In a case closely watched within Chicago’s federal law enforcement ranks, a former agent for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Investigations based in Chicago’s west suburbs has been sentenced to more than six years in prison for a litany of corrupt acts, including giving an informant investigation information, stealing money from the agency and drug dealers, and filing false tax returns.
Anthony Sabaini, 41, of Naperville, was convicted by a jury in May of illegally structuring bank withdrawals, concealing information from the Department of Homeland Security, and filing false tax returns. He worked out of the agency’s Oakbrook Terrace office prior to being charged in 2020.
In asking for a sentence of up to eight years behind bars, prosecutors also accused Sabaini of using his government-issued phone to secure a prostitute while on official business in Israel and sending “racist, homophobic, and sexist text messages with other HSI agents, expressing his bias and contempt toward certain segments of the population that he was sworn to protect.”
Among the inappropriate messages were texts mocking the Jewish faith of a federal prosecutor and others calling agents for another federal investigative agents a homophobic name, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said Sabaini repeatedly perjured himself on the witness stand, including by claiming the money he was depositing and withdrawing stemmed from gifts from his father of a substantial amount of gold coins and cash as well as $20,000 in cash reimbursements from parents of the Little League team he coached.
Sabaini’s attorney, Michael Ettinger, asked for leniency, writing in a recent court filing that while he “embarrassed himself and humiliated his family,” he had been self-medicating for post-traumatic stress disorder for years with alcohol, marijuana and other medications and was “unable to properly consider the consequences of his actions.”
U.S. District Judge Andrea Wood sentenced Sabaini to 74 months on Thursday.
The case against Sabaini “made waves through the law enforcement community,” prosecutors said, and a stiff sentence was needed to “send a distinct and clear message that corruption, dishonesty, theft, and embezzlement within federal law enforcement will not be tolerated.”
“Corrupt law enforcement strikes at the heart of our system of government,” Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jared Hasten and Jonathan Shih wrote. “When individuals in law enforcement break the law, it makes the job of legitimate law enforcement that much harder because it erodes public trust.”
According to trial evidence, Sabaini, who was assigned to a financial crimes task force, had a “corrupt relationship” with a confidential informant to whom he’d provide tips on Homeland Security investigations and would protect from federal law enforcement investigations being done by the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration. In exchange, the informant paid him about $50,000, according to prosecutors.
He also illegally took money earmarked for investigative activity from Homeland Security Investigations and stole cash from drug dealers.
Trial evidence also showed Sabaini made 162 bank deposits adding up to more than $250,000 in amounts of less than $10,000 so he could evade federal reporting rules, the U.S. attorney’s office said.
He also lied in official memos in 2017 and 2018 to protect his relationship with the informant and knowingly covered up material facts, “including that the (informant) was a target of ongoing criminal investigations conducted by other law enforcement agencies and that the (informant) had recently engaged in unauthorized criminal conduct that Sabaini knew would have affected his suitability as a paid HSI informant,” according to prosecutors.
As a result of the additional unreported income, Sabaini was convicted of filing false federal tax returns.
In 2021, a federal jury convicted Sabaini’s partner, Fernando Zambrano, of lying to investigators during the Sabaini probe. Zambrano, a Palos Heights police officer assigned to a Homeland Security Investigations task force, was sentenced to three months in federal prison.
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
