Bensenville quietly has hired two private security consultants after reports of vandalism and other incidents targeting Village President John Geils, which officials attribute to their staunch opposition to the expansion of O’Hare International Airport.
In a closed executive session last month, the Village Board authorized the hiring of the private firms for an undisclosed amount. The firms were asked to investigate the incidents, which go back to 2001, and recommend security improvements at Geils’ home and business and at the homes of trustees.
The decision was made after Geils’ home was vandalized in August. According to police reports, vandals trashed the windows of the family’s 1968 Mustang with a tire iron and spray-painted epithets on a garage wall.
It was the latest in a string of incidents, including anonymous phone threats, that has plagued Geils and his family, according to police reports filed by Geils and his relatives and interviews with him and other village officials.
“I believe it’s an intimidation campaign against all of us who feel the airport expansion is a boondoggle,” Geils said.
“I’ve had bricks thrown through my windows at home and at my business,” he said. “I’ve had two cars stolen. … I’ve had numerous death threats. My family has had numerous death threats. We’ve had graffiti, disinformation campaigns; it goes on and on and on.”
Geils, whose volatile 20-year tenure as village president has at times left him at odds with the Police Department and other political foes, acknowledges that he has no evidence indicating the incidents are connected to his strident opposition to the $15-billion airport plan.
Supporters of the airport expansion project say that Geils’ ire is misguided and that their opposition to him is political–not personal.
“No one involved in any way with this project would condone any practice that would sink to that level,” said Roderick Drew, spokesman for Chicago’s O’Hare Modernization Project. “From our perspective there is no need. We are confident this project is going forward.”
Nothing in police reports suggests the various incidents are related. In one 2001 burglary, in which Geils’ rear glass door was shattered, a 19-year-old suspect told police he was trying to score some quick cash to feed a heroin addition.
Police also investigated the possibility that the latest incident of car vandalism was the work of someone who knows the family.
Still, Bensenville trustees are concerned enough to spend taxpayer money to investigate the incidents and possibly to beef up security at their own homes.
Citing the need to keep the investigation secret, village attorney Gerald Gorski declined to say how much the city is paying the two firms, run by retired Evanston Police Cmdr. Gerald Brandt and former FBI agent Roy Lane, who once headed the FBI’s public corruption squad in Chicago.
“The taxpayers will be appraised of the costs in full when the time comes, but we did this in executive session for a reason,” Gorski said.
“The less we see about it in the press, the better,” Trustee John Adamowski said, adding: “We have given the investigators complete latitude to get to the bottom of this.”
Bensenville and the City of Chicago have been at odds for decades over the city’s efforts to expand O’Hare. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and other expansion supporters say the plan–the most complex and expensive airport project in U.S. history–is necessary to ensure healthy commerce in Chicago and the region.
But several suburbs that could be swallowed by it, including Bensenville and Elk Grove Village, argue that it is awash in insider contracts, underestimated costs and overblown claims. They also say they are fighting for their existence. Bensenville alone could lose 500 homes and 100 businesses under the project’s bulldozers.
Lawsuits filed by expansion opponents already have delayed the project and pose legal threats to its completion.
A consultant’s report prepared for the village and other expansion opponents in March accused Daley and his allies of a “direct assault” on Geils and others by supporting opposition candidates in suburban elections–an assertion Daley has denied.
———-
dkidwell@tribune.com
