Mayor Neri's last gift to Northlake
was the O'hareport hotel, an 18 story hotel and convention center next to the
Tri-state expressway. The locals figured it to be just another vehicle for mob
skim. Lacking a highway exit, it proved to be nearly inaccessible to anyone who
didn't already live in town and it closed in June of '72, two years after it opened. It fell into foreclosure and eventually (in 1987) if found a useful life
as a retirement home.
In December of 1971, during its
tenure as a nearly vacant hotel, a Ford Mustang was found abandoned in the O'hareport Hotel parking lot. It had been reported stolen from the repair lot at Al Piemonte
Ford a few months earlier. The car was towed to the insurance office in Freeport, Illinois
In the trunk was the naked body of a
man. He had been beaten, strangled and stabbed. A tattoo and fingerprints
eventually identified the man as Henry Rufo, a Lombard, Illinois resident who
had gone missing about a week before.
Back then, trunk music was bigger
than disco. The joke around town was that the mob built the hotel because they
were running out of parking spaces at the airport
That was the extent of the news
coverage at the time. What we didn't know was that Henry Rufo was in fact Henry
LaKey, the prime witness against Battaglia. He had opted out of witness
protection and figured that changing his name would be good enough.
Apparently, the feds had been
keeping William G. Riley, the developer, in Cleveland. Not long after Joe
Shine Amabile's death he leaves protection and shows back up, under his own
name, in Denver
If the seller owns the land free and
clear, these are straight forward things, but if there is a mortgage on the
property, it's another kettle of fish. Banks like to know who owns the property
they have lent on and put a due on sale clause in mortgage contracts.
Riley's idea is "what the banks
don't know won't hurt them." The original owner just keeps paying the
mortgage from the buyer’s payments and pockets the difference. Riley's scheme
is even better. He organizes his company (Investment Realty and Mortgage) into
separate buying and selling divisions that don't talk to each other. When
someone wants to sell a property they go to the buying division and offer it at
a price. Then the selling division looks for a buyer. When they find one the
property is first sold by contract to Income Realty and then instantly resold
to the buyer at a 25% profit.
Riley can get a commission from the
seller, gets a piece of the buyer's downpayment, makes the float between all
the buyers payments to him and his payments to the seller and puts an accounts receivable
asset on his book for his profit on the sale.
Then he capitalizes these receivables
by selling bonds.
You can see that this is a house of
cards. Eventually, the banks get wind of the sales and start enforcing the due
on sale clause.
A law suit ends proving that the
banks have every right to demand this payment or to renegotiate the mortgage
with the new buyer.
In 1980, to save his scheme, Riley spends
his bondholders investments to finance a amendment to the Colorado State
Constitution that would limit the amount
of interest the banks can charge on an assumed mortgage. The ballot initiative
fails.
Once again, the feds are looking at
his books and investors are looking for their money. In 1981 Income Realty goes
bankrupt and steps ahead of a 28 count indictment for defrauding investors out
of $6 million, Riley takes it on the lam to Santiago, Chile Florida
He was tried, found guilty, won an
appeal and pleads guilty to a related theft. In the end he did about two years
plus parole and relocated to Florida
