Riga: Cash payments hid Cantrell money trail
Kickback estimates are 'assumptions,' defense lawyer says
NWI Times
Jun 6, 2008
nwitimes.com/news/local/riga-cash-payments-hid-cantrell-money-trail/article_3780c195-6708-5da1-b1da-846cef77d0e4.html
HAMMOND | Disgraced former Judge Deborah Riga said Thursday that Robert Cantrell was not shy about using cash payments to hide transactions.
But defense attorney Kevin Milner said because Cantrell was paid in cash, all the glossy pie charts and reconstructed financial ledgers presented by prosecutors Thursday amounted to little more than "assumptions" about Cantrell's actions.
All told, Cantrell should have received slightly more than $152,000 between 2000 and 2003 in under-the-table cash kickbacks from former associate Nancy Fromm in exchange for getting government contracts for Fromm's business.
But the only person who saw him take the cash was Nancy Fromm, a felon who has admitted to lying under oath and gambling several times a month.
The prosecution rested its case Thursday afternoon after five full days of testimony. Cantrell, a longtime Lake County political operative, is charged with 11 counts of tax evasion, honest services fraud and health insurance fraud using the U.S. mail.
Milner said he will present only brief witnesses before the jury gets the case about noon today. Cantrell, 67, who attended his mother's funeral Wednesday, appeared confident as ever after prosecutors announced they had presented their case.
Riga took the stand Thursday morning after waiting more than two years to publicly talk about her association with Cantrell.
She served one term as elected judge of Schererville Town Court but pleaded guilty to several unrelated felonies after admitting to corrupting her office to enrich herself.
Riga said Cantrell talked openly about hiring her father, Tony, as a consultant who would be paid in cash -- not by check -- in exchange for work at Fromm's firm.
Tony Riga changed his mind, and demanded checks after he got his first two payments in cash, Deborah Riga said. In a 2003 phone conversation, Cantrell later blamed Deborah Riga for giving prosecutors evidence because her father insisted on taking checks.
"I felt bad because the gist of it was, had I done it in cash the way it was proposed, there wouldn't be a trail," Riga testified Thursday morning. "This wouldn't be happening."
Defense attorney Kevin Milner hit Riga with scathing questions about whether she had "sold your robe, your judgeship, for money."
"You spent very few honest days as a judge, correct?" Milner asked.
"The things you are looking at happened over various days. I'd have to answer 'no' to your question," Riga said.
Later in the day, Milner fired broadsides against Internal Revenue Service Agent Paul Drapac, the author of financial statements on how much cash Cantrell "should have" received based on unwritten arrangements that were described by Fromm.
Fromm said Cantrell literally divvied up profits from her cash-based counseling business, and Cantrell always advised her never to deposit her share in the bank because it could be traced.
On Thursday, Drapac admitted he could not say Cantrell had physically received the cash that the ledgers said he should have received, because he did not see it with his own eyes, and the money was apparently not deposited into Cantrell's bank.
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