The Epistolary Rezko
By Truthteller on June 12, 2008 at 7:54 PM in Barack Obama, Chicago, Chicago politics, Emil Jones, Obama's Thugs, Patrick Fitzgerald, Real Estate, Tony Rezko

The content of Antoin “Tony” Rezko’s letter to Judge St. Eve dated 9 JUN 2008 is so trite it is almost entertaining. The trope of the upwardly mobile immigrant is invoked in order to justify all the fraud and corruption in which he and other Chicago politicians and operatives were engaged. “I am simply an honest, humble immigrant who believes in the American dream[,]” he writes. He also discusses God, family and nation in order to elicit a sympathetic response from his intended reader(s). More egregious, however, is his description of his mother’s grave in a Catholic cemetery in Hillside, Illinois, the Chicago suburb in which he too will eventually rest. While this wedding of the two foundational fictions of the life course and of the American dream may yield a conventional autobiographical narrative fit for the shelves of a supermarket, it reads as a tacit admission of guilt. Indeed, this letter is nothing more than a plaintive cry for a reduced sentence.
But something else lurks in the spaces separating the letters printed on the pages of Rezko’s epistle to Judge St. Eve. This something is Barack Obama, candidate for President of the United States. I quote:
Your Honor, the prosecutors have been overzealous in pursuing a crime that never happened. They are pressuring me to tell them the “wrong” things that I supposedly know about Governor Blagojevich and Senator Obama. I have never been party to any wrongdoing that involved the Governor or the Senator. I will never fabricate lies about anyone else for selfish purposes. I will take what comes my way, but I will never hurt innocent people. I am not Levine, Loren, Mahru , or Winter.”
Once again the focus of a Fitzgerald investigation refers to the prosecutors as “overzealous.” Is Rezko a member of the Bush administration? Is the convicted political fixer and slumlord of tenements in inner city Chicago the new Scooter Libby? And why does Rezko mention Levine, Loren, Mahru and Winter? Does he fear they will discuss his relationship with Barack Obama? Is he attempting to neutralize their recollection of events?
Yes, he is. Read these conflicting accounts recorded in a Chicago Magazine article published in November 2007:
Daniel Mahru was Rezko’s partner in Rezmar for 16 years until the two men had, according to Mahru, “a difference of opinion” in 2005. He says they developed more than $600 million in properties, not counting a billion-dollar deal for 62 acres in the South Loop that has been stalled for years. By Mahru’s account, Rezko initially showed little interest in the trappings of power. “Back in the eighties, Tony had an opportunity to go to the White House with Muhammad Ali,” Mahru says. (The occasion was a dinner during the December 1987 summit of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader; Ali had been invited as a guest.) “I commented to Tony, ‘Wow, that is something I would love to do, see history in the making!’ He said, ‘Dan, that doesn’t make me any money. I’m not interested.’
“That changed. I think everything went to his head. After the late nineties he was more interested in being around powerful people. He went to a Christmas party at the Bush White House.” Rezko cochaired a major fundraiser for President Bush’s campaign in 2003.
Rezko declined to comment about Mahru, likening their breakup to a divorce. “You would hear my story; you would hear his story. I wish him no harm.”
2005 is the year Rezko helped Obama purchase the mansion in the Kenwood neighborhood in inner city Chicago. And 2003 is the year Rezko held a fundraiser for US Senate candidate Barack Obama at his posh home in Wilmette, Illinois. Another event of significance in 2003 is Illinois Governor Blagojevich’s appointment of Rezko to the Board that oversees the $30 billlion dollar teachers’ pension fund. This is the same year during which Barack Obama was appointed to the Illinois state Senate Committee on Pensions and Investments by his friend and mentor state Senator Emil Jones. According to the Superseding Indictment filed by Fitzgerald in December 2006, Obama’s appointment to this state Senate committee coincided with Rezko’s attempts to leverage his influence with “high-ranking State of Illinois officials” to oppose a pension consolidation plan that would complicate the efforts of Rezko and Levine to defraud investment firms and the pensions funds of Illinois. Notice also how Obama sat on the state Senate Pensions and Investments Board when Rezko funneled money he defrauded from an investment firm that sought access to the Illinois pensions fund to Obama through Joseph Aramanda, whose son worked as an intern in Obama’s US Senate office in 2005, the year Rezko advised and assisted the Obamas when they purchased the Kenwood mansion they could not afford.
This is the time period during which Mahru alleges Rezko became obsessed with power. These are also the years during which Obama and Rezko were involved with Illinois’s pensions funds. What does Mahru know? And why does Rezko feel obliged to proleptically invalidate any information Mahru may or may not have imparted to Fitzgerald’s prosecutors in his letter to Judge St. Eve? According to Rezko, Mahru will “fabricate” stories in order to “harm” the “innocent.” But Mahru says Rezko is the one who “is more interested in being around powerful people.” Will we believe “the immigrant” who suddenly loves, indeed clings to, his “family, nation and God,” or will we trust the business partner who knew Rezko crossed the line when he helped Obama purchase a mansion in 2005?
The epistolary Rezko: it is all so much debased fiction, but it provides an interesting interpretation of the unassailable facts.





No Quarter dossier on Obama and Rezko:
- The Tipping Point?
- Barack, The Truth Ain’t A Smear
- Patrick Fitzgerald Issues Obama A Warning
- What Hypocrite Obama Should Have Discussion during His Wesleyan Commencement Address
- Barack Obama’s Candidacy as a Take on The Picture of Dorian Gray
- A Majority of One: On Losing the Democratic Base
- Ok, So Tell Us What IS Allowed
- Two Lone Voices Speak for Millions of Us
- What’ll Be Left of the Democratic Party
- It Ain’t Over: Obama MAY Have to Pay the Piper After All
- Obama to Donate Contribution from Rezko’s Iraqi Friend
- Be My Friend, Godfather
- Jaws V, Starring Barack Obama
- The Chicago Three: Obama, Ayers & Rezko
- Charlie Gibson, Will You Ask Barack about Nadhmi Auchi?
- Saddam Hussein, Barack Hussein Obama’s Hidden Real Estate Partner?
- Barack “I-Didn’t-Know” Obama
- Those Who Haunt Him
- Hillary’s Campaign Comes out Swinging
- “Nobie and Obama”
- Authorization to Use Misleading Falsehoods
- What We’ve Noticed about the Speech
- This Is for Main Street (And for the Forgotten People Barack Obama Doesn’t Know)
- Michelle Obama: “Give Us Something Here”
- Rezko Muckrakers Alert!
- The Forgotten People
- Irrefutable Proof That Obama’s Own District Was Home to 11 Rezko Foreclosed Properties
- Speak the Truth, Fallout Be Damned
- The Rezko Saga: Two Videos
- Get Your Daily Rezko Dose Here
- The Media’s Panderbears, Part I
- Sunday Scoops: Rezko-gate and Adviser-gate
- Obama’s Prime-Slime Advisors
- Good Morning, Barack! (Rezko Got Jobs for Your Staffers? Do Tell.)
- Today’s Rezko Trial Scoops (And Prosecutors on $20K Kickback to Obama)
- ABC News: Rezko $50 Million in Debt
- 312.321.2417
- (Pants on Fire!) Lynn Sweet: Obama and His Taking Questions on Rezko
- Rezko Trial: Obama May Be Witness
- Obama’s Judgment on the Eve of Judgment Day
- Truthtelling from Lanny Davis (What about “Iron My Shirt?”)
- Experience, and Experiences (of the Rezko Sort)
- No He Can’t Because Yes They Will
- More Questions on Rezko
- “Obama Bagman” in Jail
- Democratic Death Wish
- How to Buy A Mansion You Can’t Afford
- Will Rezko Blow Up Obama?
- It is “Possible” Obama Was Aware of Rezko’s Financial and Legal Woes
- 20-Year Associate of Obama Arrested
- Look before You Leap: Obama’s Mobbed-Up Allies
- Politics Is A Blood Sport
- BREAKING: ABC News Reports $100,000 from Rezko That Obama Hasn’t Returned
- CNN on Rezko and Obama: This Is Obama’s “Slumwater”
- FACT CHECK: Obama, His Contributor Rezko, The Slum Landlord Business
- A Dope with Hope?
- Obama/Rezko: It Comes down to Judgment
- Didn’t Obama Watch The Firm
- Steve Clemons on Tonight’s Debate
- Patrick Fitzgerald Ties Obama to Rezko Indictments
- All in for Hillary
- Obama, His Lobbyists and His Cronies
RezkoWatch contains even more information on Obama’s deep and problematic ties to convicted slumlord and notorious political fixer Antoin “Tony” Rezko.






















