CHAPTER V: OBAMA’S HEART OF DARKNESS: REZKO,
AUCHI, ALSAMMARAE, AND CHICAGO GRAFT
“I am the first one to acknowledge that it was a boneheaded move....” – Obama
“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” – Obama
“Illinois is awash in scandal and corruption.” – Jay Stewart, Illinois Better Government
Association
“The Illinois Combine... the bipartisan Illinois political combine.” – US Senator Peter FitzgeraldIf Obama ever reaches the White House, he will certainly be classified as one of the most corrupt
winners of a presidential election in the history of our country. Past presidents from Grant to
Harding have been generally considered corrupt, but it is likely that a future Obama administration
would eclipse them all. As this chapter will make clear, Obama has climbed out of a veritable
sewer of corruption, crime, graft, bribery, kickbacks and rake offs to assume his current role as
seraphic advocate of good government and public probity. Obama may not be the most corrupt
individual ever to approach the presidency, but he is in all probability the person in whom the
reality of corruption and a hypocritical pretense of clean government are most at variance. In this
sense, Obama qualifies as a hypocrite greater than Molière’s Tartuffe, greater than Dickens’ Mr.
Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit.
At the center of Obama’s universe of corruption are three godfathers. They are all Levantine
Arabs from the eastern Mediterranean, corsairs of those dark seas where dirty machine politics and
illegal financial manipulations flow together. The first is Antoin “Tony” Rezko, a nominal
Catholic from the port of Aleppo in Syria, who has been Obama’s most immediate sponsor, backer,
friend, and bagman during his entire political career. Rezko has probably bilked the public treasury
for something approaching one hundred million dollars in the form of public-and private
partnerships allegedly designed to rehabilitate, renovate, and restore decayed slum properties and
make them fit for human habitation. In reality, the properties have been given over to rats and
cockroaches, while Rezko has grown fabulously rich. Obama and his wife Michelle personally
participated in this ill-gotten gain when Rezko assisted them in acquiring the bombastic and
ostentatious mansion in the Kenwood district in which this nouveau riche couple now resides.
Rezko got his start in Chicago opening Subway sandwich shops in places that needed city
concessions. Rezko then became close to Jabir Herbert Muhammad, former manager of
heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali and son of the late Nation of Islam leader, Elijah
Muhammad, and he entered active politics in 1983 to support the successful mayoral candidacy of
Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor.
The second of Obama’s three godfathers is Nadhmi Auchi, who was born in Iraq, professes the
Roman Catholic religion, and is ranked as the eighth (or 18th, depending on the account you read)
richest person in the United Kingdom with a personal fortune approaching £2,000,000,000 or about
$4 billion. In 2003, Auchi was convicted of fraud in the Elf Aquitaine bribery scandal, probably the
largest corruption investigation in the history of postwar Europe. Auchi has a 15 month suspended
sentence hanging over his head. The Elf scandal came complete with accusations against former
French police Minister Charles Pasqua and former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas, plus the
involvement of the Corsican mafia and various Freemasonic lodges. The basic charge was that a
network including scores of oligarchs had conspired to lose the French state owned oil company