CHICAGO (CN) — Former Chicago alderman Ed Burke is the undisputed star of his ongoing corruption trial in the Windy City, but on Friday, his co-defendants Peter Andrews and Charles Cui got their own day in the limelight.
Not that they wanted it — Andrews currently faces five counts of extortion, commercial interference and making false statements, and Cui faces nine counts of bribery and racketeering.
Over the course of the day and through multiple witnesses and pieces of evidence, jurors learned how the two auxiliary defendants were connected to Chicago's longest-serving city councilor and the 14 bribery, racketeering and extortion charges he now faces. The day's proceedings also drove a wedge between the defendants, who up until now have presented a mostly unified front to prosecutors.
The focus on Andrews and Cui began mid-morning, after FBI Special Agent Edward McNamara took the stand. McNamara was one of the agents who interviewed Andrews, then one of Burke's top aides, on Nov. 29, 2018. The interview occurred in Andrews' home on Chicago's south side, the same day that other agents raided Burke's offices in City Hall.
McNamara told prosecutors that he and another agent secretly recorded their conversation with Andrews on devices about the size of cigarette packs. Both in Andrews' indictment and on the stand Friday, McNamara accused Andrews of playing dumb over his boss' dealings with Shoukat and Zohaib Dhanani.
The father and son, who control hundreds of fast food restaurants via the Dhanani Group and its subsidiary Tri City Foods, both testified earlier in the trial that they felt pressured in 2017 to hire Burke's law firm Klafter & Burke in order to complete renovations of a Burger King franchise located in Burke's ward. And a recorded October 2017 phone call between Burke and Andrews the jury heard last month had Andrews telling his then-boss that he would play "hardball" with the Dhananis' renovations over a supposed lack of driveway permits for the site.
But in a recording of McNamara's 2018 interview of Andrews which the jury heard Friday, Andrews tells the FBI agents that "I don't know [the Dhananis]."
McNamara added — and a transcript of the conversation reflected — that Andrews stuttered after being shown photos of the Dhananis, while claiming not to recognize him.
"I don't know if it was these people, OK? But I know that there were people that came into our office regarding a development at ... a Burger King," Andrews eventually relented.
Though McNamara portrayed Andrews as anxious and slippery, the 73-year-old former aide's defense attorney Patrick Blegen made the agent himself stutter on cross-examination. Blegen pointed out all the problems he saw with the FBI agents' interview with Andrews, including vague statements, potentially misleading questions, McNamara mispronouncing the Dhananis' name as "Dahani" when asking Andrews if he knew them, and the agents talking over Andrews as he attempted to speak.
One misstep Blegen brought up multiple times was how Andrews asked the agents if they were referring to the Dhananis doing business in "this ward," with McNamara answering in the affirmative. Though McNamara was referring to Burke's 14th Ward, Andrews' home where the interview occurred in 2018 was located in the city's 19th Ward.
"Did you make the correction of the 19th - 14th ward issue?” Blegen pointedly asked McNamara toward the end of the cross-examination, after broaching the issue several times.
“I don’t know how to correct something we didn’t think needs correcting,” a visibly agitated McNamara responded, before adding “No, we did not come out and say, ‘14th ward.'"
Cui, a local property owner, pulled focus in the afternoon. His charges stem from his alleged attempts in late summer 2017 to get Burke's help in securing permits for a pole sign for one of his commercial tenants, a liquor store chain called Binny's. In exchange for Burke's help, the charge goes, Cui agreed to funnel tax work for another of his properties in the city.
Former Chicago Building Commissioner Judy Frydland took the stand to offer her own perspective on this front, stating that the pole sign the never got its permit and probably never would have, regardless of Burke's input. The sign was largely abandoned between 2011 and 2017, she said, meaning it would not have qualified for the kind of continuous-use permit Cui wanted for it.
And this is despite an allegedly photoshopped image Cui sent to his then-attorney Thomas Moore in September 2017, which Cui wrote was proof the sign had been used "in the past two years."
Cui's current defense attorney Tinos Diamantatos dug into this issue on cross when Moore himself took the stand, asking how Cui got himself and his "beautiful" pole sign wrapped up in the labyrinth of Chicago politics that Burke's office represented. At one point Moore implied that the only alderman Cui should have been involved with was then-45th Ward Alderman John Arena, who administered the area where the pole sign was located.
This prompted an objection from Burke's own attorneys. It was a rare discordant note in what has otherwise been a cohesive defense panel, one that resulted in presiding judge Virginia Kendall striking the answer.
The defense will get a chance to tell their version of events more completely next week, with prosecutors planning to rest their case as early as Monday.
In what is sure to be a colorful day of testimony, defense attorneys say they plan to call Danny Solis, former city councilor and Burke ally-turned-FBI-mole. Conversations with Burke that Solis secretly recorded for the FBI, in exchange for a deferred prosecution agreement on his own corruption charges, inform some of the most dramatic evidence against the 79-year-old former alderman. Prosecutors have played several of those recorded conversations for jurors, but declined to call Solis himself to the witness stand.
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