Tony Rezko, Barack Obama, the FBI Mole, and the Somnolent Chicago MSM
Posted by Archy Cary May 19th 2010###
The Chicago media covers Illinois political corruption like crime reporters. They show up at the scene, gather for the perp walk, snap a photo, and cover the trial. In short, they wait for the story to happen and then accept official explanations with minimum scrutiny.
Consequently, when the Machine gets caught, it’s generally not the media that breaks the story. And it’s been that way in Chicago for a very long time.
Here’s one example of a story gone missing:
the strange saga of an FBI mole who interacted with several Chicagoland players, including Barack Obama, associated with the rise-and-fall of Antoin “Tony” Rezko and former Illinois Governor Milorad R. “Rod” Blagojevich.
It starts in the late 1990’s in New York where Bernard Barton, Jr. made “wrong decisions” while running his billboard leasing company. One wrong decision was selling space on billboards he neither owned nor controlled.
According to an FBI affidavit, those “wrong decisions” included Thomas’ drawing more than $350,000 from his customers’ credit cards while he was running a billboard leasing business in Manhattan in the late 1990s.
He also charged more than $140,000 to an American Express business account he obtained using his father’s Social Security number.
To mitigate jail time, Barton volunteered to help New York federal prosecutors make a case against organized crime families that were trying to penetrate the billboard business. His offer worked. His sentencing has been delayed… for seven years now.
In 2000, Barton moved to Chicago, changed his name to John Thomas, and went undercover for the U.S. Attorney in Chicago.
Once in Chicago, Barton-Thomas formed a real estate brokerage, Carnegie Realty Partners LLC, and another billboard company, Outdoor Solutions (it soon went bankrupt), with Louis Giordano, his partner from New York.
In 2007, someone outed Barton-Thomas as an FBI mole. On May 4, 2007, the Chicago Tribune reported:
Thomas, who was convicted of federal business fraud in New York in 2004, has been serving as an undercover government mole in Chicago for at least a year as part of an ongoing federal investigation into fraud in the financing of large-scale commercial real estate deals, the Tribune has learned…
Thomas’s business clients and associates include several well-known commercial and residential developers. Among them is Rezmar Corp., which was run by Antoin “Tony” Rezko, the politically-connected entrepreneur who pleaded not guilty after being indicted last fall on federal influence-peddling and fraud charges…
Records show Thomas also financed deals with former Rezmar partner Daniel Mahru, who broke with Rezko in 2005 to make separate real estate investments…
Also involved in many of Thomas’s business deals was his longtime business partner Louis M. Giordano. In one Chicago transaction, the Tribune found, Giordano worked with the nephew of a reputed Chicago organized crime figure in an unsuccessful attempt to sell a River North nightclub, according to court documents
Rest:
http://bigjournalism.com/acary/2010/05/19/tony-rezko-barack-obama-the-fbi-mole-and-the-chicago-msm/
