Here’s a look back at what happened in the Chicago area on Dec. 23, according to the Tribune’s archives.
Is an important event missing from this date? Email us.
Weather records (from the National Weather Service, Chicago)
- High temperature: 62 degrees (1982)
- Low temperature: Minus 21 degrees (1983)
- Precipitation: 2.5inches (1871)
- Snowfall: 10.2 inches (1961)
1975: Twenty-one-year-old Carol Rofstad, of Elk Grove Village, was killed outside her sorority house at Illinois State University in Bloomington-Normal. Her death remains unsolved.
1997: The Chicago Bulls defeated the Los Angeles Clippers 94-89 at the United Center, and earned coach Phil Jackson his 500th career victory faster than any coach in NBA history.
Jackson needed just 682 games — two fewer than previous record-holder Pat Riley — to become the 20th NBA coach to reach 500.
The game itself, however, was forgettable. Though it was the Bulls’ fifth straight win, they didn’t take their first lead until a Michael Jordan free throw put them up 82-81 with 3 minutes, 29 seconds remaining. They shot just 37% and also had 10 turnovers.
2015: Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan issued a 15-page opinion that online fantasy sports contests offered by FanDuel and DraftKings “clearly constitute gambling” and were illegal under state law.
The next day, New York-based FanDuel and Boston-based DraftKings filed separate lawsuits against Madigan.
Four years later, Illinois legislators wrote online wagering into a bill that legalized sports betting. Gov. JB Pritzker signed the Illinois Sports Wagering Act into law on June 28, 2019, and legal online sports betting in the state began almost one year later.
Madigan announced in 2017 she wouldn’t seek reelection.
2020: President Donald Trump commuted the sentence of the so-called king of Medicaid fraud Philip Esformes — who drove a Ferrari, crisscrossed the country on private jets and bribed the head men’s basketball coach at the University of Pennsylvania so that his son would be admitted to the school.
Esformes, who once controlled a network of more than two dozen health care facilities that stretched from Chicago to Miami, garnered $1.3 billion in Medicaid revenues by bribing medical professionals who referred patients to his Florida facilities, then paid off government regulators while vulnerable residents were injured by their peers, prosecutors said.
He housed elderly patients alongside younger adults who suffered from mental illness and drug addiction — sometimes with fatal results. In Esformes’ Oceanside Extended Care Center in Miami Beach “an elderly patient was attacked and beaten to death by a younger mental health patient who never should have been at (a nursing facility) in the first place,” prosecutors wrote in a presentencing memo.
How many presidential pardons or sentence commutations have been granted to people from Illinois?
Allegations of fraud and neglect piled up. A 2010 whistleblower lawsuit alleged that the giant pharmaceutical firm Omnicare Inc. paid millions in kickbacks to secure long-term contracts with Esformes’ facilities, the Tribune reported. The Tribune also found that families had filed 20 wrongful death lawsuits over a four-year period against seven of Esformes’ facilities in Miami-Dade County, including one case where a patient was allegedly attacked by a fellow resident, then sent to another Esformes-owned facility, where he suffered a catastrophic fall and died of a brain injury.
Esformes was arrested in October 2016 at his Miami estate and charged with a massive $1.3 billion Medicare and Medicaid fraud scheme that at the time was billed by the U.S. Justice Department as the largest single criminal health care fraud case ever brought to court.
A jury convicted Esformes of paying bribes, money laundering and other crimes but was unable to reach a verdict on the main count of conspiring to defraud the Medicare program for the elderly and indigent. At his sentencing hearing in January 2019, Esformes wept and pleaded for mercy, saying, “There is no one to blame but myself.” He was sentenced later that year to 20 years in prison.
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