'Cashmere Countess' Swindled Ex-Mayor
By Michael Sneed and Scott Fornek, Staff Reporters
Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, December 16, 2001
He speaks slowly and softly, in the same gentle manner that was his public trademark. But he pronounces each word emphatically, as though it were a complete sentence:
"Don't. Trust. Anybody." That's the lesson former Mayor Eugene Sawyer says he learned four years ago when the controller of his company, taking advantage of Sawyer's age and health problems, bilked the business out of more than $475,000.
Now, the once-powerful Chicago politician wants other older men and women to be wary, too.
"That's what it's come to," said Sawyer, speaking publicly for the first time about the scam that helped drive his company out of business.
"The seniors, particularly, they get caught in so many tricks. So it's best that you just don't trust anybody."
Sawyer and millions of other older Americans have plenty of reason to be wary. A Chicago Sun-Times investigation found that financial exploitation and physical and emotional mistreatment of seniors—a wide range of crimes collectively termed "elder abuse"—have become commonplace.
And wealth or power or public stature doesn't make you immune.
Sawyer, who is 67, said he's proof of that.
"I hope that you can get people to understand," he said. "It happens to the best of us. The best of us."
'I trusted her'
In 1997, Sawyer was a tired man, past his prime, recovering from a minor stroke. He was taking medication for his heart, and he felt fatigued even before he got to work in the morning.
Looking back on that time, Sawyer says now, he can see that he was "less than 100 percent" and probably an easy target. Not only was his health bad, but he was far too trusting. He had always been a trusting person, he says, but with age and fatigue had become even more so.
Maybe if he had been healthier, more alert and less trusting, he would have seen that bird of prey coming.
It was late in 1997 when Sawyer got the news: Stephanette E. Walker, the controller of his company, CEI International Inc., had embezzled $478,035 by getting Sawyer to sign checks to a dummy corporation she controlled. Sawyer was stunned. He couldn't even remember signing the checks.
Walker was convicted of fraud and money-laundering in the case. Now 54, she is finishing a 37-month federal prison sentence at a Near West Side halfway house.
Elaine Smith, the FBI special supervisory agent who headed the investigation, says the way Walker scammed Sawyer is "a classic case" of how older people, especially when in poor health, can be exploited.
"If anybody is ill, if anybody is old or cutting back on their attention to details, they are right there to take advantage of them," Smith said.
But Sawyer, a man of dignified bearing who still feels embarrassed that he was so easily conned, said his poor health at the time was only partly to blame.
"It really involves trust," he said. "Sometimes, I didn't even look at what she give me to sign. I just signed it because I trusted her."
Siphoned cash
Sawyer became mayor in 1987, after Mayor Harold Washington's sudden death. His tenure in the job was short, with Sawyer losing the Democratic primary in 1989.
Once out of office, he and a friend, businessman Charles Harrison III, formed CEI International to resell natural gas and other fuels. Sawyer was a vice president when Walker was hired as controller in the spring of 1997. She quickly gained the confidence of Sawyer and Harrison, CEI's president, taking on tasks such as buying plants to spruce up the landscaping in front of the company's headquarters in the Auburn-Gresham neighborhood on the South Side.
"She got there early in the morning, planting flowers and making sure everything was done, and we trusted her," Sawyer said.
Only later would Sawyer and Harrison learn that it wasn't the plants that gave Walker a green thumb.
With access to CEI International's blank checks, Walker siphoned money into Lake Shore Energy Inc., a phony corporation she created, court records show.
Sawyer said he never questioned the checks Walker asked him to sign, assuming LS Energy was a legitimate supplier.
'You're being ripped off'
In December 1997, someone at CEI International's bank, Mid-City National Bank, got suspicious after getting a call from Neiman Marcus about an attempt by Walker to buy more than $10,000 worth of merchandise. She was using a check from Lake Shore Energy. The president of the bank called CEI.
"The banker, the president of my bank, called me and said, 'Look, man, you're being ripped off,' " said Sawyer, who had been surprised to see Walker drive a Mercedes SL 500 to work on occasion. "And I said, 'What do you mean?' "
The bank also called in the FBI. Smith said she knew the bank's executives were frantic when they called right in the middle of "our squad's Christmas bowling pizza party.''
FBI Special Agents Thomas J. Simon Jr. and Christ M. Kacoyannakis went to Walker's apartment on Delaware Place to question her. They found Oriental rugs from Bloomingdale's that weren't yet unrolled, clothes still bearing store tags, and a $91,000 Mercedes-Benz in the garage.
Walker confessed that night, telling the agents she had made out CEI checks to Lake Shore Energy and had Sawyer sign them.
Dubbed "the cashmere countess" by investigators for her love of luxurious attire, Walker once handed $40,000 in cash to Neiman Marcus to establish a line of credit at the store and announced she planned to spend it all.
'Greed, plain and simple'
Federal agents discovered that Walker, who had no prior criminal convictions, was funneling cash to her personal account at Mid-City from funds she embezzled from CEI International.
Walker told investigators she used the money to live nicely and buy presents. She said she spent $3,450 to buy three fur coats, $7,585 for an Oriental rug and runner and $10,000 for a Nissan Altima for a relative. She bought herself two Mercedes-Benzes, plane tickets, household goods, clothes, flowers and furnishings for relatives. She also made a $4,000 loan to former Chicago School Board President D. Sharon Grant, who went to prison for tax evasion in an unrelated case in 1996.
"This really was a case . . . of greed, plain and simple," Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven Chanenson said at Walker's sentencing.
Indicted on 13 counts of bank fraud, money-laundering and interstate transportation of stolen property, Walker pleaded guilty to two counts of mail fraud and money-laundering, returned goods to Neiman Marcus and agreed to repay the money she bilked from CEI—though her lawyer told the sentencing judge that Walker had no money and "can't pay anything."
"I sincerely regret that I fraudulently stole money from my employer," Walker said in a written statement submitted to the court before her sentencing. "There is no explainable reason for my conduct, and I am sorry that I have embarrassed my family, myself and God. I am very remorseful for what has happened, and I pray for God's grace to help me repent for my behavior.''
But Walker had an odd way of showing remorse. While Walker was out on bail in the CEI swindle, prosecutors told the judge, she tried to defraud two other businesses of more than $25,000. Then, after pleading guilty in the CEI case, she wrote $12,679 in bad checks from closed accounts.
'Won't trust anybody'
Sawyer was so embarrassed at being taken that he didn't even tell his wife.
"She found out about it by reading it in the papers," Sawyer said. "Then, of course, I had to admit it. … I didn't even want to talk about it."
Sawyer said CEI, which went out of business "partially because of this," got a car and some money back. He said he's not sure how much money he and his partner are out, but it isn't the money that matters most.
"I had something to do, someplace to go, you know?" he said. "I don't have that anymore, you know."
Asked if he had any advice for other seniors, the former mayor sighed and furrowed the brow that once worried over how to run the City of Chicago.
"Well, I just don't want things to get to the point where they're going to be trusting people," Sawyer said. "I hate to say that, but it's something that I really have to. I just won't even trust anybody else."
In preparing these stories on elder abuse, the Chicago Sun-Times surveyed police departments in Chicago, all 266 of its incorporated suburbs and the five largest Downstate Illinois cities, as well as sheriffs in the six-county region who handle unincorporated areas and suburbs without police departments. In addition, the newspaper contacted the state's attorneys' offices in all 102 Illinois counties.
Eighty-nine state's attorneys' offices responded, or 87.3 percent. The response rate for the police surveys was 94.6 percent—241 police departments handling 263 jurisdictions.
The interviews were conducted by Sun-Times reporters Becky Beaupre, Amanda Beeler, Scott Fornek, Chris Fusco, Art Golab, Kate Grossman, Curtis Lawrence, Nancy Moffett, Tim Novak, Abdon Pallasch and Dan Rozek.
