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Former Ald. Ricardo Munoz (22nd) pleaded guilty Monday to wire fraud and money laundering, admitting he took nearly $38,000 from the Chicago Progressive Reform Caucus to pay for personal expenses like skydiving and a relative’s college tuition.

The onetime veteran alderman entered his plea five months after a federal grand jury handed down a 29-page indictment that alleged Munoz’s behavior continued after the feds’ aggressive pursuit of public corruption had blown into full view in late 2018 and early 2019. It said he even used some of the money at Lover’s Lane in February 2019.

Munoz faces a likely sentence of around a year in prison. He is also expected to pay $6,891 in restitution “owed to the victim.” His sentencing is set for Jan. 5.

Richard Kling, Munoz’s defense attorney, said after court that Munoz “spent decades giving to the West Side community that elected him.”

“Sometimes good people do foolish or stupid things,” Kling said. “He’s admitted to this court that he did a foolish or stupid thing. He’s ready to accept responsibility and pay the price.”

Munoz, 56, declined to comment.

Attorney Richard Kling, left, speaks to the media about his client, former Ald. Ricardo Munoz, right, inside Dirksen Federal Courthouse.Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

Munoz announced his retirement from the City Council in 2018. He was charged in a domestic violence incident involving his wife early in 2019, but a Cook County judge found him not guilty of misdemeanor battery in June of that year. Munoz was also in counseling for alcoholism that year.

Before he entered his plea in federal court Monday, Munoz told U.S. District Judge John Kness he considers himself to be “retired” rather than unemployed. He said he has been living in Riverside, and he acknowledged he had three cans of Budweiser Sunday evening. However, he said he felt fully sober during Monday’s hearing.

After Munoz’s plea, Kness agreed to hold a sealed hearing regarding what prosecutors called an “outstanding bond violation.” The judge asked all members of the media and public to leave the room.

Three sitting members of the Chicago City Council also face separate federal indictments of their own. Ald. Edward M. Burke (14th) is charged with racketeering, Ald. Carrie M. Austin (34th) is charged with bribery and lying to the FBI, and Ald. Patrick Daley Thompson (11th) is charged with tax counts and lying to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Former Ald. Ricardo Munoz walks out of the Dirksen Federal Courthouse on Monday after pleading guilty in his fraud case.Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

A fourth, Ald. James Gardiner (45th), is the subject of a federal investigation revolving around potential bribery allegations, according to a source. He has not been criminally charged.

Munoz faced 15 wire fraud counts and one money laundering count in the indictment filed against him April 29. It accused him of trying to cover his tracks by repaying the money he took from the Progressive Reform Caucus or by claiming it was for “consulting” or “Election Day expenses.”

The former alderman’s plea agreement with prosecutors alleges he took $37,891 from the progressive caucus, including $16,000 he transferred in October 2016 to a joint account he held with a family member. He then used $15,254 from the joint account to pay tuition to an out-of-state university.

Munoz later used $16,000 from a Parent Plus loan to pay the money back.

He also bought jewelry from Louis Vuitton, women’s clothing from Nordstrom, three Apple iPhones and Chicago Bulls tickets, according to the plea agreement.

Munoz made $10,560 in cash withdrawals from the progressive caucus account in November and December 2018, including while he was on vacation in New York in late November 2018, it said.

Federal authorities famously raided Burke’s City Hall offices Nov. 29, 2018, a move that first revealed the feds’ public corruption investigations, which are still ongoing.

Between November 2018 and February 2019, Munoz used the progressive caucus debit card to spend $1,400 on a Southwest Airlines ticket from Los Angeles to Chicago for an acquaintance, Los Angeles Kings hockey tickets, a stay at the Los Angeles Crowne Plaza hotel, and at Lover’s Lane in West Dundee.

In March 2019, the plea agreement said, a contractor asked Munoz for the progressive caucus’ account balance so it could be reported at a meeting. Munoz told the contractor in an Apple iMessage the account had $11,000 in it.

It really only had $94.79, according to the plea agreement.

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The time for contract talk will come.

It certainly won’t be in a public forum, and definitely wasn’t going to play out during Monday’s media day, with training camp less than 24 hours away from tipping off.

For now, the only talk Zach LaVine was interested in had to do with “hardhats” and getting to know his new teammates.

“My plan is to [Tuesday] get ready for training camp, get ready for the season, and try and help these guys win just like everybody else,” LaVine said, when asked about his pending free agency after the 2021-22 season. “I’m not worried about my contract right now. That will be a point and time in the future, and my agent I will sit down and discuss it, go from there, but right now it’s about the Bulls and getting better tomorrow.”

A much different sounding LaVine than the one from the end of a disappointing 2020-21 season, where LaVine’s contract “plan” then involved getting “what I deserve, and whatever that is I’ll have it coming to me.”

Why the softer stance now?

He can thank his front office for that.

Not only did they give him better pieces this offseason, but they kept him in the loop about those pieces, listened to his opinion on those pieces, and then reiterated how they also feel about LaVine in their long-term future plans.

“The one thing we know is that we’re committed to Zach,” Bulls executive vice president of basketball operations Arturas Karnisovas said. “We want him to be in Chicago for a very long time. I think the trade deadline and free agency moves kind of proved that.”

It proved something.

Karnisovas & Co. added Nikola Vucevic at the deadline last season, and then this offseason added Lonzo Ball, Alex Caruso and DeMar DeRozan.

That’s two All-Stars, an elite ball-handler/play-maker with Ball, and a guard in Caruso who thrives on doing the dirty work that LaVine hasn’t always wanted to get involved with.

But that also comes with expectations.

Bowing out when the postseason arrives like the Bulls have done for four straight seasons isn’t really an option. Especially if they are invested in LaVine as a max player, and a scenario in which they could have to pay him $201.3 million over the next five years.

LaVine, who has never reached the playoffs, is well aware of that, but also aware that his skillset does come with a hefty price tag. If he focuses on winning basketball games rather than winning the PR battle about his contract, someone will pay him.

Although he did like hearing Karnisovas insist that the organization was committed to LaVine.

“It means a lot hearing that from them,” LaVine said. “I think you guys know I’m a team-first guy, I’m excited with all the moves that were made, and really looking forward to getting into camp and getting to know these guys and getting the season started because we all have a lot to prove.

“This is the most excited I’ve been, especially with the talent of the team that we have here, the support [the front office has] given me, I’m extremely happy about that, and I’m ready to hit the ground running and go out there and just get it going. There’s an excitement around the city, but there’s a bigger excitement around the team as well because we know we can do something.”

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NEW YORK — R. Kelly, the R&B superstar known for his anthem “I Believe I Can Fly,” was convicted Monday in a sex trafficking trial after decades of avoiding criminal responsibility for numerous allegations of misconduct with young women and children.

A jury of seven men and five women found Kelly guilty of racketeering on their second day of deliberations.

The charges were based on an argument that the entourage of managers and aides who helped the singer meet girls — and keep them obedient and quiet — amounted to a criminal enterprise.

Several accusers testified in lurid detail during the trial, alleging that Kelly subjected them to perverse and sadistic whims when they were underage.

For years, the public and news media seemed to be more amused than horrified by allegations of inappropriate relationships with minors, starting with Kelly’s illegal marriage to the R&B phenom Aaliyah in 1994 when she was just 15.

His records and concert tickets kept selling. Other artists continued to record his songs, even after he was arrested in 2002 and accused of making a recording of himself sexually abusing and urinating on a 14-year-old girl.

Widespread public condemnation didn’t come until a widely watched docuseries “Surviving R. Kelly” helped make his case a signifier of the #MeToo era, and gave voice to alleged victims who wondered if their stories were previously ignored because they were Black women.

At the trial, several of Kelly’s accusers testified without using their real names to protect their privacy and prevent possible harassment by the singer’s fans. Jurors were shown homemade videos of Kelly engaging in sex acts that prosecutors said were not consensual.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Maria Cruz Melendez argued that Kelly was a serial abuser who “maintained control over these victims using every trick in the predator handbook.”

The defense labeled the accusers “groupies” and “stalkers.”

Defense attorney Deveraux Cannick questioned why the alleged victims stayed in relationships with Kelly if they thought they were being exploited.

“You made a choice,” Cannick told one woman who testified, adding, “You participated of your own will.”

Kelly, born Robert Sylvester Kelly, has been jailed without bail since in 2019. The trial was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic and Kelly’s last-minute shakeup of his legal team.

When it finally started on Aug. 18, prosecutors painted the 54-year-old singer as a pampered man-child and control freak. His accusers said they were under orders to call him “Daddy,” expected to jump and kiss him anytime he walked into a room, and to cheer only for him when he played pickup basketball games in which they said he was a ball hog.

The accusers alleged that they also were ordered to sign nondisclosure forms and were subjected to threats and punishments such as violent spankings if they broke what one referred to as “Rob’s rules.” Some said they believed the videotapes he shot of them having sex would be used against them if they exposed what was happening.

Among the other more troubling tableaus: Kelly keeping a gun by his side while he berated one of his accusers as a prelude to forcing her to give him oral sex in a Los Angeles music studio; Kelly giving several alleged victims herpes without disclosing he had an STD; Kelly coercing a teen boy to join him for sex with a naked girl who emerged from underneath a boxing ring in his garage; and Kelly shooting a shaming video of one alleged victim showing her smearing feces on her face as punishment for breaking his rules.

Some of the most harrowing testimony came from a woman who said Kelly took advantage of her in 2003 when she was an unsuspecting radio station intern. She testified he whisked her to his Chicago recording studio, where she was kept locked up and was drugged before he sexually assaulted her while she was passed out.

When she realized she was trapped, “I was scared. I was ashamed. I was embarrassed,” she said.

She said one of R. Kelly’s employees warned her to keep her mouth shut about what had happened.

Other testimony focused on Kelly’s relationship with Aaliyah. One of the final witnesses described seeing him sexually abusing her around 1993, when Aaliyah was only 13 or 14.

Jurors also heard testimony about a fraudulent marriage scheme hatched to protect Kelly after he feared he had impregnated Aaliyah. Witnesses said they were married in matching jogging suits using a license falsely listing her age as 18; he was 27 at the time.

Aaliyah, whose full name was Aaliyah Dana Haughton, worked with Kelly, who wrote and produced her 1994 debut album, “Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number.” She died in a plane crash in 2001 at age 22.

In at least one instance, Kelly was accused of abusing a victim around the time he was under investigation in a child pornography case in Chicago. He was acquitted at trial in 2008.

For the Brooklyn trial, U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly barred people not directly involved in the case from the courtroom in what she called a coronavirus precaution. Reporters and other spectators had to watch on a video feed from another room in the same building.

The New York case is only part of the legal peril facing the singer. He also has pleaded not guilty to sex-related charges in Illinois and Minnesota. Trial dates in those cases have yet to be set.

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The Poetry Foundation

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For 43 years, Tom Heineman has lived on Eastlake Terrace in Rogers Park, a three-block-long street that runs past three beaches: Juneway, Rogers, and Howard. Every summer, he walked out the front door of his building, crossed the street to Rogers Beach Park, and dipped into the water.

Then came the winter of 2019–20. The lake rose to near record high levels. Violent waves coursed up the sand and overran the breakwalls. To save the parks — and the street — the Chicago Department of Transportation spent $1 million to cover Eastlake Terrace’s beaches with tons of white riprap — loose stone intended to prevent erosion. Now the beaches are gone, and so is Eastlake Terrace’s intimate relationship with Lake Michigan.

“We used to have lifeguards, we used to have sand,” Heineman said. “In the morning, people would come out of the woodwork to swim and do paddleboarding. My grandkids used to come over and visit, and they’d go to the beach. Now they go to Loyola.”

Down at the other end of the lakefront, in South Shore, the lake destroyed the private beach behind Jera Slaughter’s building at 7321 S. South Shore Drive.

“The waves shot up to the top of our 12-story building,” Slaughter said. “Water came into the building and uprooted our trees and our patio. We’re still structurally sound, but we no longer have a beach. We have Jersey barriers, bricks, and concrete blocks.”

Earlier this year, to protect Arthur Ashe Beach Park, the city piled riprap at the foot of 74th Street, cutting off access to the water. In Rogers Park and South Shore, the riprap is “temporary emergency work,” according to a CDOT spokesman. Residents in both neighborhoods are hoping for permanent protection from rising lake levels that scientists say are the result of climate change. Slaughter, a member of the South Side Lake Front Erosion Task Force, wants a breakwall between 71st and 75th Streets.

“We do not expect them to repair our property,” she said. “We expect them to slow the force of the water to protect our property.”

It could be a long wait. Next year, the Army Corps of Engineers is slated to receive $500,000 in funding for the Chicago Shoreline General Reevaluation Report, a three-year study that will identify stretches of the lakefront damaged by the high waters of the last few years.

The length of the study, plus the need to obtain funding for its recommendations, means that new work won’t begin until 2028, said David Bucaro, chief of project management for the Army Corps of Engineers Chicago District.

The corps’s last such study, which was completed in 1994, resulted in the Chicago Shoreline Protection Project, two dozen improvements between Montrose Pier and the South Water Purification Plant, at a total cost of $536 million. One of the still-unrepaired sections is Morgan Shoal, between 47th and 51st Streets, where the breakwall is cracked and battered; black trapezoidal sandbags have been installed to protect the lakefront path. CDOT hopes to begin design this fall on a $71 million repair.

“There are many other reaches of the shoreline that were not included, and it’s been 25 years,” Bucaro said. “In that time, the shoreline has further degraded, and conditions have changed.”

The new study will take a close look at six areas the city has identified as priorities for lakefront improvements: Juneway Terrace to Osterman Beach; Montrose Hook Pier; North Avenue Beach to Oak Street Beach; LaRabida Children’s Hospital; 71st Street to 75th Street; and Rainbow Beach to the South Water Purification Plant.

Joel Brammeier, CEO of the Alliance for the Great Lakes, hopes the solution isn’t simply pouring concrete to wall off the city from the lake. He’s a fan of the Friends of the Parks’ Last Four Miles Plan, which proposes building out the beaches both north and south of DuSable Lake Shore Drive, fulfilling Daniel Burnham’s plan to achieve the long-standing goal of a “forever open, clear, and free” lakefront.

“Riprap and giant sandbags are short-term fixes,” Brammeier said. “They don’t make the shoreline more resilient. The most resilient form of shoreline is things like beaches.”

In the past, the Last Four Miles Plan has been opposed by lakefront homeowners who didn’t want to lose their private beaches. However, Ald. Maria Hadden says she’s been hearing less opposition recently in her 49th Ward, which encompasses Rogers Park, since buildings have suffered expensive damage from attacking waves.

“It would be really nice to have a continuous connection to Evanston and the rest of the city,” Hadden said. “The general idea sounds excellent to me.”

Downtown, 2nd Ward Ald. Brian Hopkins has proposed using landfill to expand Oak Street Beach and add 70 acres of parkland east of DuSable Lake Shore Drive to protect the highway.

Expanding beaches is “a measure we would evaluate,” the Corps of Engineers’ Bucaro said.

In the meantime, lakefront dwellers are literally battening down the hatches to defend their buildings from the lake. Todd Rosenthal, who lives on the shoreline side of Eastlake, installed a rolling metal gate over his glass patio door after “the waves were hitting my window.”

“We want experts to not just manage us in a crisis, but come up with a comprehensive plan,” Hadden said.

That plan is coming, but will it come soon enough for the lakefront’s most threatened beaches and buildings?

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Experience Chicago – Chicago Magazine

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Apollo Chorus

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A federal judge said Monday that John Hinckley Jr., who tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan four decades ago, can be freed from all remaining restrictions next year if he continues to follow those rules and remains mentally stable.

U.S. District Court Judge Paul L. Friedman in Washington said during a 90-minute court hearing that he’ll issue his ruling on the plan this week.

Since Hinckley moved to Williamsburg, Virginia, from a Washington hospital in 2016, court-imposed restrictions have required doctors and therapists to oversee his psychiatric medication and therapy. Hinckley has been barred from having a gun. And he can’t contact Reagan’s children, other victims or their families, or actress Jodie Foster, who he was obsessed with at the time of the 1981 shooting.

Friedman said Hinckley, now 66, has displayed no symptoms of active mental illness, no violent behavior and no interest in weapons since 1983.

“If he hadn’t tried to kill the president, he would have been unconditionally released a long, long, long time ago,” the judge said. “But everybody is comfortable now after all of the studies, all of the analysis and all of the interviews and all of the experience with Mr. Hinckley.”

Friedman said the plan is to release Hinckley from all court supervision in June.

A 2020 violence risk assessment conducted on behalf of Washington’s Department of Behavioral Health concluded that Hinckley would not pose a danger if he’s unconditionally released.

The U.S. government had previously opposed ending restrictions. But it recently retained an independent expert to examine Hinckley and took a different position Monday, with attorneys saying they would agree to unconditional release if Hinckley follows the rules and shows mental stability for the next nine months.

Kacie Weston, an attorney for the U.S. government, said it wants to make sure Hinckley can adapt to living on his own for the first time in 40 years.

He recently moved out his mother’s house, which sits along a golf course in a gated community in Williamsburg. She died in July. Attorneys did not say where Hinckley is currently living.

“Mr. Hinckley does have a history of turning inward, and toward isolation,” Weston said.

Another concern is the impending retirement of one of Hinckley’s therapists and the looming end to a therapy group, which has provided much support and social interaction. Weston said Hinckley will likely face challenges finding a similar group in the future.

“All we have to do is wait a few more months and see,” Weston said. “And we’ll have actual hard data. We’ll have information in real time to see how Mr. Hinckley adapts.”

Hinckley was 25 when he shot and wounded the 40th U.S. president outside a Washington hotel. The shooting paralyzed Reagan press secretary James Brady, who died in 2014. It also injured Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy and Washington police officer Thomas Delahanty.

Hinckley did not attend Monday’s hearing. But Barry Levine, his attorney, said Hinckley wanted to express his “heartfelt” apologies and “profound regret” to the people he shot and their families as well as to Foster and the American people.

“Perhaps it is too much to ask for forgiveness,” Levine said. “But we hope they have an understanding that the acts that caused him to do this terrible thing (were caused by) mental illness.”

Hinckley was suffering from acute psychosis. When jurors found him not guilty by reason of insanity, they said he needed treatment and not a lifetime in confinement.

Such an acquittal meant that Hinckley could not be blamed or punished for what he did, legal experts have said. Hinckley was ordered to live at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington.

In the 2000s, Hinckley began making visits to his parents’ home in Williamsburg. A 2016 court order granted him permission to live with his mom full time after experts said his mental illness had been in remission for decades.

Friedman, the judge, has loosened some of Hinckley’s restrictions over the years. For instance, Hinckley was granted the right to publicly display his artwork and allowed to move out of his mother’s house. But he’s still barred from traveling to places where he knows there will be someone protected by the Secret Service.

Hinckley must give three days’ notice if he wants to travel more than 75 miles from home. He also has to turn over passwords for computers, phones and online accounts such as email.

In recent years, Hinckley has sold items from a booth at an antique mall that he’s found at estate sales, flea markets and consignment shops. He’s also shared his music on YouTube.

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A number of things that I never dreamed I would see in my lifetime all came to be in a single summer:

Dozens of people dying in the Pacific Northwest due to a record-breaking heat wave, with temperatures over 110 degrees. People trapped and drowned in their own basements and vehicles as New York and New Jersey were flooded with rain. Firefighters wrapping 2,000-year-old California sequoia trees in fire retardant foil blankets in a last-ditch effort to save the fabled giants from fast-encroaching wildfires. And my own son telling me he’s not sure if bringing grandchildren into the world right now is such a good idea.

SEND LETTERS TO: [email protected]. Please include your neighborhood or hometown and a phone number for verification purposes. Letters should be approximately 350 words or less.

It’s the stuff of sleepless nights. But in the light of day, I calm down a little and realize that we still can do something to slow the climate change that is bringing on these extreme weather events. A simple and effective solution, a national carbon fee and dividend, is called for in a statement signed recently by more than 20 economists from around Illinois. A fee would be put on carbon emissions and the money would returned back to power utility consumers, spurring innovation and a transition to cleaner fuels. Economists have long supported carbon pricing as the simplest, most transparent and most effective single policy to draw down emissions.

Congress is debating what climate change measures should be written into the federal budget reconciliation bill. We, their constituents, should let them know we favor the most effective course of action — a price on carbon emissions. President Joe Biden, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, and Sen. Dick Durbin know that each voice they hear from represents many other constituents who share those views.

Karen Campbell, Bolingbrook

No new taxpayer stadium for Bears

Eighteen years ago, Chicago went to bat for the Bears and renovated Soldier Field, compromising its status as a architecturally historic site. Now the Bears want a new stadium.

Is this quixotic venture worth it for Chicago, given the city’s other monetary problems?

No.

Most of those who attend Bears games come in from the suburbs. How much do they really contribute to the city’s coffers during those few hours on a game day? The Bears should build their own new stadium, if that’s what they want. And if they do so in Arlington Heights, they should drop the “Chicago” from the team’s name.

Warren Rodgers, Jr., Matteson

Drivers and bike riders should shape up

A Sun-Times reader, James FitzGerald of Edgewater, recently wrote in response to my letter about motorists dangerously using electronic devices that bike riders don’t always follow the rules of the road, either. I’d like to commend him on a very valid point. Both cyclists and motorists need to be held accountable.

John Livaich, Oak Lawn

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An 18-year-old was shot and killed over the weekend in West Elsdon on the Southwest Side had just returned home after a day spent with their mother.

Azul De La Garza was sitting in a parked car in the 5400 block of South Avers Avenue when someone approached and fired shots around 8:30 p.m. Saturday, Chicago police said

De La Garza was pronounced dead at Mount Sinai Hospital, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.

“It’s hard to put it in words the loss we’re feeling — for someone to take away my 18-year-old warrior princess,” the father Jose De La Gaza told reporters Sunday.

Azul De La Garza had spent the day with their mother and had just bought a halloween costume, sister Isabel de la Garza said.

Azul De La Garza had recently graduated from Solorio Academy, where they wrestled and won second place in a state tournament, the father said. They had a scholarship to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago this fall.

Azul De La Garza was “just doing everything the best way we taught her,” the father said.

De La Garza was one of at least nine people killed in weekend gun violence in Chicago.

An online fundraiser is collecting money for De La Garza’s family.

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