Former Harvey Mayor Eric Kellogg was never charged in a sprawling federal corruption investigation that engulfed the south suburb, but members of his family keep paying the price.
On Tuesday, Kellogg’s older brother, 78-year-old Derrick Muhammad, was sentenced to six months in federal prison for shaking down towing companies while serving as a Harvey police officer. U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall also ordered him to pay $75,000 to the government.
“Losing the public’s trust in their police officers is a very problematic factor,” Kendall said. “It’s like Harvey is a little incubator of corruption cases.”
Muhammad was accused of pocketing more than $134,000 in bribes between 2011 and 2019 in exchange for steering city towing work to favored companies.
It marks the second time Muhammad has landed in federal court.
In 2020, he was sentenced to nine months behind bars for obstruction of justice. He helped to cover up the discovery of a gun left in a towed vehicle belonging to a felon.
A towing company notified Muhammad about the Uzi submachine gun and he instructed another cop to write a false police report that the gun was found in bushes behind the lot in order to keep the owner out of trouble.
At Tuesday’s sentencing Muhammad told Kendall “I was not raised like this,” saying his family was not present because he didn’t want them to see him being sentenced.
“I apologize,” he told the judge. “I am embarrassed.”
He had told another judge the exact same thing the last time he was sentenced in 2020.
Muhammad isn’t the only relative of Eric Kellogg scooped up in the FBI’s corruption investigation. The ex-mayor’s brother, Rommell Kellogg, and a cousin, Corey Johnson, were convicted of extorting money from Harvey strip club Arnie’s Idle Hour.
While Eric Kellogg was never charged in that case, prosecutors alleged the then-mayor had demanded thousands of dollars in monthly payoffs in exchange for allowing prostitution to flourish at the now-defunct club between 2013 and 2018.
The FBI’s probe burst into public view in 2019 when agents raided Harvey City Hall and the police department.
Last year, U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman sentenced 73-year-old Rommell Kellogg to just one day in prison for extorting the strip club’s owners.
In handing down that lenient sentence, Coleman told Rommell Kellogg, “If you weren’t in close proximity to [the former Harvey mayor] you might not have been caught up in this,” also noting that he wasn’t accused of violence.
Johnson got probation.
Rommell Kellogg also was a co-conspirator with Muhammad in the Harvey tow-truck bribes, but he wasn’t charged with that, prosecutors said.
In Tuesday’s case, Muhammad’s attorney Michael Gillespie argued it was unfair for prosecutors to bring the tow-company extortion charges against him because they arose from the same investigation that led to his 2020 conviction involving the submachine gun.
He said prosecutors didn’t combine the two cases against Muhammad because they wanted leverage to get him to testify against his brother, the former mayor. But Muhammad and Rommell Kellogg both refused, Gillespie said.
“There is no question they were trying to get them to cooperate against Eric Kellogg,” Gillespie said in a brief interview after the court hearing.
He described his client as an Army veteran who spent decades working as a plumber for Cook County before joining the Harvey Police Department in 2004.
Gillespie urged Kendall not to send Muhammad to prison, pointing to the one-day sentence Rommell Kellogg was given.
But prosecutors asked the judge to give Muhammad three years behind bars — lower than the possible 63 to 78 month sentence called for in federal sentencing guidelines.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Andréa Campbell told the judge that Muhammad deserved a significant sentence because he used his police position as head of Harvey’s traffic division to steer towing work to four companies in exchange for kickbacks, tarnishing his badge.
Others caught up in the FBI probe include former Harvey cop Derrick Moore, sentenced to probation for his role in the submachine gun cover-up with Muhammad; Will Wiley, a former Harvey employee sentenced to four months in prison for soliciting bribes to allow a towing company to lease a city lot; and former Dixmoor Mayor Donald Luster, who died in 2024 before he could be brought to trial on the same charges.