Giannoulias failed as Treasurer and Secretary of State. If elected mayor, he will be a disaster for Chicago
Although he remains coy about his political future — while still running for re-election as Illinois Secretary of State, Alexi Giannoulis has amassed a huge political war chest for what will presumably be his following campaign — for mayor of Chicago. There is speculation that he will announce his entry into the race soon — which means, like U.S. Congressman Mike Quigley, he will be campaigning for mayor while running for another office.
As for his current electoral race, I don’t believe Giannoulis has mentioned even once his Republican opponent, Diane M. Harris. However, in softball interviews, on social media, and in political advertisements, he has plenty to say about President Donald Trump.
It’s a distraction technique that is increasingly common in politics, and a troubling one.
William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson, Chicago’s last Republican mayor — and one of the worst mayors in American history — was a master of bringing red herring bogeymen into the political discussion.
Alexi’s bogeyman is Trump; Thompson chose a British monarch, King George V, he infamously vowed to “crack him in the snoot” if he ever visited Chicago.
Thompson was notoriously corrupt, and he was closely allied to Al Capone. Big Bill had many good reasons to create distractions.
Broadway Bank failure
Giannoulias needs distractions too. He leaned heavily on his credentials as a senior loan officer and vice president at his family’s financial institution, Broadway Bank, to get elected state treasurer in 2006. Broadway Bank lent millions to convicted criminals, including alleged former Chicago Outfit member, Michael “Jaws” Giorango, and his business partner Demitri Stavropoulos.
Another onetime client of Broadway Bank was Antoin “Tony” Rezko, a convicted political fixer.
A Chicago Tribune front page story about Broadway Bank with Alexi’s photo affixed to it read: “$20 million in loans to felons.”
“Big Bill” was probably smiling in Hell when he saw that headline.
In 2010, while Alexi Giannoulias was campaigning for Barack Obama’s seat in the U.S. Senate, Broadway Bank collapsed, ultimately costing taxpayers nearly $400 million.
Not once has Giannoulias apologized to taxpayers for his bank’s collapse. He has never said anything along the lines of: “You know, I learned from my mistakes and I’ll do better now.” If he’s sorry, he’s only regretful that the bank failure cost him an election to the Senate and the possibility of comfortably serving there until he is older than Mitch McConnell.
You might be saying, “But this is old news.” Here is something more recent. In February, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that Perry Mandera, a former owner of a Near North Side strip club that operated over different names over the years, along with family members and affiliated companies, has contributed over $100,000 to Citizens for Giannoulis, Alexi’s current campaign fund. The newspaper says that two men with alleged mob ties were employed by the strip club.
Campaign contributions from an industry he is supposed to be regulating
With “Broadway Bank Alexi,” his view on money and power is an amoral one. "Sick venal" is how Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle character described such people in Taxi Driver. I’ll save you the trouble of looking up the definition of “venal,” it means capable of being bought.
Also more recently, as was outlined last December in Chicago Contrarian, Citizens for Giannoulias has collected over $130,000 in contributions from car dealerships and individuals and firms connected to the automotive sector. The actual number is probably much higher.
As Secretary of State, one of Alexi’s duties is to regulate and police automobile dealers.
Do those car retailers expect something in return?
Licenses for illegals
Issuing driver’s licenses is the best-known task of the Secretary of State. Providing standard licenses to illegal aliens is a subject worthy of an entire article, but the SoS also is responsible for issuing, to qualified applicants of course, commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs). Federal requirements stipulate that CDLs can only be issued to applicants who understand English and who are in the country legally.
CDL holders are permitted to drive large passenger vehicles and of course, big trucks.
However, in February, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy audited Illinois' non-domiciled CDL holders, meaning they lived outside Illinois but operated here, and he found that nearly 20 percent of them were issued illegally to people who at best possessed an unverified immigration status.
Did those illegals come to Illinois because they knew they had a better chance of receiving a CDL than they did in the state where they were living?
Under Illinois law, illegal immigrants may receive standard driver’s licenses (but not Real IDs or commercial driver’s licenses), provided of course that the licenses are issued under their real names.
Which brings us to the tragic story of Chloe Polzin and Katie Abraham, two college students who were killed last year in an Urbana automobile accident by Julio Cucul-Bol, an illegal alien from Guatemala who was living under the name of Juan Jahaziel Saenz-Suarez. He pleaded guilty to charges surrounding those deaths, including driving under the influence, last autumn.
Giannoulias, mostly on social media because local journalists aren’t very interested in this tragic story, has been taking heat for the deaths of Polzin and Abraham. He responded earlier this month on X about Cucul-Bol, “This individual was never issued an Illinois driver’s license. Period.”
But Katie's father, Joe Abraham, who is aggressively pursuing justice regarding her death, quickly fired back on X, “Julio Cucul-Bol was issued an Illinois driver’s license under the alias Juan Jahaziel Saenz Suarez, and that Illinois driver’s license number appears in the Urbana Police report.”
And why isn’t Giannoulias transparent about Cucul-Bol and the driver’s license that he used? During the 2010 Senate race, his campaign declared: “Alexi supports making government more transparent.”
Joe Abraham later appeared on The Real Story with Jeanne Ives and Amy Jacobson on WIND-AM, where he called for total transparency on these crimes.
“Let’s put it all out there. Why do I have to sue Urbana to get information about my daughter's killing?" Abraham told Ives and Jacobson.
As for the vehicle Cucul-Bol was driving, a Mitsubishi Outlander, whose name was the SUV registered under? Registering a car under an assumed name is a Class 2 felony in Illinois.
Although I don’t believe he has ever worked as an attorney or even received a license to practice law, Giannoulias has a Juris Doctor degree from Tulane University. Perhaps he picked up the art of twisting the truth in a Tulane lecture hall, delivering it in that slick, lawyerly style so many people find sickening, when he declared, “This individual was never issued an Illinois driver’s license. Period.”
Chicago and Illinois already have far too many politicians like that.
Is Giannoulias too consumed by political posturing against Trump and his stance on illegals to allow the facts regarding the deaths of Katie Abraham and Chloe Polzin to become widely known? Is he worried that these tragic killings could derail his mayoral ambitions?
Citizens for Giannoulias has over $22 million cash on hand, which is more than all the other candidates for mayor, both announced and unannounced, combined. As for the Secretary of State race, Giannoulias’ Republican opponent had only $1,816 in her campaign fund at the end of June. Remember that when a Democrat, whether it is Alexi or someone else, decries “big money” in politics.
And do these other donors expect something in return from Giannoulias?
Failure in public office
Another reason Giannoulias needs Trump as a distraction is that he has no real accomplishments in his nearly eight years serving as an elected official.
On his campaign website, Giannoulias makes this outlandish statement about his term as State Treasurer:
“Illinois weathered the 2008 market meltdown because of the treasurer’s conservative and diversified investment strategy.”
That’s a colossal lie. What Alexi leaves out is that because of unsound investments in a college savings fund for Illinois parents — Bright Start 529 — investors lost $150 million. A lawsuit got about half of those funds back, but Illinois families who invested in Bright Start still got fleeced.
And in a 2009 statement from Alexi announcing the Bright Start settlement, cravenly released three days before Christmas to minimize media exposure, the fund was described as one that “contained risky investments.”
Moving on to his time as Secretary of State, Giannoulias claims that wait times are lower at his DMV facilities, but there is no independent proof of that, we are expected to take Alexi’s word for it. What has changed since Giannoulias took office is that with an exception here and there, appointments are now required for driver’s tests and in-person driver's license renewals. That might be acceptable for many Illinoisans, but for people with unpredictable work schedules, especially those toiling in the gig economy, who are often "the working poor," simply showing up at a DMV office without an appointment works best for them.
Chicago’s next mayor faces many daunting challenges, including high crime, a crumbling infrastructure, poorly performing schools, and soaring pension debt. The city needs a Superman — or a Superwoman — to reverse the rot. While such a person may not exist, if there is such an individual, it is absolutely not Broadway Bank Alexi.
Chicago can do much better than Giannoulias.
