No Runny Eggs

The repository of one hard-boiled egg from the south suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (and the occassional guest-blogger). The ramblings within may or may not offend, shock and awe you, but they are what I (or my guest-bloggers) think.

Re: The $64,000 and $382,000 Obama/Rezko property questions

by @ 10:46 on June 6, 2008. Filed under Politics - National.

Jim Geraghty kicked it off by asking why Barack Obama would “overpay” Rita Rezko (Tony’s wife, and yes, THAT Tony) $64,000 for a strip of land on a vacant property she owned next to his Chicago home. Headless Blogger jumped on it and asked why Rezko would “overpay” the previous owner of both parcels $384,000 for that piece of vacant land. I burned much of last night trying to do some digging through both the City of Chicago’s online GIS map and the Cook County Assessor’s office website to see what could be discerned from that.

First, I have to thank Headless for refreshing my memory on some of the specifics of the same-day purchases by Obama and Rezko:

  • There are actually 3 parcels involved; two listed by the Cook County Assessor’s office as 5046 S. Greenwood Ave. (the house Obama purchased and an outlot behind the house and garage containing a second, small house also presumably purchased by Obama), and one listed as 5050 S. Greenwood (the vacant lot purchased by Rezko). At that time, the “main” 5046 parcel was about 10,400 square feet and the 5050 parcel was about 9,600 square feet (side note; CBS2Chicago said that it was 7,500 feet; guess they didn’t check city records too closely).
  • The previous owner of all 3 parcels was looking to sell them all for $2.575 million. On the same day in June 2005, Obama purchased the two parcels at 5046 for $1.65 million ($300,000 less than the asking price), while Rezko bought the 5050 parcel for $625,000 (the full asking price).
  • In January 2006, Obama bought 1/6th of the 5050 parcel from Rezko (about 1,600 square feet) for $104,000 (precisely 1/6th of what Rezko paid for it) despite it being appraised at only $40,500.
  • That purchase not only increased the “main” 5046 parcel size to its current 12,047 square feet and reduced the 5050 parcel to 8,002 square feet, but it caused the combined 5046 southern property line to “jog” south (so much for the claim that he was trying to “balance” the property lines).

Now, the “why”s. Do bear in mind that this is complete speculation, but I suspect that Obama wanted the entire parcel, but didn’t yet have the ability to come up with $2.275 million (the total amount paid to the previous owner). He got his friend Tony Rezko to have his wife buy the vacant parcel with the understanding that he would pay her back as the additional money from his new job as US Senator came in by buying pieces of the parcel and attaching them to his property. That scheme fell apart after Tony was indicted on federal corrpution charges in October, 2006.

I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know whether that scheme violated federal law, Illinois law or Senate ethics rules in addition to smelling as bad as Jones Island after a 3-day rain. However, I do know that, had a Wisconsin politician participated in that scheme, he or she would have faced at a minimum a criminal investigation and likely prosecution.

Revisions/extensions (10:58 am 6/6/2008) – Some more info from a March 2008 article in the Chicago Tribune (H/T – Headless):

The house and the adjoining yard had been owned as a single property, but the owners were listing them separately and asking $1.95 million for the house and $625,000 for the landscaped side lot.

Obama disclosed Friday that someone else already had an option to buy the garden lot. But he said Rezko took over that option after Rezko learned Obama was bidding for the house. Obama said he knew next to nothing about those transactions and does not recall when he learned that Rezko was interested in buying the side lot- or even how Rezko learned it was for sale….

At some point before the property sales closed, Obama toured the home with Rezko for 15 to 30 minutes. Obama said he asked Rezko to assess the property because he was a real estate developer in the area. “He said, ‘I’d be willing to go inside and take a look,’ ” Obama recalled….

Rezko later sold the rest of the lot to one of his former attorneys, who now has it listed for more than $900,000. “It appears,” Obama said, “a sale is about to be consummated.”

Curiouser and curiouser.

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