For three years, the Chicago Board of Education has been trying to collect more than $360,000 from a parking company co-owned by former Cook County Assessor Joseph Berrios’ son-in-law James T. Weiss, who is under federal indictment for bribery on an unrelated matter.
According to Chicago Public Schools officials, Weiss and his company, Blk & Wht Valet, owed CPS that much for using school lots, mostly near Wrigley Field, for paid parking.
After dumping Weiss, the school system made a deal with another company, Premium 1 Parking, that wanted to park cars on those school lots. But that company also fell behind on its payments and was fired last year.
Then, earlier this year, CPS turned to yet another parking company, a new business owned by Carmen A. Rossi, a Chicago nightclub owner who has raised money for Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s re-election campaign.
Rossi’s Chicago Parking Solutions got a two-year contract to park cars at more than a dozen schools even though the school system said the bid it put in wasn’t as good as one from SP+, a 93-year-old national company formerly known as Standard Parking that has parking contracts at Millennium Park and United Center.
A Board of Ed evaluation committee gave Rossi’s bid a higher score than offers from others that wanted the job. including the city’s parking meter operator, LAZ Parking, and EZ Parking, which handled valet parking for Rush Street restaurants.
Chicago Parking Solutions incorporated the day before the Board of Ed sought bids for the parking contract in July 2021. Rossi’s bid said his partners from Chicago Valet Services had “30 years of combined” experience parking cars and managing lots.
A few months before Rossi put in his bid, Nathan Fakhouri was trying to team up with Premium 1, which is owned by his friend Dylan Cirkic. Premium 1 got the parking deal in October 2020 after the school system sued Blk & Wht Valet, owned by Weiss and restaurateur Iman Bambooyani.
Now, Fakhouri is Rossi’s partner in the school parking deal.
CPS disqualified one of Rossi’s competitors for failing to disclose connections to Cirkic.
Rossi’s bid didn’t mention that Fakhouri had tried a few months earlier to partner with Cirkic when Premium 1 was having trouble paying the schools, according to emails Cirkic provided to the Chicago Sun-Times.
“Nathan Fakhouri was a good friend of mine,” Cirkic says. “Him and his partner Jon Moscovitch said they would help me pay my bills, but they wanted to become a partner.
“I know Carmen Rossi longer than Nathan Fakhouri,” he says. “I used to valet his cars” for his nightclub customers.
“Nathan said he was going to open a company, and ‘Tell me the right numbers to bid,’ ” Cirkic says. “Nathan said, ‘We can’t cut you in on anything.’ At the end of the day, I got screwed.”
Records show Rossi has a deal with a cellphone app company in New Orleans to collect money from people who park at the schools. Cirkic used the same company.
The schools contract allows Rossi to set his own prices for customers of the school lots, which mainly are near Wrigley Field, the United Center and Guaranteed Rate Field. Rossi is required to pay the schools a total of $764,000 — $31,820 a month — to use the lots on 13 properties: Alcott, Blaine, Brennemann, Disney Magnet, Goudy, Greeley, Hawthorne, InterAmerican Magnet, McClellan and Suder Montessori elementary schools, Lake View and Lincoln Park high schools and an administrative lot at 110 N. Paulina St.
Rossi’s company has made four payments to the school system since June, totaling $135,062, according to Michael Forde, his lawyer.
“He’s a small minority owner who’s not running the business day to day,” Forde says.
He says Rossi doesn’t know why his company got the contract and that Rossi never discussed the contract with Lightfoot.
Schools spokeswoman Mary Fergus says his company “was chosen through a competitive and standard CPS procurement process.”
Lightfoot spokesperson Kate Lefurgy says: “The mayor had no knowledge or involvement in any such procurement by the Board of Ed. To be clear, campaign contributions do not influence government policy or actions in this administration.”
For more than a decade, Chicago schools have leased parking lots during off-hours to bring in money. At one point, Blk & Wht Valet had deals to use 12 lots.
Weiss, that company’s co-owner, is a grandson of Edward Murray, deputy city treasurer under Mayor Richard M. Daley. In court papers in the Board of Ed’s ongoing lawsuit, Weiss revealed another company had worked with Blk & Wht: Fun Times II, owned by Chicago firefighter Jack Hynes, a longtime ally of indicted former Illinois House Speaker Michael J. Madigan.
Weiss and Hynes are friends of Andrew Madigan, the former speaker’s son, and served on the board of a political action committee tied to the former speaker. Weiss is married to former state Rep. Toni Berrios, whose father Joe Berrios also formerly chaired the Cook County Democratic Party.
The Sun-Times reported in August 2018 that Blk & Wht had been paying a convicted child sex offender to park cars for Cubs fans at Inter-American. The company said the employee hadn’t disclosed his sexual assault conviction. The Board of Ed didn’t require Blk & Wht to do criminal background checks on employees.
Also in August 2018, Weiss formed a company, Collage LLC, seeking to license sweepstakes machines — knockoffs of video poker machines that sidestep video gambling prohibitions. Weiss hired state Rep. Luis Arroyo to lobby to legalize the machines.
Blk & Wht stopped paying the schools in April 2019 — months before Arroyo was charged with bribing state Sen. Terry Link to back sweepstakes legislation — but kept parking cars on those lots.
Federal agents raided Weiss’ office on Nov. 13, 2019. Within a week, Weiss left a voicemail with school officials saying Blk & Wht had ceased operations, unable to pay its rent for the school lots, court records show.
But Weiss continued to use some school lots, according to the suit the Board of Ed filed against him, Bambooyani and their company in January 2020 to collect more than $366,000. In Blk & Wht’s final contracts with the schools, the company promised to pay a total of $2.1 million.
Indicted in October 2020, Weiss is accused of being part of a bribery scheme involving Arroyo and Link. Weiss, 43, is fighting the charges.
Arroyo and Link pleaded guilty. Arroyo has been sentenced to 57 months in prison.
After suing Blk & Wht, the Board of Ed got bids from nine companies, including LAZ Parking, SP+ and a company owned by a Bambooyani relative.
Demand for parking vanished during the COVID-19 shutdown. But the schools hired Premium 1 even though Cirkic owed City Hall more than $45,000 for valet-parking taxes at downtown lots and fees, including fees for bouncing two checks.
City Hall cited those debts in refusing to renew Cirkic’s licenses. Cirkic still owes $22,465.82.
After Cirkic fell behind in paying the schools and bounced three checks, the Board of Ed fired his company on June 17, 2021, but won’t say how much he owes. Cirkic says he owes nothing.
Rossi, a lawyer and registered lobbyist at City Hall, has given $31,000 to Lightfoot’s campaign fund through his businesses. Soon after the mayor was elected, he threw her a fundraiser, selling tickets for $250 to $5,000.
He also had given $11,000 to then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who put Rossi on the Commission on Chicago Landmarks.
The son of a Will County judge and former mayor of Frankfort, Rossi operates bars on the North Side and holds the liquor license for Lollapalooza.
The Sun-Times reported last month that the Chicago Police Department and City Hall have shut down businesses on the South Side and the West Side over violence but gone easy on clout-heavy bars downtown — including Rossi’s, after shootings outside his bars Joy District and Liqrbox.
The Sun-Times also reported that Ken Meyer, Lightfoot’s commissioner of business affairs and consumer protection, had hosted a party at Joy District.
When Rossi landed the school parking contract in February, he emailed Meyer on March 7: “Our leases have commenced, but we aren’t able to start because we are without the licenses. In addition to getting the license applications, my hope is to be able to expedite the issuance of the licenses themselves since there are so many locations ready to operate.”
It’s unclear whether Meyer took any action.
In April, a school official chastised Rossi’s company for charging for parking at Hawthorne Elementary in Lake View before it had city permits.
“Chicago Parking shouldn’t be charging for use until the official start date, whenever that might be per the city,” Ann Yi wrote to Rossi’s partners on April 6.
Yi was one of three schools officials who evaluated the parking bids from six companies.
SP+ got the highest marks. The panel said the “large and stable company” submitted the “most detailed bid,” which included revenue-sharing with each school rather than a flat monthly fee. SP+ declined to comment.
Rossi was second, with reviewers saying his company appeared “less stable” but managed “a significant number of locations.”
But Chicago Parking Solutions got the contract because “SP+ submitted an all or nothing proposal and did not want to negotiate their terms” to guarantee a steady monthly payment, according to a school procurement official’s memo.
SP+ also didn’t want to park cars at three schools near Sox park or the United Center, which are surrounded by parking lots.
