It is an examination of the facts surrounding 16 cases from that list of 124. The cases were selected based on: 1) their similarities; 2) their degree of connection to one another; 3) their having occurred near the beginning of the Obama Administration; 4) reports by Michelle Malkin from 2011; 5) Larry Sinclair's public statement; and 6) a televised interview with reporter Wayne Madsen, from early 2011, in which he named somewhere between five and ten of the cases explained below.
You can see the original list of 124 deaths and disappearances by clicking on the following link:
III. Explanation of 16 Victims' Cases
Now that we’ve become acquainted with these
lesser-known figures who will be mentioned throughout this piece, we’ll move on
to discussing the deaths of the second, third, and fourth victims; Larry Bland,
Donald Young, and Nate Spencer.
Each of these men were openly gay black
male Chicago residents who died within forty days of one another in November
and December 2008, the last of whom died just eight days prior to Obama’s
victory in the Iowa Caucus on January 3rd, 2008.
The first two of these three victims –
Larry Bland and Donald Young – were both members of Chicago’s Trinity United
Church of Christ, and both were shot execution-style in the back of the head.
For the sake of relevance, we will skip
the first victim for now, and instead look at victims two through four.
Our second victim Larry Bland worked as a security guard at Northwestern Hospital
in Evanston, Illinois. On November 17th, 2008, he was found
shot to death in the entryway of the home which he had once shared with his
mother Josephine.
Josephine Bland told a Fox affiliate in
Chicago that she had been concerned about the telephone bills her son was
running up calling gay sex lines, the amount of time he spent on gay sex sites
(including adam4adam.com), and the frequency with which he brought strange
young men over to their house. Bland’s mother said that these circumstances led
to her moving out of the home which she had shared with her son, who she
believes was killed by one of his lovers.
Two days before that Christmas, Larry
Bland’s fellow Trinity United churchgoer – our third victim, Donald Young – was found shot to death
in his Chicago apartment. Numerous items were discovered missing from the scene
of the crime, leading investigators to believe that Young was murdered by
burglars. Young was not only a member of the Trinity United Church of Christ;
he was also its choir director, as well as an elementary school teacher.
In
his June 2008 press conference in Washington,
D.C. – and in a sworn affidavit
he filed with the Chicago Police Department – Larry Sinclair claimed that between
September and November 2007, he contacted a representative of Trinity United,
and later discovered – only after his death – that this man was in fact Donald
Young.
The purpose of Sinclair’s various calls
and text messages was to urge Young to have Reverend Jeremiah Wright ask Obama
to amend his publicly-disclosed records of drug use to include the
crack-smoking incident – which allegedly involved Obama purchasing an
eight-ball of cocaine with $250 of Sinclair’s money on his behalf, the two
drinking alcohol together, and Obama pulling a pipe and a crack rock out of his
pocket and smoking it while Sinclair performed fellatio on him – which Sinclair
claims occurred in 1999.
As a bit of background, Obama has publicly
admitted – numerous times – that he smoked marijuana, and wrote in his 1995 autobiography
Dreams From My Father that he had snorted cocaine, and once almost had an
acquaintance inject him with heroin.
Larry Sinclair alleges that during one of
the instances in which Young called Sinclair, Young asked why Sinclair had not
asked him to urge Obama and Reverend Wright to disclose information regarding a
sexual relationship.
Sinclair later claimed that his question
surprised him, because he had never mentioned his sexual relationship with
Obama in his conversations with Young. This would seem to indicate that Obama
had admitted to having had such a relationship with Sinclair in private talks
with Reverend Wright and Donald Young when Young confronted Wright and Obama
about Sinclair’s call about Obama’s drug use.
Reporter Wayne Madsen has claimed that
Reverend Wright ran a gay matchmaking service called the “Down-Low Club” for
members of Trinity United, who were typically married men.
Madsen said the abbreviation of the
service – D.L.C. – served as a cover, such that anyone overhearing Wright’s
conversations would think he was discussing the Democratic Leadership
Committee, a non-profit think tank (affiliated with “New Democrats” Obama, the
Clintons, John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Lieberman, and Al Gore) which dissolved
in early 2011.
The well-publicized murders of Larry Bland
and Donald Young led some Chicago
residents to wonder whether there was a serial killer on the loose targeting
homosexual African-Americans.
Larry Sinclair has alleged that Reverend
Wright announced the death of Donald Young at either the 7:30 A.M. or the 11:00 A.M. Trinity United service. This is interesting
because – according to the certified copy of Young’s Chicago Death Certificate
– Young was found shot at 7:30 A.M.,
but was not officially pronounced dead by the Medical Examiner until 12:10 P.M..
Donald Young’s mother Norma Jean told the
tabloid The Globe that she believes that persons trying to protect
Obama’s reputation had her son murdered.
The day after Christmas 2007 – just three
days after the murder of Donald Young – our fourth victim Nate Spencer was found dead in his home. Spencer’s cause of death
was given as septicemia, pneumonia, and complications related to HIV.
Spencer’s fellow gay black male Chicago resident Tim Hooker
runs the blog chgocutie.blogspot.com. On the blog, Hooker has reported the
death of Donald Young, as well as the death of Nate Spencer, who he claims had
once been his lover. Hooker has amended these posts to chide readers who have
posted comments asking Hooker whether he believes there is a link between Obama
and the deaths of Spencer and Young.
Let us now move from Chicago to the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C..
On April 17th, 2008, our sixth victim Leiutenant Quarles Harris, Jr. –
Leiutenant being simply the man’s first name rather than a military rank – was
found in his car, dead from multiple gunshot wounds. At the time of his death,
Harris was cooperating with federal officials concerning his March 25th
arrest for being in possession of large quantities of marijuana, 20 or 21 credit
cards, and eight completed passport applications, four of the names on which
matched names on the credit cards.
Harris had been in court for that fraud
case only three days before he was murdered. According to court documents,
Harris told police that he had conspired with employees of the State Department
and the Postal Service to commit credit card fraud.
It has been reported that in March 2008 –
the month Harris was arrested – the passport records of major presidential
candidates Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain had been breached by three
State Department contract employees.
Despite claims by then Assistant Secretary
of State for Public Affairs Sean McCormack that the cases are not related, Harris’s
claim that his friend in the State Department had helped him commit the credit
card fraud prompts questions as to whether the Harris case has anything to do
with these incidents.
At least one of these breaches of the
presidential candidates’ personal records allegedly took place during a
training exercise, in which the employee was asked to show he had learned how
to access a person’s files, and in which the employee was urged not to pull up
the name of a famous person. That employee allegedly pulled up one of the
candidates’ names. Two of these employees were fired, and one was merely
reprimanded.
The employees worked for Virginia-based
State Department personal records contractors Stanley Inc. and The Analysis
Corporation. The Analysis Corporation – whose CEO John O. Brennan is President
Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and
Counterterrorism – also deals with information concerning counterterrorism and
national security, working with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security,
and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
We may remember John O. Brennan from May
2011, when he gave public statements concerning the details of the raid on the
compound of Osama bin Laden which allegedly caused his death; statements which
arguably conflicted with statements made by White House Press Secretary Jay
Carney.
Being that the passport information of
Obama, Clinton, and McCain was breached, it is necessary to mention that the
breach of this information carries with it the potential that Social Security
information was also accessed and viewed, which could be used to find credit
card information.
Reporter Wayne Madsen has claimed that
Obama has a false Social Security number issued from Connecticut, where the President never
lived. If Madsen’s claim is true, then a person viewing Obama’s social security
number would be privy to some very controversial information which could lead
to questions about the President’s status as a natural-born citizen, and
therefore his eligibility for the presidency. This is keeping in mind that when
Harris died, Obama had not yet secured the Democratic nomination.
With four of our seven total black male
victims – three of whom were shot to death – and three of our eight total
victims with ties to Chicago
out of the way, we can now turn towards Tarpon
Springs, Florida.
There, our seventh victim Deborah Jeane Palfrey was found hanging
from a beam in a shed attached to her mother Blanche’s mobile home on May 1st, 2008,
some two weeks after she was found guilty of money laundering, racketeering,
and using the mail for illegal purposes, and two months before she was
scheduled to be sentenced. For these convictions, Palfrey faced up to 55 years
behind bars, and was likely to serve between five and eight years.
Palfrey was known as the “D.C. Madam”,
having operated and founded the California-based high-price illegal escort
service Debora Martin and Associates, which served clients in Maryland and the nation’s capital. Palfrey had
stated that she had had as many as fifteen thousand clients.
From 1992 to 1993, prior to founding the escort
service, Palfrey – who had received a degree in criminal justice and worked as
a paralegal – spent a year and a half in jail for pimping, pandering, and
extortion. In 2006, Palfrey ran afoul of the law again; her bank accounts were
frozen, and her documents were seized during a raid by the I.R.S..
The following year, Palfrey appeared on
ABC’s “20/20” as part of an investigative report. ABC went through nearly fifty
pounds of phone records, but decided that none of the clients were high-profile
enough to merit being mentioned in the report, despite the subsequent claims of
reporter Wayne Madsen, who believes that Palfrey’s clientele included 2008
Republican presidential candidates Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani, and John
McCain, and then Vice President Dick Cheney.
Despite this decision by ABC, the scandal
led to the admission by Republican U.S. Senator David Vitter of Louisiana and USAID Administrator
Randall L. Tobias (who resigned as a result of this admission) of having used
Palfrey’s services.
Military strategist Harlan Ullman and Vice
President Cheney were named as Palfrey’s clients by her civil attorney Montgomery
Blair Sibley, who also defended Obama accuser Larry Sinclair, has filed a lawsuit
regarding Obama’s citizenship status, and announced in early January 2012 that
he is running for president.
Palfrey’s official cause of death was
given by police and the coroner’s office as suicide by hanging.
Reports abound which claim Palfrey had
previously considered suicide. When she went to prison in the early 1990s,
Palfrey allegedly told a judge that she had considered starving herself to
death while incarcerated.
In early 2007, when University of Maryland
professor Brandy Britton – who had been brought up on prostitution charges, and
faced six months in jail – committed suicide, Palfrey said that she was “made
out of something that Brandy Britton wasn’t made of”.
After Palfrey’s death, Washington, D.C.
writer Dan Moldea – who either was considering writing a book with Palfrey, or
was actually in the process of doing so – claimed she told him in 2007 that she
would rather commit suicide than go back to prison, and find herself alone and
penniless in her late fifties when released. Palfrey had also told ABC that she
would never go back to prison.
According to police, a suicide note
written by Palfrey was found addressed to her sister. The outside of the note
read, “[d]o not resuscitate (DNR),
do not feed under any circumstances”, and the contents of the note read in
part, “I cannot live the next 6 to 8 years behind bars for what you and I have
both come to regard as this 'modern-day lynching' only to come out of prison in
my late 50s a broken, penniless and very much alone woman” and “[y]ou must comprehend there was no way out, i.e., 'exit strategy,' for me other than the one I have chosen here”.
Police stated that Palfrey’s mother and sister confirmed Deborah Jeane’s
authorship of the note.
These claims about Palfrey’s consideration
of suicide conflict with statements made by Palfrey herself. Prior to her
death, Palfrey had contact with syndicated Texas radio show host Alex Jones,
and stated on Jones’s radio show that, “No, I’m not planning to commit suicide;
I’m planning on going into court on April 7th and I plan on exposing
the government in ways that… I do not think they want me to expose them.” She
even went as far as to indicate that Dick Cheney was one of her clients, and to
threaten to name names.
Palfrey also told Jones on-air that she
believed that authorities would kill her and make it look like suicide, that
she was not suicidal, and that if found dead, the cause would be murder. In August
1991 – before going to prison – she wrote to the judge that the San Diego police vice
squad had a vendetta against her, saying, “If taken into custody, my physical
safety and most probably my very life would be jeopardized… [r]ape, beating,
maiming, disfigurement and more than likely murder disguised in the form of
just another jailhouse accident or suicide would await me…”.
After Palfrey’s death, Jones stated that
“there is no doubt in my mind that she was murdered”, and claimed that it would
be obvious to anyone – even people who are not experts on the analysis of
signatures – that the letters addressed to her sister (which some have claimed
were written weeks before her death) were not even in Palfrey’s handwriting.
According to Jones, the owner of Blanche
Palfrey’s condo told NBC that Deborah Jeane Palfrey told her mother two days
before she died that she believed that she was being followed, there was a hit
out on her, and that she had no plans to kill herself. Palfrey’s mother claimed
that Palfrey was happy at the prospect of fighting the government on her
charges.
The statements by Deborah Jeane Palfrey, Blanche
Palfrey’s landlord, and Alex Jones would seem to indicate that Palfrey’s
statement that she would rather die than go back to prison may have been merely
hyperbole.
Given the fact that Palfrey’s attorney
claimed Cheney and other prominent Republicans as her clients, that her
prosecution and death occurred during the Bush Administration, and that Obama –
according to claims by Larry Sinclair and Wayne Madsen – seems more inclined to
seek sexual relationships with men rather than women, it would seem that Cheney
appears to have a more direct incentive to silence Palfrey, and therefore that Obama
is not likely to have had a role in her death.
Now that we have examined the deaths of
the three black gay male Chicago residents in late 2007 – as well as the deaths
of the black male admitted identity thief in Washington, D.C. and of the D.C.
Madam in Florida which occurred the following spring – we must now delve into
the corrupt world of the politics of Chicago and Cook County (President Obama’s
home turf) as we look into the deaths of Orlando Jones; John Stroger;
Christopher Kelly; Michael Scott, Jr.; and Phil Pagano.
On September 12th, 2007, the
body of Orlando Jones – the first
chronological death of the sixteen victims mentioned in this article – was
found with a gunshot wound to the head near Gowdy Shores, an upscale
residential community in Union Pier, Michigan (75 miles east of Chicago) where
Jones owned a vacation home.
Less than a week before Jones died, a CBS
affiliate in Chicago
reported that “a corruption inquiry targeting him was heating up”. The day
before his death, Jones met with Robert Stephenson – his friend and legal
advisor – to discuss the allegations against him, to review documents that
would refute those allegations, and to discuss Jones’s plans to set up his own
investment advising firm.
After the meeting, Jones made a few cell
phone calls, but he never returned home, and his family reported him missing
the following afternoon, before his body was found hours later. Despite
Stephenson’s having said that Jones did not appear distraught or suicidal when
they met the day before his death, Barrien County, Michigan police described
the death as an apparent suicide.
After Jones’s death, Stephenson remarked
that he was “shocked”, saying “[i]t’s scary that somebody so well-balanced
could just do such a thing. He obviously had demons that I didn't know about”,
and “[i]f I had had any indication that he was [suicidal], I would have tried
to intervene”.
Before leaving for Union Pier, Jones
evidently left a suicide note in his Chicago
home. In the note – which has not been made public and has been reviewed by
police in both Chicago
and Las Vegas –
Jones mentioned his wife, his friendship with Lacy Thomas, and – according to
the Chicago Tribune – “outlined how [he] wanted his affairs to be handled after
his death”.
Prior to his death, Las Vegas police
handed-in a 60-page report to the district attorney, in which they recommended
that Jones, Lacy L. Thomas, Martello Pollock, and Kathy Suey (the Deputy Chief
of the Homeland Security Division of the Las Vegas police, which includes the
Criminal Intelligence Section that conducted the investigation) be charged with
misconduct by a public official, bribery, fraud, and theft. District Attorney
David Roger said that a decision would not be made for several weeks, which
means that Orlando Jones died before charges could be filed.
Jones was the godson and longtime family
friend, the chief of staff, and the political advisor of John Stroger, our next
discussed victim, and the president of the Cook County, Illinois Board of
Commissioners. During Stroger’s tenure as president, the Cook County
Hospital was renamed in
his honor, becoming the John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County.
From 1993 to 2003, Lacy Thomas served as
the head of Stroger
Hospital. In 1999,
Martello Pollock founded the Chicago-based telecom company Crystal
Communications Telephone Corporation. Pollock owned the company with Jones, who
worked as Crystal’s
corporate officer.
Shortly after Thomas was hired at the Clark County-owned
University Medical
Center (UMC) in Las
Vegas – Nevada’s
only public hospital – in November 2003, Crystal
received a $24,000 consulting contract for the hospital’s telecom project. Soon
after, Crystal
was set to receive a $150,000 no-bid contract, and – despite the county Finance
Director’s demand for open bidding – Crystal
won a $132,000 contract for the project, despite being underbid by $36,000 by a
Nevada
telecom company.
UMC
officials told detectives that Crystal
did little to no work; the county’s Chief Deputy District Attorney later said
that one contractor was paid nearly a million dollars, but only produced a
half-hour computer presentation of information which was already available to
the public.
Lacy Thomas’s
tenure at the UMC lasted until one
day in January 2006, when he was fired by the Clark County Manager, and
detectives raided the hospital’s offices, seizing computers and boxes of files.
In the four years that followed, Thomas was investigated, charged, and
prosecuted for concealing nearly 45% of the cash-strapped UMC’s $34 million in losses.
Las Vegas police alleged that Thomas received
kickbacks for steering Crystal’s
contract with the UMC towards his
friends in Chicago.
Investigators discovered that Orlando Jones paid for Thomas and his wife
Henrene to take a trip to Aruba in March 2005,
and Family Guidance Centers
– a behavioral health care company for which Jones lobbied – deposited $14,000
into a bank account for the Henrene Thomas Limited Liability Company.
While it is quite probable that the death
of Orlando Jones was indeed a suicide, and while it is almost certain that
President Obama – let alone former Vice President Cheney – had anything to do
with his death, a discussion of Orlando Jones provides excellent opportunities
to get acquainted with the rampant corruption one will find when looking into
Chicago politics, to gain familiarity with the tendency of that Chicago
corruption to migrate to elsewhere in the country (in this case, to Nevada),
and to introduce our next discussed victim – and fifth chronological victim –
John Stroger.
John
H. Stroger, Jr. died on the morning of January 18th, 2008 of complications
from a stroke which he had suffered in March 2006, a week prior to the
Democratic primary for the reportedly “controversial” 2006 election of the
President of the Cook County Board of Commissioners.
In this election, Stroger faced a
challenge by Commissioner Forrest Claypool, who accused Stroger of presiding
over a “bloated” government, at a time when Stroger’s critics described his administration
as ridden with scandals and patronage.
Stroger never recovered from the stroke,
did not appear in public between the stroke and his death, and resigned three
months prior to the election. He was replaced on the ticket by his son Todd,
who (with the backing of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley) won the election –
beating Republican Tony Peraica – serving what would have been his father’s
fourth four-year term as Board President.
Due to John Stroger’s advanced age of 78,
and his extensive health problems – he had battled diabetes; prostate cancer; heart
problems; and paralysis, seizures, and neurological complications arising from
the stroke he suffered in 2006 – he was almost certainly not murdered. But his
connections to Chicago politics invite a closer look into his career, as well
as his personal and professional relationships.
Stroger worked and served as an assistant
auditor with the Municipal Court of Chicago, as the personnel director for the
Cook County Jail, for the financial director of the State of Illinois, and as the 8th Ward
Committeeman of Chicago,
and eventually chaired each major committee of the County Board.
Stroger also served as president of the
National Association of Counties, and was appointed by President Bill Clinton
as a member of the Advisory
Committee on Intergovernmental Relations. Before he died, Stroger cast an
absentee ballot for Barack Obama in the Illinois Democratic Presidential
Primary.
After
Stroger’s death, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley called him “one of the most
dedicated public servants of our time”, saying “[d]uring a fifty-year career in
government, he left a mark on Chicago and Cook County that will be equaled by
very few others”.
Given
Daley’s praise of John and Todd Stroger through the elder Stroger’s scandals –
as well as John Stroger’s support of Obama, and Daley’s brother William’s
having later served as Obama’s Chief of Staff – it would come as no surprise
that there have been reports of corruption connecting these individuals.
While
Stroger began his 2006 run for re-election for President of the Cook County
Board of Commissioners in 2005, he selected Tony Rezko – who had also headed
the finance committee for Stroger’s 2002 campaign – as an honorary chair and
head of his campaign finance committee.
Reports
of this selection came just one year after Rezko served on the finance
committee of Barack Obama’s campaign for U.S. Senator from Illinois – making
contributions which allegedly violated campaign finance laws – and at a time
during which reports implicating Rezko’s involvement in various scandals began
to surface in the media.
It has
been claimed that Stroger received more money in campaign contributions
directly from Rezko than did Rod Blagojevich, Richard Daley, and Barack Obama.
The Chicago Sun-Times reported that Rezko contributed nearly $150,000 to
Stroger’s campaigns.
But this
campaign finance allegation is not the only instance of possible corruption
involving Stroger, the Rezko family, and Obama; Stroger also appointed Rita
Rezko to a part-time position in the Cook County Employee Appeals Board, for
which she earned a salary of $37,000 a year. According to court documents, this
was her sole income when she secured a half-million-dollar mortgage to buy a
$625,000 lot next to a parcel of land owned by Obama.
Rita
Rezko later made $50,000 selling part of this parcel to attorney Michael
Sreenan, who put the lot up for sale for $1.5 million in October 2007, and
contributed $5,000 to Obama’s campaigns.
Additionally,
a company affiliated with Tony Rezko and his wife Rita had a contract to
maintain pay telephones at the Cook County Jail while Stroger served as Board
President.
But the
relationships between Rezko, the Obamas, and real estate scandals do not end
here; they in fact extend to our next two victims – two more with ties to
Chicago government – Christopher Kelly and Michael Scott, Jr..
Christopher Kelly died on September 12th,
2009 at the hospital which was re-named in honor of our last victim; the John
H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook
County. Kelly’s estranged
wife told police that she received text messages from him saying he had tried
to kill himself. She found Kelly inside his car in the parking lot of a lumber
yard in County Club Hills, Illinois – a southwest suburb of Chicago – and drove him
to a hospital in nearby Oak Forest.
At Oak Forest Hospital,
Chris Kelly became lucid enough to speak to police, but his condition later
deteriorated, and he was sent to Stroger
Hospital, twenty-five
miles away in Chicago.
Despite Kelly’s condition having deteriorated, Oak Forest Hospital
spokesman Michael Bright stated that Kelly was stabilized before being
transported. We can only guess what Kelly told police before his condition
worsened.
Kelly’s death was attributed to salicylate
intoxication arising from an overdose of aspirin, and investigators considered
the possibility that his death was a murder as well as a suicide.
Kelly had been indicted three times
between 2007 and 2009; the first involved tax fraud; the second, mail fraud
involving contract-bid-rigging by his company BCI Commercial Roofing Inc. for an
$8.5 million project to do roofing work on hangars at Chicago’s O’Hare
International Airport; and the third involved racketeering and extortion
charges in a kickback scheme with Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.
In the first case, Kelly was indicted for
tax fraud in April 2009. He pleaded guilty, admitting to hiding $1.3 million in
personal and corporate income from the I.R.S. over the course of five years,
and to improperly converting the corporate funds of BCI Roofing to pay some of
the millions of dollars in gambling debts which he had incurred in Las Vegas. Kelly also
used corporate funds to pay off a loan from real estate developer and political
fundraiser Tony Rezko. Kelly was sentenced that June to three years in prison.
In the second case – the mail-fraud bid-rigging
scheme between BCI Roofing and O’Hare – Kelly was prepared to go to trial –
which would have occurred the day after he died – but he came up with a
compromise to turn himself in when the government moved to revoke his bond. Kelly
would have reported for incarceration just six days after his death, and he
would have served nearly five years in prison.
At the request of prosecutors, the judge
granted a motion to dismiss the charges against Kelly; this occurred two weeks
after his death. Because he wasn’t sentenced while he was still living, Kelly’s
guilty plea was wiped clean, and his agreement to turn over $450,000 in cash
and home equity to the government was voided. Charges against BCI were also
dropped; its attorney Tom Leinenweber said that the “assets of the company will
be used for [Kelly’s] wife and children”.
In the third case, Alonzo “Lon” Monk –
Blagojevich’s former chief of staff – testified that in 2003, Monk, Rod Blagojevich,
Tony Rezko, and Christopher Kelly plotted with an insider in investment firm
Bear Stearns to let the four men split between them $2 million in funds which were
illegally procured in a deal by the State of Illinois to permit Bear Stearns to
sell $10 billion in pension-obligation bonds (we may remember Bear Stearns from
its mid-2007 collapse, which played a significant role in triggering the
sub-prime mortgage crisis that caused the [arguably] current recession).
Facing “an extraordinary amount of
pressure by federal prosecutors to cooperate” in court, Kelly pleaded not
guilty to the racketeering and extortion charges in this case. Had Kelly
survived long enough to be sentenced for his involvement in this kickback
scandal, he would have faced up to 13 years in prison, in addition to the
combined eight years stemming from the two previous cases in which Kelly
pleaded guilty. The trial of Blagojevich and Kelly – who has been described as
a friend and adviser to Blagojevich – was scheduled to take place in June 2010.
As an aside, Blagojevich’s first trial
ended in August 2010, over a year before he was sentenced to 14 years in
prison, 11 or 12 of which he will actually serve. He was arrested and indicted
in the spring of 2009 on federal corruption charges, which included conspiracy
to commit mail and wire fraud and solicitation of bribery for his role in the
scandal concerning Obama’s vacated U.S. Senate seat.
Blagojevich hired Kelly as a fundraiser to
oversee Illinois’s
deal-making with a casino developer who allegedly had mob ties. Eric Holder –
who now serves as Obama’s Attorney General – assisted Blagojevich in a battle
to help the casino get its license in 2004, and Holder’s law firm later made
$300,000 investigating the matter.
What’s more, Tony Rezko was reported as
having “held an option to lease a hotel site next to the proposed casino site”.
In late November 2011, Rezko was sentenced to 10 ½ years in federal prison for
his conviction of sixteen counts of fraud and corruption relating to a
multimillion-dollar extortion scheme to use his influence with Blagojevich to
demand kickbacks from businesses with state contracts.
Being that the outcome of these three
cases would have been that Christopher Kelly would be incarcerated from the age
of 51 until the age of 72, it is certainly likely that he may have sought
suicide as a way to avoid prison. But the fervent belief of Kelly and his
attorney Sam Adam Jr. in Governor Blagojevich’s innocence would seem to suggest
that – having another person to defend him – Blagojevich may not have been as
likely to bear the entire brunt of punishment for crimes which were committed
by his associates – Barack Obama included.
Before considering the possible
motivations behind the death of Christopher Kelly, we must examine a related
death, that of Michael Scott, our fourth and final victim who shared Obama’s
status as a black male living in Chicago.
In November 2009, Scott’s body was found
shot in the head near the banks of the Chicago River on Chicago’s Near West
Side. Michael Scott had been a real estate developer, and a member of the team
which bid for the 2016 Olympics on Chicago’s behalf. Viewers may remember
Barack and Michelle Obama traveling to Copenhagen in late 2009 to secure the
bid for Chicago, which eventually lost out to Rio de Janeiro.
More details about the death of Michael Scott - and explanations of the deaths of Michael
Scott Jr., Phil Pagano, Christopher Smith, Jack Wheeler, John Roll, Gabriel,
Zimmerman, Ashley, Turton, and Tracy Lawrence - will be available on this page at
a later date.
