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For a company that is supposed to be completely independent of Cook County Board President John Stroger's office, Crucial Communications Inc. -- the firm that is supposed to maintain the pay phones at Cook County Jail -- has a surprising amount of ties to the administration.

The woman who notarized Crucial Communications' latest recertification for minority-owned status, Gwendolyn A. Duncan, is Stroger's secretary. She is paid $72,000 by the county to be his administrative assistant. Stroger concedes that doesn't look good.

"When I found out about it, I blew a blood vessel," Stroger said. "I told Gwendolyn, 'You don't notarize anything for any outside people coming in here.'"

The company's payroll shows lots of familiar names, such as William Granberry, Stroger's friend and a top precinct captain in Stroger's 8th Ward organization.

Crucial Communications took care of Granberry with a job after Granberry abruptly resigned his $90,000-a-year post as director of maintenance after the "Emperor's Thrones" scandal.

The Chicago Sun-Times had reported in 2003 that Forest Preserve District officials diverted five top-class port-a-potties for once-a-year use at Stroger's annual picnic at the Green Lakes Forest Preserve. Stroger said he was embarrassed at the pictures of forest preserve workers replacing the old wooden port-a-potties with the newly cleaned plastic-laminated ones just before his picnic, then swapping them back weeks later and putting the nice ones in mothballs until the next summer.

'I didn't have to'

But Stroger denies getting Granberry a job at Crucial Communications Inc. after Granberry left the county payroll a year shy of full pension eligibility.

"I don't know how he hooked up with Crucial," Stroger said. "Do you think a guy like Bill Granberry, after working for me for 20-some years, after he retires you think I wouldn't try to help him find a job? I didn't have to. Other people did. He used to work for Tony Rezko; that's no secret."

Rezko, a top fund-raiser for both Stroger and Gov. Blagojevich, has come under fire in recent weeks as Chicago officials suggest he is the real power behind Crucial Inc., an allegedly minority-owned company that controls Panda Express restaurants at O'Hare Airport.

An affidavit filed by the company in 1997 listed Rezko as chief executive officer of Crucial Inc. More recent documents showed him as a 45 percent owner.

Rezko's spokesman and attorney both said Rezko has no role in Crucial Communications Inc., even though both businesses share an office at 409 W. Huron and Rezko's brother Aboud Rezko is one of only six employees listed at Crucial Communications Inc., along with Granberry.

Jabir Herbert Muhammad, 76, son of former Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, is supposed to be the 100 percent owner of both companies, despite his ill health. A former office manager at Crucial Communications, Delores Wade, an African American who helped convince a county inspector in 2003 that the company really was at least minority-operated, died last year, and Muhammad failed to mention that when he filed his recertification papers notarized by Stroger's secretary, saying there had been no change in the control/management of the company.

No one from Crucial Communications returned repeated phone calls last week to explain what Crucial Communications' six employees -- Aboud Rezko, Bill Granberry, Muhammad, Mrs. Antonia Muhammad, 74, who lives at the same address as Muhammad, Herbert J. Bias Jr. and Bernice B. Polk-Hatchett -- do to earn their salaries or where they acquired any expertise in maintaining pay phones.

Attempts to ring the front buzzer of the businesses were met with constant busy signals. A peek through the blinds of the door into the fifth-floor office of Crucial and Crucial Communications Inc. found the office empty of people, with mail on the floor just inside the door and photos of Jabir Herbert Muhammad with boxer Muhammad Ali, whom Muhammad used to manage.

Critics voiced concerns

Cook County commissioners asked what Crucial -- whose only customer is Cook County -- does for $3 million a year, or 30 percent of the contract. Rezko used to have his main offices one floor above.

Stroger's godson and former chief of staff Orlando Jones, a longtime friend and former business partner of Rezko, had a company called the Crucial Group in this same fleet of offices. But he has said that company is defunct and he never had anything to do with Crucial Communications Inc.'s contract with the county.

When that contract was last renewed two years ago, Stroger's critics on the board said they were concerned because of Jones' and Rezko's involvement with Crucial Communications' sister companies.

"Who actually fixes the phones?" Commissioner Mike Quigley asked.

"SBC," senior account manager Ron Lindsey said.

"So what does the minority contractor do?" Quigley asked.

"They maintain the platform, the call processing," Lindsey said.

Stroger emphasized that it was SBC that chose Crucial Communications to be the minority subcontractor.

SBC spokesman Jerry Lawrence said SBC chose Crucial Communications from a list of certified minority-owned companies provided by Cook County.

Quigley and other opposition board members say the news about Granberry, Duncan and Tony Rezko proves what they have argued all along: The $10 million-a-year no-bid contract to SBC and the 30 percent subcontract to Crucial was an insider deal to enrich the connected.

''It creates a fraud on all the other minority businesses who should be sharing in these contracts," said Commissioner Lawrence Suffredin.