Ex-McCook police chief gets 27 months in prison for extorting business owners with mayor
The former police chief of west suburban McCook was sentenced to more than two years in federal prison Wednesday for conspiring with the town’s then-mayor to extort two business owners out of tens of thousands of dollars, a scheme the judge called breathtaking in its depth of corruption.
Mario DePasquale, 50, pleaded guilty last year to one count of conspiracy to commit extortion, admitting he helped shake down the victims of a total of about $85,000 over five years, often at meetings while he was wearing his gun and badge.
“The idea of a police chief extorting money from local businesses is just — I’d like to think that it was just not done, at least not in this country in the 21st century,” U.S. District Judge Elaine Bucklo said in handing down the 27-month prison term. “It just takes my breath away to think that this is happening right now, or was, in the suburbs of Chicago.”
In a statement to the court, DePasquale said he was a good man who fell in with a corrupt crowd, including Jeff Tobolski, and that he still could not wrap his head around “who that person was, what he was doing or why he was doing it.”
“I became surrounded by and ultimately involved with some very bad people,” DePasquale said. “These were people without morals, who were ethically bankrupt. I wish I had an answer.”
But one of DePasquale’s extortion victims, a Greek immigrant who ran the Pub at the Max, one of McCook’s signature entertainment venues, testified in court that DePasquale could have simply refused to be Tobolski’s bag man.
Instead, the town’s police chief showed up after every big event, demanding $1,500 in cash — $1,000 for the mayor and $500 for him — regardless of whether there was a profit or not, the victim said.
“If someone told me (I’d have to do that), I say, ‘Here’s my star, here’s my gun and have a good day,” the man, who asked to remain anonymous, told the judge in a thick accent.
In July 2018, after the victim came up short with a payment, DePasquale warned him that the boss would not be happy, according to prosecutors. The man said his license was revoked by the city the next day, putting him out of business.
“That was one of the worst days I have in my life,” the victim said.
DePasquale was charged more than three years ago as part of a sprawling federal corruption probe that also ensnared Tobolski as well as a host of other suburban mayors and Democratic power players.
Tobolski, who at the time doubled as a Cook County commissioner, pleaded guilty in September 2020 to participating in the extortion schemes with DePasquale and has been cooperating with the government while awaiting sentencing.
In asking for probation, DePasquale’s attorney, Jonathan Minkus, said his client had a terrible “lapse of judgment” when, shortly after Tobolski made him chief of police in 2013, he decided to go along with the corrupt scheme of the mayor, whom Minkus described as “one of the most vile and corrupt people that one could possibly imagine.”
Minkus said Tobolski “created in the western suburbs an almost unfathomable, Wild West-like atmosphere, where everybody was fair game for them.” And the mayor made it clear to DePasquale from the get-go that if he refused to go along, he’d lose his job, Minkus said.
Minkus said DePasquale “hated himself” for what he was doing but lacked thfurthered e moral compass at the time to say, “I’m not going to do this. I’d rather bag groceries than be Jeff Tobolski’s bag man.”
But Assistant U.S. Attorney Tiffany Ardam argued for a significant prison term of up to about four years, saying DePasquale not only damaged the lives of his victims, he betrayed his oath to protect and serve and continued to perpetuate the state’s reputation for public corruption.
A light sentence, Ardam said, would “perpetuate the narrative that corruption is just a part of the landscape and people just have to accept it because there is no alternative.”
Ardam also read a statement to the court from the scheme’s other victim, who wrote he was summoned to DePasquale’s office at police headquarters shortly after purchasing a development business in McCook in 2015.
DePasquale, while in uniform with his gun on his hip, told him he’d have to keep making $1,000 monthly payments to the mayor like the previous owner, or it would “not go well” for him, the victim stated.
“I left his office that day in disbelief and overcome with fear,” the letter read. He wound up making the payments until 2019, when the federal investigation went public with a series of raids in McCook and surrounding suburbs.
In handing down the sentence, Bucklo said she took issue with DePasquale trying to lay so much blame at the mayor’s feet.
“He is corrupt? Well, you don’t join the corruption, you go and report it,” the judge said. “This didn’t happen once or twice. It went on for years. It ruined the lives of other people …That kind of corruption, it corrupts society, it corrupts everything that we hold to be true and good in this country.”
DePasquale, who became McCook’s police chief in 2013, admitted in his 20-page plea agreement with prosecutors that he conspired with Tobolski to extort a total of $29,700 from the restaurant owner between 2016 and 2018. DePasquale also told the restaurant owner that he had to donate to Tobolski’s political campaign funds, which the victim did on multiple occasions.
DePasquale also admitted to the second extortion scheme involving the owner of the development business, identified as Individual B. According to the plea, Individual B paid a total of about $55,000 to DePasquale from 2015 to 2019.
Over the years, DePasquale also asked Individual B for payments for fundraisers and campaigns and “several free items” from the company, which totaled about $1,100 in value, according to the plea.
In his plea agreement, Tobolski admitted that he extorted or collected bribes from at least three other people by abusing his official position as mayor or county commissioner. The amount of bribes he collected totaled at least $250,000, though the plea does not spell out how many victims were involved.
A sentencing date in Tobolski’s case has not been set.