Ronald Keller already had dished out $1,400 to buy tickets for a Cicero Republican golf outing when town workers began showing up months later at his Casablanca Flea Market asking for more political donations.
Furious, he refused. But soon after, he alleges, a bill of another sort came due.
A platoon of building inspectors, health inspectors and fire inspectors swooped down on his sprawling facility on Cicero Avenue, declared it a safety risk and shut it down, he charges in a civil suit.
The roof leaked, the inspectors complained. Wiring and plumbing were substandard. Paint was chipping. A dangerous toxic substance, later identified by the town health commissioner as Fantastik spray cleaner, was found in a restaurant at the market.
“You hear about things like this happening in Poland or Russia,” Keller said. “This was so ridiculous and out of the question, every time I think about it I get goofy.”
More Top Picks Best Mens Peacoats
The 1996 crackdown, Keller alleges, ran him out of business.
His charges, detailed in a federal lawsuit he filed against the town, join a chorus of complaints that those who resist requests for political contributions can face swift and harsh retribution from Cicero’s Town Hall.
Just last week, former Cicero building commissioner Michael Nisk, a Republican precinct captain, was indicted for allegedly issuing a building permit in exchange for a $1,000 contribution to the Cicero Republican Party.
And law enforcement sources say federal investigators are taking careful stock of allegations that town officials strong-armed businesses such as Casablanca and some residents into buying tickets to Town President Betty Loren-Maltese’s annual golf fundraiser, which has been held each July since she took office in 1993.
With Cicero’s police department in turmoil and its recently ousted police chief alleging widespread corruption, leadership in the troubled town is under scrutiny as never before. Though the town’s reputation long has been tainted by its gangster past, interviews with business owners and law enforcement sources provide a taste of the dubious practices that have grabbed the attention of federal investigators.
Even as Loren-Maltese purged her police department of four top officials in seven days, claiming credit for ferreting out alleged police corruption, she also is facing hard questions about whether the wrongdoing permeated not just the police department but Town Hall itself.
Keller leveled his charges in a 1997 federal lawsuit against the town. He wasn’t the only one.
Loews Chicago Cinemas Inc., which runs the Bel-Air Drive In across the street from the flea market, filed a federal lawsuit last year after Cicero inspectors barred the facility from opening for the second year in a row. According to the complaint, at least two of the inspectors confided to drive-in employees that the shutdown was ordered because the movie chain failed to buy golf outing tickets.
Both suits are pending.
Cicero Town Atty. Paul Karkula insisted that the closures of the theater and flea market had nothing to do with political fundraising. “It is completely false,” Karkula said.
Karkula said he is not bothered by town inspectors soliciting contributions on the side.
“People who sell tickets are volunteers,” he said. “They are selling them on their own time.”
But one former Cicero employee said the sales were anything but optional for town workers.
When Loren-Maltese first took office, she distributed the tickets with great ceremony, the employee said. He said he was present in May 1993 and 1994 at dinners at an Italian restaurant in Berwyn during which Loren-Maltese read off the names of commissioners, top inspectors and other officials and then handed them each an envelope stuffed with tickets. They were expected to either sell the tickets or pay for them personally at $50 a pop, the former employee said.
“Building inspectors had the best ability to sell because they had all the connections,” he said.
But Loren-Maltese, in an interview, said that there was no pressure involved in the ticket sales, which benefit the Cicero Township Republican committee fund. As the township committeeman, Loren-Maltese controls that fund.
“No one strong-arms anybody, to my knowledge,” she said. “I think this allegation comes up with almost every politician that sells tickets.”
She went on to say that the golf outing is a Cicero tradition that goes back 30 years, and she inherited the practice from her predecessors as township committeeman.
Though some business owners complained about the ticket sales, others said they realized benefits from participating.
A grocery store owner, who did not want to be identified, said he has gotten away with an outsized canopy and other code violations thanks to his purchase of golf-outing tickets.
“They come in here, I buy tickets to the golf outing,” the owner said. “I don’t golf. I don’t go. Nobody’s forcing me. I got my liquor license. This is a small town, not like Chicago. One hand washes the other.”
One Hispanic business leader said he frequently heard complaints from owners of supermarkets, restaurants and beauty salons that town employees intimidated them into donating to the golf outings and other political events.
“They don’t want any problems. Who wants to have their building shut?” the business leader said. “They feel pressure. They figure if they cooperate, they won’t get hassled. . . . It’s like paying another bill, another rent.”
By 1996, Loren-Maltese had raised the ticket price for the golf outing and added a new fundraising wrinkle: an ad book she called “the bible.”
At 536 pages, the book was as thick as classic Russian novel and filled with messages of praise for Loren-Maltese from hundreds of local businesses and residents who paid from $100 to $5,000 depending on the size and location of their ad.
Keller, like most other merchants, was a regular golf-outing ticket buyer. He bought the flea market in 1983.
Open only on weekends, it let space to about 100 vendors who sold furniture, trinkets, clothes and food from small stalls.
In an interview, Keller said he was first approached to buy golf tickets several years ago by Gerald Resnick, then the town collector and one of the veteran Cicero political bosses who helped put Loren-Maltese in power. Keller said Resnick suggested that he buy a block of 20 tickets and then give back the ones he didn’t use “so they could be given to senior citizens.”
Though he bought tickets through Resnick, Keller said the two didn’t like each other and rarely spoke.
More Top Picks Best Sleeper Sofas
Attempts to reach Resnick for comment were unsuccessful.
In late 1996, new requests for political contributions started coming in from town workers, including some of the same people who inspected the flea market, said Keller’s lawyer, Kenneth Ditkowsky.
“He told them he had already paid,” said Ditkowsky. “I think that was his mistake.”
In a deposition taken in connection with his lawsuit, Keller said he could not remember everyone who tried to sell tickets. But he identified two Cicero employees who are also Republican precinct captains.
Keller and his attorney provided this account of what happened to him in Cicero:
Keller’s problems began in late 1996 and early 1997 when rats scampered over from an illegal dump nearby and started chewing up his roof. He said he tried to hire exterminators and roof repair firms to fix the problem, but the town balked at issuing permits for the work.
Then one day in early April, as many as a dozen town inspectors arrived en masse, cited the Casablanca facility for 45 separate code violations, and closed it. One problem listed was the leaky roof that Keller had been blocked from fixing.
He found a repair firm that officials finally approved of and patched the roof for $68,000–three times the price of earlier quotes. Keller said he also fixed all the other problems, only to be hit with another wave of inspections, and then another after those violations had been fixed.
Giving Keller only two days’ notice, Loren-Maltese ordered a hearing on the code violations and personally served as the hearing officer, court records show.
A witness at one session was Wayne R. Cichowicz, a licensed nutritionist and naprapath who also was the Cicero health commissioner and a precinct worker for Loren-Maltese. Under questioning by Ditkowsky, Cichowicz was asked to identify the substance that inspectors had found in a flea market restaurant and had deemed to be toxic.
“If you are asking me what the toxic material is, it’s the Fantastik,” said Cichowicz, who later acknowledged that the spray cleaner would only be toxic if somebody drank it.
Cichowicz, who recently left his post, also said he used Fantastik in his own home.
Loren-Maltese never rendered a ruling on the hearings, but they effectively came to a halt after inspectors found the roof repair inadequate and ordered the entire roof torn off and replaced.
Keller said he couldn’t afford the $250,000 price tag and sold his interest in the building to a partner.
The flea market has never reopened.