This is an excerpt from a column I wrote last week For Deadline Detroit about Lido Bucci, who was Tony Marrocco’s right-hand man at the Macomb County Public Works office.
By Chad Selweski
Dino Bucci finally met his match when faced by the feds.
The right-hand man for former Macomb County Public Works Commissioner Tony Marrocco — the “godfather” of Macomb politics for a quarter century — Bucci is hit with 18 criminal indictments.
Charges brought Wednesday against Bucci by federal prosecutors after an FBI and IRS investigation were not a surprise. He’s one of the few big fish hooked by the feds in their corruption probe of Macomb County officials over the past year,.
Marrocco
For more than two decades, from 1993 to 2016, Bucci never had a real job at Tony Marrocco’s office, other than as the enforcer in what appeared to be a Mafia-style operation within Marrocco’s public works office, according to the charges.
If convicted, Bucci faces up to 30 years in prison for fraud, extortion, money laundering, bribery and embezzlement.
His method of doing business, according to the feds, consisted of demanding that construction contractors contribute large sums of cash to Marrocco’s re-election campaign, plus the commissioner’s two political action committees, high-powered PACs with a statewide reach that allowed the boss to play the role of political kingmaker.
Yet, Bucci’s alleged activities went beyond a simple pay-to- play approach, as the public works office dealt with sewers, drains and soil erosion permits on major construction projects in fast-growing Macomb County.
Bucci demanded kickbacks (through bribes, extortion or embezzlement) when builders sought new contracts or when they came calling to get their money back on previous up-front costs, the feds say. Those who refused were threatened with being blacklisted on future construction sites, FBI investigators allege.
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