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Kevin Kakac. Judge in Wayne County.
….just another day in uber-corrupt southern Illinois.
We’ve been talking to attorneys from all over the state since the appointment of former Wayne County state’s attorney Kevin Kakac to the bench in Wayne County to fill out the unexpired term of resident judge Bennie Joe Harrison.
And to a one, these attorneys are flabbergasted that a committee of “local attorneys” produced and allowed the appointment.
That’s because Kakac would be the only judge seated on the bench in downstate who has an active, high-dollar, wrongdoing-alleged civil litigation suit against him in the circuit in which he presides, something that’s relatively unprecedented. Yet there he is, and there the lawsuit is, and a high-end attorney is continuing to help in the pursuit of justice for one Mark Gilula, whose case, filed in April, has yet to make mainstream media. Here now is your next Read the Lead: “Attorney involved in civil litigation named judge“:
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WAYNE/FRANKLIN COs.—A five-member committee in Wayne County has subjected the entire Second Judicial Circuit to appearing in front of a judge who has a major lawsuit pending against him in one of those courts, and the decision they made has complicated the pending case to the point that it may have to be moved completely out of the circuit.
Kevin Kakac, former Wayne County State’s Attorney, former corporate attorney for Peoples National Bank and defendant in a Franklin County civil suit filed by Benton resident Mark Gilula, was named interim resident judge for Wayne County on November 8, 2013, in the wake of the retirement of long-time Wayne judge Bennie Joe Harrison.
The people responsible for this decision were a committee of area attorneys who were probably largely unaware of the quietly-proceeding civil suit in Franklin County: Bob Hawkins, Richard Kline and Neal Laws, Jr., of Fairfield in Wayne County; Gary Milone of Flora in Clay County; Scott Quinn of Mt. Vernon in Jefferson County; and Jay Walden of Grayville in White County.
The silence surrounding the Franklin County case is brought on by the fact that it’s alleged within the documents of it that Peoples National Bank, and its corporate officers along with Kakac as their then-attorney, have been structuring real estate for the benefit of the bank, and potentially abusing a TIF District (which seems to be endemic in southern Illinois) in which sits a building owned by Peoples and the Bonans, and which was supposed to have contained condominiums.
One of the people who purchased a condo in this historic building, Mark Gilula, has filed the lawsuit against Bill Bonan II, Kakac, the Benton Square Condominium Association, Inc., and members of that board: John David Oxford, Bethany Shaw and Frances Crawford Rogers, all of them either current or former employees of the bank.
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