A former south suburban official was sentenced to 18 months of probation Wednesday for his role in a scheme to pay bribes to get lucrative red-light cameras installed in Oak Lawn.
In sentencing John O’Sullivan, 57, a onetime Worth Township supervisor and state lawmaker, U.S. District Judge LaShonda Hunt said even low-level corruption erodes the public’s faith in government and leads to the assumption “we act in our own self-interests, not in the interest of constituents.”
“This pay-to-play mentality really does have to end,” Hunt said. “This is your community, Mr. O’Sullivan … The point was to get additional red-light cameras approved in your town, and you would have profited from that — but not necessarily the people of Oak Lawn.”
The judge did, however, note that O’Sullivan has led an otherwise honorable life, calling his crime “one minor blip in your entire story.”
O’Sullivan pleaded guilty more than four years ago to conspiring with longtime political operative Patrick Doherty and an executive representing red-light camera company SafeSpeed LLC to pay bribes in exchange for the official support of an Oak Lawn trustee to put the ticketing cameras at additional intersections.
At the time, O’Sullivan moonlighted as a paid “sales consultant” for SafeSpeed, earning commissions by helping the company expand in the west and southwest suburbs.
The SafeSpeed executive, Omar Maani, was secretly cooperating with federal investigators and recorded calls and meetings between the three men for the FBI. Maani was granted a deferred prosecution agreement with prosecutors and testified earlier this year in the trial of state Sen. Emil Jones III, who is accused of agreeing to take bribes in exchange for his help in the legislature.
O’Sullivan, meanwhile, cooperated immediately after being approached by the FBI and testified before a federal grand jury, helping secure Doherty’s conviction, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Tiffany Ardam.
Doherty was sentenced in 2023 to more than five years in prison.
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In asking to spare O’Sullivan from prison, Ardam said he also provided information against other individuals, some of whom are still under investigation, as well as other “matters important to the government.”
Before the sentence was handed down, O’Sullivan stood at the lectern and read a two-page statement to the court, his voice breaking into sobs at times as he apologized to his family and community for the harm he’d caused.
“Several years ago I made a terrible mistake,” he said. “It was selfish and foolish and it was wrong, and it will have repercussions for the rest of my life.”
O’Sullivan’s attorney, Dan Collins, told the judge that his client has had the case hanging over his head for more than six years and suffered public embarrassment as well as the stigma of a felony conviction. He currently works as an unarmed security guard and helps take care of a son with special medical needs.
“It’s a sad case, judge. John is otherwise a good man,” Collins said.
O’Sullivan’s background includes many stops in Cook County politics, most recently Worth Township, which was a political stronghold for longtime House Speaker Michael Madigan.
O’Sullivan was a staffer of then-Cook County Commissioner Ed Moody, long a top member of Madigan’s vaunted political army who also was briefly Cook County recorder of deeds. According to testimony in Madigan’s recent criminal trial, Moody was among a handful of ComEd subcontractors who were secretly paid more than $1.3 million by the utility in exchange for Madigan’s support for its legislation.
O’Sullivan served a brief stint as an appointed state House member and voted as a lame duck in January 2011 for a 67% increase in the income tax rate driven by Madigan.
Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle later put O’Sullivan on the county payroll as an $85,000-a-year regional superintendent at the Cook County Forest Preserve District. But O’Sullivan only worked for the forest preserve for a short time before resigning over what officials said were résumé discrepancies.
According to federal prosecutors, O’Sullivan conspired with Doherty and Maani in 2017 to get a job for the son of an Oak Lawn trustee in a bid to get new red-light cameras installed there.
In a recorded phone call on May 23, 2017, Doherty told Maani that the trustee was “looking for a job for his kid,” to which Maani asked whether he would want to be a violations reviewer for SafeSpeed, according to Maani’s deferred prosecution agreement, which offered the most detailed version of the alleged scheme.
“I don’t know,” Doherty allegedly replied. “I think he’s looking to make as much money as he can because he’s going to college. … I pay him out of my LLC. Something like that. I don’t know. Something for him to do.”
Two days later, Doherty told O’Sullivan in another recorded call that he would pay the teenager through his company and have the teenager “research stuff for the LLC,” court records show.
“Just make sure we get the, make sure we get the (expletive) thing, the (red-light camera) contract,” Doherty told O’Sullivan on the call.
Eventually, it was decided that payments were going to be doled out to the relative in $500 installments over a period of eight weeks, according to the indictment filed against Doherty in February 2020.
The FBI later recorded Doherty telling the trustee’s son, “It’s not like I need ya,” but that he’d pay the money anyway, according to the Doherty indictment. Doherty then cut the relative a $500 check for the first installment, the indictment alleged.
According to prosecutors, the trustee’s son was paid only the one installment, and SafeSpeed was never rewarded additional business as a result of the scheme.
In his sentencing filing, Collins wrote that the teenager testified before the grand jury and said he found the work assigned by Doherty to be “boring.”
“I spent an hour or two on the project and never finished it,” the teen testified, according to Collins’ memo. “I did not enjoy the work, so I did not ask for any more projects.”
The trustee was never charged.
Maani’s cooperation also led to charges against former state Sen. Martin Sandoval, a Chicago Democrat who pleaded guilty last year to taking at least $70,000 in government-supplied cash from Maani in return for acting as SafeSpeed’s “protector” in the state Senate. Sandoval was cooperating with prosecutors when he died in December 2020 of a COVID-19-related illness.
A jury in April deadlocked on all counts against Jones, the state senator, and a retrial is set for early next year.
SafeSpeed, meanwhile, has denied any wrongdoing. The company also has said Doherty and Maani were acting without its knowledge.
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