Gift cards for Chicago city workers?

The Chicago Sun-Times reports:

Twenty employees of Chicago's scandal-scarred Buildings Department were summoned to the commissioner's office Tuesday to explain why their names appeared on a list of city employees who allegedly accepted $100 and $200 gift cards from a permit expediter-turned-government witness.

The gift cards were allegedly distributed in 2005 by Catherine Romasanta, a former expediter caught up in the federal investigation known as Operation Crooked Code who testified in the trial that culminated in last week's conviction of former supervising building inspector Michael Reese.

Expediters apply for permits on behalf of developers, contractors and homeowners and shepherd those applications through an intimidating city bureaucracy.

For more on the concept of Chicago's city government as a racketeering enterprise.