Bracken’s firms also are a subject of a separate federal probe targeting possible fraud in the city of Chicago’s minority-owned business programs. Subpoenas issued by the U.S. attorney’s office earlier this year sought records for nine city contracts. Of those, the city awarded six to Bracken companies since 2016 to process construction debris and supply dumpsters and heavy equipment during natural disasters and emergencies.
Together, the city contracts are worth up to $215 million and collectively are the most valuable of the nearly four dozen contracts or purchase agreements Bracken-owned companies have secured since 2009 with the city of Chicago, its sister agencies, Cook County, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago and suburban municipalities, records show.
Bracken, 51, has not been accused of wrongdoing in any of the cases. His attorney, Kalia Coleman, declined a Tribune request for Bracken to be interviewed about the federal investigations.
An examination of government contracts, campaign finance reports, state business records and a deposition Bracken gave in a separate civil case paints a picture of a high school dropout from the Canaryville neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side who earned a GED and quietly built his businesses with government contracts and made connections with some of the city and county’s most powerful politicians.
Among those politicians who Bracken contributed to was former Ald. Edward Burke, 14th, the longest-serving alderman in Chicago history who also hails from Canaryville and whose trial on corruption charges began this month.
Bracken is not part of the Burke trial but records show several ties between the two. Bracken and his companies contributed more than $43,000 to Burke’s political funds over the years and more than $12,000 to the campaign fund of Burke’s brother, former state Rep. Dan Burke. And Bracken tapped a firm run by a former Burke staffer, as well as the former top attorney in Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration, to lobby the city on behalf of three Bracken companies. Bracken also once hired Burke’s law firm to get his home’s assessment lowered.
In all, state records show, Bracken, his wife and his father have registered two dozen businesses in Illinois over the last two decades. In addition to KLF Enterprises and Riverdale Materials, some of the better-known Bracken firms are Brackenbox, Utility Transport Service and Markham Transfer & Recycling.
While each has its own specialty, most Bracken businesses focus on demolition and construction, from providing services for hauling and equipment rental to supplying giant roll-off dumpsters to delivering topsoil, gravel, sand and mulch to work sites. In recent years, the Brackens formed businesses that handle property management and assemble motorcycles.
Some of Bracken’s earliest campaign contributions went to David Webb Jr. in 2006 when Webb was mayor of south suburban Markham, where Brackenbox, Markham Transfer & Recycling, KLF and other Bracken companies are located.
Bracken’s contributions to Webb raised eyebrows in 2011 after a Bracken business was cited multiple times by Illinois Environmental Protection Agency officials for illegally dumping crushed drywall in an open field and improperly accepting household hazardous waste, garbage and landscaping debris at his Markham transfer station.
By then, Bracken and his companies had given Webb’s campaign fund nearly $15,000. At the time, residents and the EPA questioned what city officials were doing to stop pervasive illegal dumping and an EPA official told the Tribune that local “apathy” about dumping in Markham was “disturbing.”
Webb was mayor of Markham from 2001 through 2017. In all, he received $38,550 from Bracken companies, according to state campaign records, while Jackson received more than $34,000 from Bracken and his firms.
In 2021, Webb was sentenced to two years in federal prison after admitting to a corruption scheme in which he collected bribe-filled coffee cups from a contractor beginning in 2008.
In a brief interview with the Tribune earlier this year, Webb, who is out of prison, said Brackenbox, the main company in Markham, was a good business while he was mayor.
“They paid their taxes, they paid their licenses and they hired a lot of people,” Webb said.
In recent years, Markham city records show, Brackenbox has been cited multiple times for various issues. In the past six years, the company was cited 18 times for illegal dumping. And the firm even through this year has been dinged by the suburb for an array of alleged offenses, from having an unpaved parking surface and failing to offer accessible parking to powering a refrigerator in a shipping container with an extension cord and having debris and tires around its main building.
Markham’s current mayor, Roger Agpawa, described the businesses as a “bad neighbor.”
“I’m passionate about the fact that he has not treated this community right,” Agpawa said.
In the subpoena to the city of Chicago earlier this year, federal authorities sought contracts tied to six Bracken firms, including Brackenbox. That company won its first Chicago city contract in 2009 — a few years after Bracken first began contributing to Chicago aldermen — in what would become one of its most lucrative deals.
The company provided large dumpsters at street corners for city street sweepers to unload debris into. Initially worth up to $6.1 million, the contract was renewed multiple times through 2017 and the company also secured another contract for roughly identical services in 2016. Brackenbox has made $48.7 million from those two contracts and was awarded two more this June, city records show.
KLF, the firm identified as Company A in the Harvey hotel indictment, also was awarded its first city contracts in early 2011 for emergency snow and storm tree removal and disposal.
One year after securing that contract, the Brackens launched Utility Transport Service, which offers tractors, trailers, flatbeds and other equipment “to move what you need from where it is to where it has to go,” according to its website. That company has received four contracts with the city’s water department worth up to $145 million, city records show.
Freddie Snerling, 67, a former Brackenbox driver, said the different Bracken firms provided complementary services and worked together, which seemed to give the companies collectively an advantage in bidding on projects.
“They just undercut everyone,” he said.
As the companies amassed government contracts, they also were the target of lawsuits. Bracken, his wife, Kelly, and their businesses have been sued in federal court at least seven times and accused of failure to pay overtime rates, wrongful termination, failure to make insurance and union benefit payments and failure to obtain an employee at a job site through a union referral office as required by agreement with the city of Chicago.
In 2021 and 2022, KLF owed the city for fines — one a $5,000 fine for code violations related to pavement restoration in the Washington Heights neighborhood and the other a fine for tearing up the public way in the Grand Crossing neighborhood. KLF paid nearly $20,000 for the Grand Crossing violation, but no payments had been made on the other fine by the start of November, according to the city.
While Bracken’s firms got city business beginning in 2009, many of the new contracts and renewals have come since 2015 when it hired attorney Michael Synowiecki as its city lobbyist.
A former staffer for Chicago’s Finance Committee, Synowiecki became a lobbyist and among his first clients was Brackenbox. Since then, Synowiecki has added Utility Transport Service and KLF as clients. Synowiecki’s wife, Meaghan Cleary Synowiecki, also used to work for the Finance Committee and Synowiecki himself briefly worked for Burke’s wife, recently retired Illinois Supreme Court Justice Anne Burke, according to his online biography. Michael Synowiecki is now law partners with Mara Georges, who was Chicago’s longtime corporation counsel under Daley.
Synowiecki did not return messages seeking comment. Officials with Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration have said the administration is complying with the federal subpoenas.
Ryan Gage, a spokesman for the city’s procurement office, said a city contractor being under investigation does not mean the company is at risk of losing its contract but that the city is “ready to act should any contractors be formally charged with or convicted of wrongdoing.”
In addition to having city contracts, the Brackens also launched a motorcycle garage and storage facility in Canaryville that offered custom vintage motorcycle builds and doubled as an event venue. Both candidates for 11th Ward alderman hosted events at the garage and Jackson, Riverdale’s mayor, hosted a fundraiser there in the spring of 2021.
Motorcycles appear to be something of an obsession in Bracken’s family. Last year, Brackenbox sponsored a documentary-style video focused on Bracken’s father, JB Bracken, and his daredevil attempts to ride his Indian motorcycle across the Utah salt flats at speeds in excess of 200 mph.
Titled “Canaryville to Bonneville,” the film, which was commissioned to be used as “promotional” material for Brackenbox, was billed by the Chicago-based production company as “a fast paced story of building a business on the south side of Chicago while breaking speed records on the Utah salt flats.
While the city contracts have proven to be the most lucrative, Bracken’s work with other governments, especially in the suburbs, has also been noteworthy.
In addition to KLF having secured $8.3 million in contracts for heavy equipment and operators, materials and demolition services for the Water Reclamation District, KLF has won smaller deals in Hazel Crest and Lyons.
The recent federal charges in Harvey deal with a contract between KLF and the Cook County Land Bank Authority, the indictment and land bank records show, in which KLF was paid to demolish the Chicago Park Hotel near 170th and Halsted streets.
A Tribune investigation in 2013 found the village of Harvey borrowed $10 million to renovate the hotel but not much was spent on construction, leaving Harvey taxpayers on the hook. One of the central figures in the deal, Joseph Letke, a longtime bookkeeper, killed himself in 2016 amid an ongoing FBI investigation.
A year later, the land bank authority, which was created to buy and renovate blighted properties, acquired the property and intended to use federal community block grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to “demolish and repurpose” the site.
Before negotiating the sale, the land bank hired Carl Fioravanti’s firm, Alliance Environmental Control Inc. in Lansing, to conduct an asbestos survey and Fioravanti stated asbestos was present on the hotel site, the indictment alleged.
Several months later, the agency said KLF was the winning bidder to demolish the 75,000-square-foot hotel. KLF’s first contract was for $376,000 but that increased to $499,000 four months later in September 2018, land bank records show. In an unusual move, KLF in turn hired Alliance as a subcontractor for asbestos removal and remediation services. A CCLBA spokeswoman said KLF disclosed all of its subcontractors, but the authority abided by its procurement requirements, and complied with the HUD subpoena.
The same month the contract was increased, the FBI, HUD, and the Environmental Protection Agency began “an investigation of Company A, AEC, Fioravanti” and others into whether Alliance accurately stated in its survey how much asbestos was on the property, according to the indictment. Company A is KLF, public records show. The probe also focused on whether Alliance and KLF had improperly received federal funds for the hotel demolition.
The indictment alleged Fioravanti tried to obstruct the investigation by altering the manifests “to reflect that a different quantity of asbestos was removed from the hotel site and delivered to the landfill.”
Fioravanti, 55, of Lansing, has pleaded not guilty to one count of obstruction of justice.
“We find the allegations to be wholly out of context and we do not believe any offense was committed,” Fioravanti’s attorney, Barry Spevack, said in a statement.
Two days after Fioravanti’s not guilty plea, the indictment against Jackson, the Riverdale mayor, was made public and stated Bracken, who was identified in the indictment as “Individual A,” and his wife funded virtually every aspect of a trucking company called Centennial Holdings that Jackson and his wife formed in March 2018.
According to the indictment, the Jacksons knew nothing about the trucking business and the Brackens provided Jackson with a loan to get the company going. The Brackens also provided operating costs, from trucks and fuel to insurance, repairs and licensing, the indictment alleged. The loan was never fully repaid, according to the indictment.
Bracken hid the payments by paying third-party operators who deducted a fee and passed the money to Centennial, according to the charges.
Jackson was not charged with anything related to those payments. Instead, the perjury and obstruction charges stem from sworn statements he made in a federal lawsuit filed against Riverdale Materials by a competitor that for years had contracts for garbage hauling in Riverdale.
When asked specifically during a sworn deposition whether Centennial had done any business with the Bracken family, Jackson said he wasn’t sure because he didn’t handle Centennial’s day-to-day operations, the indictment alleged.
Jackson was then asked who does handle it.
“That would be my wife,” he allegedly replied, “and also wherever we are dispatched to work at.”
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