A man who once worked for the Cook County assessor’s office has become the latest person to avoid prison after being caught up in a bribery scandal — but only after he spent eight years helping the feds and recording hundreds of conversations, according to his lawyers.
U.S. District Judge John Kness on Thursday sentenced Lavdim Memisovski to 18 months of probation. He did so after prosecutors said Memisovski’s assistance had been “integral” to securing several felony convictions tied to wrongdoing in the assessor’s office.
Still, the judge told Memisovski that “public corruption is … endemic in this district. … It occurs because of individuals like you who hold positions of authority and abuse those positions of authority. Everybody else who didn’t have an ‘in’ had to pay their taxes.”
The conduct generally dates back to the tenure of former Cook County Assessor Joseph Berrios, who has not been accused by the feds of wrongdoing.
“I want to apologize to the court for everything that I did. I take full responsibility,” Memisovski said through tears Thursday. “I’ve worked tirelessly to get out of this. It’s just something that I have to deal with.”
Thursday’s sentencing comes almost exactly four years after Memisovski pleaded guilty to a conspiracy and admitted he’d helped lower taxes on certain Cook County properties by at least $1 million in exchange for personal benefits, like home improvements.
He did so by lowering property assessments, which are a key factor in calculating property tax bills.
“[Memisovski’s] scheme gave honest taxpayers good reason to doubt the system: The well-off and connected, who could help fund [Memisovski’s] lifestyle, got an inside track at the Assessor’s Office,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Rothblatt wrote in a recent court memo.
Still, defense attorney Lisa Wood argued that the assessor’s office “had a culture of top-down corruption since long before Mr. Memisovski’s offenses.” She said Memisovski agreed to cooperate with the FBI the day he was approached in July 2018, “wiring up that very day.”
She said he recorded 97 meetings and more than 400 phone calls, even recording armed individuals who “claimed to have connections to organized crime.” His cooperation even led to rifts in his family as he “corroborated the criminal conduct of his own cousin, Lumni Likovski,” she wrote in a separate memo.
Many of the people he helped prosecute wound up avoiding prison, though. The feds ultimately dropped the charges against Likovski after a co-defendant, Robert Mitziga, was acquitted at trial. Another co-defendant in that case, Basilio Clausen, got three years of probation.
Another former assessor’s office employee, Francisco Perez, got two years of probation. So did John Bodendorfer, who worked for a construction company owned by another player in the scheme.
But Kness in 2024 gave a five-year prison sentence to Alex Nitchoff, who owned the construction company where Bodendorfer worked.
Rothblatt noted that, unlike Memisovski, “Nitchoff did not cooperate with law enforcement officials,” and the benefit to his companies “was substantial.”