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“These employees of the buildings department and the zoning department are paid good salaries with excellent benefits,” Hoffman said. “Their jobs were to make sure that the building codes and the zoning ordinances were laws that protect city residents. But what they actually did with their jobs was to make sure the laws were violated. Everything was the exact opposite of the way it should be. The people who we the taxpayers were paying to protect us were actually using their jobs to make sure regular taxpayers got hurt and corrupt real estate developers benefited.”
“There is a problem here bigger than the complaints issued today,” he said, and the investigations into it are not done. “If you were one of those people taking bribes the last few years, you ought to be uncomfortable right now.”
The feds said payoffs were made in such sinister locales as a Starbucks, the street outside a bank’s ATM lobby, and the entrance to a Payless Shoes store. It should be noted, though, that one was allegedly made outside of “Oprah’s place”—the Wishbone restaurant in the West Loop—because a city employee, Phyllis Mendenhall, no longer thought it appropriate to receive envelopes at her city office.
“Yah, I heard.”
