A former Chicago Housing Authority director and the president of a local construction company face charges for allegedly paying and receiving bribes in exchange for construction work with the city.
Ryan Ross, a former senior director of asset management for CHA, is accused of taking $421,000 in kickbacks from Vanessa Rhodes, president of Bell’s Better Buildings, Inc., a Chicago company operating as Twenty Eleven Construction, Inc., according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois.
The kickbacks were allegedly in exchange for sending the company more than $4.8 million in construction and renovation work at CHA properties between 2023 and 2024, according to prosecutors.
Ross, a 50-year-old Bolingbrook resident, and Rhodes, a 47-year-old Chicago resident, both face eight counts of honest services fraud, prosecutors said. Each is punishable by up to 20 years in federal prison.
Rhodes declined to comment Tuesday when reached by phone. Ross could not immediately be reached for comment.
“They hijacked a program meant to repair and preserve Chicago’s already scarce public housing, diverting public funds to enrich themselves,” CHA inspector general Kathryn Richards said in a statement.
Ross was terminated from the city department in September 2024 for breaking agency procedures, including one that cost the CHA over $19,000 in “unnecessary expenses” for construction work, according to public records. It came amid a string of departures that started August 2024.
Department of Housing and Urban Development officials said the two “corrupted the fair and competitive contracting process and undermined the confidence in the integrity of HUD-funded programs.”