As the Illinois Judicial Inquiry Board investigates powerful Cook County Judge E. Kenneth Wright Jr. for claiming improper property tax exemptions in another county, an Injustice Watch examination into his other property holdings raises additional ethical questions.
Wright, 83, a highly respected presiding judge overseeing dozens of colleagues in the first municipal district, was a solo practitioner handling mostly estates before the loyal Democrat was tapped to become a judge in 1994.
His background and finances faced little scrutiny as he rose to prominence in the Cook County judiciary. Had anyone checked his Joliet driver’s license and his Will County homestead exemption filings before he was appointed, he might never have become a judge.
Both are disqualifying.
The Illinois Constitution requires judges to live in the jurisdiction where they serve, and state law allows homeowners to benefit from tax exemptions only on their principal residence.
Only this year — as he faced a retention vote in the Nov. 5 election — did Injustice Watch initially catch his residency conflict during a routine background search for its judicial election guide. The search found Wright had a general homestead exemption since at least 2005 and another senior citizen tax exemption on the Joliet home since 2018.
The revelation caused a stir within the legal community and prompted some leading bar ratings groups to grill Wright about the conflict. After closed-door interviews, two leading bar associations for the first time recommended voters kick Wright from the bench.
The conflict nearly cost Wright his job, but he narrowly won retention.
Throughout the controversy, Wright has declined numerous requests to be interviewed by Injustice Watch, which has since conducted a far-deeper examination of Wright’s personal real estate holdings — poring through thousands of pages of land and court records, tracking down surviving relatives of his deceased former law clients, and interviewing legal scholars who suggest the judge may have breached his ethical obligations, based on the facts in government records and the claims of the surviving relatives.
The investigation revealed Wright obtained four properties through the estates of his former law clients, sometimes serving as a beneficiary and an executor of the estates. In two cases, records show, his dead former clients filed property tax appeals on property owned by Wright — one more than two decades after the client’s death.
Records also show Wright repeatedly failed to disclose ownership in some of his Chicago properties in required ethics statements.
And now, two families of his now-deceased former clients have come forward in interviews with Injustice Watch to claim Wright took advantage of his position of trust — in one case, by allegedly engaging in an overly familiar relationship with a law client before she died, and in the other, allegedly betraying the wishes of a longtime friend.
“He did this underhanded,” said Deborah Elligan, 75, the daughter-in-law of deceased Wright client Lydia Adams, who signed a will enabling Wright to buy her home at a discount.
Besides declining to be interviewed, Wright did not respond to detailed emails outlining the allegations in this report.
Law professors who reviewed the Injustice Watch reporting said courts generally prohibit estate lawyers from engaging in business transactions with their clients because such dealings suggest undue influence, financial exploitation, or perhaps even fraud.
Wright “might be very close to the line on undue influence, potential fraud, or financial exploitation,” said Danaya Wright, a law professor at the University of Florida.
Peter Wendel, a law professor at Pepperdine University, agreed.
“Anytime an estate planning attorney receives a substantial gift from a client’s will, it raises potential ethical and legal issues,” Wendel said. “An attorney who engages in such conduct has a lot of explaining to do.”
Lawyer, executor and beneficiary
Lydia Adams was once well-known as “the Queen of Black Beauty Culture.” Before her death in 1992, she built a substantial estate running accredited hairdressing schools that reportedly trained 27,000 beauticians.
In retirement, she played golf in courses around the world and displayed glittering trophies in her Grand Crossing home. At 80, in the months before her death, she entrusted her final affairs to Wright, an attorney 30 years her junior.
Wright served as Adams’ lawyer, executor of her last will, and beneficiary of her estate, government records show.
He also allegedly became very close with her, according to interviews with two of Adams’ surviving relatives.
“My sons and I went to her house to help her pack and clean up some things, and he was there. And that was the first time we met him,” Elligan said.
“When he left, she just told me that they were seeing each other, that he was like, ‘my little boyfriend,’” the daughter-in-law said. “She got real sick. All of a sudden, he was in the picture. And the next thing we knew, the property was left to him. That should not have happened.”
Adams’ grandson, clinical psychologist Don Elligan, 56, was in his early 20s and getting his master’s degree at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. He told Injustice Watch he often returned to Chicago and encountered Wright at his grandmother’s home.
Elligan said he was uncomfortable with the nature of Wright’s relationship with his grandmother.
“I was really upset with the guy,” the grandson said. “I think she was easy prey for the right candidate, so to speak. An African American attorney who seems accomplished and educated, that’s her type of guy.”
“I always knew on some level that he was a scoundrel who was probably trying to exploit her and take advantage of her,” he said.
Another lawyer drafted Adams’ will, which included a provision giving Wright an option to buy Adams’ home for only $40,000 “in consideration for all his help and not ever charging me for legal services and advice.”
Land records show Wright, as executor of her will, conveyed to himself the property at 7408 S. Calumet Ave. in 1992. When Wright took title to Adams’ home, the notary for his signature was the treasurer of Wright’s law firm.
Injustice Watch could find no record whether Wright actually paid $40,000 to Adams’ estate.
The court records also show Wright posthumously billed Adams’ estate for his legal work, charging $150 per hour. He submitted bills to her estate in 1993 for more than $13,000.
Experts interviewed said case law in Illinois and nationally stresses an executor such as Wright owes a fiduciary duty to provide his client with independent advice. The lawyer cannot solicit gifts or benefit from business transactions with the client’s estate, unless approved by the court, law professors told Injustice Watch.
If flagged by a probate judge, such transactions can be voided by the court, or the attorney might face sanctions.
Neither happened in this case, records show.
Decades after Wright was appointed judge in 1994, Adams remained listed as the taxpayer of record for this home, although she was dead.
In 2012 and then again in 2015, two decades after she died, “Lydia Adams” filed appeals with the Cook County assessor challenging the property taxes on the home owned and controlled by Wright, government records show.
The Cook County Assessor’s Office only analyzes physical data on properties when considering tax appeals and does not confirm the identities of people filing the appeals, spokesman Christian Belanger said.
“When people file an appeal, there’s not usually going to be a reason for us to check up on the taxpayer or the property owner that’s listed in that appeal. There aren’t really going to be any penalties or consequences for this kind of error because it wouldn’t change the value of the property,” Belanger said.
Wright officially became the taxpayer of record in 2019, and he remains so today, records show.
Longtime friend and client
Another client, Elmer Scott, ran a Morgan Park hardware store and owned several South Side properties until his 2006 death at age 84. During the 1990s, records show Wright represented Scott in property and probate matters. But their friendship — and Wright’s legal advice — continued after Wright became a judge, according to Rose Scott, 79, who is Scott’s widow.
“When I came into the picture, they had been longtime friends,” Rose Scott said. “Ken Wright was important. He was a judge. That was a lot to Elmer, a hardware guy, just an everyday guy.”
Wright married the Scotts in a private ceremony in his Daley Center judicial chambers in 2000, then presided at a public wedding in the backyard of the home Elmer Scott had inherited and rehabbed at 11247 S. Vincennes Ave., Rose Scott said.
“To see him around my husband, for the most part, you would never know he was a judge because he was dressed in boots and jeans,” Scott said. “He would lay on the floor at the house. He was comfortable there.”
In the months before he died, Elmer Scott suffered from dementia, Rose Scott said. Despite his doctor’s warnings, he would drive around every day to check up on his properties — and sometimes got lost.
In his final months, Elmer Scott began deliberately passing on his wealth.
He gave one home to his son by a previous marriage and left two small apartment buildings to his longtime handyman, land records show.
Rose Scott said her husband told her Wright had drawn up his will and included a provision for Wright to personally buy the Vincennes Avenue home and give her the proceeds. Injustice Watch cannot confirm whether these statements were influenced by Elmer Scott’s dementia at the time.
But when Elmer Scott died in July 2006, there was no will, court records show.
Rose Scott said she called the lawyer Wright said he had paid to draft Elmer Scott’s will.
“Judge Wright told me he paid the guy to do the will for my husband, like he was doing a favor for my husband,” she told Injustice Watch. “That lawyer said, ‘I don’t even know what you’re talking about.’”
The Scotts had a $208,000 mortgage on the home. By December 2006, five months after Elmer Scott’s death, Rose Scott had missed monthly payments totaling $14,732, court records show.
When the bank sued for foreclosure, Wright didn’t buy the property as Rose Scott said she had been promised. He also did not help her fight the foreclosure in court, she said.
“My husband told me before he passed not to worry because he was going to have the judge buy the property. But when the property went into foreclosure because I couldn’t pay the mortgage, I called the judge, and he said, ‘Just let it go in the foreclosure,’” Scott said.
“I didn’t know anything about foreclosure,” she recalled. ”I asked him if I could stay in the house, rent, do something — because I didn’t know where I was going to go. And he was like, ‘No.’”
Grieving her husband’s death, trusting his friend and former attorney, and unsure how to assert her rights in court, Scott said she followed Wright’s guidance.
She moved into an apartment and let the bank take the home.
Months later, Wright bought the home for himself from the bank for $105,000, land and court records show.
Scott said she later learned of the transaction and was shocked.
“The judge bought the property from the bank,” Scott said. “He got the property for half price.”
“People with titles and positions are expected to do right by others, but as soon as his eyes were closed, this person starts raking in.”
Wright also took possession of a second home Elmer Scott owned just up the street at 11241 S. Vincennes Ave.
Even after Elmer Scott’s 2006 death, his identity was used in 2007 and 2008 to file two board of appeals assessment appeals about this property. It’s unclear from the records who filed these appeals in his name.
But in subsequent years, Wright emerged officially as the taxpayer of record on this home. Subsequent records show Wright filed Cook County assessment appeals in 2015 and 2018 and is listed as the current taxpayer of record on tax bills.
Wright has not disclosed this address on his required annual ethics statements, records show.
A third Elmer Scott one-story single-family frame house at 11245 S. Watkins Ave. was also used by Wright as his address for making political donations. Before his death, Elmer Scott transferred the property to his son using a quit claim deed under which no money changed hands, records show.
Scott’s son got a mortgage on the home but failed to repay it, and in 2008, a lending company acquired it in a court-supervised foreclosure sale. The son later died, relatives said.
Campaign finance records show from 1996 through 2016, Wright listed this as his address as he made 32 political contributions totaling $13,500.
For eight years after the Watkins Avenue house went into foreclosure, Wright continued using it to make and receive political donations, including a refund from the election committee of then-Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice Anne M. Burke.
‘How did we miss this?’
In 1984, a decade before he was appointed to the bench, Wright received a special award for his legal service to the 21st Ward Democratic Organization at a fundraising dinner featuring then-Mayor Harold Washington, the city’s first Black mayor. Wright also became a leader of the Chicago Bar Association, the Illinois State Bar Association, and legal groups advancing Black lawyers and judges.
Wright first became a judge as a part of a countywide reform movement to diversify the Cook County bench, then largely dominated by white men. In 1992, the county was formed into neighborhood judicial subcircuits and required judicial candidates to live within those neighborhoods.
In 1994, Wright ran in a judicial subcircuit stretching from the South Side to the suburbs of Hazel Crest and Homewood on a countywide slate of more than 50 Black candidates advertised as the “soul slate.”
Wright and others were vetted by the leading bar groups when he ran unopposed in the March 1994 primary.
The bar groups focus on each candidate’s conduct within the courtroom — their legal knowledge, temperament, and clarity in written and oral communications — and don’t have the tools to conduct in-depth probes into their finances, according to five veteran bar group evaluators who described the confidential procedures on condition they not be identified.
Weeks later, Wright became one of eight primary winners elevated to the bench by an Illinois Supreme Court vacancy appointment.
“The court put us in because they needed bodies,” said fellow first-time candidate Garritt Howard, who was appointed alongside Wright in May 1994. “The only ones they appointed were those already found qualified by the bar associations.”
The volunteer bar group evaluators missed Wright’s residency conflict in part because they do not use commercial services that compile public and private records about candidates, the five sources told Injustice Watch.
Judges are routinely required to attest to their residency when filing a statement of candidacy to run for office. State elections officials said Wright’s 1994 statement of residency was purged from their files.
Following Injustice Watch’s initial October report on Wright’s residency conflict, he told the bar associations the exemptions were inappropriate and he had moved to revoke them. Will County officials confirmed Wright had corrected the record and eliminated the exemptions.
In the wake of Injustice Watch reports, leaders of the Illinois State Bar Association and the Chicago Bar Association advised a “no” vote for Wright’s retention to the bench, and both groups are now reviewing how they evaluated judges’ performance and fitness for office.
In one obvious residency conflict revealed by government records, Wright since 1977 has continually used the address of his ranch home in Joliet on his Illinois driver’s license, according to a spokesperson for the Illinois secretary of state.
Wright’s residency conflicts were also apparently overlooked by the state Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission, which investigates misconduct allegations against lawyers. Wright in the early 1990s listed his Joliet home as his residence on the attorney registration he filed with the state commission — an address disqualifying him from joining the Cook County bench in 1994.
“How did we miss this?” said one veteran bar evaluator who described their group’s confidential deliberations on condition they not be identified.
According to one evaluator, Wright told the group the ARDC conducted an inquiry in 1994 about his residency conflict and quickly resolved the matter in his favor after he told investigators he bought the Joliet home for a relative while he actually lived in Chicago. Contacted by Injustice Watch, a spokesman for the ARDC said the commission can neither confirm or deny the existence of any investigation.
In 2003, Cook County Circuit Court Chief Judge Timothy Evans appointed Wright as the presiding judge of Cook County’s first municipal district, putting him in charge of more than 40 other judges in Chicago’s housing, evictions, and small claims courts.
“In addition to his stellar service in all of his judicial assignments, Judge Wright possesses an excellent academic and professional background,” Evans said at the time.
From 2007 through March of this year, Wright used an old law office address at 711 E. 75th St. to make 34 political donations to Democrats totaling $12,000, according to campaign finance reports filed with state elections officials.
On his state ethics disclosure statements, he said he had owned this building but sold it in July 2021.
Yet even after Wright declared he sold the building, he made five political donations totaling $2,250 listing this as his address, government records show. These include donations to three appellate court judges and one Illinois Supreme Court jurist. The most recent was $500 to the Committee to Elect Justice Cynthia Cobbs for the state appellate court on March 25 of this year.
From 2020 to the most recent year, the tax bill for this property was sent to a land trust connected to Wright and former law clients.
The front door is gated with a padlock, and the windows are boarded with gray-painted plywood, Injustice Watch found.
Kelly Garcia contributed reporting.
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