Infamous landowner Suzie Wilson is facing a potential ban from owning Chicago property, after inspiring the creation of the city’s new special collections unit designed to help go after its largest, most indebted landlords more efficiently.

The city is pushing to bar Wilson — who racked up over $15 million in fines for municipal property violations — from ever investing in Chicago real estate again as part of any settlement that might be reached in her bankruptcy, deputy city attorney David Holtkamp said. And Chicago’s efforts to crack down on negligent property owners aren’t going to end with her.

The playbook used to take down Wilson forms the basis for the city’s new special collections unit — a group of attorneys housed under the Chicago Law Department’s Collections, Ownership, and Administrative Litigation Division. It hired three more attorneys with funds recovered from Wilson’s debts and will work with the city’s Department of Streets and Sanitation to monitor property inspections and citations for landowners that owe significant amounts to the city.

They are starting with about 10 landowners in particular that hit a certain threshold of unpaid fines and fees with the city, including two the city has publicly filed “additional enforcement actions” against in recent months. Those are Hinsdale-based QCD Financial and Grayslake-based Goldmine Investments, which the city referred to as large-scale “land speculators” that “gobble up vacant lots in hopes of getting rich,” according to city litigation.

QCD has been found liable “at least 1,618 times” for municipal code violations across 125 properties it owns, allegedly amassing over $3.8 million in fines and interest since 2013, according to court records. Goldmine allegedly owes the city over $5.2 million in fines from more than 1,500 counts of blight-related code violations, records show.

In both cases, the special collections unit moved to consolidate judgements made against the owners in city administrative hearings into lawsuits filed with the Cook County Circuit Court over the last few months.

“Once you discover a pattern and a practice, then that allows you to begin an entire mechanism of researching and tracking down owners,” said Mary Richardson-Lowry, Chicago’s top legal advisor.

She wouldn’t disclose the identity of the other landowners being targeted by the collections unit or the amount of debt the city is using as its threshold to pursue. Most own vacant lots, like Wilson, but some also own occupied residential properties, Holtkamp said in a statement. (The Real Deal has made a formal public records request to determine the property owners.)

Richardson-Lowry recalled talking to aldermen about the trouble they were having with negligent landowners like these just a few months after she was hired by the city in June of 2023.

The city lacked a system to track the ownership of vacant lots that weren’t being cared for, especially when owners didn’t want to be found, and Richardson-Lowry wanted to change that, she said.

With Holtkamp, she began to uncover just how pervasive the issue of abandoned, vacant lots in the city is, she said. Private owners held nearly 32,000 vacant lots in Chicago as of the 2021 tax year, according to Cook County Assessor data.

They found many non-responsive owners who don’t keep their lots clean, fail to pay taxes or fines on time, and shift the property’s ownership between countless legal entities to avoid being tracked, Richardson-Lowry said.

But there was one name that stood out from the rest, one they kept seeing: Suzie Wilson. So, they went after her with every tool they had: enforcing existing judgments, bringing new cases and connecting her name to the legal entities that many of her properties were purchased under.

A year-and-a-half later, she was forced to sell 812 properties as part of a bankruptcy case filed in the fall. The properties, which are being marketed by Hilco Real Estate, are concentrated in low-income areas, predominantly on the South and West sides of the city.

“These are communities where blight is viewed as part of their DNA,” Richardson-Lowry said. “Now we have a person that we can directly attribute to part of the cause of the blight in certain communities. So, that’s how we began.”

An attorney representing Wilson and various LLCs named as “interested parties” in the bankruptcy filing did not respond to requests for comment. An attorney for Wilson’s B.A.S.S. & M, Inc. and other companies named as debtors also did not respond to requests for comment. A representative of Goldmine didn’t return a request for comment and attempts to reach QCD weren’t successful.

Savvy scavengers

Wilson began investing in Chicago real estate with her sister and business partner, Swedlana Dass, in 1987, according to a declaration Wilson made as part of the bankruptcy filed in October.

In 1989, Wilson’s husband, Michael Wilson, began helping them purchase commercial and residential properties through Cook County’s scavenger and annual tax sales, according to Wilson’s declaration. Back then, scavenger sales were held every two years for properties with taxes that were more than three years behind. Buyers bid on the properties, with bids starting at $250, and the highest bidder won a lien on the property.

It’s a little different than Cook County’s annual tax sale, where buyers bid on property tax debt, not the properties themselves — meaning the scavenger sale properties are at an even deeper level of distress. However, if the property owner does not pay their tax debt back to the buyer within a certain period, then tax buyers can file a petition to take over ownership of the property.

The tax buyer is still required to pay back any unpaid property taxes remaining on the property if they do take over the deed, though, which is why people looking to acquire land at a low cost typically gravitate more toward scavenger sales, where properties can be sold for even less than their delinquent taxes and interest owed.

Wilson was among the investors who used these sales to accumulate a massive amount of land very quickly. She and Dass, through their various companies, acquired over 800 commercial and residential properties over 32 years. The lots have an estimated market value of $17.8 million, according to court filings. Most of the properties are vacant lots, but Wilson did lease some of them to businesses, generating about $290,000 in annual rent revenue, according to her declaration.

Illinois passed reforms in 2023 that made scavenger sales optional and closed a long-criticized loophole that allowed tax buyers to get refunds should they find a way to claim property was sold in error.

Scavenger sales are “unlikely to be held again” in the county, given the reforms, a Cook County Treasurer’s Office spokesperson said, acknowledging that the sales were a vessel “through which many properties were acquired by investors at low cost.”

“It’s much more difficult for investors to acquire properties at an annual tax sale because they must pay all back taxes, and in about 95 percent of cases, the taxpayer pays off their tax debt before the investors can take title to the property,” the spokesperson said.

The main thing that brought Wilson onto the city’s radar was the sheer volume of code violations she racked up, amassing $15 million in unpaid municipal tickets for dumping garbage on vacant lots and failing to address rat infestations caused by the dumping.

That affects neighboring residential and commercial buildings as rat infestations spread and run-off from discarded metal products leaches into the soil, Richardson-Lowry said, calling Wilson “the worst offender that we’ve found so far.”

It took a while to connect the dots on just how many properties Wilson owned, Richardson-Lowry said. First, they thought it was 200. Then, it was 500. And finally, over 800 properties were found to be owned by Wilson or companies associated with her or Dass.

When Wilson wasn’t responsive to the city’s requests for her to clean up her properties, Holtkamp and his team decided to get serious.

Three-pronged approach

First, they enforced any preexisting judgements they had against Wilson and her companies in the city’s Department of Administrative Hearings, registering them all as cases with the Circuit Court of Cook County.

Over 5,000 new complaints were filed against Wilson in Circuit Court, Holtkamp said. They consolidated the cases and pursued them “very, very aggressively,” digging for evidence and freezing bank accounts.

Then, the city filed separate cases in the Circuit Court to petition a judge for temporary restraining orders requiring Wilson to clean up specific properties immediately, which was successful in some cases, Holtkamp said.

Last April, for example, the city sued Wilson and her company Regal LLC, seeking over $10 million in damages over a vacant lot in the Englewood neighborhood on the South Side. Large stacks of tires dumped on the property were cleaned up in April after the city sent letters notifying Wilson and Regal of the impending litigation, Illinois Answers Project reported.

The final and perhaps most important approach taken by Holtkamp and his team is that they started suing and issuing any new citations not just to the entities that owned each property, but to the people behind them, he said.

Now, the city is naming the individual owners behind LLCs, whenever possible, as soon as the owner receives a citation with the city.

That way, “when we have those judgments and we seek to enforce them, we will be able to freeze their personal assets, and that is quite a motivator,” Holtkamp said.

The city is suing Wilson for at least $46 million between the preexisting judgments filed in court and new lawsuits brought by the city, Holtkamp said. But there are other citations still pending, he added.

Wilson’s companies filed for bankruptcy as the lawsuits and fines accumulated. In response, the city accused Wilson and her sister, Dass, of fraud, claiming they hid their wealth by transferring ownership of local properties around to businesses based in South Dakota until their Illinois companies appeared penniless.

The city objected to the bankruptcy filing to make sure it was “protected as a creditor and that things would be done appropriately” — an issue that has since been resolved, according to Steve Madura of Hilco Real Estate, who is selling Wilson’s 812 properties.

The bankruptcy case is ongoing. Wilson has begun to pay back some of the fines she owes the city, about $1 million so far, Holtkamp said, adding that they “expect to see quite a bit more by the end of sales.”

Proceeds from the sale will also go to repaying Wilson’s debts to two other lenders — Charles L. Walker and New York-based global alternative asset manager Nine Left Capital.