A former FBI informant and convict who embezzled nearly $375,000 from a south Chicago suburb has bought the Ecolab University Center tower in downtown St. Paul with plans to convert it into an apartment building with a grocery.

John Thomas paid $3.5 million for the property at Wabasha and Sixth streets after an auction last December. He plans to develop 200 apartments on the upper floors and add a 10,000-square-foot supermarket, Jet Express, on the ground and mezzanine levels.

“It’s a smaller version of a supermarket,” Thomas said Thursday night. “It will have produce, baked goods, prepared foods.”

The mezzanine level will be a wine bar, he said.

In addition to the former Ecolab building, about 16 months ago Thomas attempted to buy the downtown Capital City Plaza Parking Ramp at auction for $12 million from the St. Paul Port Authority. But that deal has been held up by litigation from property owner John Rupp, who states he had an option to buy the ramp for $32 million. Right now the ramp is still owned by the Port Authority.

In 2015, Thomas was sentenced to five years in prison for embezzling nearly $375,000 of taxpayer funding designated for the development of a marina in Riverdale, Ill. A judge also ordered Thomas to pay the suburban village restitution. During the court proceedings, prosecutors called Thomas a “serial con man,” according to an article in the Chicago Tribune.

It wasn’t the first conviction for Thomas. Under the name Bernard Barton, he’d been convicted of fraud for “various financial schemes” in New York, the Tribune reported.

“But his sentencing was delayed for years while Thomas worked as an informant for the FBI on investigations into fraud in commercial real estate as well as political corruption,” according to the Tribune.

Thomas once was a business associate of Antoin “Tony” Rezko, who was convicted in the federal probe that felled imprisoned former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich,” according to the Chicago Tribune.

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According to an article in a Chicago suburban newspaper, the Daily Herald, Thomas is the CEO of Freedom Development Group of Chicago. The firm recently bought a former 13.7-acre hospital campus north of Elgin, Ill. He and his partner, Daniel Olswang, have not decided what to do with the property, whether to sell it or redevelop it.

In that article, Thomas said “he’s tired of his past being rehashed. ‘I have done nothing wrong since I got out of prison. I have been rehabilitated,’ he said. ‘I built my company from zero from walking out of prison.’ ”

Frederick Melo contributed to this article.