http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/353829,CST-NWS-rez23.articleFor more than five weeks during the brutal winter of 1997, tenants shivered without heat in a government-subsidized apartment building on Chicago's South Side.
It was just four years after the landlords -- Antoin "Tony'' Rezko and his partner Daniel Mahru -- had rehabbed the 31-unit building in Englewood with a loan from Chicago taxpayers.
Rezko and Mahru couldn't find money to get the heat back on.
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"Senator Obama does not remember having conversations with Tony Rezko (inset) about properties that he owned" — Obama’s campaign staff on Sunday.
(Sun-Times/AP)
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Staff reporter Tim Novak examines previously unreported government-funded, low-income housing deals involving Antoin "Tony" Rezko, the indicted political fund-raiser.
TODAY | Rezmar kept getting city and state funding, even as earlier projects fell into disrepair and financial troubles.
But their company, Rezmar Corp., did come up with $1,000 to give to the political campaign fund of Barack Obama, the newly elected state senator whose district included the unheated building.
Obama has been friends with Rezko for 17 years. Rezko has been a political patron to Obama and many others, helping to raise millions of dollars for them through his own contributions and by hosting fund-raisers in his home.