Perry Environmental, a company owned by Julie Keebler, removed three condemned tanks from the former Ayerco gas station at 2727 S. MacArthur Blvd. in Springfield in March 2025. (Illinois Times photo by Zach Adams)
By Dilpreet Raju, Illinois Times
When Illinois Times last wrote about environmental engineer Michael Keebler in August 2015, his situation was grim. The U.S. government had filed seizure notices for multiple assets, including his home, around the same time he was sentenced to five years in federal prison for defrauding the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency out of $13 million. The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation suspended his engineering license.
At the time of his sentencing, U.S. Central District Judge Sue Myerscough said the fraud involving fake invoices for work never performed on leaking underground storage tanks was “breathtaking in scope.”
But a little more than a decade later, things seem to have returned to normal for Keebler. His engineering license was reinstated in April 2021. He kept his home in Sherman and one of his companies, which continues to do business with the IEPA. Since 2015, Keebler has collected nearly $1.5 million from the same state agency he was sent to prison for defrauding.
Keebler has even sought additional reimbursement from the state’s underground storage tank fund by appealing more than 15 of the IEPA’s final reimbursement notices. His most recent appeal, which remains open, requests a $21,000 payment be added to nearly $393,000 already received for cleanup of a Vermilion County property. And it’s unclear if the state has improved its system of checks and balances to verify the accuracy of invoices submitted since Keebler’s return to the profession. However, Keebler has not been accused of further wrongdoing since his previous case was settled.
The IEPA began to investigate issues with Keebler’s work for property owners who were trying to get their leaking underground storage tanks cleaned up after a 2010 visit to a McLean County site showed no remediation had occurred. By the time federal attorneys indicted Keebler in 2013, he was accused of being the ringleader of a scheme that had gone on for 12 years and involved multiple people.
Keebler owned Environmental Management Inc., a Springfield-based company that did work statewide and employed as many as 50 people. While some of the fraud involved billing for work that hadn’t been performed, Keebler was also accused of creating fictitious companies to avoid competitive bidding requirements and inflate invoices, paying subcontractors a lesser amount than what he billed the state.
According to the 2013 indictment, Keebler “established the corporation ‘JK-Five Construction, Inc.’ This corporation, while established in the name of Michael R. Keebler’s spouse, was completely controlled and operated by Michael R. Keebler.”
Keebler’s brothers created shell businesses “to purchase properties which either had been contaminated by one or more leaking underground storage tanks” that would then be cleaned up by businesses they also were connected to in order to “disguise and inflate invoices from subcontractors and submit these fraudulent invoices to Illinois EPA for payment from the LUST Fund.”
Five other people ultimately pleaded guilty to fraud, although they received much smaller penalties based on their lesser roles in the scheme. EMI founder Joel Andrews of New Berlin, his brother Eric M. Andrews of Springfield, and Keebler’s brothers, Duane T. Keebler of Missouri and Joseph R. Keebler of Carbondale, were all ordered to pay restitution along with Jeremy L. VanScyoc of Springfield, an EMI engineer.
Joel Andrews and Eric Andrews were sentenced to three years and two-and-a-half years in prison, respectively, while VanScyoc only received a one-day sentence. Keebler’s brothers were both sentenced to two years of probation with conditions, including the first three months in home confinement.
Same players, different name
Illinois has one of the highest motor fuel tax rates in the country. Consumers in the state pay about 85 cents in taxes for every gallon of non-diesel gasoline purchased.
Packaged inside those various state and federal taxes is a tax amounting to three-tenths of a cent on every gallon of gasoline purchased that is earmarked for the state’s Leaking Underground Storage Tank, or LUST, fund. When property owners have tanks of oil stored underground that have begun to leak and need to be removed, they can apply to the LUST fund to be reimbursed for the cleanup costs.
Across the state, there are thousands of these oil tanks buried underground, many on the sites of former businesses such as gas stations and industrial parks. Such tanks, most buried for decades, have been found to leak and contaminate the surrounding soil. The process of removal and cleaning up the affected area can cost anywhere from thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands.
A property owner in the Metro East told Illinois Times about his unexpected encounter with Keebler and his previous company, Environmental Management Inc. in 2014. Illinois Times agreed to identify the property owner only as “John” since the remediation work is not yet complete.
“Somebody had hired them, or they knew that there was a leaking underground storage tank on the adjoining property. Two tanks were on my property — this was one parcel at one time and then was split off,” John said. “Somebody showed up and a neighbor called me and said, ‘Hey, they got a drilling derrick set up on your property.’ I ran down there and told the people to leave (because) they didn’t have my permission.”
An apologetic Keebler told John his property, next to the property Keebler was hired to clean up, was also contaminated. John asked Keebler how he knew that.
“He said, ‘Well, we took samples’ — I was by that property every day, two, three times a day, and my property was never sampled,” John said.
“I started getting documents, information and saw that it was Michael Keebler of Environmental Management Inc. out of Springfield. I talked to a friend of mine who was an engineer and he said, ‘The state is watching him. He’s being investigated.’ That made me perk up and I just kept following it,” John said.
John eventually managed to speak with people involved with investigating Keebler, including the FBI, regarding his own property. “They didn’t care,” John recalled. “They said, ‘We’ve got enough on him. We got four or five (properties), we don’t care.’”
Left with questions about his property’s contamination, John eventually talked to state employees about getting his land tested by the IEPA.
“He’s never tested my property,” John told state workers involved with the remediation of leaking underground storage tanks. “All you got to do is test my property. If it’s clean, I’m happy, but I don’t think it’s clean.”
Finally in 2023, John convinced the state to sample his property and found that it was indeed contaminated.
The investigation into Keebler’s company and his subsequent prison sentence had halted the cleanup work on the property adjacent to John but years later, that property owner decided to finish the remediation work.
“Next thing I know, it’s Perry Environmental (who comes out to do the work),” John said. “I had done enough investigating to find out that all of Keebler’s previous employees at Environmental Management were now employed by Perry Environmental. Players are the same, it’s just a different name.”
In late August 2015, during the weeks between her husband being sentenced and entering prison, Keebler’s wife, Julie, incorporated a new company, Perry Environmental. It has remained active as a business remediating leaking underground storage tanks for property owners.
Perry Environmental began work in 2016, with Josh Fortado listed as a point of contact for the company in more than a dozen Illinois Emergency Management Agency records. A LinkedIn account under Fortado’s name lists Environmental Management Inc. as an employer beginning in 2006, the same year Michael Keebler became majority owner and president. Neither Fortado nor Julie Keebler hold engineering licenses.
Another business in Julie Keebler’s name, GBL Properties, was registered with the Illinois Secretary of State in June 2008. The forfeiture action taken by the federal government in 2015 included “any and all assets of GBL Properties,” but the company itself was never dissolved. GBL Properties has been paid nearly $1.5 million by the state since Keebler entered prison in 2015, with the latest reimbursement being sent out in February, according to the comptroller’s office. The company has also purchased more than 60 leaking underground storage tanks in various parts of the state, beginning in 2008 when it was first incorporated and as recently as 2022.
Restitution and return
Keebler and his attorneys managed to negotiate down the final restitution judgment from over $13 million to just more than $7.75 million after requesting additional audits and appeals of the work that the EPA claimed was fictitious or overblown.
That final restitution payment was split among Keebler and his codefendants, largely through assets the federal government seized and subsequently liquidated, including more than two dozen bank accounts.
Keebler’s restitution posted with the court neared $3 million in 2016, according to federal court filings, while Eric Andrews posted roughly $2.5 million and Joel Andrews posted close to $750,000. VanScyoc faced a significantly smaller penalty of about $175,000, which was posted in full.
In January 2018, the federal government filed a motion to vacate against seven different seized properties, including Keebler’s personal residence and parcels of land owned by GBL Properties. The U.S. Attorney’s Office filed a motion that explained the government’s reasoning behind the reduced judgment, which then led to a surplus of assets seized.
“At the suggestion of this court, the victim in this matter, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, has accepted several million dollars’ worth of claims from Michael Keebler and EMI, which had previously been denied or had not yet been submitted,” the motion reads. “When it became clear that the amount of forfeited property… would extinguish the remaining restitution obligation, the government requested that this court vacate the forfeiture judgments regarding certain properties (such as the defendants’ homes) to mitigate any over-collection.”
Another result of the reduced restitution amount meant Keebler was able to get the government to waive a probation requirement.
“Keebler seeks to eliminate the conditions of supervised release requiring him to provide the U.S. Probation office with financial information ‘until restitution and any fines have been paid in full.’ The government affirms that once this court applies the funds with the clerk to the remaining restitution, the restitution and fines will have been paid in full, and therefore has no objection to modifying the conditions of supervised release,” the motion reads.
Chip Mulaney, a partner at Chicago-based law firm Goldberg Kohn and an attorney who specializes in white-collar fraud, said it’s unlikely that Keebler’s federal probation office would have released him if they knew about his return to the cleanup work.
“All this indicates to me that they were not aware that he was going back into doing exactly this kind of work,” Mulaney told Illinois Times. “If you’re back in the field that you were originally convicted of fraud in, I think the probation office, and likely the government, would have opposed early termination of supervised release.”
Keebler was released from federal prison in January 2019, although his engineering license remained suspended until April 2021.
Despite the suspension, Keebler’s name appears as the “authorized representative” of Perry Environmental on two 2020 underground storage tank removal applications that were approved by the Office of the State Fire Marshal.
Steven Johnson, public information officer for IDFPR, informed Illinois Times that suspended engineers must petition for a reinstatement of license privileges.
“There is nothing in law that would strictly prohibit a professional engineer who has been suspended or revoked from being reinstated. However, to restore their license, the engineer would need to file a petition for restoration with the Department,” Johnson wrote in an email. “The petitioner must prove by a preponderance of the evidence that they have been sufficiently rehabilitated and that their restoration is in the public interest.”
Since returning to work in 2020, Keebler is listed as the point of contact for more than 100 contaminated sites from St. Clair County all the way to Cook County in Illinois Emergency Management Agency logs. And once again, there are multiple business entities that overlap. In 2024, Perry Environmental cleaned up multiple tanks owned by GBL Properties, which then submitted payment requests to the state. Both companies list Julie Keebler as president and registered agent.
“Me and a whole bunch of other people are still wondering how he was able to keep working,” a central Illinois subcontractor who asked to not be identified due to being in the same line of work as Keebler told Illinois Times. “He never should have gotten his license back.”
State oversight
As is the case with most government environmental operations, removal (and installation) of these tanks is done by certified contractors on behalf of property owners.
CSD Environmental Services is a Springfield-based civil and environmental engineering and contracting firm. Senior project manager Shane Thorpe told Illinois Times that the IEPA has no control over who property owners hire for removal of underground storage tanks. However, he said it would be unusual for the company doing the remediation to also own the tank.
“Consultants do not typically own the tanks, but consultants do perform work and then the owners assign their rights to reimbursement from the LUST Fund to them,” Thorpe said of the process.
He acknowledged that there are some circumstances where the entity performing the work also owns the leaking tank. “I wouldn’t say it’s normal, but it does happen,” Thorpe said, citing examples of some large oil companies that buy and remediate land.
Kim Biggs, the public information officer for IEPA, told Illinois Times the agency does not maintain a list of approved consultants, so it is up to property owners to identify a company to do the work. Biggs said the agency recommends evaluating a firm’s experience and capability, willingness to explain cleanup operations so owners can make informed decisions and the project timetable and price.
“However, a licensed professional engineer or a licensed professional geologist registered in the state of Illinois must certify all reports, budgets and applications for payment…only a licensed professional engineer may certify the Corrective Action Completion Report,” she wrote in an emailed response.
IEPA did not respond to a follow-up question from Illinois Times about how often the state agency audits the corrective action plans that are submitted before issuing payment. However, there are not a significant number of appeals to the Leaking Underground Storage Tank Fund.
“In FY24, the Board had 21 (Underground Storage Tank) cases, in FY25, the Board had nine, and so far in FY26, we have received five. As far as Mr. Keebler, we have no comment on his practice either in his private practice or any possible contracts with IEPA,” Marie Tipsord of the Pollution Control Board wrote in an email response to questions from Illinois Times.
Despite receiving nearly $1.5 million in state payments since Keebler’s sentencing, one of his wife’s companies, GBL Properties, has sought additional reimbursement from the state’s underground storage tank fund by appealing more than 15 of the EPA’s final reimbursement notices with the Illinois Pollution Control Board. The IPCB is an independent agency created in 1970 by the Environmental Protection Act that adjudicates non-criminal complaints related to the act.
Filings from the time between Keebler’s indictment and sentencing show GBL Properties requested $390,000 in additional payments for costs associated with cleaning up tanks on eight different properties, although the company later dropped the appeal request.
Each appeal, aside from one filed in January 2025 that remains open, was eventually dropped by GBL Properties. The complaint from last year requests an additional $21,000 be added onto a nearly $393,000 state payment for a Vermilion County property that was cleaned up by Perry Environmental, another of Julie Keebler’s companies.
Illinois Times contacted Patrick Shaw, a Springfield lawyer who is listed as representing GBL Properties at the Illinois Pollution Control Board. Shaw filed, and eventually dropped, at least a dozen appeals with the IPCB on behalf of GBL Properties. He declined to comment on the multiple appeals.
Since opening the latest appeal more than a year ago, filed by Stephen Hedinger of Springfield law firm Sorling Northrup, GBL Properties has agreed to delay a final decision from the IPCB four times as GBL “is awaiting an additional agency determination” for the Vermilion County facility in question.
The aftermath
Illinois Times reached out to Keebler numerous times by phone, email and a certified letter through contact information listed in public records to request comment but never received a response.
Joel Andrews declined an interview request and said he is no longer in contact with Keebler. “I don’t have an opinion or care what he’s doing now. He put a lot of people in a bad situation is all I have to say,” Andrews wrote in an emailed response.
Illinois Times also reached out to VanScyoc, who was given the lightest sentence in the 2015 case, but did not receive a response. According to his LinkedIn profile and other publicly available information, he has worked for Springfield-based Fuhrmann Engineering since 2016.
Illinois Times contacted numerous state agencies on multiple occasions, including IDFPR, the state fire marshal and IEPA, with follow-up questions regarding the public records related to Keebler.
Biggs, the public information officer for IEPA, provided IT with what she characterized as a “joint statement” from the three agencies. “LUST program payments are completed through owners and operators, not contractors or subcontractors. Owners and operators are solely responsible for selecting the contractors and subcontractors who perform decommissioning duties,” she wrote. “However, we are concerned by the recent information brought to our attention. The state will be evaluating the scope of this individual’s alleged role in this work and determine whether any appropriate action can be taken.”
Mark Rossow, a professional engineer who taught civil engineering at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, authored an online continuing education course on engineering ethics, “Case Studies of Theft through Fraud.” The first case study in his course revolves around Keebler’s past scheme.
“The type of fraud that Keebler committed – submitting invoices for work that was inflated in reported cost or never done at all – seems to be a common type of industrial or commercial fraud now and in the past, probably because it is so easy to do: Just prepare a piece of paper (an invoice for fictitious work done), send it in, and hope that the defrauded party doesn’t have the manpower or the will to inspect the work,” Rossow wrote to Illinois Times.
Dilpreet Raju is a staff writer for Illinois Times and a Report for America corps member. He has a master’s degree from Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and was a reporting fellow at Capitol News Illinois.
