A onetime political operative admitted Friday that he offered a bribe to the late state Sen. Martin Sandoval but insisted he never actually paid Sandoval the money.
But William Helm, a former city of Chicago deputy aviation commissioner, also admitted he was involved in other corrupt activities that involved more than $40,000 in bribes and that he cheated on his taxes.
“I was wrong,” Helm told U.S. District Judge Elaine Bucklo. “It’s on me, your honor.”
Helm has faced indictment since March 2020, when he was first accused of bribing Sandoval. The scheme involved a development project in East Dundee. Helm’s sentencing in the matter has not been set.
Sentencing guidelines call for Helm to get about three to four years in prison. But Helm has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for a possible sentencing break.
In court Friday, Helm told Bucklo he lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, and has been “unemployed” for three years.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Paige Nutini said Friday that Helm was hired as a consultant to help with “signalization” issues in the East Dundee project for $20,000. Helm agreed to pay Sandoval some of that money for his help as chairman of the Illinois Senate’s transportation committee.
Though Sandoval ended up attending a meeting and tried to influence an Illinois Department of Transportation official, Sandoval told Helm he didn’t trust the construction company involved in the project, according to Nutini.
The company previously has been identified as being owned by a member of the Palumbo family. It isn’t charged with any crime.
Helm also admitted cheating on his taxes from 2015 to 2018 to the tune of about $9,300.
Sandoval pleaded guilty in January 2020, admitting he took a “protector fee” from someone with an interest in the politically connected red-light-camera company SafeSpeed. Sandoval also said he’d engaged in corrupt activity with other government officials and that he’d accepted more than $250,000 “in bribes as part of criminal activity that involved more than five participants.”
Sandoval agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors in Chicago, but he died in December 2020.
SafeSpeed partner Omar Maani resolved a bribery conspiracy charge he faced with a deferred-prosecution agreement.
Helm was tied to former Cook County Commissioner Jeff Tobolski, who also pleaded guilty in 2020 and agreed to cooperate with the feds. Tobolski, who doubled as mayor of McCook, has yet to be sentenced.
Mario DePasquale, former McCook police chief, is set to be sentenced Feb. 21 after admitting he demanded bribes for Tobolski. In a memo to the judge this week, DePasquale’s lawyer wrote that Tobolski “was as corrupt a person as one could possibly imagine” and that a movie version of his life would be dismissed as a “hopelessly exaggerated Hollywood caricature.”
“But Jeff Tobolski was as real as real could get and he ruled his small corner of the world with an iron and yes, outstretched hand,” defense attorney Jonathan Minkus wrote.
