The Chicago Sun-Times reports on America's most conflicted politician:
This is a story about how hot dogs and money are made, Chicago-style.Rahm Emanuel knows who's running Chicago and it's not him.....
Nine months after Ald. Edward M. Burke led the Chicago City Council in approving a nearly $5 million tax deal for Vienna Beef to buy a vacant factory in Bridgeport in 2013, Burke’s law firm got a new client — Vienna Beef.
It hired the alderman’s law firm to push for property tax cuts on the factory site.
And Burke’s firm got results. It got Vienna’s property taxes slashed by an average of 70 percent over the next two years, arguing to Cook County Assessor Joseph Berrios and the Cook County Board of Review that cuts were merited because the factory wasn’t operating while renovations were underway. That saved Chicago’s biggest hot dog maker a total of $308,460, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis has found.
On top of that, records show Burke’s firm won a refund of $135,602 of property taxes Vienna had paid when it bought the factory at 1000 W. Pershing Rd., where Sara Lee Corp. used to make Best’s kosher hot dogs.
Klafter & Burke — a small law firm that specializes in property-tax work — was paid an undisclosed percentage of the money it saved Vienna on taxes, according to Vienna president John “Jack” Bodman, whose father is the company’s biggest shareholder.
