Was the DelGaldo Group beneficiaries of statements about Sterk on Proviso Insider?

Forest Park Review (Josh Adams):

In an expanding war of words being waged online and in court, District 209 school board President Chris Welch won a temporary restraining order against a Forest Park man, forcing him to remove allegedly slanderous material from an Internet site.

The judge's July 16 ruling was handed down just two days after Welch filed a lawsuit against Carl Nyberg, claiming that he is the victim of libelous statements posted on Nyberg's blog. Welch, who is being sued by the school district's former attorneys for slander, filed the paperwork with the Cook County Circuit Court.

If you haven't seen the Forest Park Review coverage of Welch's lawsuit against me, follow the link.

I thought it was odd that Michael DeBartolo, the District 209 lawyer from the DelGaldo Group, makes the claim that District 209 is paying for part of Welch's defense in the Odelson & Sterk v. Proviso Insider case and implies that the district isn't paying for the counter suit. This claim seems non-sensical to me. Also, note DeBartolo picks his words carefully.

As a point of clarification, DeBartolo said the $22,400 paid by the district does not cover any of Welch's expenses for the counterclaim filed by the school board president in January. The money expressly pays for Welch's defense in the Odelson and Sterk case.

What I think DeBartolo is saying here is that Welch hasn't submitted his bills for the counterclaim lawsuit. Those are yet to come.

If the logic behind paying Welch's legal bills is that the case is intertwined with his duties as a school board member--a bullshit claim, but let's pretend for a little bit--then the one part of the suit that touches on Welch being a school board member is the countersuit, about Welch getting fired from Roche & Associates because he stopped giving taxpayer money to James Roche's buddies, Odelson & Sterk.

The part of the lawsuit DeBartolo says taxpayers should pay for revolves around Proviso Insider making statements about Mark Sterk and Melrose Park police officers. How is the responsibility of District 209 taxpayers that Welch and Emily Robinson wrote probably slanderous statements about Mark Sterk on a blog? Welch had his identity concealed. What part of the case involves District 209?

One conflict-of-interest that might not be immediately apparent is the role of the DelGaldo Group. The claim Proviso Insider (Welch and Robinson) made was that Sterk was coaching Melrose Park police officers to lie to the federal grand jury that subsequently indicted seven, including the chief of police and deputy chief.

Someone familiar with Village of Melrose Park politics speculated if any law firm was involved in coaching these cops it was the DelGaldo Group. The firm is very close with Melrose Park village president Ron Serpico. If the feds indicted Vito Scavo, the chief of police, he would be tempted to give them a bigger fish to reduce his sentence. (I'm a bit of a contrarian on the issue of who is the big fish in Melrose Park. Scavo was chief of police before Serpico was village president. I think Scavo has his scams going and ran the patronage in the police department and he agreed to bring in Serpico as his flunky. The counter argument is that Ralph "Babe" Serpico, Ronnie's dad, was a big fish when Scavo was just a kid.)

We don't know if any lawyers were involved in coaching those police officers to lie. But it seems a potential conflict of interest that a lawyer from the DelGaldo Group is deciding whether Welch was acting in the scope of his D209 duties while anonymously spreading gossip, if not lies, on his blog.