Can Alexi Giannoulias shake off the problems plaguing his family's bank to win Obama's old Senate seat?

The Chicago Reader has a long article on Chicago Mob linked Alexi Giannoulias:

Just days before the election, news outlets ran stories about Broadway Bank loans in the 1990s and early 2000s to Giorango, the Florida developer with ties to bookmaking and prostitution—stories prompted by a pre-primary mailer from the Madigan-led state Democratic Party declaring that Giannoulias was "friends" with mobsters. Giannoulias said privacy laws prohibited him from getting into details, but he noted that there was nothing illegal about the loans. "We lend money to people who we trust from a business standpoint," he said at a news conference. "We're a safe and sound financial institution and we run a good business." He added that these loans were irrelevant to his campaign—he'd been in law school when they were issued.

That was true—but Giannoulias himself had overseen a couple of loans to Giorango in 2005, and the Tribune soon dug up records of those. The paper reported that one of those loans had been used to take out a mortgage on a marina in South Carolina that was home to a casino boat. One of the companies with a stake in the boat had been led by a Greek immigrant named Konstantinos Boulis, who'd been murdered in an apparent hit in 2001. The company was then sold to investors that included Jack Abramoff, the Washington lobbyist convicted on federal corruption charges in June 2006, before being sold back to Boulis's nephew, Spiros Naos—who had donated $5,000 to Giannoulias's campaign in December 2005. But the campaign had returned the check in February, when the Daily Herald had written about Naos's connection to Abramoff.

Another great one from Mick Dumke.