CHICAGO — A former alderman who led an insurrection in the 1980s against this city's first black mayor pleaded guilty on Monday in federal court to conspiracy in a real-estate kickback scheme.
A year later, he left the company on the day that three of Ditech's managers were indicted on a charge of trying to extort kickbacks from a real estate firm.
One particularly rapacious former bank official from Shaanxi Province, Gong Aiai, has become known as "House Sister" for having parlayed bribes and kickbacks into a real estate portfolio of 41 apartments in Beijing.
A former Fannie Mae specialist in foreclosures was sentenced to 15 months in prison for soliciting illegal kickbacks from a real estate broker, a practice he said was "a natural part of business" at the nation's largest mortgage finance company.
Recently, he says, he heard of a real estate broker who paid $7,000 in kickbacks to four employees of a client to win a $20,000 lease contract.
Michael D. Calhoun, president of the Center for Responsible Lending, described the action as "a real milestone," but he said that he had been trying to convince regulators for at least 15 years that yield spread premiums were no more than illegal kickbacks.
The suit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Baltimore this month, alleges that Creig Northrop Team P.C. — a real estate group ranked among the highest-grossing nationwide in recent years — received payments totaling $1.3 million from 2001 to 2014 from a title insurance company, which the complaint characterizes as illegal "kickbacks" that were never disclosed to buyers.
The former alderman, Edward R. Vrdolyak, said he was guilty of agreeing to share a $1.5 million kickback from a real-estate deal with Stuart Levine, a businessman who was on the board of the medical school selling the property and used his influence to favor Mr. Vrdolyak's buyer.
A missed kickback is a serious business.
"We would consider that a borderline kickback," he said.
