By HANNAH MEISEL
Capitol News Illinois
[email protected]

CHICAGO — By the time FBI agents came knocking at Omar Maani’s door on a January morning in 2018, the red-light camera entrepreneur had spent at least the last decade and a half getting ahead in business by bribing public officials. 

Maani, who quickly agreed to become a cooperating witness, told a federal jury this week that he’d been doing business that way since he was “in my early 20s.” And as an FBI mole, the feds needed Maani to keep it up as he secretly recorded “dozens and dozens and dozens” of people over the next 18 months.

It wasn’t until the tail end of his cooperation that Maani’s undercover camera turned to State Sen. Emil Jones III. At the time in mid-2019, the Chicago Democrat had recently marked 10 years in the General Assembly as a relative “backbencher” in Springfield parlance — the inverse of his high-profile father, former Senate President Emil Jones Jr.

Even Jones was surprised to learn that legislation he’d filed for the past few years calling for statewide audits and studies of red-light camera systems kept Maani up at night, joking to his dinner companion at a suburban steakhouse: “Really? Little old me? Come on.” But Maani explained that he felt those studies could easily be misconstrued, leading to bans that would hurt his industry and his livelihood as the co-founder of Chicago-based red-light camera company SafeSpeed.

After cajoling Jones to come up with a fundraising goal for Maani — usually an easy sell for those Maani was used to bribing — the senator instead asked for something surprising.

“But most importantly, I have an intern working in my office,” Jones said, digging into his wagyu filet at Steak 48 during a dinner with Maani in July 2019. “And I’m trying to find him another job, another part time job.”

After watching back that portion of the secretly recorded dinner in a Chicago federal courtroom Thursday, Maani told the jury that Jones’ request to hire his intern, Christopher Katz, “caught me off guard a little bit.” But at the FBI’s direction, Maani went with it, eventually hiring Katz for $15 an hour in August 2019, even though he never received any work assignments for the 20-hour-per-week gig.

Katz ended up getting paid $1,800 directly from Maani and his real estate development company, Persidio Capital. And Jones never ended up receiving the $5,000 campaign contribution Maani had promised.

But those dual agreements — and allegedly lying to the FBI about them — form the basis of the feds’ 2022 charges against Jones that the lawmaker is fighting in court this week.

Former intern to testify

Maani left the witness stand Thursday afternoon after two days of testimony in Jones’ trial. Katz is expected to testify beginning Friday morning, followed by three FBI agents who worked on the case. The senator’s legal team has so far promised two witnesses before closing arguments likely to begin early next week. Jones has not yet said whether he’ll testify.

Even if Jones doesn’t take the stand, the jury has gotten plenty of facetime with him via the grainy video from Maani’s hidden FBI camera, which captured a big group meeting that included Jones in April 2019, along with three dinners that summer.

It was at the second dinner that Jones told Maani: “If you can raise me five grand, that’d be good.” Maani in turn explained that they needed to find “a creative way” for Jones to accept the money so the contribution wouldn’t show up in the senator’s public campaign finance reports.

“I don’t want it to look funky, you know, that our company is cutting you a check or I’m personally cutting you a check,” Maani said. “And then somebody asks some questions or whatever about it.”

On the witness stand Thursday, Maani explained he was especially nervous about the media following a trail of campaign contributions back to SafeSpeed, having already been the subject of unflattering reporting by the Chicago Tribune in 2017. So he suggested that maybe he could pay directly for a portion of Jones’ upcoming campaign fundraiser at a Chicago White Sox game.

“I could just, whatever, you know, cut a check to them or however we do it,” Maani said, to which Jones replied, “OK.” 

“The number’s fine,” Maani continued. “Whatever the number is, the number is. I just don’t want it to look goofy.”

Jones laughed, agreeing when Maani asked him to “keep it quiet, is that cool?”

“The main thing: Take care of my intern,” Jones said. “That’s it.”

Maani agreed before Jones turned the conversation to his bill, which Maani had already asked him to limit from a statewide study to only the city of Chicago, where SafeSpeed didn’t operate. Before they moved on to talking about the restaurant’s famed corn creme brûlée, Jones’ pilot license training and travel plans, Maani reiterated that he’d “take care of” the senator’s intern if Jones would limit his legislation.

But Jones raised Maani’s commitment, promising to “protect you all from McSweeney,” a reference to then-Republican State Rep. David McSweeney, R-Barrington Hills, with whom Jones had formed an odd alliance based on their mutual distrust of red-light cameras.

Jones’ lawyers on Thursday went after Maani’s credibility during cross-examination, zeroing in on his years of bribery — and the fact that the deal he cut with the government allowed him to both keep his earnings from SafeSpeed and stay out of prison. Maani’s singular conspiracy bribery charge was dismissed in 2023, and Maani emphasized that his testimony during Jones’ trial was not subject to any cooperation agreement with the government, but a run-of-the-mill subpoena.

Defense attorney Joshua Adams asked Maani about a time when he allegedly paid off a former suburban mayor who pleaded guilty to red-light camera-related charges using a check stolen from his own mother.

Maani balked at the line of questioning after several minutes, telling Adams he wanted to “make something very clear.”

“I never voluntarily just decided to give them money,” Maani said of the elected officials he bribed. “They always asked me for money. They asked me for money and I capitulated and I agreed to give it to them after they asked me.”

But Jones, Adams pointed out, was different. 

As the senator sat down for a third dinner with Maani in August 2019, Adams noted the senator was excitedly telling him about the flying lesson he’d just come from, which made him a bit late to their meeting.

“Did he show up asking for $5,000?” Adams asked, to which Maani said “no.”

“After this dinner, how many times did Mr. Jones call you asking about the $5,000?” Adams asked Maani.

“He did not,” Maani replied.

“How many times did he text you asking about the $5,000?” Adams asked.

“He did not,” Maani said again.
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