NWI Federal Indictments Next Week

The rumor currently in Northwest Indiana is that there are going to be a number of surprise, or maybe not so surprising, indictments come out of the current ongoing federal inquiry next week, the week of October 1.

The individuals who are to be indicted on corruption charges are: Will Smith, Willy Harris, and Roosevelt Powell.  The reality is that these indictments are more than just the usual rumors but rather are in the neighborhood of pretty good probability since at least one of the individuals is aware of the upcoming indictment against him.

For those of you who are not aware of these NWI movers and shakers, Will Smith represents Gary on the Lake County Council, Willy Harris has been the Gary shenanigans lawyer of renown, and to tie it all together Roosevelt Powell is the head of SRI the company that pocketed, on a sole-source basis, millions of dollars selling "tax delinquent" and "unwanted" properties in Lake County under contract from the Commissioners and/or Council of Lake County Government.  The question is who else is going to be snared with these people and how close it comes to others in Gary's city government?

Now when the Feds are getting into the Lake County Government beehive all kinds of stings are going to come out and hopefully we the citizens of Lake County will be left with mostly the honey.  May the cleanup continue, i.e. the indictments.

Comments

[nwi]

I was under the belief that Roosevelt Powell operated U.S. Research Consultants Inc. I thought that they went after county real estate tax delinquencies prior to tax sales, as well as other types of unpaid county taxes. I thought he was acting like a collection agency for the county. Not hard to see the potential for abuse in allowing someone to negotiate tax settlements and payment plans, however. Did he also have something to do with SRI, which I thought was owned by Jim Hughes and based out of Indianapolis?
Didn't the same cast of characters attempt to remove SRI from the auctions? I thought I remember that a few years ago they suddenly realized that they had given an outside firm (SRI) a lucrative contract. This, of course, led them to suspend the sales in order to see if they had a "qualified" vendor closer to home. The re-assessment hit at that time and they stopped the auctions, thus halting their search for (creation of?) a "qualified" vendor.