

The suit against the state wasn’t filed, Claypool has said, because lawmakers and Gov. Bruce Rauner agreed on a stopgap budget deal on June 30 providing CPS with hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding.

The school board voted in closed session July 27 to pay as much as $250,000 to Jenner & Block for its work on the abandoned legal fight. CPS ended up paying the firm more than $182,000.

CPS agreed to pay the firm $295 an hour, its standard rate for outside counsel. Initially, though, the school system signed a deal that would have paid Jenner & Block at its much higher, normal hourly rates if the suit succeeded in winning any money, records show.

Claypool says he and school board President Frank Clark chose Jenner & Block.

But CPS emails, released in response to a request made under the state’s open-records law, show Marmer was deeply involved at an early stage in CPS’ dealings with Jenner & Block and communicated with the firm frequently as the proposed suit was prepared.

Randall Mehrberg. | Jenner & Block

Claypool and Marmer discussed the possible litigation against the state in emails on Feb. 7. Sixteen days later, Claypool received a request for a meeting from Randall Mehrberg, the lawyer who later signed the deal with CPS and led Jenner & Block’s work on the never-filed lawsuit.

Mehrberg had worked for Claypool in the 1990s, when Claypool headed the Chicago Park District under then-Mayor Richard M. Daley. Mehrberg also served briefly as a volunteer adviser to Claypool in Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office while Claypool was chief of staff in 2015.

Mehrberg was set to return to work at Jenner & Block when he contacted Claypool in February.

Claypool asked Marmer if the proposed time of a meeting with Mehrberg would “work for you.” Marmer replied that it did.

On March 1, Mehrberg again wrote to Claypool, saying, “I started at Jenner today. I will get the file opened.”

Two days later, Mehrberg wrote to Marmer at CPS to “establish direct lines of communication” between the general counsel and the firm. On that same day, Jenner & Block began billing CPS.

Another Jenner & Block lawyer wrote to Marmer the following week, saying, “Ron, we have a legal team in place.”

Marmer wrote to Claypool, “I will recuse from negotiating financial terms” with Jenner & Block. Marmer also said his top aide in the CPS legal department could sign the engagement letter with the firm.

Yet, Marmer continued to supervise Jenner & Block’s work.

On April 1, Mehrberg sent Marmer a “draft complaint.” Marmer told Claypool he had received the draft of the lawsuit, adding, “You and I should discuss the approach.”

Four days later, Marmer emailed Claypool, telling his boss, “I sent Jenner my revised draft with a few minor tweaks this morning.”

Twice in April, Mehrberg reported to Claypool that he’d had a “good conversation” with Marmer about the draft of the lawsuit.

“Great,” Claypool replied to one of those emails.

Also in April, Jenner & Block lawyers sent Marmer “a quick update for you on our status” and gave him a new version of the proposed complaint against the state.

In a statement, the firm said its contract with CPS was a good deal for the schools that “involved substantially reduced economics.”

“Jenner & Block has had a longstanding commitment to public service,” says the firm’s managing partner, Terrence J. Truax.

Claypool got his first job out of law school at Jenner & Block in 1982, according to the state attorney-registration agency. Marmer and Mehrberg were working for the firm at that time.

While Claypool quickly moved on to prominent roles in government and politics, he maintained ties to the firm and to Marmer and Mehrberg, who have spent much of their careers at Jenner & Block.

According to court records, the firm represented Claypool in 1999, when a Jenner & Block lawyer filed a petition in a dispute with Claypool’s ex-wife over child visitation rights.

Mehrberg has given more than $30,000 to Claypool’s campaign committees. Marmer has contributed $24,000 to Claypool’s bids for elected office, including $10,000 toward his unsuccessful run for Cook County assessor in 2010.

After 30 years with Jenner & Block, Marmer became CPS’ general counsel in October 2015. Emanuel-appointed school board members approved Claypool’s decision to bring him on, though two board members voted no.

Mehrberg worked about 17 years at the firm, state licensing records show, in two stints before and after his time at the park district with Claypool.

Before rejoining Jenner & Block this year, Mehrberg spent a brief period in the mayor’s office while Claypool was Emanuel’s $215,000-a-year chief of staff. Emanuel administration officials say Mehrberg wasn’t paid, though Mehrberg had a City Hall office, email account and phone number, and he attended many meetings with Emanuel and top aides.

“Randy volunteered his time and energy to advise the senior team and staff here on a variety of issues,” Emanuel spokesman Adam Collins says.

Mehrberg hosted a pizza party for the mayor’s office staff after arriving at City Hall in May 2015. A couple months later, Claypool emailed him to say he would be announced as the new CPS chief executive.

Over the past nine years, two nephews of former Mayor Richard M. Daley have been involved in separate plans to redevelop a rundown warehouse on 15 acres of polluted land in Little Village just north of the Stevenson Expressway.

It hasn’t turned out well for Chicago taxpayers.

First, taxpayers have to make up for $4.2 million in city pension money invested on behalf of teachers, police officers and other city workers that ended up squandered on failed development plans involving Daley’s oldest nephew, Robert G. Vanecko.

Now, taxpayers stand to lose another $4.1 million on the same property at 3348 S. Pulaski Rd. That’s the amount of a property-tax break given to a second redevelopment deal for the site.

This one involves Vanecko’s first cousin, Patrick Daley Thompson, an attorney who helped the developers get the tax cut last year shortly before he was elected alderman of the 11th ward — the family’s power base for six decades.

It’s one of the largest tax breaks the Chicago City Council has ever given to an industrial property — about $1 million more than the tax break the Ricketts family will get from City Hall for renovating Wrigley Field, a designated Chicago landmark.

For obtaining the tax break and zoning changes for a California developer, Thompson and the law firm where he works stood to make as much as $100,000, according to records the Chicago Sun-Times obtained from City Hall. It’s unclear how much Thompson’s firm actually got paid, and he declined to say.

Thompson’s client wanted the tax cut as part of a plan to clean up the property and build a warehouse there — a project bankrolled by the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, one of the country’s largest public pension funds. His client took over the project after his cousin’s deal with the Chicago pension funds fell apart.

The Chicago pension funds got nothing when they unloaded the decrepit warehouse two years ago, dumping it on the California pension fund and its developer.

But the California retirement plan and the developer tore down the building, removed 70 tons of soil polluted with chemicals including arsenic and lead, erected a new warehouse and then flipped it to a branch of Prudential Insurance for $29.7 million last December — making $5 million to $8 million, according to sources and city records.

The new warehouse at 3348 S. Pulaski Rd. | Leslie Adkins / Sun-Times

City Hall granted the tax break after Thompson and the developers promised the new warehouse would create as many as 250 permanent jobs.

For now, though, the 316,000-square-foot warehouse on Pulaski Road sits vacant, waiting for a tenant — the trigger that will start the clock on the 12-year tax break.

Thompson’s spokeswoman, Joanna Klonsky, says: “Ald. Thompson served as the attorney on this project prior to his 2015 election as alderman. The firm’s fees are between the client and the firm and therefore confidential. Ald. Thompson’s firm was not involved in the acquisition of the property in question, and he was not privy to any information regarding the pension-fund investments in question. He does not represent any clients on zoning matters in the city of Chicago, as it is prohibited by law.”

Vanecko didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.

The story of how the polluted Pulaski Road property became toxic for Chicago taxpayers begins in 2004, when Daley was still mayor. That’s when Vanecko — his sister’s oldest son — went into business with Allison S. Davis, the Chicago attorney who gave President Barack Obama his first job out of Harvard Law School, and Davis’ son Jared Davis.

Operating under the name DV Urban Realty Partners, their idea was to redevelop properties in some of Chicago’s most downtrodden neighborhoods. And they were aiming to get government pension funds to invest $100 million to bankroll their plans.

They had a hard time securing investments from pension funds, though, until the Chicago Teachers Retirement System agreed in early 2005 to put in $25 million of the money it held toward teachers’ retirement pay.

Robert G. Vanecko in December 2012. | Sun-Times files

Then, the pension funds for police officers, municipal employees, city laborers and the Chicago Transit Authority also agreed to invest.

Altogether, the Davises and Vanecko wound up with $68 million from five public pension funds.

DV Urban had begun investing in real estate deals by the time the Sun-Times revealed in September 2007 that a nephew of the mayor stood to make millions of dollars from city-connected pension funds, with Vanecko asserting that he hadn’t used his family connection to get that business.

A Daley spokeswoman said at the time that the mayor hadn’t helped his nephew land the deals. But one pension board member, Judy Rice, who at the time was Daley’s city treasurer and is now a Cook County judge, said she knew Vanecko was Daley’s nephew when she voted to invest city workers’ pensions with his company.

In November 2007, DV Urban invested $4.2 million of the pension money with Sydney Partners LLC, which then bought the Pulaski Road warehouse for $10.5 million.

Sydney — headed by Stanley and Joseph Weissbrot, Jeff Josephs and Anthony Burns — borrowed $7.85 million from LaSalle Bank. DV Urban later guaranteed to repay that loan.

That guarantee ended up preventing the city workers’ pension funds from being able to recover any of their money when the land was unloaded to Thompson’s client.

Three city of Chicago water department trucks sit outside the warehouse at 3348 S. Pulaski Rd. in 2009. | Sun-Times

The warehouse on Pulaski — which formerly was home to NuTemp Corporation and Steel Sales Corporation — largely remained vacant during DV Urban’s investment, except for a month-to-month lease for a portion of the space with the Chicago water department. It used the property to park some of the trucks bought after Daley was forced to shut down the city’s Hired Truck Program when the Sun-Times revealed that City Hall had been paying nearly $40 million a year to lease dump trucks from favored companies that did little or no work.

Vanecko and Davis had collected more than $480,000 in rent from City Hall when the Sun-Times exposed the warehouse deal in June 2009. City Hall moved the trucks, and Vanecko announced he would walk away from DV Urban. Vanecko never explained whether he sold his stake in DV Urban.

In 2012, the five pension funds fired DV Urban. That set off a series of court battles in Delaware and Illinois that remain ongoing.

The pension funds hired Newport Capital Partners to sell the properties DV Urban acquired, including the Pulaski warehouse — a task Newport’s owner Derrick McGavic says should wrap up by year’s end.

The pension funds are likely to end up losing 75 percent of the money they invested with Davis and Vanecko.

It’s unclear where all of the money the pension funds invested went.

When the city pension funds invested $68 million with DV Urban, Davis and Vanecko put up an additional $3 million. Because of that small stake, DV Urban gets a share of any money Newport recovers for the pension funds by selling off other properties that DV Urban purchased.

In addition, DV Urban collected $8 million over the years in fees for managing the pension funds’ money.

During the fall of 2013, Newport got three bids for the Pulaski warehouse, including a $5.4 million offer from PanCal Pulaski LLC, a joint venture between the California teachers pension fund and Panattoni Development of Newport Beach, Calif.

Panattoni began negotiating a deal with Thompson — an attorney with the firm Burke, Warren, MacKay & Serritella — to lobby City Hall for the project. At the time, Thompson was an elected member of Cook County’s sewage-treatment agency, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago.

On Jan. 17, 2014, Newport agreed to sell the Pulaski property to PanCal. And Thompson and his firm were soon hired to lobby city officials about land-use uses and the tax break.

Thompson also submitted an application to Cook County Assessor Joseph Berrios seeking a tax break — under what’s called the 6(b) incentive program — to lower the tax on the industrial property by as much as 60 percent over 12 years. That application, which remains pending with Berrios, estimated that PanCal would spend $16.3 million on demolishing the warehouse, cleaning up the soil and building a warehouse before it had any tenants signed up to lease the property.

After Thompson got Ald. Rick Munoz (22nd), whose ward includes the Pulaski site, to support the tax break, PanCal Pulaski bought the property on July 31, 2014, for $5.4 million.

The pension funds didn’t get any money from the sale. Instead, $3 million went to settle the delinquent mortgage that DV Urban guaranteed. Another $2.4 million went into a fund PanCal could tap to clean up the pollution, which included four leaking underground storage tanks, according to the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency.

PanCal sold the warehouse at 3348 S. Pulaski Rd.for $29.7 million on Dec. 11, 2015, to PRII Pulaski LLC, a company managed by Prudential Insurance. It now stands to benefit from the tax break Patrick Daley Thompson secured. | Leslie Adkins / Sun-Times

“The remediation fund approach is common in transactions such as this, when it is known that there will be some environmental clean up work that will need to be done of the property being conveyed,” says William Bullen, executive director of real estate investments for Panattoni.

Bullen says the real estate purchase was handled by a law firm in Denver, not Thompson’s firm.

A month after the sale, Thompson announced he was running for alderman but remained registered as a lobbyist for PanCal during his campaign.

He was forced into a runoff election on Feb. 24, 2105 — the same day Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s planning commissioner submitted a report estimating that PanCal’s tax break would cost local governments about $4.1 million over 12 years, including a $690,000 loss for City Hall.

Thompson won election as alderman on April 7, 2015. A week later, the City Council approved PanCal’s tax break.

Thompson has ceased his lobbying activities at City Hall, though his law firm still represents PanCal.

PanCal sold the warehouse for $29.7 million on Dec. 11, 2015, to PRII Pulaski LLC, a company managed by Prudential Insurance. It now stands to benefit from the tax break Thompson secured, once it finds someone to lease at least half the space.

Contributing: Data Reporting Lab editor Darnell Little

Chicago Police officers faced nearly 135,000 complaints over a 34-year period but less than 1 percent of those cases resulted in a firing, according to a trove of records Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration released Wednesday under a court order.

But despite the Emanuel administration’s pledge of transparent government, the information was released to the Chicago Sun-Times and other news organizations late in the day in a format that prevented a complete analysis of recent complaints.

Those disciplinary cases are a focus of a wide-ranging U.S. Justice Department investigation of the police department in the wake of the Laquan McDonald shooting.

The information was distributed in two parts: a searchable, sortable spreadsheet and a 7,000-page PDF file.

The Chicago Sun-Times was able to analyze only the spreadsheet, which covered a period from 1967 to 2001. The PDF file contained more recent complaints, between 2001 and 2014, that appeared to be lodged against more than 15,000 cops.

The analysis of the spreadsheet covering the complaints filed between 1967 and 2001 showed:

• There were 134,683 records of complaints against 18,907 officers. It appears some complaints might have been listed twice.

• In 87 percent of the complaints, 116,901 of them, no action was taken.

• Action was taken in 17,783 other complaints — about 13 percent of the total — ranging from reprimands and suspensions to firings.

• Two officers accumulated more than 100 complaints each.

• Just 553 complaints ended in a firing, or “separation.” That’s 0.4 percent of the total complaints filed.

Former Supt. LeRoy Martin, who led the department from 1987 to 1992, had nine complaints — the most of any top cop. Current Supt. Eddie Johnson had eight; Phil Cline and Matt Rodriguez had four each; Richard Brzeczek had two, and Terry Hillard had one. None of the complaints led to any action. Garry McCarthy and Jody Weis weren’t affiliated with the department during this period.

The most frequent form of discipline was a reprimand. That happened with about 4,169 complaints, or 3 percent of the total.

The most common reason for being fired was testing positive for drugs, which happened in 49 instances. Other leading reasons for being separated: domestic altercations, possession or sale of drugs, and use of weapon against department policies.

The vast majority of the complaints from 1967 through 2001 were filed in the 1990s. There were just seven complaints in the late 1960s; 88 in the ’70s; 9,945 in the ’80s; 112,839 in the ’90s; and 1,184 in the early 2000s.

Although the PDF file that shows individual complaint histories between 2001 and 2014 couldn’t be sorted, a spot check shows three of the police department’s most notorious cops — Jerome Finnigan, Broderick Jones and Corey Flagg — all had more than 65 complaints against them.

During their time on the force, Jones was suspended a total of four times and reprimanded once. Flagg was suspended once and reprimanded twice. And Finnigan was never disciplined. They all have been convicted of corruption and sent to prison.

Complaint registers — called “CRs” in department lingo — are the formal name for complaints against cops. In 2006, the department began sending commanders lists of officers who had 10 or more complaints filed against them within a five-year period. The lists were meant to highlight cops who were engaging in patterns of unacceptable behavior and needed counseling and additional training, officials said.

The city had fought to keep complaint registers secret. But in March 2014, the Illinois Appellate Court ruled that the state’s Freedom of Information Act doesn’t exempt CR files from being made public.

In August 2014, the Sun-Times filed a request seeking all complaint registers filed against Chicago officers since 1967. The Chicago Tribune also filed a request seeking logs summarizing all police misconduct cases since 1967.

The police union, the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 7, filed a lawsuit to block the city from releasing the records, arguing that the union contract barred the city from maintaining CRs for more than four years. Emanuel’s law department wound up fighting the police union — seeking to release the police complaint data.

The case ended up in the state appeals court, which ruled on July 8 that the Emanuel’s administration had to release the data, which includes the names of the officers, the date they joined the police department, the complaint lodged against them and the outcome of the cases.

Contributing: Dan Mihalopoulos

Former Mayor Richard M. Daley and his son are aiming to cash in on a federal program that offers green cards to wealthy foreigners with a deal that could bring their company $15 million, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.

Tur Partners — which Daley formed with his son Patrick Daley after leaving office — is seeking permission from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to solicit $150 million from foreign investors to help finance construction of a downtown skyscraper through a controversial visa program known as EB-5.

The Daleys hope to land as many as 300 foreign investors, most likely from China, according to the application Patrick Daley submitted to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Sept. 22, 2015. Each would put up $500,000 for the skyscraper project and also pay a $50,000 administrative fee that would bring the Daleys’ company $15 million, the application shows.

In return, the foreigners would be eligible to be granted visas allowing them and their immediate families to move to the United States and live here forever.

The Daleys would then lend the money put up by the foreigners to Magellan Development Group, a Chicago company that’s building Vista Tower, which would be the city’s third-tallest skyscraper, on Wacker Drive near Lake Shore Drive. Magellan also has plans for another tower nearby.

Many of the details of the plan aren’t clear. The federal agency released the Daleys’ application four months after receiving a request for the records from the Chicago Sun-Times under the Freedom of Information Act. But the 933 pages of documents were heavily redacted.

“Site O,” the vacant lot at 195 N. Columbus Dr. that might be the site of a future skyscraper. | Santiago Covarrubias / Sun-Times

The application focuses on providing financing for a proposed skyscraper at 195 N. Columbus Dr. — a project that’s been on Magellan’s drawing board for years, with no indication that construction will begin in the foreseeable future.

But the application also includes a one-page document that refers to a planned skyscraper at 383 E. Wacker Dr. That’s where caissons are being sunk for construction of Vista Tower, a $1 billion project largely being bankrolled by Wanda Group of China. Magellan is providing part of the financing for the tower, which is to include condos and hotel rooms.

Magellan — which wrote the $6,230 check to cover Daley’s EB-5 application fee to the homeland security agency — and Patrick Daley say Tur Partners isn’t involved with Vista Tower, the latest skyscraper to rise on Magellan’s 28-acre Lakeshore East campus that former Mayor Daley approved more than a decade ago.

Asked why the EB-5 application has addresses for two different skyscrapers — the one under construction and the dormant project, called “Site O” — David Carlins, Magellan’s president, says, “The application was only meant to apply to Site O.

“No final decision has been made with respect to the use of EB-5 funds for either project,” Carlins says, “though Vista is much further along and is more likely to use EB-5.”

Patrick Daley. | Sun-Times files

Patrick Daley’s application included a letter from the Illinois Department of Employment Security certifying that the Vista Tower site lies within an area of high unemployment.

That certification makes it cheaper for foreign investors to obtain one of the 10,000 visas the federal government can issue each year. The EB-5 program allows foreigners to obtain visas for themselves and their immediate families after investing $1 million in a development project that creates at least 10 permanent jobs. But they have to invest only half that amount — $500,000 — if the project is in an area of high unemployment.

To get that designation, the Daleys argued in their application that Vista Tower, which is being built in one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, sits in an area of 9.4 percent unemployment stretching from the gleaming lakefront all the way to North Lawndale, one of the city’s poorest communities.

“The application was not for the Wanda Vista site,” the former mayor’s son says in an email. “We have no business relationship or affiliation whatsoever with the Wanda Tower and never did.”

Daley’s lawyer, Rohit Kapuria, says both Magellan projects are in the same census tract, so the state letter citing Vista Tower is “similarly applicable to Site O.”

The Department of Homeland Security has yet to approve Tur’s application, according to Kapuria, so it hasn’t been able to start raising money from foreign investors.

Homeland Security officials declined to discuss the Daleys’ application.

Created in 1992 to provide economic development in rural communities and downtrodden neighborhoods, the EB-5 program has come under fire from two powerful U.S. senators, Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. They say EB-5 should be reformed or ended because the program has “little oversight” despite allegations of abuse and fraud, as well as concerns about the foreigners who have been allowed entry to the United States.

U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. | AP

“The enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security wrote an internal memo that raises significant concerns about the program,” Grassley said on the Senate floor last month. “Members of the working group made recommendations to reform the program . . . due to crippling fraud and national security vulnerabilities.”

Some foreigners have been granted visas “despite security warnings,” Grassley said, raising concerns about the source of the money they used to obtain a visa through one of more than 800 authorized EB-5 “centers” — including Tur Partners.

“It is obvious that foreign corporations and foreign governments are increasingly taking advantage of the . . . program to establish ownership in U.S.-based real estate projects,” Grassley said. “I am concerned that this may allow foreign corporations and foreign governments to profit from marketing U.S. green cards to their citizens.“

The senators said some foreign investors have been defrauded and charged excessive administrative fees and that there is little follow up by the federal government to verify those foreign investments create the promised jobs.

Grassley and Leahy maintain that developers have co-opted the EB-5 program by gerrymandering their project boundaries to include impoverished neighborhoods.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. | AP

“Affluent areas now dominate the program by exploiting incentives intended for underserved areas, a practice . . . described as gerrymandering,” Leahy said in a speech on the Senate floor last month. “Only in the world of EB-5 is Beverly Hills considered economically distressed.”

The EB-5 program was set to expire Sept. 30 but has been extended by Congress until December.

Daley’s company applied to become an EB-5 regional center in November 2013, more than two years after he left office as Chicago’s longest serving mayor. Its application — based on raising money to build a “hypothetical” skyscraper on Magellan’s property at 195 N. Columbus — sought permission to raise money to finance economic developments in 13 counties, stretching from Kenosha, Wis., to Valparaiso, Ind.

President Barack Obama’s administration approved the application on July 17, 2014, allowing the Daleys to raise money from foreign investors for projects approved by the Homeland Security Department.

Fearing that Congress might end or change the EB-5 program, Tur began preparing its application for its first project in the summer of 2015, according to Kapuria, who says the Daleys hoped to get in before that happened.

“Tur filed the September 2015 application, under the Site O project, in an effort to preserve the option for the developer to potentially utilize EB-5 capital in the event the developer later opted to proceed with the Site O project,” Kapuria says. “Making a preapproval request allowed Tur and the developer to hopefully grandfather the Site O project under current EB-5 rules.”

They asked the Illinois Department of Employment Security for a letter certifying that the project is in a “targeted employment area” with unemployment of at least 9.4 percent, using Vista Tower’s address rather than that of Site O. Both Magellan projects are in the same census tract, which has 1.7 percent unemployment, far below the national average.

But the Daleys followed a common practice by expanding the project’s geographic area by stringing together 14 additional census tracts that together have an unemployment rate of 9.4 percent — the minimum needed for the Daleys’ foreign investors to be required to put up $500,000, rather than $1 million.

The Illinois Department of Employment Security certified the unemployment rate for the area in a Sept. 1, 2015, letter to Lori Healey, who’d been a top City Hall aide to Daley and had been TUR’s chief executive officer. According to emails obtained by the Sun-Times, the state had been directed to address the letter to Healey, even though she says she left Tur in April 2015 to become CEO of the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, the government agency that owns McCormick Place and Navy Pier.

Healey says she knew nothing about Tur seeking approval to raise foreign money to help finance a skyscraper for Magellan.

Construction site of Vista Tower, 383 E Wacker Dr. | Santiago Covarrubias / Sun-Times

The so-called “Targeted Employment Area” letter from the state became part of Daley’s application. That letter cites the property at 383 E. Wacker, though the remainder of Daley’s application refers to the Magellan-owned property at 195 N. Columbus.

“We believe this was simply an unintentional error” by an economist Tur hired to work on the project, Kapuria says.

The Daleys’ application includes two separate public offerings, unregulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, to raise $150 million from “non-U.S. individuals,” who are warned “it is possible that the . . . members could lose their entire investment.”

According to the documents, the investors would be helping Magellan finance a 53-story skyscraper with 31 floors of apartments, 624 hotel rooms, commercial space and a public parking garage, all south of Magellan’s Aqua skyscraper designed by architect Jeanne Gang, who is also designing Vista Tower.

The Daleys’ application says they were hoping to raise all of the money from foreign investors by Dec. 31, 2016, but they can extend that date by a year.

The Daleys are to collect an additional $50,000 from each investor to “cover the costs of the offering, migration services and marketing fees.”

Three months after Daley’s son submitted the application, he sent a letter to the Homeland Security Department last Dec. 8, saying Tur might also seek foreign investors for other projects involving Magellan and other developers.

Tur “has been in discussions with other leading developers within the Chicago region regarding future projects,” the former mayor’s son wrote, and “has developed a strong pipeline of potential projects within the designated geographic area.”

Contributing: Data Reporting Lab editor Darnell Little

THE DALEY GERRYMANDER by The Watchdogs on Scribd

For all the promises from federal authorities to do all they can to help Chicago fight gun violence, their prosecutions of gun crimes here have remained stagnant, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation has found.

“The Department of Justice will continue to do everything in its power to help the city of Chicago combat gun violence,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in July 2014, vowing to keep up “the federal government’s ongoing commitment to helping local leaders ensure Chicago’s streets are safe.”

“This year, our office has increased its intake of gun cases across the board,” U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon said in a speech last month to the City Club of Chicago. “We have many more federal gang and violent-offender cases charged and in the investigative pipeline. We have not and will not take our foot off the criminal enforcement pedal.”

But a Sun-Times analysis of court records shows that federal weapons charges in Chicago have actually fallen slightly over the past five years.

That’s happened even as the number of murders in Chicago has hit a 13-year high and federal prosecutors in some other major urban areas — Manhattan, Brooklyn, Milwaukee, Detroit and Baltimore — have charged far more people with weapons offenses than the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago has.

From July 2010 to June 2011, 92 people were charged in Chicago with federal weapons offenses, according to the court data. That fell to as low as 57 in 2014 before rising to 84 in the 12-month period ending June 30, 2016.

Federal prosecutors declined to file charges in dozens of other gun cases over that five-year period, including investigations by the FBI and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, records show.

Altogether over the past five years, 477 people have been charged with federal weapons offenses in Chicago.

In comparison, 499 were charged in Brooklyn, 563 in Milwaukee, 810 in Baltimore, 1,012 in Manhattan and 1,249 in Detroit.

Total prosecutions for all federal crimes also have declined in Chicago in recent years. In 2013, when Fardon took office, 982 people were charged with federal crimes, compared with 617 from July 2015 to the end of June.

The total number of federal prosecutions nationwide has fallen, too, though not as sharply.

Sources at City Hall and in the Chicago Police Department, ATF and the federal Drug Enforcement Administration have expressed frustration with the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago, saying it needs to be more aggressive at a time of rising violence.

“The weapons charges are flat,” said a former supervisor in the Chicago division of the ATF, speaking only on the condition he not be named. “Almost everything else except weapons takes precedence. To me, that’s a cultural thing we need to overcome.”

The U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.

In part, budget cuts appear to have played a role in why federal gun prosecutions have remained stagnant in Chicago. The federal government’s 2013 shutdown prompted the layoffs of more than 40 lawyers in Chicago — about a quarter of the U.S. attorney’s staff. Most of those positions have since been added back.

Also, in some cases, federal sentences for gun crimes aren’t as stiff as those in state court, so authorities have said they sometimes choose to go that route.

And federal prosecutors have said that rather than bringing a large volume of cases, they focus on cases they believe will have wide-ranging impact. In the speech last month, Fardon pointed to the ongoing trial of leaders of the Hobos, a “super gang” made of members of the Gangster Disciples and Black Disciples that’s been linked to killings.

U.S. Atty. Zachary Fardon speaking to the City Club of Chicago last month. | Santiago Covarrubias / Sun-Times

His office also has touted a 2014 gun case in which 15 men were charged with the illegal possession or transport of firearms based on gun sales witnessed or initiated by ATF informants. That came after Holder, the attorney general at the time, temporarily boosted staffing at the Chicago ATF office to help fight gun violence.

A couple of the men in that case were involved in just one or two exchanges of guns, but one — Larry McIntosh — sold 22 guns and possessed at least 21 more firearms, according to prosecutors.

“When people like the defendant collect their vast arsenals of dangerous guns and then turn around and sell those guns to whoever is willing to buy them illegally on the street, a powder keg is lit,” prosecutors said in a court filing in McIntosh’s case.

McIntosh pleaded guilty to two counts of gun possession and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Eleven of the other defendants have pleaded guilty and got sentences ranging from 18 months to 100 months. Two of the others are awaiting sentencing, and another has a plea hearing set for December.

In another, higher-profile case, federal prosecutors decided to bring gun charges against a defendant in the April 2014 killing of 14-year-old Endia Martin in Back of the Yards. Vandetta Redwood is set to go to trial on federal gun charges Monday in that case.

Prosecutors say Redwood’s cousin had feuded online with another girl over a boy, and they challenged each other to a fight. They say Redwood egged on her cousin, then handed her a .38-caliber revolver, telling her to “shoot that bitch.” The alleged teenage shooter wounded her rival but killed Martin. Charged as a juvenile, she is awaiting trial.

Cook County prosecutors charged Redwood with mob action and obstruction of justice. But Cook County Circuit Judge Donald Panarese Jr. threw out those charges, finding that the cellphone video of the shooting was “choppy” and “poor.” A federal indictment against Redwood was announced in February 2016.

Despite those high-profile cases, defense attorneys say federal weapons charges in Chicago typically are brought mostly for illegal gun possession, rather than trafficking weapons.

Two of every three federal gun charges brought this year in Chicago have been for illegal possession or transport — a charge commonly wielded against felons caught with one or two weapons, records show. Five years ago, such charges accounted for less than half the total.

Meanwhile, prosecutors are charging fewer people with illegal gun sales, including “straw purchasers” with clean records buying guns for felons — a key source of illegal firearms in Chicago.

And charges for using a firearm in an act of violence or a drug crime have fallen by about 50 percent.

“The U.S. attorney is bringing a lot of the small gun cases: a felon in possession, a guy with one gun,” said John L. Sullivan, a longtime defense attorney who formerly worked as a federal prosecutor. “I think there are bigger fish to fry.”

An ATF source said he doesn’t have a problem with bringing possession cases. A larger volume of federal firearm cases — whether they’re complex conspiracies or cases against individual felons for possession — would serve as a deterrent to criminals carrying guns, the source said.

Defense attorney Heather Winslow said she doesn’t think the prospect of facing federal charges is keeping people in violent neighborhoods from carrying guns because the number of federal gun cases is so small.

“In terms of a general deterrent effect, it’s just not there,” Winslow said.

A defendant in a federal gun case put it this way: “People would rather get caught with a gun than without it.”