Fees that sparked theft charges against Frank Rousseau have been paid since 1986, when he was appointed Will County’s insurance broker, the former Bolingbrook businessman testified Tuesday.
“Frankie, take care of it,” were the marching orders Rousseau said he got from county officials eager to escape the responsibility of setting up an insurance department.
“They had one (insurance) employee for 600 employees,” he said.
Rousseau said that was when he began providing administrative services for a fee.
During 100 minutes of testimony in the fifth day of his trial in Will County Circuit Court on charges that he swindled the county out of $140,000, Rousseau denied that he intentionally misled officials on his charges.
“They were written, in a proposal,” Rousseau said in the crisp, confident style that for a decade helped sell insurance to government agencies and answered critics who said he built his business on political connections.
Rousseau was indicted in May on charges that he padded bills from the Chicago insurance firm of Martin Boyer Inc.
Rousseau contends that the fees county officials said should not have gone to him were part of a longstanding arrangement that went back to his earliest days as the county’s insurance broker.
Rousseau said that he was signed up as the county’s broker at a time when the insurance business had been apportioned among several favorite insurance agents and that he quickly hired Martin Boyer to administer claims against a self-funded liability program.
“Things were difficult in those days because the county had no records,” Rousseau said.
He added Martin Boyer to process liability and, later, worker’s compensation claims.
From that day on, the two firms shared the administrative fees, Boyer for processing claims and Rousseau for supervision, he said.
Those services, Rousseau said, were different from the free risk-management help he promised at a tape-recorded bidding session with the county’s Insurance and Personnel Committee.
Prosecutors said those tapes show that Rousseau bilked the county by secretly pocketing money for services he promised to provide free.
Rousseau said that what he pledged to give away was the analysis and evaluation of the county’s high-risk areas that he had been supplying to the county insurance department.
When the county decided in 1994 to put out for bid the brokerage services Rousseau had supplied for eight years, the broker said he expected stiff competition from large firms.
Rousseau said that to blunt the firms’ expected offers of bundled services, he put together a “strategic team” made up of insurance wholesaler Benchmark, himself and Martin Boyer.
He was asked by county officials about his 10 percent broker’s commission, but Rousseau insisted that as for how the three entities shared other aspects of the job, he never said and nobody asked.
The fee was put in writing, but the relationship between the county and the three insurance entities was never drafted into a contract.
Rousseau said that he never padded bills or deceived officials.
“I feel there has been a multimillion-dollar savings to the county in the years I handled the programs,” Rousseau said.
