A longtime Chicago political operative was sentenced Wednesday to 18 months in federal prison for a scheme to bribe then-state Sen. Martin Sandoval on behalf of a suburban construction company that needed state approval for a development in East Dundee.
William Helm, the onetime deputy commissioner of the Chicago Department of Aviation and a former state transportation official, also admitted in a plea agreement with prosecutors earlier this year that he and others helped arrange $40,000 in bribes to other, unnamed officials.
He also pleaded guilty to a tax count showing he vastly underreported his income over a five-year period, costing the IRS and Illinois about $9,000.
Preliminary sentencing guidelines called for up to about four years in prison, but prosecutors instead asked for a year and a half behind bars because of Helms cooperation with the investigation and other “ongoing” matters.
Exactly who Helm may be cooperating against has not been made public. Prosecutors blacked out the information in a recent sentencing filing.
In that filing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Paige Nutini said that regardless of his assistance to the government, Helm’s conduct was serious and corrosive. He routinely “chose corrupt conduct” in an effort “to line his own pockets and stay relevant in his political circles,” she wrote.
“To (the) defendant, his conduct was just business as usual,” Nutini wrote. “But (his) actions contributed to eroding the public’s trust in all levels of government, and to tarnishing by association the honest public servants who do not act out of self-interest and self-dealing.”
Helm was one of more than half a dozen people to be charged in a sprawling political corruption investigation that first came to light when the FBI served a search warrant on Sandoval, then the powerful head of the Senate Transportation Committee, in September 2019 in Springfield.
Helm’s name was among a who’s who of Illinois power players named in the warrant, which included asphalt and casino magnates, red-light camera operators, transportation and utility executives and a handful of other elected officials.
The charges involved the Terra Business Park along Route 72 and Christina Drive in East Dundee. The mixed-use development includes an office building, trucking service bays and a planned Speedway gas station.
According to the charges, Helm was retained in 2018 by a construction company, Company A, that paid him $20,000 for his help seeking Illinois Department of Transportation approval for the project.
The indictment alleged that Helm offered bribes of at least $5,000 to Sandoval from July to November 2018 in exchange for the senator’s influence with IDOT.
In summer 2018, Sandoval “attempted to influence” IDOT officials to approve the construction project’s needs during a meeting that included Helm and representatives of the construction company, according to the plea.
After the meeting, Sandoval told Helm “that he did not trust Company A officials, and Helm never paid Sandoval,” according to the plea.
Helm was a longtime 47th Ward operative who left his position as a manager for IDOT after he was disciplined for doing personal or political business on state time.
He departed his job with the airport several years ago after he was accused in a lawsuit of pressuring airport truck drivers to do political work — an allegation he denied.
Helm also was listed in a search warrant served on village hall in southwest suburban McCook, where then-Cook County Commissioner Jeff Tobolski was mayor.
Tobolski’s chief of staff, Patrick Doherty, was convicted of conspiring to pay bribes to a relative of an Oak Lawn trustee in 2017 to get lucrative red-light cameras installed there on behalf of a clouted company called SafeSpeed LLC. Doherty was sentenced last year to more than five years in prison.
Tobolski has pleaded guilty to a separate extortion scheme and is awaiting sentencing.
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
