A federal jury on Monday convicted a west suburban contractor of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks to the elected head of the Bloomingdale Township Highway Department by inflating prices on stone deliveries and charging for sewer and dump leveling work that was never performed.
After hearing closing arguments Monday morning, the jury deliberated less than two hours before convicting Mario Giannini, 60, on 14 counts of wire fraud at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse.
The swift verdict came after Giannini’s co-defendant and girlfriend, Debra Fazio, was acquitted in rare fashion by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly, who ruled in the middle of the trial that prosecutors had failed to prove Fazio had knowledge of the scheme or intentionally participated in it.
Giannini and Fazio were indicted in 2020 on charges of conspiring for years with Robert Czernek, former elected highway commissioner for Bloomingdale Township, to pay more than $700,000 in kickbacks through their company, Bloomingdale-based Bulldog Earth Movers Inc.
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Czernek, 71, pleaded guilty earlier this year to one count of honest-services wire fraud and agreed to cooperate against Fazio, who owns Bulldog, and Giannini, who is a longtime employee.
Czernek told jurors last week that Giannini first proposed the kickback scheme during a visit to the township quarry a few months after Czernek was appointed as highway commissioner in 2012.
“He said, ‘We can make some money on this,’ ” Czernek testified.
Czernek told the jury that over the next eight years, he used his official position to approve more than $700,000 in payments for stone delivery, dump-leveling and storm sewer invoices submitted by Bulldog Earth Movers.
As part of the scheme, the invoices had been artificially inflated by overcharging for the stone and billing for hours of sewer and dump-leveling work that was never performed, according to Czernek.
He concealed the fraud by leaving handwritten notes for Giannini in various secluded places on Bloomingdale Township Highway Department property, as well as in a barbecue grill at Giannini’s home.
The notes included a description of the work and number of hours purportedly spent by Bulldog on various projects. Fazio later submitted invoices to the township that repeated Czernek’s notes word for word, according to his testimony.
One note shown to the jury had been scribbled out on a scratchpad with numbers indicating loads of stone. At the top were the words “All you” and the number 3,575. At the bottom was another figure, 9,850, with the word “Split.”
“That ‘All you’ meant that (Giannini) would get that $3,575,” Czernek testified. He said for the $9,850 figure, “split” meant they would each take an equal cut.
Testifying in his own defense Friday afternoon, Giannini told the jury he never overcharged the township for any services and denied telling Czernek that they could “make money” off of any scheme.
Claiming to be “terrible at paperwork,” Giannini said he trusted the numbers Czernek was writing down on the notes, which he simply handed off to his office.
“He’s the road commissioner and I’m working for him,” Giannini testified. Later, he added, “I mean you don’t get any higher than he is. I mean he’s in charge of the whole township.”
“Did you intend to defraud the citizens of Bloomingdale Township?” his lawyer, Susan Pavlow, asked at one point.
“No, I did not,” Giannini replied.
But prosecutors accused Giannini of lying to save his own skin, pointing out he told FBI agents during an interview outside an Addison restaurant that he “knew that (Czernek’s) numbers weren’t straight.”
In his closing argument Monday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Saurish Appleby-Bhattacharjee said the case “boils down to greed, the lure of easy money.”
“It may be true that Mr. Giannini is terrible at paperwork, but what he’s truly terrible at is telling the truth,” Appleby-Bhattacharjee said.
