Golden (21 page)

Two days later, clouds hung heavily in the sky on the chilly morning of March 19, 2002—Election Day. Blagojevich was nervous but optimistic as morning turned to evening. Polls continued to show him in the lead, but he knew it would be tight with Vallas. He hammered Vallas with a string of negative television commercials but cleaned himself up in the final weekend with a string of positive ads much like those first bio-commercials he ran.

Crowds gathered once again at Finkl steel, cramped inside the hangarlike building where he had announced his candidacy nearly fifteen months earlier. His brother, Robert, flew up from Tennessee and watched the returns with him, Patti, and Amy.

Early results were iffy. With suburban votes being counted first, Vallas was in the lead. But Blagojevich knew he wouldn't even think he was losing until downstate votes were counted. He also kept an eye on the race to replace him as congressman of the Fifth Congressional District. Emanuel was on his way to defeating Kaszak.

Across town at the Holiday Inn in downtown Chicago near the Merchandise Mart, a few friends and supporters gathered in Vallas's room as he sat and watched the movie
Training Day.
Now a
Tribune
columnist, John Kass was there working on a piece for the newspaper. When Vallas awoke from a nap and asked how things looked, Kass told him he was in the lead. Downstate votes still had yet to come in, but things looked promising. “Be a good governor,” Kass said.

But by the time Vallas jumped in his car and made his way north to his election night party, the downstate votes had poured in. As Tuesday slipped into early Wednesday morning, the results showed Burris winning Chicago, Vallas carrying the suburbs, but Blagojevich scoring more than 55 percent of the vote downstate. It was, indeed, the difference. Blagojevich was the nominee, winning 37 percent of the vote to Vallas's 34 percent and Burris's 29 percent. He defeated Vallas by less than 26,000 votes.

Before heading onstage, Wilhelm and other aides counseled Blagojevich about his speech. Go immediately on the attack against Ryan, who hours earlier had won. Now is the time to begin shaping the campaign. Seconds after Blagojevich walked out to cheers, he opened up.

“Jim Ryan's fellow Republicans have it right,” Blagojevich said, taking a tack from O'Malley and Wood, who had criticized Ryan for not doing more as attorney general to crack down on the abuses of George Ryan. “At a moment when leadership was needed most to fight corruption, the attorney general cut and ran.”

Ryan's campaign was stunned by the quick assault. The following day, as a sleep-deprived Ryan rode in a black van to a meeting, he got visibly annoyed when a reporter repeated what Blagojevich said the night before.

“He hasn't even thanked his supporters yet and he's already attacking me,” Ryan said. “Do I have a powerful alderman as a member of my family to help raise all my money? He spent millions and millions of dollars. Where did that come from? Come on, let's get real.”

Blagojevich paid little mind. He had defied the skeptics and won. Even more important, he won with money from
his
people, especially Kelly. Now everybody in the Democratic Party was kowtowing to Blagojevich. Even Vallas eventually endorsed him, inviting him to attend a fundraiser at the same Holiday Inn to retire some of his campaign debt. Blagojevich brought along Kelly and Petrovic, and the Democratic nominee sashayed through the crowd like a conquering hero.

Inside an elevator on their way out, the trio found themselves with several strangers, one of whom asked Blagojevich, almost as a joke, if he could get him a state job if Blagojevich won in November.

Blagojevich looked seriously at the stranger and raised the specter of Tim Degnan. A little-known name outside of Chicago politics, Degnan was renowned inside the scene as one of the most powerful men behind Mayor Richard Daley. Pointing to Kelly, Blagojevich told the stranger, “This is going to be my Tim Degnan. You talk to him.”

At one-thirty on the morning after he declared victory in the Republican primary, Jim Ryan sat in his suite at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers listening to his closest lieutenants talk about his next opponent, Rod Blagojevich. They didn't have much to tell him.

John Pearman and Dan Curry were longtime aides of Ryan in the attorney general's office. Ryan's campaign director and good friend Stephen Culliton was also there.

A skinny, disciplined, thirty-one-year-old marathon runner, Pearman addressed Ryan as “General” and started with the obvious: he's Dick Mell's sonin-law. A quick look at his record in Congress didn't show much. The only bill he's passed was renaming a post office. Once he started campaigning, he often missed votes in Washington. Pearman also pointed out an intriguing story the
Tribune
did in 1996 when Blagojevich was running for Congress in which, Pearman said, the report made it sound like he might have been a ghost payroller. So we'll have to look more into that, Pearman told Ryan.

Ryan nodded and didn't say much. He had little to add. This is what he paid people like Pearman and Curry to do. He was the opposite of Blagojevich. Ryan had an aversion to the retail politics of shaking hands, kissing babies, and walking parades. He was disinterested in opposition research. He got visibly uncomfortable asking people beyond his closest friends and supporters for money. He realized he had to do all of it to get to the end goal. But that didn't mean he had to like it.

Ryan preferred to view the world through the lens of the law. There were evidence, rules, and black-and-white conclusions. Politics was messy and often unfair. There was no judge to rule something out of bounds. It was little wonder the public offices Ryan held were all in law enforcement. Before serving two terms as attorney general, Ryan was the state's attorney of DuPage County, the wealthy suburbs just west of Cook County.

Ryan hadn't paid much attention to the Democratic primary, but one thing he noticed was that Blagojevich spun yarns and sold himself well but didn't have much beneath the surface. It especially irked Ryan that Blagojevich talked about his time as a Golden Gloves boxer. Ryan also was a Golden Glove boxer, but, unlike Blagojevich, he had actually been a two-time champion.

Boxing is a great storyline for politicians. It lends itself to dramatic portrayals of men alone in the ring and fighting for what they believe in. If any politician has one organized fight in his childhood, he is sure to talk about it on the campaign trail. At fifty-six, Ryan was older than forty-five-year-old Blagojevich, but he had heard about Blagojevich's lackluster fighting experience from others involved in Chicago's tight-knit boxing community. It was a purposeful resume inflation on Blagojevich's part. And even though any politician would do it, it peeved Ryan that Blagojevich tried to play himself off as some kind of boxing aficionado when all he did was enter a tournament, something any chump could do.

So, after receiving Pearman's lowdown on Blagojevich, Ryan felt optimistic as he settled into bed. Indeed, the whole campaign thought they had dodged a bullet by not having to face Vallas, who was smart, had a strong grasp of the issues facing Illinois—especially the budget and education— and exuded a good-government nerdiness that would have played well with independents and some Republicans wanting to clean themselves off following the scuzz-show the state had endured the last three-plus years under George Ryan.

But there was no escaping that being a member of the same political party and having the same last name as George Ryan wasn't going to help. And Blagojevich showed he wasn't going to hold back trying to link the two men. The race was just hours old, and Blagojevich had already all but called Jim Ryan a crook for not bringing charges against George Ryan.

And it was just that sort of thing that annoyed Jim Ryan so much about politics. The attorney general's office didn't conduct major corruption investigations of statewide officeholders. More importantly, the feds were already
neck-deep into their probe of George Ryan when some of this licenses-for-bribes stuff came to the surface. What was he supposed to do, launch his own investigation and get in the feds' way?

“Get real,” Jim Ryan said again and again when Blagojevich laid out the accusation.

Ryan hoped voters would see through such silliness. And if they didn't, he wouldn't let the accusations go unanswered. Unlike Vallas, Ryan and his campaign aides felt they could at least compete with Blagojevich's fund-raising juggernaut. Vallas couldn't win because he got into the race too late and couldn't raise enough money. People knew Jim Ryan. They knew his story. They knew his family's stories and its tragedies. And they knew how he had persevered.

As for fund-raising, he was getting help from some of his closest acquaintances, including one of his best friends, a man he'd known since they studied together in law school and who had gone on to become independently wealthy and a powerful behind-the-scenes player in Illinois politics.

Stuart Levine would be there for him.

Stuart Levine met Jim Ryan at their first day of law school in 1968 at Chicago-Kent College of Law. The two quickly became inseparable. “We were a study group of two,” Levine once recalled. “Jim Ryan got me through law school.”

After graduating, Levine worked as a lawyer and then as an administrative assistant for his mother's cousin, Ted Tannenbaum, and made millions of dollars in the health and dental insurance businesses. He started as a special counsel to Tannenbaum's Chicago-based HMO America Inc., the largest health-maintenance firm in the state, and quickly turned thousands into millions by investing. Later in life, he became a very public local philanthropist, serving on boards for the blind, the Lincoln Park Zoo, and several Jewish causes, including the US Holocaust Museum, which was built in a suburb near his home. In 1994, King Gustav XVI of Sweden knighted Levine for nurturing cultural and economic ties between the United States and Sweden.

GOP governors had placed Levine, a noted Republican, on several state boards, including those that oversaw teacher pension investments and hospital expansions. The positions didn't pay much but that wasn't the point. The posts on the state boards gave Levine power and influence.

Levine drove Porsches, traveled in chartered jets, and kept a private office on the twenty-ninth floor of the John Hancock Center at the northern end of Michigan Avenue, Chicago's Magnificent Mile. He looked the part of a distinguished, established businessman who had a perfect family, a two-story mansion in wealthy Highland Park, friends in high places, and seats on influential boards. He wore glasses, dressed impeccably, and kept his short hair neatly parted, appearing for all the world like he had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and things had only improved from there.

While Levine got rich, Ryan entered politics. During Ryan's previous runs for office, Levine loaned or donated nearly $250,000 to his various campaigns. When Ryan decided to run for governor, he asked Levine not only for more money but also to serve as finance chairman of his campaign. He was the man in charge of finding donors and getting them to fork over cash. Levine was essentially playing the Chris Kelly role for Jim Ryan. And before the election was over, Levine would personally donate more than $540,000 to Ryan's bid to beat Blagojevich.

Few working for Ryan liked Levine. He was arrogant, brash, and abrasive with everyone in the campaign except the even-keeled Ryan. The two men couldn't have been more different, and close Ryan staffers chalked it up to an old friendship that was difficult to explain. But they were counting on Levine's aggressiveness to make Ryan competitive with fund-raising.