Julio Vargas, a candidate for a seat on the Triton College Board of Trustees is facing numerous business-related lawsuits, is running a real estate business without state licensing, and may have just had an assault charge against him dropped.
State records show Vargas, 35, named either individually or through his latest company in possibly as many as 10 lawsuits that allege fraud and other financial misconduct. In the six suits that Wednesday Journal has confirmed, a total of almost $400,000 is being sought.
County records show a Julio C. Vargas with the same birthdate as the Triton board candidate was arrested and charged in November for aggravated assault with a gun or knife. That charge was dropped in January when the complaining witness did not appear in court.
Vargas did not return messages that Wednesday Journal left on his cellphone, his wife’s cellphone and on their business line.
State records also show that Vargas’s real estate license was revoked in October, half a year after he neither paid nor corrected violations that a state investigator had found at one of his offices. Vargas now is running another real estate business, one for which no state license is on record and one that advertises “foreclosure prevention” services.
County records show that the modest ranch Vargas and his wife, Janina, own in Norridge – which has a $1.16 million mortgage – is under foreclosure, 15 months after the Vargases bought it.
In his defense, Vargas has filed several documents challenging the legality of the court proceedings against him.
One of those objections, filed in September, includes a 20-page report provided by an anti-tax group called Sovereignty, Education and Defense Ministry. That group is one of two anti-tax organizations run by San Diego resident Christopher M. Hansen, who is also the author of The Great IRS Hoax: Why We Don’t Owe Income Tax, a book that purports to show people why they can opt out of the U.S. tax system. (In June 2006, the federal government obtained a judicial injunction against Hansen, prohibiting him “from making fraudulent statements in connection with his scheme, including the false statements that only federal workers are subject to the Internal Revenue Code.”)
In that filing with the Illinois Secretary of State, Vargas attempted to separate his physical self from the “legal entity” of Julio C. Vargas, contending the U.S. government has no claims on him as a living individual.
“After the government assumed title to the infant and subsequently created the Debtor, the Debtor was pledged, as a fictional substitute for the future live infant’s energy and labor (sweat equity), to fund the debt of the bankrupt U.S. Government and Congress …” the document states in part. The actual Julio Vargas (as opposed to the legal entity “Julio C. Vargas”), the filing contends, now finds himself “in a condition of involuntary servitude to the government.”
On the site for his current company, Executive 1 Financial Services in Schiller Park, Vargas claims to have “rehabbed and sold over 250 properties” in the last eight years, as well as 15 condominium conversions.
In addition to “foreclosure prevention” services, the Web site for Vargas’s current company lists negotiation, underwriting and acquisition, rehab and management, buyer mortgage origination, processing and approvals, and brokering sales to existing investor/clients “through other innovative avenues.”
According to the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, Delta Mortgage Company, which Vargas established in 1991, was fined $7,500 after inspectors found “numerous” violations of department rules on Oct. 25, 2006, at the company office at 2911 N. Cicero Ave., Chicago.
The department said it attempted to work with Vargas, but that he refused to accept a supervisory letter mailed Nov. 13, 2007. By that time, the business had moved to 9456 W. Irving Park Road in Schiller Park. A department investigator visited that location in November 2007 and determined that Vargas’s company “was taking loan applications and conducting licensable residential mortgage activities from this new office location without proper signage and submission of change of address or application for an additional full service office location.”
In March 2008, Delta Mortgage was fined $7,500. Vargas neither paid the fine nor corrected the violations, according to this state department, which revoked Delta’s license in October.
