ABC: Rezko in $50 million hole

posted at 1:57 pm on March 5, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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Drip, drip, drip:

Accused Illinois fixer Antoin “Tony” Rezko is in debt by $50 million and relies on “family” handouts of $7,500 a month to pay monthly costs, according to a previously sealed court transcript reviewed by ABC News.

Rezko’s bleak financial picture raises the question of how the Rezkos were able to buy a vacant lot adjoining the home of Sen. Barack Obama in 2005, at a time Rezko says he was already in deep debt.

Rezko also reveals in the testimony, before Judge Amy St. Eve on Jan. 16, 2007, that he already knew he was under federal investigation at the time of the land purchase and had hired a criminal defense attorney to deal with the “feds.”

Obama says he sought Rezko’s help because the house he wanted to buy in Chicago’s Hyde Park came with an adjoining lot the seller wanted to sell at the same time.

So even though he had the feds on his case at the time and he had no clean source of income, he went into the deal with Obama to buy the land. In order to make that deal, he had to have his wife buy the property, even though her income and assets clearly didn’t qualify her for a $500,000 loan — let alone produce the $125,000 down payment. During this time, Obama maintains that he didn’t know anything about this situation, nor did he think anything amiss when he paid $104,000 to the Rezkos to buy a strip of land from their lot.

And how does Rezko pay his lawyers now? “Friends.” He has no source of income now, either, and his lawyers told the court that Rezko has not paid them — at least, not directly — since the indictment. Could one of these “friends” be Nadhmi Auchi, the British billionaire who got convicted of fraud charges himself in France?

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