A Connemara businessman has become the first person to be charged with bribery in a contracts-for-bribes case that has gripped political life in Chicago and led to the arrest of three government officials, writes Sean O'Driscoll in New York.
Mr Martin McDonagh (36), from Lettermore, Co Galway and now living in Naperville, Illinois, is to appear in a Chicago court today to answer charges of lying to the FBI about bribes he allegedly made to city officials in exchange for trucking contracts.
The investigation, which has escalated over the last six months, has led to the arrests of three city officials, the resignation of the director of the mayor's budget office, and compelled the mayor to sack all 165 companies that provided dump trucks under Chicago's Hired Truck Programme.
Mr McDonagh is accused of making 381 phone calls to a city official he claimed not to know and of arranging to have his truck company placed on the Hired Truck Programme after the city put a freeze on new participants. Three city employees - Mr Angelo Torres, who ran the Hired Truck Programme; Mr Gerald Wesolowski, a senior water department official, and Mr John Boyle, an engineer for the transportation department, have been arrested in recent days for allegedly setting up trucking companies with lucrative contracts in exchange for bribes.
Mr McDonagh's trucking company made $188,203 in 16 months from four city departments that hired his trucks.
According to the indictment, Mr McDonagh told the FBI last July that he did not know a Department of Transport official he is accused of bribing.
The FBI claim Mr McDonagh wrote $19,700 in cheques to the same official between May and August of last year, written in the name of Mr McDonagh's other business, McDonagh Concrete.