Burke was indicted five months later on racketeering conspiracy and other charges alleging a host of corrupt schemes, including the allegations involving the old main post office deal. 3, 2019, the day after Burke was first charged, according to Burke’s lawyers. Solis entered into his deferred prosecution agreement with the government on Jan. Later in the conversation, Burke said he wanted to meet with the developer himself, and promised Solis there would be a “day of accounting” for him if Burke’s law firm wound up getting the developer’s business. “So, did we land the, uh, the tuna?” Burke asked, according to the indictment. Some of the conversations Solis allegedly recorded with Burke have already entered the city’s political corruption lexicon, including one on May 26, 2017, when Solis told Burke he’d recently spoken with the post office project’s developer. Those conversations, in which Burke allegedly talked about how he could use his position as Finance Committee chairman to push the developer to hire Burke’s private real estate tax firm, formed the backbone of prosecutors’ first request to a federal judge to tap Burke’s City Hall telephone lines on May 1, 2017, according to court records. Many of the early conversations had to do with the massive renovation of the old main post office in Solis’ 25th Ward, which had also been a focus of the investigation of Solis, according to court records. Solis’ work as an FBI mole began in mid-2016, when he was confronted by investigators who had secretly listened in on hundreds of his phone calls over the course of nearly a year, including conversations where the alderman solicited everything from campaign donations to sexual services at a massage parlor, court records show.įrom August 2016 to May 2017, Solis wore a hidden wire and secretly recorded meetings with Burke, the then-powerful Finance Committee chairman and dean of the City Council. attorney’s office, and none could remember such an arrangement being made for a public official caught abusing their office. Last, year, the Tribune interviewed nearly a dozen longtime members of the city’s legal community, including several who worked on public corruption cases for the U.S.
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