Ex-Riverdale Mayor Jackson Gets 6 Months for Lying

Former Riverdale Mayor Lawrence Jackson was sentenced Thursday to six months in federal prison for lying under oath about his financial ties to landfill owner James Bracken, who did business with the south suburban village. U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman said elected officials need to hear that lying carries consequences, especially when they do it in an official capacity.

“Public officials are expected to be honest with how they approach the judicial process,” Gettleman said. “(Jackson) was a public official, he was involved with people doing business with the city and he violated the oath that he took ... It’s very serious.” Prosecutors had sought a longer sentence. Gettleman said he couldn’t justify probation. “Obviously in this courthouse we have seen a lot of disappointing results on that,” he said.

What the Jury Heard

A jury found Jackson guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice in November. He resigned as mayor and gave up his publicly funded pension. The case stemmed from Jackson’s 2021 deposition in a civil lawsuit filed by Tri-State Disposal, a waste company that accused him of favoring Riverdale Materials, which Bracken owned. Among the company’s claims: Jackson fired the chair of the village’s Zoning Board of Appeals and replaced the chair with “persons politically connected to the mayor.”

Prosecutors said Jackson wanted to replace a troublesome contractor and asked Bracken to find a new waste company. Bracken connected him with Flood Brothers, which the village hired for a spring cleanup event in May 2018, although Tri-State already had an obligation to do the work. During his deposition, Jackson denied having a role in hiring Flood Brothers and said village administrator Tim Williams had made the introduction. Prosecutors said both answers were lies.

Trial testimony also showed that Bracken had a substantial role in Centennial Holdings, a trucking business Jackson and his wife incorporated in 2018 despite knowing nothing about running it. Texts and emails presented to the jury showed Bracken handled nearly all daily operations, from payroll and insurance to timesheets and truck assignments. Prosecutors said Bracken also arranged a job for Jackson’s wife at Morris Dirt, another company, and paid the mayor to do virtually nothing.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Kirsten Moran put it bluntly in a sentencing filing: “Defendant’s only role in the company was to pick up a paycheck once a week and pay the truck drivers. Bracken ran defendant’s business—for free—and gave defendant a paycheck for effectively no work.”

The Defense and the Money Trail

Jackson’s lawyers argued that mistakes in his answers were honest errors caused by poor questioning from Mark La Rose, the attorney who deposed him. “Mistakes happen, and they happen often, because people are human,” defense attorney Gabrielle Sansonetti told the jury. In court Thursday, attorney Nancy DePodesta said Jackson had helped the FBI with other corruption investigations involving Riverdale but refused to say Bracken had bribed him because that wasn’t true. “Had there been a corrupt relationship with Mr. Bracken, he would have cooperated,” she said. Jackson didn’t speak before sentencing. His attorney read a statement saying he “is not able to stand before the court and admit that he violated the law.”

State campaign records show that companies affiliated with James and Kelly Bracken donated more than $30,000 to Jackson’s campaign fund from 2016 to 2021. That included an $8,177 in-kind contribution for Jackson’s 2019 golf outing at George Dunne National golf club in Oak Forest. Bracken hasn’t been charged with wrongdoing. Around the time Jackson was charged, federal investigators were reported to be interested in Bracken’s dealings in Riverdale, contracts with asbestos-removal companies and possible fraud in Chicago’s minority-owned business programs.

Tri-State lost its lawsuit. Judge Sara Ellis found insufficient evidence that the company had faced political retribution. Prosecutors argued that the Jackson-Bracken relationship was materially relevant and might have affected the outcome.

A Village Still Paying

Gettleman acknowledged Jackson’s personal story. The judge said Jackson pulled himself “literally up by his bootstraps” from Chicago’s housing projects, washed dishes to pay for college and entered public service. Jackson became mayor promising to fix Riverdale’s finances. In his last reelection bid before being charged, he said that when he took office in 2013 the village “couldn’t pay our bills.”

Thirteen years later, the numbers haven’t improved. Fitch Ratings downgraded Riverdale to CCC in its most recent report in April, citing “a severely weakened financial profile, including a negative balance of available general fund reserves, and very limited liquidity.” The village of about 13,000 has faced this kind of trouble before. In 2014, developer John Thomas received a five-year federal prison sentence for stealing more than $375,000 in taxpayer funds earmarked for a Little Calumet River development. Jackson said then that Riverdale “will never be made whole.”

Prosecutors dropped charges of failing to file federal income tax returns for three years after the sentencing. More than four years passed between the FBI raid on Jackson’s home and his sentencing.

Why This Matters: Riverdale residents are left holding the bill. A village of about 13,000 people, already buried in budget problems and carrying a CCC credit rating, watched its mayor take a paycheck for little work from a businessman with village-related contracts, then lie about it under oath. That’s the human cost of blurred lines between public office and private deal-making: services, reserves and trust all erode. The case also shows why courts, civil discovery and honest testimony matter. False answers undermined a lawsuit meant to test claims of political favoritism. Gettleman’s remark about “a lot of disappointing results” in his courthouse suggests the problem isn’t isolated. Bracken hasn’t been charged, so questions about who else benefited remain open, and residents of small, financially strained municipalities depend on strong enforcement and transparency rules to protect them.