One morning in the early summer of 1990, Frenchelle Barnett looked out her front window and saw a green truck dump a load of crushed cement on the lot across the street from her West Side home.
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Then came another truck, followed by another and another. Today, a mountain of broken concrete, dirt, and asphalt towers above her home in one of the city`s poorest neighborhoods.
On dry days, the air is thick with cement dust, she said. When it rains, the entire neighborhood is coated with a film of gray grime.
”We just looked up one day and it was there. Nobody ever asked,”
Barnett said.
”We are very upset about it and we would like it removed, but it seems the community has no power,” said Donna Williams, principal of the Charles Sumner Elementary School, just north of the site.
In the 18 months since the first truck came to the site near Roosevelt Road and Kildare Avenue, a mass of rock and dirt has grown to cover nearly two square city blocks and has reached five to six stories high at some points.
How that mountain of debris and dirt came to be dumped is now the subject of a federal investigation. And the city has sued to close it down as an illegal dump.
The cast of characters includes an alderman charged in an unrelated federal extortion case, a non-profit group that is collecting rent on the land while failing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes, a trucking executive convicted in the early 1980s of defrauding the city, and the defunct Cosmopolitan National Bank and its former chairman.
The construction debris is being dumped on the property by Krisjon Construction Co., a firm owned by John Christopher.
Attorneys for Christopher say their client is operating a legal recycling operation in which broken up concrete and other road-building materials are collected from highway projects, brought to the site and then sorted and recycled for other construction work.
”It is a program that helps people, not hurts,” Christopher said earlier this year.
City officials said they asked the U.S. attorney`s office to investigate Christopher`s West Side operation after finding out that federal authorities were probing a construction firm, MCC Contractors Inc., owned by Christopher`s relatives.
Christopher said this week that he is not under investigation.
In December 1990, the city`s corporation counsel`s office filed a lawsuit seeking to shut down the Kildare site and two other West Side sites operated by MCC Contractors.
After the city contended that MCC was dumping debris on a city-owned lot at 2600 W. Taylor St., a Cook County Circuit judge ordered the firm not to store debris there.
MCC also was recycling rock at 2130 S. Kostner Ave., according to court records and interviews. The city sued Christopher, who held title to the land in a Cosmopolitan bank trust, charging that the rock-crushing operations there violated city ordinances.
The MCC firm, which records show was run by Christopher`s mother and brother, is being scrutinized by federal investigators as part of its ongoing probe of Cosmopolitan National Bank, seized last May by federal regulators.
Court records show that MCC borrowed and defaulted on a $1.5 million loan from the bank. The Christopher family has alleged in court documents that former bank Chairman James E. Wells placed a woman in control of the firm`s finances and that they lost financial control of the firm. Wells was charged last month with bank fraud in connection with his operation of the bank.
MCC was declared bankrupt and its records have been subpoenaed as part of the federal investigation of the troubled bank, according to Glenn Heyman, the appointed trustee overseeing MCC`s liquidation.
Court records show that in addition to family connections, MCC and Krisjon also had business ties. Krisjon was hired by MCC on six suburban road construction and paving projects, in some cases hauling construction debris from those projects or providing construction materials. James Graney, Christopher`s attorney, said he didn`t know if the debris from the suburban projects was hauled to the Kildare site.
When dumping began on the Kildare site in June 1990, Christopher touted the rock-crushing operation as a way to bring jobs to the impoverished community, and he drew the support of then-Ald. William Henry (24th).
Henry, who was voted out of office last April after his indictment on federal corruption charges, arranged for Christopher to rent part of the site from HICA Inc. of North Lawndale, a non-profit group.
”Krisjon approached Henry, and they looked at this as an intermediate thing,” said Sam Flowers, head of the non-profit agency that leases some of the land to Christopher`s company. ”Krisjon would hire people from the ward.”
Neither Christopher nor Flowers would describe the terms of the lease or disclose how much Krisjon is paying HICA, but city officials said they were told Thursday that firm was paying $9,600 a year.
County land records show that HICA, which recently received a $6 million state housing authority loan to develop West Side real estate, has failed to pay more than $500,000 in real estate taxes on two of the three lots that comprise the site.
”People just don`t pay taxes. That`s a standard,” Flowers said.
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Although Flowers said the purpose of the rock-crushing operation was to provide jobs for residents, he said he didn`t know if anyone had gotten work there.
Christopher`s lawyer accuses city officials of singling out Christopher. Graney contends that there are at least a dozen similar construction debris sites across the city that officials aren`t trying to close.
”They are more interested in Mr. Christopher and his links to MCC and his background,” Graney said.
The 41-year-old Du Page contractor`s background includes convictions for fraud in connection with defrauding the city during the blizzard of 1979, possession of a silencer and theft of construction equipment. In addition, he was under investigation in the 1980s for defaulting on loans from a defunct Arlington Heights bank.
”There is no other site in the city like this,” said Susan Herdina, an assistant corporation counsel. ”What makes this site so egregious is the proximity of the residences. There is no site that has a five- to six-story mountain in the middle of it.”
Some neighborhood residents disagree on whether the operation is a nuisance.
”I put plastic on my windows in the wintertime and then put on fresh sheets of plastic in the summer, and the dust still gets in here,” said Herma Watkins, 54. ”It irritates your eyes and gets up in your nose. I just can`t live with that stuff back there anymore.”
”I`d rather see that there than raw garbage,” said Walter Killingsworth, who owns two apartment buildings on Roosevelt Road that abut the site.
Last summer, when residents were complaining about the dust, according to Killingsworth and several other residents, Christopher offered residents small cash payments for window and car washing. ”He was giving money away,”
Killingsworth said.
Christopher also recently offered to provide a newly formed community group with a 5 percent slice of his proceeds, city officials said.
Ald. Jesse Miller (24th) said Christopher promised some residents a great deal of money for their support, but ”those people haven`t received a penny.”