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CAT Tracks for August 28, 2011
CHARLES KOEN & ALEX BROOKS SENTENCED |
From the Southern Illinoisan...
Cairo man gets 12-year sentence
The Southern Staff
Cairo resident Charles Koen was sentenced in Cook County late last week to 12 years in prison for theft and forgery. Codefendant. Alex Brooks, 82, pleaded guilty to one count of forgery and was sentenced by Judge Walsh to two years IDOC.
Koen was convicted in an earlier jury trial, according to the Illinois attorney general's office, with the theft charge alleging he stole more than $100,000.
The charges stem from a theft scheme in which Brooks and Koen deeded a building owned by the United Way of Harvey - a southern Chicago suburb - to a Cairo-based entity controlled by Koen named United Front.
The basis of the theft count is that through a fraud scheme he stole a building that belonged to United Way of Harvey and had it conveyed to a corporation he controlled named United Front. Koen and United Front collected rent from the tenants for the months of September 2004 through March 2005.
Koen was convicted in federal court in 1991 of arson, mail fraud and embezzlement and sentenced to prison. Those charges arose from his burning down a building he owned in Cairo shortly after he increased his fire insurance coverage on it, according to the attorney general's office.
