Take a walk through the stripped-down interior of Blaxican’s house. Click here for a larger version

List Price: $350,000
The Property: For about five months in 2006, this 11-room house on a cul-de-sac in southwest suburban Homer Glen was home to an aspiring rapper who went by the name Blaxican. The embellishments included gargoyles and security cameras across the front of the roof, a shark tank in the dining room, a recording studio and two baby alligators in the basement, a movie screen that rolled down from the ceiling in the master bedroom, and an 80-inch TV screen, a custom pool table, and a video game arcade in the three-car garage.

But the house has sat empty since November 2006, when it was seized by law enforcement officials who charged that Blaxican (whose real name is Eric Jaglicic) had perpetrated a $1.6 million scam. Authorities alleged that Jaglicic and an associate had fraudulently convinced friends and friends of friends to back Jaglicic in producing an Adam Sandler movie to be called The Record Deal. In March, Jaglicic pled guilty to 11 counts of theft and to three other charges; he received a six-year prison sentence. He later pleaded guilty to two more counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, for which he received a concurrent two-year sentence. His associate, who maintains his innocence, awaits trial.

Jaglicic, whose self-produced rap CD is called Suburban Police Are Nerds Who Became Cops, fought for a year to keep the house. Along the way he released a rap track called “They Took My House,” which included the lines: “I’m a dead man walking; I’ve got nothing left. They might as well finish me off quickly.”

Last fall, a judge ruled that the Illinois secretary of state could unload Jaglicic’s house and possessions to provide some recompense for the victims of the fraud. Before listing the house for sale, the secretary of state’s staff auctioned off its contents. The auction, in mid-March, raised $21,000, including $2,799 for a hot tub with a built-in TV (valued at $14,000), and $1,200 for the shark tank (valued at $8,000) where Blaxican’s two pet sharks and a bat ray had swum. His orange Hummer, a Chrysler 300 sedan, and the recording studio equipment were sold in a separate auction; the total proceeds of the two auctions totaled about $80,000.

Stripped of nearly all the Blaxican touches—except for the black paint that he used liberally on the fine oak banisters, on a rock wall over the fireplace, and elsewhere—the home hit the market on April 11th. Christine Kempa, the real-estate agent representing the house for the state, showed me around the property a few days earlier. The house is a well-built, almost-new structure with a swimming pool, an expansive first floor layout, and four over-size bedrooms on the second floor. Blaxican’s two pet alligators, Danger and Dangerous, were gone, but the big crawl space where he had intended to build them a pen was still visible in the basement. “You will have to spend some money getting rid of all the black paint,” conceded Kempa. “It might cost you less to replace the entire stairs than to try and strip it.”

Price Points: Jaglicic paid $450,000 in cash when he bought the house new from a builder in June 2006; of course he likely spent an additional sum to trick the place out. The secretary of state’s office authorized Kempa to price the house “for a very fast sale,” she says, so she priced it slightly higher than the cul-de-sac’s other houses—which are all at least 20 years older and smaller than this one. (The house stands in a nice part of Homer Glen, with preserved natural land running through the neighborhood—but also with a high-tension power line immediately behind it.) When she led me on the tour, Kempa said she hoped “people could see past the weird story of the house to what a great value it is now.” Evidently they could: By April 15th, Kempa had shown the house 37 times and received four offers. Those offers are with the Illinois secretary of state’s office, and Kempa expects to be able to notify the winning bidder within a week.

Listing Agent: Christine Kempa, Kempa Group Realty, (708) 301-4100 and kempahms@aol.com