This is the bomb thrower that used to give Mike Sheahan a bad time. He is another former BF of Carol Mosely Braun

POS Deadbeat judge — hounded by IRS, making $190,258 a year

WRITTEN BY TIM NOVAK AND MAX RUST POSTED: 10/03/2015, 06:50PM

Tommy Brewer, now a Cook County judge, at the Dirksen Federal Building in 2005. | Sun-Times file photo 

Cook County Circuit Judge Tommy Brewer is being hounded by the Internal Revenue Service.

The IRS has slapped Brewer with seven liens — two filed as recently as last year — seeking payment of a total of $227,559 in personal income taxes while Brewer was an attorney in private practice between 1997 and 2010, the year the Illinois Supreme Court appointed him to a vacant seat on the Cook County bench.“I’m a good guy,” the judge says. “I’m not trying to cheat anybody out of anything. I’m trying to battle them
as I can. I’m not saying I don’t owe them anything. I thought I owed them about $50,000 . . . I pay my tax religiously.

“They’re just claiming that I didn’t file,” says Brewer, who’s among thousands of Cook County residents and businesses the state or federal government have gone after since 1985 for unpaid taxes, court fines or restitution in criminal cases. “In the later years, they say I didn’t pay enough. So I went out and hired an accountant. He suggested I start paying them. I have an installment agreement with them. I’m paying them a pretty penny.”

Brewer, 64, is paid $190,258 a year as a judge, and, since his appointment, Illinois taxpayers have paid him a total of $883,285.

His tax problems began more than a decade ago. The IRS filed its first lien against him in 2004, seeking $70,482 in income taxes for 1997, 1999 and 2000. And the liens kept mounting as Brewer made several failed attempts to get elected Cook County’s sheriff or state’s attorney.

The IRS had filed five liens against Brewer, seeking to collect more than $207,000 in income taxes, when he landed a judicial appointment from the Supreme Court in November 2010. It’s unclear whether the Supreme Court justices were aware of Brewer’s tax problems, though he regularly discloses his IRS debts on the statements of economic interest he files each year with the clerk of the Supreme Court.

The two liens the IRS filed last year against Brewer are for another $79,969 in income taxes owed from 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2010.