A former employee in the Cook County assessor’s office was sentenced to two years of probation Tuesday after a federal judge credited his extensive cooperation with investigators.
Francisco Perez, 51, pleaded guilty last January to one count of bribery conspiracy after federal authorities accused him of accepting low-level bribes from employees of three local law firms in return for lowering property value assessments.
“His cooperation virtually began on the day he was confronted by agents in March 2019,” Perez’s attorney, Robert Seeder, said Tuesday. “He’s testified before the grand jury explaining the culture of his office was ‘Don’t talk to the feds.’”
“He grew up in that office,” Seeder added, noting that Perez began working in county government when he was still in high school as a way to avoid gang activity in his Northwest Side neighborhood.
Though no one else was charged as a result of his cooperation, U.S. District Judge Sunil Harjani said Perez’s willingness to work with the feds is what kept him out of prison.
“If it wasn’t for your cooperation, this case likely would warrant some degree of incarceration,” Harjani said. “The nature and circumstance of the offense may not be the most serious thing on the planet … but you were in a public service job and you had an obligation to the people of Cook County.”
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But still, after hearing arguments from Seeder and Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Peabody — both of whom called for sentence of probation — Harjani told Perez that his criminal conduct “appears to be, really, an aberration in how you operate.”
Before the sentence was handed down, Perez told Harjani, “Your honor, I’ve been going through this for six years. I’m sorry.”
Perez worked as a chief hearing officer in the Cook County assessor’s office under Joe Berrios, the former assessor and county Democratic Party boss who lost to current Assessor Fritz Kaegi in the 2018 primary. Kaegi’s administration terminated Perez on Dec. 6, 2018.
In his job, described in his plea deal as a high-level decision-making position, Perez “directly reviewed, assessed and approved property values on commercial appeals and reviewed applications for certificates of error.”
The plea deal lists three people, known only as Individuals A, B and C, who worked for three law firms and sought to influence Perez’s decisions. Individual A was a tax consultant; Individual B was a tax analyst and Individual C was an attorney, according to the plea deal.
In the deal, Perez admitted to often supporting their requests for certificates of error and recommending that their assessments be lower. He also admitted to shepherding the three lawyers’ appeals to specific workers in the assessor’s office and giving them nonpublic information about the assessment process. Investigators secretly recorded a phone call between Perez and one of the lawyers, during which Perez gave the lawyer an update on his firm’s property appeals.
“What we need to do is in the next two weeks, all the ones that you’re like shaky on, you’re like, ‘Man, this (expletive) didn’t come out right,’ boom. Pull them, and we’ll look,” Perez said on the call.
Perez is the latest of several former assessor’s office employees to be hit with federal bribery charges in recent years, all of whom worked under Berrios, whose administration was often criticized as a den of clout and patronage.
Berrios has not been charged with wrongdoing.