Copyright Chicago Sun-Times
Former Cook County Commissioner Jeff Tobolski, who became a central figure in a corruption probe that roiled suburban Chicago and was due to report to prison early next year, has died, his attorney confirmed for the Chicago Sun-Times. Tobolski, 61, died Sunday morning after a short illness, attorney James Vanzant said. Tobolski was due to begin serving a four-year prison sentence Jan. 16. U.S. District Chief Judge Virginia Kendall handed down that sentence in August, five years after Tobolski pleaded guilty to an extortion conspiracy. Tobolski also once served as mayor of southwest suburban McCook while serving as commissioner. Members of his family declined to comment. Kendall recently agreed to delay Tobolski’s surrender date until January after Tobolski’s lawyers said he’d been hospitalized Oct. 7. They said he had issues related to his heart and lungs. Doctors identified a heart rhythm disorder known as atrial fibrillation and found a “suspicious spot on his pancreas,” they explained. The former politician remained in the hospital until Oct. 15, but he returned by ambulance five days later and was diagnosed with pneumonia. He was again released Oct. 25, they said, and he had medical procedures scheduled through Dec. 15. Tobolski took over as mayor of McCook in 2007 after the death of his father. He won election to the Cook County Board in 2010. He found himself at the center of a swirling corruption probe in 2019. FBI agents raided several locations that included his home and McCook’s village hall. Prosecutors leveled charges against him in August 2020. He soon admitted accepting more than $250,000 through a series of bribery and extortion schemes. But he also agreed to cooperate with the feds and disappeared from public life until his sentencing. Tobolski told investigators “everything he knew and answered every single question they had,” attorney David Sterba told the judge in August. Tobolski worked with them from October 2019 until May 2022 and helped make seven secret recordings, Sterba said. A prosecutor noted that Tobolski helped build a case against his former chief of staff, Patrick Doherty, and former McCook Police Chief Mario DePasquale. Doherty admitted to multiple corruption schemes and was sentenced to more than four years in prison. He’s since been released. DePasquale was sentenced to more than two years in prison for helping Tobolski extort a McCook restaurant owner. As part of the sentencing process earlier this year, Tobolski’s wife and daughter wrote letters to Kendall. They described in blunt and honest terms how politics had transformed him. Tobolski’s daughter said she “loathed” and “despised” him while he held public office. His wife derided people who became “nauseatingly deferential” to him and laughed “uproariously” at his jokes that she didn’t find funny. “I had lost him to politics rather than the cliche ‘other woman,’” she wrote. “I rarely saw him and when I did he was often hungover and grumpy. He was no longer the Jeff I knew.” But Tobolski’s daughter said he wound up apologizing to her. He promised to do the right thing and atone for the damage he’d done to their family. “This man managed to dissolve years of built up hatred for him in my heart by proving almost every single day that he meant it when he said he would change, that he really was unaware of how far he had fallen,” his daughter wrote. “The most shocking part? I actually believe him now.”
