Debt Collector Bribed Dorothy Brown's Office For Business: Feds

CHICAGO — Federal prosecutors announced conspiracy charges Friday against a Pennsylvania businessman accused of bribing Cook County Circuit Clerk Dorothy Brown in exchange for business with her office.

Donald Donagher, 67, ran the debt collection company Penn Credit Corporation out of Harrisburg Pennsylvania, according to prosecutors. An indictment returned Thursday in Chicago charges him with one count of conspiracy to commit bribery and five counts of bribery of a federally financed program.

Donagher donated thousands to accounts linked to Brown, covered expenses for celebrations and paid for hundreds of thousands of robocalls in support of her 2012 re-election campaign, according to the indictment, which said the payments were "intended to influence and reward" the clerk. He's accused of bribing Brown and clerks in three Florida counties.

Brown is not named in the indictment but is identified throughout as "Clerk A." She has been in office since 2000 and under federal investigation since at least 2014, according to the Better Government Association. In October 2015, the FBI executed a warrant at her house and seized her cell phone. Despite losing the Democratic Party's endorsement in 2016, she won election to a fourth term with 47 percent of the vote in the party primary. In 2018, she declared her candidacy for Chicago mayor but was removed from the ballot when the election board found her nominating petitions fell short of the required number of signatures. She has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and has not been charged with a crime.

Prosecutors said Donagher gave money and services to court clerks and related entities in an effort to "corruptly" attempt to win favor when it came to awarding the court's debt collection work between 2009 and 2016. Campaign finance records show his first donation to Brown's campaign was a $2,500 payment made in August 2009.

On June 7, 2011, Donagher gave $5,000 to an account in the name of the Dorothy Brown Scholarship and Community Development Fund, according to the indictment. Brown's website for her mayoral campaign said she is the founder and executive director of the fund, which was "developed to secure funding for college bound students."

Within a few weeks of his company starting to collect debt for Brown's office, Donagher promised $10,000 in contributions, according to the indictment. In August 2011, he sent an email to employees and one of the lobbyists he had hired in Illinois to let them know he had promised Brown "10k of 'early' money." Later that month he asked his lobbyist to attend an event for Brown.

"We are giving her 10k and I want to make it count with [Dorothy Brown] and her staff," Donagher wrote on Aug. 24, according to the indictment. In September, he sent $10,000 via an electronic transfer to support "the fund raising efforts of Contributions to Friends of [Dorothy Brown].

In February 2012, Donagher had his staff carry out "hundreds of thousands of robocalls" on behalf of Brown's campaign and her associates as an unreported in-kind donation, according to the indictment. That November, he emailed two of his lobbyists, telling them to make sure his firm was getting an equal share of work from the office compared to a competitor under the same contract.

"Just a reminder that we made a s---load of calls for [Brown]," Donagher wrote, according to the indictment. "Have you received all of the numbers we requested to make sure everything is equal?"

In July 2013, Donagher told his employees the firm would "give as much plus a dollar" as a competitor to a campaign fundraiser for Brown, prosecutors said. That month, he donated $2,500 to Brown's campaign. In September, he told his employees and lobbyists he'd promised another $2,500 to a birthday party in Brown's honor. That payment was made through five separate checks from Donagher, Penn Credit and three entities he controlled.

In March 2014, Donagher agreed to underwrite the expenses for Brown's Women's History Month celebration. He paid $869 to a trophy company in Morton Grove to buy plaques for the celebration and about $1,000 to a Chicago food services company for the celebration, according to the indictment. Donagher gave four more checks to the Friends of Dorothy Brown campaign committee in July 2014.

Read more: Indictment from the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois

Donagher faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in federal prison if convicted of bribery and five years if convicted of conspiracy.

A lawyer for Donagher provided a statement to the Chicago Sun-Times denying the allegation and asserting Penn Credit's actions were legal.

"Unlike the long line of corruption cases that have been prosecuted in Chicago, this case has none of the standard hallmarks of bribery and corruption," defense attorney Theodore Poulos wrote, according to the Sun-Times. "The contracts Penn Credit received from Cook County and other government entities were awarded to it purely on the merits."

A spokesperson for Brown told the Chicago Tribune that Donagher "never approached the Circuit Court Clerk’s Office or the Clerk improperly in any way or at any time." Her office said all negotiations for the contract were "conducted in the appropriate manner with the Cook County Procurement Department and the State’s Attorney’s Office involved at all times.”

Brown's office has for years been under federal investigation for taking bribes and kickbacks in exchange for jobs. A Glenview man was sentenced to three years of probation in February 2017 after pleading guilty to lying to a grand jury investigating "the purchasing of jobs and promotions." Three months later, former Associate Clerk Beena Patel was indicted on three counts of lying to a grand jury about bribery and kickbacks in the clerk's office.

That case is still pending. A former clerk's office employee told investigators $10,000 was known as the "going rate" to buy a job in Brown's office. The office's level of incompetence has "long been the subject of ridicule within the legal community, and certainly among journalists," according to Politico.

Last year, a Chicago Reader investigation found hundreds of people remain jailed due to the office's inability to find records, and Brown's office had to be ordered by the Illinois Supreme Court to make electronic filings public. The current system does not allow for electronic filing or for defendants to check their court dates online in criminal court. Last year Brown told the Chicago Tribune she expected a "complete overhaul" of the criminal case management system by March 2019.

Related:

• $10,000 Buys A Job In Clerk Dorothy Brown's Office: Court Filing
• Ex-Cook County Clerk Employee Sentenced For Lying To Feds
• Federal Judge Orders Cook County To Fix Electronic Record Access
• Dorothy Brown Wins Dem Nomination for Circuit Court Clerk Under Cloud of Federal Probe