Homeless Shelter director faces 50 count indictment

[Bombero1956]

SPRINGFIELD - Former homeless shelter director Francis G. Keough III traded jobs for cash, housing for sex and board appointments for bonuses, according to a 50-count federal indictment unsealed yesterday.

It is the third wave of criminal charges in a year for Keough, a one-time City Council president and former head of the Friends of the Homeless shelter on Worthington Street.

Two co-defendants - city worker Michael P. Hallahan and former shelter employee Angel T. Guzman - were arrested yesterday and charged with conspiracy and fraud.

http://www.masslive.com/news/topstories/index.ssf?/base/news-0/1137228912242220.xml&coll=1

Additional stories

http://valleyadvocate.com/gbase/News/content.html?oid=oid:115904

Last week, the city bid adieu to Frankie Keough, the one-time-city-councilor-turned-convicted-tax-fraud-turned-homeless-shelter-director-turned-corruption
-probe-target, who was canned from his job as head of Friends of the Homeless. The move came after the feds indicted Keough for extortion and after the Springfield Republican reported allegations that Keough had been using inmates from the county jail to do yard work at his home and paying them with pizza.

It may be the end of the public gravy train for former City Councilor Keough, if anything can be. Keough beat out others with better credentials for the job as shelter director after leaving the Council when he was convicted on tax charges. Before and even after that, he's been known as a political operator with almost unlimited influence on city agencies.

http://valleyadvocate.com/gbase/News/content.html?oid=oid:46414

Sometimes he worked behind the scenes, sometimes in the open. In 1989, for example, he cast the swing vote to stop a City Council investigation of Insurance Cost Control, a company hired to consult with the city on ways to trim the costs of employee and retiree health insurance. The state Attorney General later prosecuted ICC on charges of bilking the city of $800,000. Three years ago John Iellamo, a shelter client whose father had been involved in business partnerships with Keough that went sour, was convicted of stealing $21,000 worth of groceries he claimed to be getting for the shelter from a local food bank. The case hinged on Keough's statement that the shelter had never received the food. After Iellamo's conviction, ugly questions remained, such as why Keough, who had helped Iellamo get the credentials he needed to obtain the food in the first place, didn't respond to the food bank's monthly invoices listing the items Iellamo had taken for four months, until Keough incriminated him by denying receipt of the food.

[acmavm]

1. There's a special place in the afterlife somewhere for human trash that

will steal from the poor. Stealing is bad period, but from the poor and the hungry and the homeless. That's really despicable.

[NaturalHigh]

2. "Do not steal from the poor...

because they are poor." This guy should pick up his Bible and read it.

[Boojatta]

3. "traded jobs for cash, housing for sex and board appointments for bonuses"

That sounds like the behavior of someone who would have fit right in and been a good team player in the administrative apparatus of the Soviet gulags.

[lpbk2713]

4. Why look to the other side of the planet?

Shit-for-brains thought a horse show commissioner would make a heck of fine FEMA chief. I would love to know the real story behind that appointment.

[havocmom]

5. And: inmates from jail doing yard work - pizza was their pay

The ultimate Cheap Labor poster boy? So much for the rich investing tax cuts in jobs creations!

Friend of the Homeless my ass! Sex for shelter? Hope the sonofabitch got some serious illness from his predatory behavior!

[Greyhound]

6. Political corruption in Springfield? I'm shocked, shocked to learn

of such happenings in the land of Lincoln. :sarcasm: I especially love the part where he "beat out" several other, better qualified, administrators to get that job. Illinois is one of the most corrupt States it has been my misfortune to have ever worked in.