Antitrust Lawyer Blog
On April 21, 2009, Douglas E. Ritter, president of a refuse disposal container repair company, and Stephen Fenzl, vice-president of the same company, were charged with conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, two counts of mail fraud and one count of wire fraud.
According the indictment, Mr. Ritter and Mr. Fenzl conspired to defraud the city of Chicago by misrepresenting the number of legitimate, competitive bids submitted to the city as well as determining the prices of those bids and submitting fraudulent documents with them. Mr. Ritter and Mr. Fenzl also provided the city with fraudulent documents regarding the use of subcontractors from the city’s Women and Minority Business Enterprise program. They fraudulently collected on payments made by the city to these subcontractors.
This is the first case to be brought in the Department of Justice’s ongoing antitrust investigation into the refuse cart repair industry.