Name: Cook County Land Bank Authority sold vacant lots to a drug dealer
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Cook County Land Bank Authority sold vacant lots to a drug dealer

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SHARETwo years ago, the Cook County Land Bank Authority sold two West Side lots to a convicted drug dealer who at the time was free on bail and required to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet while awaiting trial in another drug case for intent to distribute a kilo of cocaine.Obed Eli Ornelas paid $22,602 for the adjacent lots in the 600 block of North Cicero Avenue in West Garfield Park, less than the length of a football field north of his existing used-car business, Xclusive Automotive LLC.Together, the vacant lots had amassed nearly $10,000 in unpaid taxes when Ornelas signed a deal with the county agency in August 2017 to buy the properties, with plans of expanding the business he shared with a partner to now also sell secondhand luxury cars — BMWs, Infinitis and Mercedes-Benzes, he told state regulators.The land bank is under scrutiny by Cook County’s inspector general, who opened an investigation of the agency after the donated a dilapidated building to the land bank. That wiped out Wilson’s debt for unpaid property taxes, penalties and interest totaling more than $200,000. At Wilson’s recommendation, the land bank then sold the building to his onetime business partner.Following the Sun-Times report, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle ordered an audit by an outside firm of the agency created in 2011 by Cook County Commissioner Bridget Gainer to redevelop abandoned buildings in distressed neighborhoods. to document its research of potential buyers of properties it has bought or seized.At the time Ornelas took the first steps to buy the vacant lots from the land bank, he was on parole after being convicted of possession of marijuana with intent to distribute in a case in which the police raided his Gary home after his electric bills skyrocketed in 2010 and found almost 500 marijuana plants growing inside.Ornelas and the land bank were in the process of finalizing his purchase of the vacant lots in Federal authorities said he had bought a kilo of cocaine from a co-defendant in a deal that took place in his Ford Mustang a few months earlier. When officers tried to pull him over, of the driver’s-side window of the car.Released on bail, Ornelas was ordered confined to his home on an electronic monitoring device. On Nov. 20, 2018, while he was on home confinement, the land bank wiped out the $10,084 in taxes unpaid since 2011 on the lots at 645 N. Cicero Ave. and 647 N. Cicero Ave. and finalized the sale, turning over the properties to Ornelas free of the tax debt.Under the terms of sale, the land bank also gave Ornelas a $2,000 loan, which he won’t be required to repay as long as he maintains the properties up to code.At Ornelas’ real estate lawyer’s request, the closing on the land was handled via email so Ornelas, unable to leave his home while on bail, didn’t have to be there in person.On Jan. 10, Ornelas, 38, pleaded guilty to the cocaine charge. He faces a maximum possible 40-year prison term when he’s scheduled to be sentenced Aug. 27.He no longer operates the car lot, according to his criminal defense lawyer Robert Rascia, who says Xclusive Automotive is “not an active business.”Land bank officials say they don’t do background checks on buyers and didn’t know Ornelas was a drug dealer.also says: “While the land bank considers various factors in our selection process, excluding people based on a prior conviction is not one of them. Why wouldn’t we award the vacant lots to an existing, adjacent licensed business in good standing?”After Ornelas was arrested on the cocaine charge, he was sued by his landlord Ahmad Daoud, who said he failed to pay more than $7,000 in rent on the property Xclusive Automotive began leasing in 2015.RelatedDaoud had sold used cars on the property for more than two decades, doing business as Cairo Auto Wholesaler Inc. His son Adel Daoud is serving a 16-year prison sentence, of attempting to blow up a liquor store in the South Loop in 2012.Federal authorities won’t comment about Ornelas, who has agreed to cooperate with them. His lawyer says that’s “strictly limited to the drug deal.” Asked about Cook County doing business with a convicted drug dealer who was awaiting trial in a more serious drug case, Rose, in an email, says:“To be crystal clear, you have not explained the relevance of his background to our decision to sell vacant lots to Xclusive Automotive LLC. “Obed Ornelas was released on bond in August 2018, so he was not in custody at the time of the purchase.At the time of the sale, he had not been convicted and currently still awaits sentencing. The upshot from this information is that there is nothing revealed that would have — or should have — prevented [the land bank] from working with Xclusive Automotive LLC.”Cook County Land Bank Authority has erased $19 million in long-overdue property taxesOver the past five years, the Cook County Land Bank Authority has erased $19 million of real estate taxes that were years overdue on a total of more than 600 properties it has acquired and flipped to rehabbers, records show.And that’s a good thing, according to Cook County Commissioner Bridget Gainer, who spearheaded the creation of the land bank.That’s because erasing the long-unpaid tax debts helps make it possible the land will be redeveloped — and start bringing in taxes.“The $19 million in taxes were bad debt,” Gainer says, “not being paid by anyone, likely for over a decade. That’s because they fall in that bucket where the taxes were higher than the property value. If we didn’t redevelop the property, it would still be sitting there, not paying taxes. Now, it’s occupied, not a safety risk, and paying taxes.”The county’s aim with the properties the land bank buys or seizes is to help turn around those eyesores, resume the flow of property taxes and improve the neighborhoods.That’s the plan, for instance, for a long-vacant funeral home in Maywood that had a decade’s worth of unpaid property taxes when it was seized by the land bank in 2018. Aiming to make the property more attractive to a potential buyer, the county agency wiped out the tax debts — nearly $1.5 million. Gerald Cannon then bought it for $100,000 and says he plans to open a new funeral home there this summer.“We’re currently in construction,” Cannon says. “This would be our very first funeral home. We have been leasing funeral homes.”The Maywood property had the biggest unpaid tax debt erased by the land bank.Second is a former Wickes furniture store in Calumet City. Nearly $1.4 million was owed in property taxes when the store site was surrendered to the land bank three years ago. The land bank then sold the building, now free of the tax debt, to Homewood Furniture Co. for $185,000.Asked how they determined the sale prices for those and other properties, land bank officials offered no documentation or appraisals.The land bank’s rules on determining sale prices call for “good and valuable consideration in an amount not less than the lower of the fair market value of the property as determined by the” Cook County Land Bank Authority.But, in June, outside auditors Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle brought in following a Chicago Sun-Times investigation reported that the way the land bank determined its sales prices “was not sufficiently documented” for sales they examined. “Management represented . . . that the team looks at MLS listings, real estate websites, their own pricing matrices and similar information in determining each sales price, however they do not currently document this information as it is accumulated,” the auditors wrote. — Tim Novak, Lauren FitzPatrickNext Up InMost ReadThe LatestThey were in the 7100 block of South State Street when they were struck by gunfire, police said.They were in the 2100 block of West Adams Street when they were shot, police said.Kramer, who survived a suicide attempt in 2015, is the personification of resilience and hope.Plus, a look at cornerback Jaylon Johnson’s shutdown performance, the right guard debate and more.After battling in court for body-cam footage that showed a Chicago police SUV barreling into Martina Standley in 2019, activist William Calloway kept pushing for evidence the police department was acting in bad faith.

SHARETwo years ago, the Cook County Land Bank Authority sold two West Side lots to a convicted drug dealer who at the time was free on bail and required to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet while awaiting trial in another drug case for intent to distribute a kilo of cocaine.Obed Eli Ornelas paid $22,602 for the adjacent lots in the 600 block of North Cicero Avenue in West Garfield Park, less than the length of a football field north of his existing used-car business, Xclusive Automotive LLC.Together, the vacant lots had amassed nearly $10,000 in unpaid taxes when Ornelas signed a deal...

Cook County Land Bank Authority sold vacant lots to a drug dealer

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