Alexi Giannoulias has used his family bank at every turn to show how qualified he is to be treasurer. It was Giannoulias who said he has met with “Jaws” Giorango at the bank “a few” times, and described him as “a very nice person” and, according to the Tribune, questioned whether Giorango was really a criminal.

Here’s more about Giorango, from Knight-Ridder’s archives.

From Laws’ 20th-floor condo at 405 N. Wabash Ave., the muscular riverfront skyline spilled into a crosshatched quilt of lights. Here, perched near the Sun-Times building, Laws ran a lucrative arm of the “Circuit,” an upscale prostitution ring that flourished in Chicago and 10 other U.S. cities between 1995 and 2002, federal court papers show.

The prostitutes, who charged $350 to $1,000 an hour, stayed in each city a week or two, in swank apartments maintained by madams such as Laws. The Circuit’s midtown Manhattan penthouse was a romper room of cocaine and Viagra, courtesans in slinky eveningwear and pay-for-sex pathos. […]

What sort of man paid for sex on the Circuit? Court records show they included well-connected business executives such as real estate investor and former bookie Michael Giorango, a twice-convicted Chicago bookmaker who reinvented himself as a real estate investor who controlled Miami Beach hotels and more than a dozen Chicago properties.

Federal prosecutors alleged that Giorango promoted the Circuit operation of Miami madam Judy Krueger by encouraging her prostitutes to work from one of his Miami hotels and by using the women to entertain and entice his business associates. “There was a parasitic relationship between (Giorango) and Judy Krueger’s prostitution business,” federal prosecutors wrote in court papers.

Giorango declined to comment. In January, a federal jury in Miami convicted him of violating the Travel Act by using a telephone in interstate commerce to promote Krueger’s operation, according to a Justice Department press release and court records.

From yesterday’s Tribune story.

Broadway Bank lent Giorango and one of his property firms $2.5 million and extended a line of credit allowing him to borrow an additional $2.5 million, Miami-Dade County land records show. Those loans helped him finance his acquisition of the Lorraine Hotel in Miami Beach.

Now, there’s zero evidence that the bank knew what Giorango was doing with his hotel, and, as the Trib says, “the transactions don’t appear to be illegal,” but eyebrows had to rise all over town when Giannoulias said, “I don’t know what the charges are that makes him this huge crime figure.”