Daley pal who won deal dogged by debts

For the past decade, developer Jack Higgins has been dogged by debt.

The longtime friend of the Daley family has defaulted on loans from banks and Chicago’s Pritzker family and been hounded by the Internal Revenue Service.

Higgins, who developed Chicago’s police headquarters under Mayor Richard M. Daley, recently disclosed his financial problems to the Illinois Medical District Commission as part of a bid to develop 9.5 acres of government land on the West Side. Those records show:

• Higgins and his wife have worked out a payment plan with the IRS to settle four liens on his Gold Coast home to collect $2.9 million in income taxes dating to 2005. The IRS is among Higgins’ past clients, according to his website.
• The Pritzker Realty Group wrote off a defaulted loan it had given Higgins so he could buy out the Pritzkers’ stake in Higgins Development Partners. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Higgins and the Pritzkers developed the family’s Loop skyscraper and the FBI’s Chicago offices.
• Bank of America wrote off a line of credit made to his company after Higgins missed payments.
• Bank of America foreclosed on a defaulted loan Higgins got to develop a vacant property for the federal government, a deal that fell through.
• An undisclosed lender ended up with a Detroit warehouse Higgins and his partners leased to Chrysler Motors.
• He vacated his company’s headquarters on the Near North Side earlier this year after his landlord sued for more than $40,000 in rent.

Higgins didn’t disclose another foreclosure suit, this one filed by Chase Bank in 2013 after he, his daughter Bridget Higgins McCarthy and son-in-law Kevin McCarthy stopped making payments on a $1 million mortgage on the couple’s North Side home. Chase dropped the suit last summer. A Higgins spokesman says the loan has been renegotiated.