http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/353829,CST-NWS-rez23.article

Barack Obama And His Slumlord Patron

suntimes.com

April 23, 2007
BY TIM NOVAK Staff Reporter

For more than five weeks during the brutal winter of 1997, tenants shivered without heat in a government-subsidized apartment building on Chicago’s South Side.

It was just four years after the landlords — Antoin “Tony” Rezko and his partner Daniel Mahru — had rehabbed the 31-unit building in Englewood with a loan from Chicago taxpayers.

It was just four years after the landlords — Antoin “Tony” Rezko and his partner Daniel Mahru — had rehabbed the 31-unit building in Englewood with a loan from Chicago taxpayers.

Rezko and Mahru couldn’t find money to get the heat back on.

Rezko and Mahru couldn’t find money to get the heat back on.

But their company, Rezmar Corp., did come up with $1,000 to give to the political campaign fund of Barack Obama, the newly elected state senator whose district included the unheated building.

Obama has been friends with Rezko for 17 years. Rezko has been a political patron to Obama and many others, helping to raise millions of dollars for them through his own contributions and by hosting fund-raisers in his home.

Obama, who has worked as a lawyer and a legislator to improve living conditions for the poor, took campaign donations from Rezko even as Rezko’s low-income housing empire was collapsing, leaving many African-American families in buildings riddled with problems — including squalid living conditions, vacant apartments, lack of heat, squatters and drug dealers.

The building in Englewood was one of 30 Rezmar rehabbed in a series of troubled deals largely financed by taxpayers. Every project ran into financial difficulty. More than half went into foreclosure, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation has found.

“Their buildings were falling apart,” said a former city official. “They just didn’t pay attention to the condition of these buildings.”

Eleven of Rezko’s buildings were in Obama’s state Senate district.

Obama, now a U.S. senator running for president, has come under fire over his friendship with Rezko, who was charged last fall with demanding kickbacks on state business deals under Gov. Blagojevich.

Much of the criticism has centered on two real estate deals involving Obama’s South Side mansion. In the first, Obama paid $300,000 less than the asking price for a doctor’s home, while Rezko’s wife paid the doctor full price for the vacant lot next door. Then — a few months before Rezko was indicted — Obama bought part of that lot from Rezko’s wife.

But Obama’s ties with Rezko go beyond those two real estate sales and the political support, the Sun-Times found. Obama was an attorney with a small Chicago law firm — Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland — that helped Rezmar get more than $43 million in government funding to rehab 15 of their 30 apartment buildings for the poor.

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Obama the Sell OUT!

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1986307/posts

Chicago Tribune has now removed the article and is covering up the Rezko thing.. the article is called..

“Obama: I trusted Rezko” By David Jackson

Chakra Hammer on September 27, 2008 at 7:42 PM

Barack Obama: I trusted Rezko

Senator says friend raised more money than previously known

By David Jackson | TRIBUNE REPORTER
March 15, 2008

http://i33.tinypic.com/16h6d74.jpg

This corner lot formerly owned by Antoin “Tony” Rezko’s wife, Rita, is next door to the home (right)
of U.S. Sen. Barack Obama in Chicago’s Kenwood neighborhood. (Tribune photo by Milbert O. Brown / March 6, 2008)

———

Trying to put his past with Antoin “Tony” Rezko behind him, presidential candidate Barack Obama on Friday said he never thought the nowindicted
Chicago businessman would try to take advantage of him because his old friend had never asked for a political favor.

But in a 90-minute interview with Tribune reporters and editors, Obama disclosed that Rezko had raised more for Obama’s earlier political campaigns
than previously known, gathering as much as $250,000 for the first three offices he sought.

Obama also elaborated on previous statements about his private real estate transactions with Rezko, saying they were not simply mistakes of judgment
because Rezko was under grand jury investigation at the time of their 2005 and 2006 dealings. “The mistake, by the way, was not just engaging in a transaction
with Tony because he was having legal problems. The mistake was because he was a contributor and somebody who was involved in politics.”

The Illinois senator made his most extensive comments about Rezko to date in an effort to quell the lingering controversy over his relationship with the politically influential
developer and over the personal financial deals first revealed by the Tribune in November 2006.

Faced with intensifying scrutiny as the Democratic primary season grinds on, Obama said voters should view his Rezko dealings as “a mistake in not seeing the potential conflicts of interest.”
But he added that voters should also “see somebody who is not engaged in any wrongdoing . . . and who they can trust.”

After news reports of Rezko’s questionable political dealings first emerged in 2005, Obama said he asked his friend about them. Rezko assured him there was nothing wrong.
“My instinct was to believe him,” he said.

Asked if he ever thought Rezko would expect something from their relationship, Obama was emphatic: ‘No. Precisely because I had known him for [many] years and he hadn’t asked me for something.”

The friendship between the Obamas and Rezkos included occasional dinners and the Obamas once spending a day at the Rezkos’ Lake Geneva retreat. It began in about 1991,
when Obama became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review and Rezko offered him a job building affordable homes with his Rezmar Corp. Though Obama declined, a friendship and political alliance began.

His first big contributor

When Obama launched his bid for the Illinois Senate in 1995, Rezko was his first substantial contributor. Obama said it was his “best guesstimate” that Rezko raised $10,000 to $15,000 of Obama’s roughly $100,000 collected for that race.
Obama said he didn’t have more certainty because he didn’t then have the staff to maintain better campaign finance records.

Rezko helped bankroll all of Obama’s subsequent campaigns except his presidential bid. Rezko was on Obama’s campaign committee in his failed run against U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush
and gathered between $50,000 and $75,000 of the estimated $600,000 raised in that race, Obama said.

Rezko also was on the finance committee for Obama’s 2004 U.S. Senate run. “My best assessment is that he raised $160,000 during my U.S. Senate primary,” he said, adding that those funds had been given to charity.

Obama explained Rezko’s appeal to up-and-coming politicians. Part of it was his seeming modesty. “In my interactions with him, he was very gracious. He did not ask me for favors.
He was not obtrusive. He wasn’t one of those people who would insist on coming around all the time or constantly being photographed with me.”

And Rezko was loyal. He had been a supporter of Rush but sided with Obama in that 2000 race. Five years later, bolstered by payments for his best-selling autobiography and advances for future books,
Obama and his wife, Michelle, went house hunting. They were drawn to a 96- year-old South Side home with four fireplaces, glassdoor bookcases fashioned from Honduran mahogany and a wine cellar.

The house and the adjoining yard had been owned as a single property, but the owners were listing them separately and asking $1.95 million for the house and $625,000 for the landscaped side lot.

Chakra Hammer on September 27, 2008 at 8:01 PM

If Obama Trusted Rezko a convicted slumlord for 17 years..

If Obama Trusted Rev. Wright a racist black separatist with “Black liberation theology” For 20 Years…

And Obama Still Trusts William Ayres and Dohrn an unrepentant terrorists to this DAY!

He Is Unfit to Command our Country!

He’s an Extremist and NOT the main Stream of America or American Values!

Chakra Hammer on September 27, 2008 at 8:14 PM

This is incredible! I’ve read where he used spurious and conniving legal tactics to eliminate opponents when he was running in Illinois. A truly dangerous man who must be defeated at any cost.

jeanie on September 27, 2008 at 8:11 PM

Thats the only want Obama got elected he got his completion thrown off the ticket, he ran unopposed.

Chakra Hammer on September 27, 2008 at 8:15 PM

Need to start the revolution NOW, before it gets worse.

Chakra Hammer on September 27, 2008 at 9:01 PM