A federal judge in U.S. District Court in Chicago sentenced the owner of a residential contracting company to five years in prison on Aug. 14 for bribing a local official to lower the assessed value of properties he developed .
Alex Nitchoff, 57, owner and president of Summit, Ill.-based Oakk Construction, pleaded guilty in January to one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States and racketeering after prosecutors said he took bribes to Lavdim Memisovski, a trade group leader with the Cook County Assessor’s Office.
The scheme, which began around 2016 and continued through June 2019, kept about $1 million out of the public treasury, prosecutors said.
Nitchoff and a company superintendent directed Oakk employees to provide Memisovski with home improvement services, installing a concrete pad, roofing materials, container use, fascia and soffit, a fence , a gas line, sprinkler heads, tile and windows in Memisovski’s home. Nitchoff also provided Memisovski with jewelry, meals, sports tickets and other items, and hired an electrical contracting company owned by a Memisovski relative. In exchange, prosecutors said the county clerk would lower the assessed values of Nitchoff’s properties.
“His conduct was an affront to Cook County residents who deal honestly with the burden of their property taxes,” prosecutors wrote. “They pay or fight through appeals. [Nitchoff] bought an insider.”
The investigation into Nitchoff was part of a larger corruption probe that also resulted in charges against several employees and former Chicago Councilwoman Carrie Austin. Memisovski pleaded guilty last year to one count of conspiracy. He has not yet been convicted.
Nitchoff had faced as severe a sentence as 10 years in prison and fines of $500,000 or more.
Attorneys representing Nitchoff, who did not immediately respond to inquiries, wrote in court documents that it is “impossible” to determine to what extent Nitchoff was legally entitled to assessment reductions. They singled out the Oakk superintendent allegedly involved in the scheme and wrote that he acted independently without Nitchoff’s knowledge.
Prosecutors recommended an 87-month sentence that was stiffer than the 60 months that U.S. District Judge John Kness handed down to Nitchoff. In court records, they said the investigation also revealed that Nitchoff in 2014 falsely certified to the city of Chicago that he had completed porches for low-income residents as part of a housing assistance program and who received almost $100,000 as a result, but still hadn’t. job done And in 2017, they said Nitchoff paid $250 to an employee of a company that administered tax increment financing projects in exchange for having more projects assigned to his company, and also provided an inspector with ‘suburban buildings the use of a house in florida plus free repair work. on a deck and pergola for not enforcing regulations on a property he owned.
Nitchoff even charged two others a fee to get Memisovski to lower their property taxes, prosecutors said. In one case described in court records, the owner of a marina in Forest View, Illinois, paid Nitchoff $10,000 for the service.
