This piece was reported in collaboration with Pando.com.
However, what the mayor and his aides didn’t mention—and what has gone unreported until now—is that in the year leading up to the lucrative deal for Marriott, the hedge fund of one of Emanuel’s largest campaign contributors bought millions of shares of stock in the hotel chain.
Griffin describes Mayor Emanuel as his “good friend.” Over the last three years Griffin and his wife, Anne Dias Griffin, have together donated more than $210,000 to Emanuel’s campaign. And other Citadel employees have donated at least $172,000 to the mayor’s war chest.
And in September the McPier board of directors, whose members are appointed by the mayor and governor, announced that they had chosen Marriott—over Hyatt and Hilton—to run the hotel. According to McPier spokeswoman Mary Kay Marquisos, McPier did its due diligence through “a two-phase process” of review.
Among the hotel’s amenities will be a 300-seat restaurant, a rooftop bar, a coffee shop, several banquet rooms, a fitness center, and an indoor swimming pool.
Yet the taxpayer-financed Marriott project is very much a governmentally engineered deal, siphoning public resources into a tax increment financing scheme that will underwrite a private hotel chain.
