Indictment in Bellwood pay scandal

chicagotribune.com


Indictment in Bellwood pay scandal

Roy McCampbell accused of stealing more than $500,000 from west suburb by manipulating employment contracts

By Joseph Ryan and Joe Mahr, Chicago Tribune reporters



6:50 AM CDT, August 16, 2012



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Two years ago, Roy McCampbell said in a Tribune investigative story that he earned every penny of his $472,000 salary by holding 10 different village positions.



Today he faces indictment.



The former Bellwood village administrator, McCampbell, 57, of Schiller Park, faces eight felony counts of theft and four felony counts of official misconduct, according to court records.



The grand jury indictment accuses him of stealing more than $500,000 from the west suburban village, in part by manipulating his employment contracts and deceiving the Village Board about them.



A spokeswoman for Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez said her office would not elaborate on the charges until next week's scheduled arraignment.



McCampbell's attorney, Craig Tobin, said his client has done nothing wrong and has been made a political scapegoat by leaders of the struggling near west suburb.



A 2010 Tribune investigation revealed that McCampbell had been paid $472,255 in 2009 for holding 10 job titles — from mayoral assistant to public safety CEO — in the town of 20,000 and from cashing out a generous allowance of unused sick and vacation time. When McCampbell retired early the next year, the pay spike inflated his annual pension to about a quarter of a million dollars — then the highest of any retiree in the statewide pension system that serves municipal workers outside Chicago.



Bellwood officials said at the time that they didn't know McCampbell was making so much money and that they turned over records from their own investigation to Alvarez's office. The village filed a lawsuit against McCampbell late last year, accusing him of fraud.



McCampbell told the Tribune in 2010 that village officials signed off on all of his pay. "I didn't hold a gun to anybody's head to get this," he said.



He said he worked for his big paycheck — the capstone of a lengthy government career that stretched from being a teenage public works employee to a political player in the near west suburbs.



While little-known outside government circles, McCampbell was at the forefront of the push to bring red-light cameras to the suburbs, once touting that Bellwood's first camera made so much money it was like a "casino type of operation."



A licensed attorney, McCampbell cut his teeth in management posts for the villages of Schiller Park and Franklin Park. In the mid-1990s he served as a Leyden Township trustee and headed business services at Triton College.



In his resume provided to Bellwood, McCampbell touted his work with law enforcement, including once being named by the state's attorney to an environmental task force. In previous jobs, according to his resume, he "directed the news media to focus on issues away from the entity's negative experience."



But actions in his last position would be dogged by negative perceptions that led to embarrassing headlines over costly development gambles, the lawsuit accusing him of fraud and now a grand jury indictment alleging Class X felonies punishable by up to 30 years in prison.



Once the state OK'd red-light cameras in Chicago, McCampbell and other Bellwood officials began pushing for the state to allow suburbs to install them, which the General Assembly did in 2006.



Bellwood quickly installed one at an intersection that leads to an entrance ramp for the Eisenhower Expressway. McCampbell then boasted at an Illinois Municipal League seminar that the camera's fines raised $60,000 to $70,000 a month, calling the take a "guaranteed amount of money" and fueling complaints that the cameras were meant merely to shake down motorists.



By then, McCampbell's pay had skyrocketed in the village. In 2002 he made $144,000, roughly in the range of what many suburban village managers made. By 2009 his compensation soared as he added new job titles: comptroller, public safety CEO, finance director, corporation counsel, budget director, human resources director, mayoral assistant, property commission director and development corporation chief administrative officer.



His contracts ensured that he was given a car and gas paid for by taxpayers, who also covered his pension contributions and premiums for health and life insurance.



The sparse grand jury indictment, filed Aug. 9, accuses McCampbell of creating a "false impression" to the Village Board by orally misstating the salary increases in his contracts.



That mirrors allegations McCampbell faces in the village's lengthy lawsuit, which accuses him of secretly inflating his salary while ruining the village's finances.



Court records show that McCampbell was not arrested and is set to appear in court Tuesday. In the meantime, as a government retiree, he is set to collect about $237,000 in pension payments this year, though his pension could be slashed if he is convicted of a crime related to his work in Bellwood.



McCampbell's attorney accused Alvarez of being "politically motivated" in charging his client in an effort to advance Bellwood's lawsuit.



"We have no doubts that when the facts come out he will be vindicated," Tobin said. "He was a good and faithful public servant."



jbryan@tribune.com



jmahr@tribune.com



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