The lead defendant in one of the biggest mortgage fraud schemes ever prosecuted in Chicago has allegedly been threatening some of his co-defendants and other individuals involved in his case, a federal prosecutor disclosed Tuesday during an arraignment at the Dirksen Federal Building.
Assistant U.S. Atty. Daniel May told a judge that defendant Bobbie Brown, Jr., 44, is “a danger to the community.” In response to the disclosure, U.S. Magistrate Judge Jeffery Cole ordered that Brown be placed under house arrest at his mother’s home pending a hearing Thursday, July 3, to decide whether or not Brown should be detained.
“Several individuals involved in the case have expressed that they have been threatened by Mr. Brown,” May said. One of the targets of the alleged threats was defendant Leslie Love, 42, a licensed real estate agent and owner of the Total Real Estate, May said. In addition, Brown allegedly told several people that if they spoke to federal agents they “should be watching [their] back.” May added.
Prior to the court hearing, Brown, a Country Club Hills resident who operated several businesses, including Chicago Global Investments, Inc. and Brown Trucking, Inc., said in an interview outside the courtroom that he is being unfairly charged. “I’m being railroaded,” he said. “We did a lot of business with a lot of people who aren’t here,” including loan officers, appraisers and investors. When asked if he believes that the trial will be fair, Brown responded: “They’re going to crucify me like they crucified Jesus Christ.”
Also Tuesday, the judge appointed a lawyer to represent Brown after his original attorney failed to appear in court because Brown had not paid him.
Brown was one of approximately 20 defendants arraigned during two separate hearings. All pleaded not guilty to the charges, which included counts of mail, wire and bank fraud, as well as using false identification, according to an indictment released by the Department of Justice two weeks ago. According to the indictment, Brown and his fellow defendants allegedly obtained 150 fraudulent mortgage loans on Chicago area homes, receiving $95 million from lenders and subsequently defaulting on some of the loans, leaving lenders with an estimated $19 million in losses.
According to the indictments, the defendants included “straw purchasers” recruited to purchase homes, loan originators who prepared false loan applications, a lawyer who oversaw home closing and builders. The indictment was the result of a national investigation into mortgage fraud, code-named “Operation Malicious Mortgage,” which lead to charges against more than 400 people, 67 from the Chicago area.
So, there’s apparently a movie called Watching the Detectives. Starring big-eyed wonder Cillian Murphy no less. Here’s what the IMDB synopsis had to say:
“Neil, a self proclaimed film geek and owner of Gumshoe video, has always been content to live vicariously through his favorite film noirs. But when he meets Violet, a real-life femme fatale, his mundane world gets turned upside down and the line between reality and the movies quickly begins to blur. Will Neil step up and embrace a life full of adventure or retreat back to his comfortable couch?” PeaceArch Entertainment 2007
That sounds amazing! Where can I see this movie? Apparently at the Palm Springs International Film Festival in January… Meanwhile, I guess I’ll have to tide myself over with gems like Semi Pro. Sigh.
Hey all! Since this Web site is actually for a class, I have to do some audience research. Will you all be so kind as to take my survey, so I know who I’m talking to and how to improve this site? Thank ya! Click Here to take survey
Remember how I showed you that awesome cop-shaped air freshener that arrived in the mail this week? Well, today I went to write a post on WTD and noticed… IT’S GONE!
I was about to start combing the apartment. I mean, sometimes I misplace things. I could have lost it, right? But something caught my eye.
There was a glass next to my computer.
I did not leave that glass there.
Something was definitely rotten in the state of Illinois, and I was determined to find out what. This was no ordinary case of absent-mindedness—this was theft, through and through.
Watch the video below to learn how I caught the culprit.
Dusting for prints in the real crime world is a much more involved process than what I went through to find my missing cop air freshener. Take a look at these sites to see what the real cops do.
Adrian Holovaty, a journalist and computer programmer from Chicago, started up chicagocrime.org in 2005. If you’re in the with the tech- or crime-obsessed crowd, you’ve probably seen this site– or stared at it for hours on end. Give or take a few hours.
You probably also know that Holovaty has recently expanded his site into the brand new web resource EveryBlock, a hub for neighborhood news from Chicago to New York to San Francisco.
Holovaty has created Web applications for washingtonpost.com, Lawrence.come and LJWorld.com. So, as you can imagine, he’s a pretty busy guy. But today, this gypsy-guitar playing programmer took a couple of minutes to answer a few questions for Watching the Detectives. Take a look.
WTD: Tell me a little bit about chicagocrime.org. Why did you start it? How did you start it?
What kind of response have you gotten from it?
AH: I started chicagocrime.org for the fun of it, in May 2005. I’d found the Chicago Police Department’s Citizen ICAM site and was blown away by the amount of quality crime data — but I found myself wanting to interact with it in more of a “browse” fashion than a “search” fashion. At the same time, I was part of the early community that was working to figure out how to embed Google Maps on our own sites, so the project was an excuse for me to use mapping on a Web site.
The response was overwhelmingly positive, both from residents/users of the site and people outside of Chicago who saw it as an innovative project. It inspired more than a dozen similar sites in other cities around the world, it was named by the New York Times Magazine as one of the year’s best ideas, and it made some waves in the journalism industry, where it was seen as an interesting new form of journalism.
WTD: Why did you decide to switch over to EveryBlock?
AH: In spring 2007, I received a two-year grant from the Knight Foundation to start an experiment with address-specific news — essentially, to create the successor to chicagocrime.org, with more data than just crime and more cities than just Chicago. Thanks to the grant, I have the luxury of working on this project full time, whereas chicagocrime.org was always a side project.
It didn’t make much sense to operate both sites, given that EveryBlock provides Chicago crime data too, so I redirected chicagocrime.org to the appropriate EveryBlock pages a couple of weeks ago.
WTD: Can you tell me a little about EveryBlock?
AH: The concept is, it’s a newspaper for your block. We pull together as much local news we can find — public records, mainstream media reports, plus Webby stuff like Flickr photos — and let you filter it geographically, at an extremely granular level. Every block in Chicago gets its own page, e.g., http://chicago.everyblock.com/streets/addison-st/1050-1098w/ .
WTD: What kind of response have you gotten from the changeover?
AH: It’s been mostly positive, but any redesign causes its share of anxiety and confusion. People have said they like the wealth of additional data we offer, along with the fact that we now offer e-mail alerts. The main criticism has been that we no longer have a way of finding *only* the crimes on a given block, as we now use a small search radius around each block. But we’re working on fixing that.
WTD: Has your site every helped anyone to stop or prevent a crime, or to catch a criminal?
AH: I have no way of knowing that for sure, but I think increasing
information and awareness about neighborhood crime has the effect of making a community a bit more safe. What I hear anecdotally is that people use the site to keep tabs on crime in their neighborhood and, in some cases, create reports to take to aldermen to point out specific trends.
WTD: Why crime?
AH: Because the data was available.
WTD: How do you think the advent of the Internet has affected crime reporting/fighting? Does it promote amateur crimefighters? Or merely provide an outlet for armchair sleuths?
AH: I think tools like chicagocrime.org and EveryBlock get people more interested in their neighborhoods, which has a positive effect.
WTD: Was Django named after Django Reinhardt?
AH: Yes. I’m a big Django Reinhardt fan and even attempt to play that
style of music.
I propose a road trip, and I propose it ASAP. The Dick Tracy museum in Woodstock is closing in June.
The Chester Gould-Dick Tracy Museum opened in 1991, and was pretty popular for a while. But lately low attendance is driving the landmark into the ground.
So, what I want to know is: What’s going to happen to the Crimestoppers?!
The Crimestoppers were first introduced in 1947 in the Dick Tracy comic strip, penned by Chester Gould. Junior, Dick Tracy’s adopted son, started the group in order to help kids stay on the right path by becoming involved in detective work. Awesome.
During the late 90s, back in the real world, Woodstock Police Chief Joe Marvin kicked off the “Crimestoppers Police Academy.” Due to scheduling and other issues, the program failed, but in 2000, the Museum started working on the “Crimestoppers Youth Program,” which ran for eight, one-hour weekly sessions. Kids from grades three through five learned all about crime, safety and—of course—identity theft. They even got a t-shirt and a badge. I so wish I was in fifth grade again.
The museum’s Web site says that the Crimestoppers Youth Program was to be implemented in the Boys and Girls Clubs of Chicago in April 2003, but the news stops there. What happened to the program? I found an organization called Crime Stoppers on the CPD Web site. Is this the same organization? Does anyone know? It seems almost impossible to find out.
Either way, the Crime Stoppers mentioned on the CPD page are currently partnering with CAPS and the CPD to continue the search for the Tinley Park killer.
Maybe, if we’re lucky, we can get Dick Tracy on the case– before his museum hits the sheets for the big sleep.
My Tribune alert just informed me that Will County officials have announced that an autopsy conducted in November found that Drew Peterson’s third wife’s death with a homicide.
That was a mouthful.
In case you didn’t get all that: Kathleen Savio was Drew Peterson’s third wife. She was exhumed in November. An autopsy was conducted. Will County officials just announced the results of that autopsy. The results were that her death was not accidental; it was a homicide.
So, what does this mean for the Drew Peterson case, which has been pretty dormant for the last month or so? What do you think readers?
Radar magazine recently posted a pretty interesting article on Stephen Kazmierczak, the NIU shooter. Apparently, they found a comment on a music message board in which someone said he was the shooter’s former co-worker at Pirates Cove Children’s Theme Park.
The poster goes on to make some pretty wild claims.
Then, a commenter going by the same alias as the poster– sinicalypse– responded to the post. Hm, real lead or false ramblings? Take a look at Radar’s site and let me know.
Photo by The Chicago Tribune, courtesy of Maurice Possley
Maurice Possley works as a criminal justice reporter for the Chicago Tribune. With around 36 years of reporting under his proverbial belt, Possley has seen a lot—the good, the bad and the wrongfully accused.
This week, Possley took a few minutes to talk to Watching the Detectives about his career as a crime writer—past and present.
WTD: How did you start out covering investigative criminal justice?
MP: In 1997, I was covering the “26th and Cal” criminal courts building, as well as doing some national trial reporting—the Timothy McVeigh trial, for instance, and the Unabomber case—when he pleaded guilty. And there was another reporter at the paper by the name of Ken Armstrong who had proposed a project on prosecutorial misconduct, and I was asked to team up with him because of my experience covering the courts system. And it ultimately lead to a five-part series on prosecutorial misconduct that was published in January of 1999. And that… sort of… that series begat other series and other stories, projects came out of that.
WTD: Have you heard back from any of the people that you’ve written about?
MP: There’s a fellow by the name of Ken Berrywho is now a paralegal at a law firm that I wrote about. And he is working for people you know that are—he believes are wrongfully imprisoned. Really turned his life around. Got some awards for his work, and you know, he was a guy who was wrongfully convicted and now is, you know, doing really terrific things. And so we chat occasionally about the cases that he’s working on, or things that are happening in his life.
WTD: And you wrote most recently about Alton Logan?
MP: That was a story a few weeks ago.
WTD: Do you write a lot of stories like that? Or do you find that this [wrongful imprisonment] is common occurrence? I know that we have the Innocence Project at Northwestern to try to prevent that from happening.
MP: Well, are you talking about the suggestion that someone is in prison who is innocent?
WTD: Mm-hm.
MP: I mean, we’ve seen a number of those cases in Illinois. I mean, we’ve seen them nationally—the DNA exonerations in this country are over 250 and there have been a number of people who have been released from Death Row. That’s over a hundred. So, Illinois has a fair share of those. So, if you say… I don’t think… I don’t know how to characterize it when you hear… when someone says, ‘How often does it happen?’ You know, how many times is too many? Some would argue that one time is too many. So, we see it. In terms of the Alton Logan case, the peculiar facts of that case—in terms of the lawyers who kept something secret for a quarter of a century—I’ve never run across something like that.
WTD: Do you think that they acted rightly? I mean, I guess it was within the law to not reveal the truth.
MP: Well, it’s not for me to decide whether they acted rightly. They certainly believe that they did and that they followed their ethical… what the ethics of their profession required. Some people have taken issue with that. I’m not sure that the ones who take issue are taking issue because… they think that the ethical rules are wrong, or whether they [the lawyers] should have ignored them. There’s a lot of interesting questions that arise out of a story like this.
WTD: And how do you yourself deal with writing about such horrible things on such a frequent basis?
MP: Sometimes it helps to take a break and go write about something else, whether it’s fly-fishing in Montana or good barbecue in Texas, or something that’s different. Sometimes you just sort of have to go off, have a good cry and start all over.
Subscribe to RSS
