The gravel of a funeral home parking lot could be heard crunching under the feet of two public officials from suburban Summit as they left a wake to privately compare notes on a worrisome federal bribery investigation.
During the March 2022 conversation, John Kosmowski, the Summit police chief, tried to tell his colleague and frequent drinking buddy, then-Public Works Director Bill Mundy, that a cash payment they’d received from a bar owner five years earlier was just a loan — and that neither he nor Mundy pulled any strings to get the owner’s liquor license transferred.
“Kris gave me the money as a loan. I gave you $3,000 because just, in general principle, you need the money,” Kosmowski said to Mundy, who was secretly wearing a wire for the FBI.
“You think anybody’s gonna buy that?” Mundy replied. “I love you like a brother, but this is (expletive) up.”
Kosmowski, though, warned that the feds were closing in and it was important for them to be on the same page.
“There’s a statute of limitations coming up — that means that they’re going to be indicting soon,” Kosmowski said. “Here’s the thing, no matter what we say, remember this: It’s gonna be their version against ours. It always is. It was a loan from me to you. That was that.”
The 15-minute conversation took center stage Wednesday in a federal courtroom in Chicago, where Kosmowski is on trial on charges of bribery and obstruction of justice. It was played during the direct examination of Mundy, who pleaded guilty in 2023 and is the prosecution’s star witness.
While the charges were relatively low-level, the case was an offshoot of a larger corruption probe that netted indictments against then-state Sen. Martin Sandoval and a slew of other suburban elected officials, police chiefs and political operatives allegedly on the take.
Jurors heard a number of names from that investigation Wednesday, including Omar Maani — the red-light camera company executive who also wore a wire for the FBI — who Mundy said paid him bribes to help find properties to buy in Summit.
Mundy also told investigators he took money from now-deceased developer Boris Nitchoff, who was implicated in parallel bribery investigations into former Chicago Ald. Carrie Austin and employees of the Cook County Assessor’s Office.
Mundy and Kosmowski, meanwhile, were charged in an indictment in 2022 with conspiring to accept $10,000 from the owner of the Fire Station Pub in Summit in exchange for helping secure the transfer of a liquor license to a relative.
According to prosecutors, Kosmowski received the bribe payment from the owner, Kris Hodurek, in March 2017 and then gave Mundy his $5,000 cut later that day. In the meantime, Mundy called Summit Mayor Sergio Rodriguez and, with Kosmowski listening in, urged the mayor to approve the transfer, the charges alleged. Rodriguez has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
In opening statements Tuesday, Kosmowski’s attorney, Gabrielle Sansonetti, told jurors that Mundy cannot be trusted.
Sansonetti called him an alcoholic and drug abuser who was offering his own self-interested interpretation of conversations in order to get a deal from prosecutors on a host of schemes he allegedly pulled in his years as a building inspector and public works director.
She also warned that wiretapped recordings are only as reliable as the witness who interprets them.
“Think of an interpreter who is drunk, who forgets the right words, who can’t remember the language, who was caught committing other crimes,” Sansonetti said. “You would not trust the interpretations that you got. And you should not trust Bill Mundy.”
Sansonetti said at the time Kosmowski took the money from Hodurek, his daughter was going off to college and he was worried about making the first tuition payment. So he did what many in the tight-knit Polish immigrant community do — he turned to a friend for financial help, she said.
Hodurek, who also cooperated with the investigation, pleaded guilty in October to collecting $115,000 in fraudulent unemployment benefits and is expected to testify against Kosmowski later in the trial.
“It was a small loan from one member of the immigrant community to another to help his kid be better in this world,” Sansonetti told the jury.
Mundy, 62, whose lengthy career in Summit and knowledge of the village’s inner workings earned him status as “unofficial mayor,” took jurors Wednesday through a series of wiretapped calls and other evidence, including a 2017 meeting at a cul-de-sac street on Chicago’s Southwest Side where the FBI was watching as Kosmowski handed him $5,000 in cash in a cup.
A large chunk of Mundy’s direct testimony centered on the conversation he recorded outside the funeral home in southwest suburban Justice in 2022, more than two years after he first began cooperating with the feds.
“We had attended a wake, and on the way out, John stopped me and asked if we could have a conversation in the parking lot,” Mundy testified.
Mundy said Kosmowski wanted to go over the details of the ongoing federal investigation, which had recently heated up with a flurry of grand jury subpoenas. During the conversation, Kosmowski repeatedly “tried to classify the transaction” with Hodurek as a loan, Mundy testified.
“It was kind of a tough conversation,” he told the jury. “I think he was trying to get me to look at it his way. I just explained that the facts are the facts…and trying to make up some story about a loan was just not gonna fly.”
In the expletive-laden conversation, Kosmowski told Mundy there was no way they could’ve helped Hodurek with any licensing because it was not in their power to do so. Kosmowski also said he suspected Hodurek was wearing a wire for the feds when he came to Kosmowski’s house the previous Thanksgiving and told him “two FBI guys” had been asking him about the money.
“I says, ‘Well, tell them you loaned me money. I paid you back, and that’s it. End of story,’” Kosmowski told Mundy on the recording.
Later, Mundy asked, “What if the (expletive) on the tape doesn’t corroborate what you just said?”
“Well, I’d like to hear the tape, because I know I never talked about money for licensing with Kris,” Kosmowski said. “…I specifically remember, I says, ‘Listen, you got a problem with your licensing, you have to contact the mayor, make an appointment, and you have to ask him what you can do,’ and that was it. I says “Kris, that’s out of my league. I can’t help you there.”
Mundy testified that while it was true he and Kosmowski could not “officially” get a liquor license approved, they could — and did — pull strings with the mayor to get things done.
To bolster that point, prosecutors played a wiretapped call from 2017 where Kosmowski and Mundy talked about the status of several taverns in Summit, including one that they wanted to see remained closed.
“Now do they know in the office not to renew his license?” Mundy said on the call. “You might want to send a memo over there when he comes in to pay for it. He shouldn’t get it.”
Kosmowski replied that he would make sure officials in Summit were aware. “(Expletive) him. He needs to be closed as far as I’m concerned,” he said on the call.
In her direct examination, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tiffany Ardam asked Mundy whether it was true that the money they took from Hodurek was a loan. Mundy said it was not.
So why did they help out Hodurek?
“Uh, we did it for the cash,” Mundy said. That’s what I recall.”
On cross-examination, Mundy acknowledged abusing both alcohol and cocaine while he was under investigation as well as after he was charged, which was a violation of his pretrial release conditions.
Sansonetti also grilled Mundy on the bribes he allegedly admitted taking over his 30 years as a building inspector, including one instance when a developer threw cash into his car for helping him get a construction contract and another where a real estate magnate paid for trips to Florida and Panama.
“Sometimes if I did somebody a favor, they would give me money, but I wouldn’t take money up front to pass an inspection,” Mundy testified. “I guess it’s technically a bribe, but it wasn’t like I was shaking them down for the money
More like a gratuity? Sansonetti asked.
“Nah, not really. It’s all a crime,” he said.
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com