Tom Simon

And so the idea was that Benny, we had intel that Benny was soliciting, was the one, if you wanted to make sure you passed your plumbing inspection and had it done fast, because time is money when you have a building loan,

You call Benny, and he gets the plumbing inspector there, and you're going to make sure you pass, whether that plumbing's good or not.

Benny sounds like the guy to know.

Benny is a good guy to know.

So when we were thinking about perhaps going up on a wiretap,

to try to build cases against crooked building inspectors and crooked builders paying and receiving bribes, it would not make sense for us to go up on a wiretap on a crooked building inspector, right?

Because we're just going to catch one guy.

It also, by the same token, didn't make sense for us to go up on a Romanian builder or any builder because, again, we're just going to catch one guy.

What if we went on a wiretap on the expediter, the guy who's in the middle of a lot of transactions for a lot of builders and a lot of bribes being paid to building inspectors?

That's exactly what we did.

We went on a wiretap on Benny and began listening to his calls.

And we had this three-agency team of postal inspectors, FBI agents, and City of Chicago Inspector General.

The Inspector General guys, we put them on the streets with their cameras to take pictures of meetings between the building inspectors and Benny and the builders and Benny when we would hear that a bribe is going to be handed off.

And so...

We had all of us in the wiretap room, and then we're dispatching, listening to Benny live, and then we're dispatching people.

We kept the wire up.

We renewed the wire until Christmastime because Benny was creating a – Benny was going to be giving envelopes full of cash to the building inspectors that he was seeking to kind of buy their favor for the next year.

Because it wasn't always a one-to-one thing.

He would –

pay the building inspectors with these kind of envelopes full of cash.