Keesing Bandit NOT Involved

We should say "allegedly," but who knows?

• Behind the blacked-out windows of a Near West Side storefront building, 10 dominatrixes offer clients a variety of services at what’s billed as “Chicago’s premier dungeon,” catering to people with sexual fetishes.

  For 32 years, Chicago Illusions has been in business there.

  For the past two decades, the property owner has taken advantage of a Cook County program to give tax breaks to owners of small storefront buildings that also have apartments. He’s used that program to cut his real estate taxes by 60% a year — for a tax savings totaling nearly $300,000.

We'll bet if you get a look at this establishment's client list, there would be more than a few "connected" names that keep the property taxes "discounted."

The names that the Sun Times did publish reveal quite a bit anyway:

• Anthony Vaughan, the dungeon’s operator, says he doesn’t use the apartments for his sex business, which he says is limited to the 1,450-square-foot ground floor retail space at 1210 W. Grand Ave.

• If the apartments were deemed to be part of the business, Cook County officials could end the lucrative tax breaks for the building owner, Frank P. Cangelosi, who paid $15,274 in real taxes last year. Without the tax break, the tax bill would have been $40,075.

  Cangelosi didn’t return messages.

• Chicago Illusions opened in the Grand Avenue building in August 1992, according to Vaughan, shortly after he finished serving probation for a conviction of using violence to collect debts owed to a Fulton Market meat distributor. According to a court filing that described him as tall and burly, Vaughan would hand out business cards bearing a drawing of a funeral wreath and the words: “We guarantee results.”

Grand Avenue? A guy convicted of violence collecting debts? Fulton Market?

No wonder they got tax breaks out the wazoo.