A former contractor was sentenced today to six months of home confinement on electronic monitors for paying nearly $70,000 in bribes to corrupt city inspectors so they would ignore building-code violations.
Padraig Gravin, 33, who admitted paying out bribes while working as a project manager for a Chicago developer, was in tears as he left U.S. District Judge David Coar's courtroom with his wife and two friends.
Coar also imposed five years of probation. Gravin's attorney, Michael Clancy, said it was unclear if the Irish immigrant would be deported because of the felony conviction.
"He's been just sick about this," Clancy said.
Gravin is one of 21 defendants convicted of wrongdoing in the Operation Crooked Code probe of city inspectors, a tally that includes 15 former city employees. The investigation is led by the city inspector general's office, the FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.
Gravin faced up to one year in prison but was given probation in part because he cooperated with authorities, helping in prosecuting Jose Hernandez, a former city inspector.
Gravin was charged with paying $500 to "expediter" Catherine Romasanta, knowing she would give the money to Hernandez as a bribe to win a favorable inspection on two apartments in the 2800 block of West Congress Parkway.
Romasanta was in fact cooperating with investigators. Gravin himself then began cooperating against Hernandez in July 2008.
In a deal with prosecutors, Gravin pleaded guilty in March to one count in connection with the $500 bribe, but he admitted paying out $69,200 in bribes to fix inspections on numerous properties.
Gravin said he paid Hernandez $15,000 to sign off on three units in a development that another inspector had failed in June 2008, as well as $10,000 to clear a 10-building development that had flunked inspections a few weeks later.
On one occasion, Gravin said he paid $1,000 after Hernandez showed up at the site of a building that had already passed an inspection by another inspector. He said Hernandez seemed to be expecting a bribe.
Hernandez, who was convicted of four counts of taking bribes, is scheduled to be sentenced Friday.
Coar noted that Gravin hadn't lived for long in Chicago, or the U.S., when he began working for local builders as a construction foreman, with job responsibilities he soon learned, including acting as a courier for bribes to inspectors to overlook code violations. While Gravin may have believed payoffs were just part of the system in his adopted city, Coar said that did not excuse Gravin.
"The problem is that (the system) never gets cleaned up if everyone just throws up their hands and says, 'That's the system,'" the judge said.
-- Andy Grimm
No comments:
Post a Comment