Golden (17 page)

As he had with Schakowsky, Blagojevich began telling his fellow members of Congress his plans to run for governor in hopes of lining up their support. In the summer of 2000, Blagojevich called US Representative Luis Gutierrez's congressional offices. Since Blagojevich worked the streets for Vrdolyak and Mell against him in 1986, the two had mended fences. They now got along well, though Gutierrez privately was not overly impressed with Blagojevich's thin record as a congressman.

After Blagojevich told Gutierrez his plans to run for governor, Gutierrez pulled aside his top aide, Doug Scofield. “I just had a very interesting conversation with Rod Blagojevich,” Gutierrez said, seeming almost stunned. “He's going to run for governor.”

“Who is he kidding?” Gutierrez continued. Personally, Gutierrez liked Blagojevich, finding him an amiable colleague who had shown little interest in government and would be getting in over his head running for governor, except for the fact that he had Mell on his side. But Scofield, who had earned a reputation as a thoughtful aide who wouldn't dismiss ideas out of hand, told Gutierrez not to be so hasty to dismiss Blagojevich.

“It's a wide-open race,” Scofield said. “He'll get lots of money from Mell.”

Before joining Gutierrez, Scofield worked at the Strategy Group with David Wilhelm, who had made a name for himself successfully heading Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. The only thing Scofield knew about Blagojevich was his reputation as a fierce campaigner.

Gutierrez remained skeptical. Although the race was still nearly eighteen months away, the names being bandied about in gossip columns and over drinks at Gene & Georgetti, a steakhouse frequented by pols, was far more impressive: William Daley, President Clinton's commerce secretary and Mayor Daley's brother; Illinois Comptroller Dan Hynes, the son of longtime Cook County powerbroker Tom Hynes; Cook County State's Attorney
Richard Devine, who also happened to be the father of Blagojevich's press secretary, Matt Devine; even US Senator Dick Durbin.

But in general Scofield was right. It was a wide-open race, and Illinois voters were looking for something different, something new. Maybe Blagojevich could fill that void, that yearning. What was certain is that Democrats thought they finally had a real shot at winning the governor's mansion for the first time since Daniel Walker in 1972. Not because they had such a plethora of solid contenders, but because the Republican incumbent was so abysmal.

George Homer Ryan was, to many, the embodiment of what was wrong with Illinois politics. A beefy man with a round face, thick neck, and thin white hair, Ryan—now in his late sixties—came from an old-school era of politics. He hailed from Kankakee, a small working-class city south of Chicago dominated by the local Republican Party.

In the early 1960s, he joined his brother Tom in running the family business, a pharmacy. But both men were interested in politics and befriended the county's Republican powerbroker, State Senator Ed McBroom. George became McBroom's campaign manager, and Tom became Kankakee mayor. Eventually, George moved up to county board and a state legislator, earning a reputation as a man happy to help friends and then come looking for their help when the time called.

George steadily climbed the state's political ladder, becoming speaker of the Illinois House, lieutenant governor, and secretary of state for two terms before defeating former US representative Glenn Poshard in 1998 and becoming Illinois's thirty-ninth governor.

All the while, Ryan seemed to embrace the image he carved out for himself as the backroom-dealing, cigar-chomping old political horse unafraid to make a deal over a drink. It was the way things got done, the way politics was practiced for decades. Nobody was getting hurt. Roads were being built, bridges repaired, and the state was better for it.

But to reformers and some federal prosecutors, those were simplistic explanations to rationalize the patronage and corruption that followed Ryan throughout much of his political career. And by 2000, Ryan's image was battered by scandal.

Investigators had been probing Ryan's eight years as Illinois secretary of state, an office with a long history of corruption. The secretary of state's
office kept track of state records and business filings, but its biggest responsibility was overseeing auto license plates and drivers' licenses. That meant the secretary held sway over thousands of jobs and tens of millions of dollars in contracts and leases for the office's branches located throughout every corner of the state.

Perhaps Illinois's most famous secretary of state was Paul Powell. A former state legislator who famously cackled, “I can smell the meat a'cookin'” whenever the subject of state jobs was raised, Powell became secretary at the end of his political career. When he died in 1970, officials found $800,000 in cash stuffed into shoeboxes, strongboxes, and briefcases in the Springfield hotel where he was staying. Officially, Powell never made more than $30,000 a year.

By August 2000, the FBI and US attorney's office had been digging deep into illegalities that occurred while Ryan was secretary of state. What they found were office employees taking bribes in exchange for giving unqualified truck drivers their drivers' licenses. Some of the money, they discovered, was being donated to Ryan's campaign fund.

The US attorney's office called the licenses-for-bribes investigation Operation Safe Road. That name stemmed in no small part to an incident that occurred on Election Day 1994.

On the same day voters reelected Ryan secretary of state, an Illinois reverend, Scott Willis, and his wife, Janet, were driving a minivan with their children on an interstate near Milwaukee. Both had voted for Ryan. Ricardo Guzman, a Chicago man who prosecutors later alleged had paid a bribe to receive his commercial driver's license, drove a truck in front of them.

As the two vehicles sped down the highway, a mud flap-taillight assembly hung off Guzman's truck. At least one other motorist screamed and honked to alert Guzman about it. But Guzman couldn't speak English, and he ignored the warnings. Minutes later, the metal chunk split off Guzman's truck, flittered along the highway, and pierced the underbelly of Willis's minivan, striking its gas tank. In seconds, the minivan burst into flames with the Willis family trapped inside.

Almost instantaneously the flames engulfed Scott and Janet Willis. The couple fought hard to open the minivan's side door to get their children out. It was a horrific scene. The couple's oldest son, thirteen-year-old Ben, ran from the burning minivan while still swallowed up in flames before collapsing on the road as motorists who had stopped tried to help.

“His hair and eyebrows were gone,” Janet Willis recalled years later. “His burned lips made it hard for him to talk. I was suddenly aware of searing,
blinding pain in my burned hands. I could not imagine what my son, who was burned over much of his body, was going through.”

Ben died. So too did five other Willis children in the minivan. The accident became national news, and when stories broke that Guzman may have bribed a secretary of state employee to get his license, it quickly became a massive scandal. By February 2000, federal prosecutors indicted one of Ryan's dearest friends, Dean Bauer, the secretary of state's inspector general, on charges he buried the investigation into the Willis accident.

It was looking less likely voters would reelect Ryan, if he decided to run at all. His popularity numbers were in the tank, and the feds were continuing to be on his tail. Democrats were excited. But who could win?

In mid-August 2000, Democrats from around the nation gathered in Los Angeles for the national convention and to nominate Al Gore to run against George W. Bush for president. When Rod Blagojevich arrived, he strode through the hallways of the Staples Center with the wide smile of a confident man.

In a way, this was going to be his coming-out party too. Word had begun to leak out that he was considering a run for governor. Democrats had thought of Blagojevich (if they thought of him at all) as someone who could be a congressman for life. With almost no effort, he was on his way to winning a third term in office. But few thought he could be more than that.

Blagojevich had arrived in LA to demonstrate he had no intention of being a lifelong congressman. But to do so, he'd have to convince the powers that be that he was a candidate to be taken seriously.

Accompanied by Chris Kelly, Blagojevich arrived at the convention amid news that Durbin wasn't closing the door on a run for governor. It stole some of the thunder Blagojevich hoped to produce, but he tried to take it in stride. To supporters there, Blagojevich dismissed questions that he had accomplished almost nothing in Congress, telling them he soured on the “legislative branch,” especially being a member of the minority party. But if he got a job in the executive branch, he could finally achieve something.

The next morning, as the Illinois delegation gathered for breakfast in an orchestrated scene that played out before the media, Blagojevich cheerfully shook hands with delegates, laughing as a few greeted him as “Mr. Governor.” He told reporters he arrived in Los Angeles later in the week to avoid the hubbub about possibly running for governor.

“I did not feel it was appropriate for me to promote my aspirations I may have in an election that comes after this one” in 2000, he said, trying to draw a distinction between himself and Durbin. Few reporters bought the self-serving comment, but many picked up on what Blagojevich said were his criteria before deciding to run for office: “What can I do for the people as governor? Do I have the support of my family? Can I raise enough money to be competitive?”

“If those three all come up ‘yes,' it won't matter who's in the race or what they say, because I'm going to do it,” Blagojevich said.

Of course, the last rule was truly essential. And Blagojevich's plan to be taken seriously was bolstered when he revealed he'd already amassed more than $1 million in his campaign fund. Still, it wasn't enough.

“We need to keep going,” Blagojevich said to Kelly and others who had begun helping him in his fund-raising effort. “Keep pushing.”

Among those who had questions about Blagojevich's ability to be governor was his media consultant, David Axelrod. When Blagojevich first broached the idea, Axelrod immediately thought it was bad. Blagojevich hadn't distinguished himself in Congress, he wasn't detail oriented, and he seemed to want the job more to have it than to do anything with it.

The two men discussed it over a series of meetings, and each time Axelrod refused to commit.

“Axelrod needs to get into this. Is he in or out?” Blagojevich would rant to close aides. During one meeting, Axelrod attempted to divert Blagojevich by suggesting he run for a lesser office—like president of the Cook County Board. Blagojevich fumed afterward. “Axelrod doesn't think I have the gravitas to be governor,” he complained. “Well, who the hell is he?”

One of those Blagojevich privately complained to was Carol Ronen, who quickly came up with an idea for a replacement. Ronen knew Blagojevich needed a fulltime, high-powered strategist, someone who would make him real in the eyes of the Democratic political establishment and the media. She called up an old friend, David Wilhelm.