Unsealed docs detail profanity-laced fraud scheme
A federal judge on Monday unsealed eight documents detailing profanity-laced talks secretly taped by witness Stuart Levine as he planned with former political powerhouse Edward Vrdolyak to get a $1.5 million kickback.
Levine, an admitted political fixer who was the government's chief witness at the Tony Rezko corruption trial, taped 82 conversations with Vrdolyak over four months in hopes of getting a break from the court when he receives his sentence.
The Vrdolyak case is an outgrowth of the government's investigation of corruption on state boards in Gov. Rod Blagojevich's administration but it has nothing directly to do with state government or the governor.
A dozen of the conversations were face to face and the rest were over the phone, according to the documents unsealed Monday by U.S. District Judge Milton I. Shadur.
Vrdolyak, 71, a former Chicago alderman and Cook County Democratic chairman, pleaded guilty Nov. 3 to scheming with Levine to squeeze a $1.5 million kickback out of the $15 million sale of a Near North Side building to a developer, Smithfield Properties.
The company paid $15 million in November 2004 for the property.
Levine was able to steer the sale to Smithfield because he was chairman of the real estate committee of Chicago Medical College, which owned the property, but he had to hide the fact that he defrauded the board by getting a kickback.
Vrdolyak is quoted in one of the documents as telling Levine that he wanted to get his share of the money to him in a way that "would pass the smell test."
Speaking of a representative of Smithfield who negotiated the deal, Vrdolyak is quoted as saying: "I want him to have amnesia about all this ..."
In a conversation in February 2003, Levine asks Vrdolyak about the one-page contract that would have paid a $1.5 million finders fee for engineering the sale.
"Where does it say that our end is a million and a half?" Levine says. "It doesn't say that anywhere."
"Yeah, it does," Vrdolyak says. "Ten percent of the purchase price."
According to one of the documents, there were two copies of the contract. Levine showed the contract to one of this friends and then tore it up because he didn't want evidence lying around, the court papers said.
The documents represented a dual between federal prosecutors and defense attorneys who were trying to keep large portions of the tapes out of the trial.
Most of the conversations are drenched in profanity and key portions had to be redacted, evidently out of concern that they could bias juries in future cases.
Levine, who would have been a witness if Vrdolyak had gone to trial, testified in the Rezko case that he and Rezko launched a $7 million scheme to squeeze a contractor and seven money management firms seeking state business for kickbacks.