Golden (2 page)

“Yankee and
voyageur,
the Irish and the Dutch, Indian traders and Indian agents, halfbreed and quarterbreed and no breed at all, in the final counting they were all of a single breed. They all had hustler's blood,” Nelson Algren wrote of Chicago's founders.

It was penned five years before Blagojevich was born, but he learned it. And his politics were entirely Chicago's. He was the young man who grew up in the shadow of his smarter, stronger, and more serious older brother. He struggled with how to make something of himself until finally finding a place under the wing of a powerful alderman whose daughter he married. He rode that good fortune as long as he could until he figured out the game for himself and acquired associates beholden to him—not his father-in-law.

Blagojevich got wise and succeeded in a city that too often shrugs and says corruption is a built-in if you want potholes filled and garbage picked up and someone to answer a phone in a ward office when you call.

The Chicago that Blagojevich grew up in was one fashioned by Mayor Daley—the original—Richard J. It was a city where, in theory, the people elected the judges, but in practice even black robes were passed out by the Democratic organization Daley controlled. Patronage thrived. It was the backbone of the machine. City workers often served as the precinct captains for the local Democratic Party. They lived a few doors down or a few blocks away and handled the neighborhoods' problems. Trouble with the sewers or litter on the streets or in the parks? Your kid crossways with the law? They could all be solved with a simple call to the precinct captain.

But when election time came around, so did that precinct captain. He would have a few questions and a few requests. Did you like having all those
problems solved? Do you want to make sure they'd be solved again? Well, sign your name on this petition, hang this poster in your window, and take this list of the party's slated favorites with you to the voting booth. Pull the lever for these fine candidates and Chicago will continue to be the city that works. The precinct captains came to the two-flat where Rade and Millie Blagojevich raised their two sons, just as they had years earlier when other immigrants lived in the five-room apartment.

And while the system had always kept the order of things, corruption flowed through nearly every vein in the city, and Chicago's bane became the state's.

During the nineteenth century, governors Joseph Duncan and Joel Matteson faced lawsuits and accusations, with Matteson allegedly owing the state a quarter-million dollars when he left office. Lennington Small, Illinois's governor during the Roaring Twenties, was indicted on charges he ran a money-laundering scheme during his days as the state treasurer. He deposited state funds in an inactive bank, lent the money to Chicago meat-packers, collected 6 percent interest, and refilled state coffers at a rate of 3 percent. But Small beat the rap, and it was only later discovered that four of his jurors had gotten state jobs for their bother.

Illinois seemed to forget to come of age in the twentieth century. Republican William Stratton, Illinois's governor during the 1950s, was indicted after he left office on income tax evasion. He was accused of mishandling campaign cash, but he too was acquitted. Stratton's successor, Otto Kerner, was convicted of bribe-taking, and in 1987, Dan Walker, who had been governor for a term the prior decade, was convicted of fraud related to his banking business.

So when Rod Blagojevich rose from middling lawyer and low-level Cook County state's attorney to a seat in Springfield and then from the US Congress to the governor's office, he knew exactly what he was getting into. In all, four Illinois governors—Republicans and Democrats alike—had been accused of crimes by the time Blagojevich took office. And the man from whom Blagojevich inherited the governorship, George Ryan, was on his way to becoming the fifth. Ryan was just months away from being charged when Blagojevich was sworn in as governor in 2003.

Those crooked governors took their place among hundreds of politicians—statewide officials, congressmen, city council members, school board trustees—in the class picture of Illinois's convicted political caste. There was an attorney general convicted of income tax evasion and a former
state treasurer who pleaded guilty to a check-kiting scheme. There were federal probes with catchy names—operations Phocus, Incubator, Greylord, Gambat, Haunted Hall, Silver Shovel—that nabbed mobsters, aldermen, and judges. And then there was Paul Powell, the secretary of state whose Springfield hotel room was found filled with shoeboxes jammed with hundreds of thousands of dollars after he died in 1970.

Blagojevich got to the governor's mansion using a mind less adept at budgets and problem-solving than dissecting nearly every conceivable angle of campaign fund-raising in a state with few laws governing any of it. Controversy swirled around him early in his first term, but it didn't matter. Chicago and his fund-raising machine flexed their muscles again, and Blagojevich was reelected four years later despite a federal investigation that signaled to those paying attention that he might join that shameful class picture.

In today's histrionic, polarizing world of politics, Rod Blagojevich's unique fall from grace is a morality tale for the nation. His story is an object lesson on what can go wrong when voters elect leaders—for governor, president, even school board—based on superficial things like commercial sound bites and image-making spin that seem to dominate the country's current poisonous political scene. There is no better proof of the political adage that the candidate with the most money wins than Rod Blagojevich. He was a great campaigner and an even better fund-raiser, and he never lost an election.

And when his day in court eventually came, Blagojevich was not going to go easily. He had one more campaign to win. Staring out from under his trademark shelf of dark hair at a federal jury, he finally found himself very much on the ropes and ready to talk paint off a fence. Impossible to pin down, ready to fight, willing to play dirty, and seemingly wearing his heart on his sleeve.

How Chicago.

“I'm Rod Blagojevich. I used to be your governor,” he said, dropping his voice in a tone that sounded like he was trying to either tell the jury or convince himself that everything was going to be OK. “And I'm here to tell you the truth.”

Chicago's city hall hummed with activity. Aldermen and bureaucrats clip-clapped across the marble floors inside the city's hulking, eleven-floor, Classic Revival seat of power. Alone and unnoticed, a young man sat in a hallway. Rod Blagojevich was definitely a nobody.

Home on summer break between his second and third years of law school at Pepperdine University in the summer of 1982, Blagojevich had a meeting. His father, Rade, a Serbian who emigrated from Yugoslavia after World War II, knew a friend who knew an alderman named Edward Vrdolyak. A personal injury lawyer who had become one of Chicago's most powerful politicians while representing the Southeast Side, Vrdolyak was a very good man to get to know. The alderman had come from a gritty neighborhood that bumped up against Indiana and was once filled with steel mills populated by working-class families with Eastern European roots. They toiled during the day and occupied the stools at corner taverns at night. Vrdolyak's parents had owned one of those taverns.

Since entering politics, he had become “Fast Eddie,” and it was a nickname he had more than earned as a master of the city's nasty and complex political scene and a brilliant purveyor of the deal. Chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party, Vrdolyak made lawyers he liked into judges and businesspeople he favored into state reps. Out-of-work ironworkers who came to him often got city jobs.

And that's why Rod Blagojevich was sitting outside his office. The appointment was for 9:00 A
M,
and while the perpetually late Blagojevich had surprisingly arrived on time, it would be hours before he was invited in.

When the moment came, Vrdolyak sat in his office chair; papers were piled high atop his desk. Glaring at the young man with a ten-thousand-pound stare, Vrdolyak asked how he could help. Blagojevich explained the connection to his father's friend and wanted to see if Vrdolyak could get him a job for the summer, preferably as a law clerk for the city. He needed legal experience.

“You have my resume,” Blagojevich said.

Sure, sure, Vrdolyak answered. “What ward do you live in?”

Blagojevich didn't have a clue. He told Vrdolyak he lived in “Ted Lechowicz's” ward, name-dropping the powerful Northwest Side Democratic committeeman, Cook County commissioner, and former Illinois state senator, adding he thought that was the Thirty-Sixth Ward.

Vrdolyak looked at him incredulously. You live in the Thirtieth Ward, he corrected him before picking up the phone and instructing someone on the other end to come to his office. Minutes later, in walked George Hagopian, alderman of the Thirtieth Ward.

“This kid lives in your ward,” Vrdolyak told him. See what you can do for him.

A week later, Blagojevich's phone rang. There was a city job waiting for him—driving a bus at night. It paid a healthy $11.25 an hour, but Blagojevich said there must be some mistake. He wanted a law clerk's job. It paid less but would give him the experience he needed, not to mention a political foot in the door.

A few days later, the city called back with the better offer. He could clerk for the city's law department that summer. Ecstatic, Blagojevich went back to city hall to thank Vrdolyak in person. Again he waited, this time unable to get by henchmen standing in front of the alderman's office door. When Vrdolyak appeared, he looked at Blagojevich like a man wanting to know what else this kid wanted from him. Hadn't he just gotten him a job?

“I know who you are,” Vrdolyak said, stopping Blagojevich's attempt at a reintroduction. But Blagojevich continued, saying he didn't want anything more except to say thank you. “Ludicrous as it sounds considering your position, if there's anything I can do to help you, please don't hesitate to call.”

Blagojevich was a breathless greenhorn, but he had clearly made an impression. Vrdolyak grabbed him and took him for a walk down one of city
hall's large stairwells. The alderman asked what Blagojevich's plans were after he graduated from law school. Would he be coming back to Chicago? If he did, there could be a job waiting for him at the powerful alderman's law firm.

“We'll make you part of the family,” Vrdolyak said. “You look like our kind of guy.”

“How are you doing right now, Rod?” said the criminal lawyer, as a jury, a full courtroom, the state of Illinois, and, in fact, the country awaited a response. It was almost thirty years and a universe away from Vrdolyak's job offer and Blagojevich's baptism into Chicago politics.

“I'd prefer to be somewhere else, but I'm happy to be here,” Blagojevich answered.

He was finally getting a chance to talk about everything that had happened to him, but by any stretch, Blagojevich certainly wasn't happy to be sitting on the witness stand in federal court. He had suffered the greatest political tumble in the state's history, beginning with the indignity of a predawn arrest at his home on corruption charges. Even in Illinois, Blagojevich was the only governor summarily thrown out of office after being impeached. Most of his closest friends had turned on him, helped the government, and testified against him; one was behind bars, and others were heading there. Still another had committed suicide under the pressure. And even the elusive Vrdolyak had been sent to prison in a scheme tied to Blagojevich's criminal case.

Blagojevich's finances were in shambles, and he was sitting through his second grueling federal trial. His wife, Patti Blagojevich, daughter of Chicago alderman Richard Mell, sometimes wept as she sat in support of her husband. Blagojevich's young daughters faced the prospect of losing their father for a decade or more. The former congressman and governor who had dreamed of being president of the United States had seen everything he had worked for crushed and had been forced to support his family by doing things like selling pistachios in television commercials.