Golden (22 page)

Just hours after Pearman and Curry's meeting with Ryan, both Blagojevich and Ryan awoke to a fresh start and the beginning of a new campaign season. The next election was more than seven months away, but both men engaged in post-primary election win clichés. How they went about it told everything a voter needed to know about how different Rod Blagojevich and Jim Ryan were.

Blagojevich had slept only forty minutes but showed no signs of it. With an earnest look in his eye, dressed sharp and bursting with energy, Blagojevich bounded up the steps of Union Station in downtown Chicago and eagerly shook the hands of every commuter he could buttonhole. He thanked them for their vote, whether they cast one for him or not.

A few blocks away, Jim Ryan stood at Lou Mitchell's, a famous breakfast diner in the West Loop jammed with businesspeople and construction
workers fueling up for the day on coffee and omelets. But instead of charging into the restaurant to meet the public and revel in his victory with an eye toward another one in November, Ryan stayed by the front door where the management handed out little cartons of Milk Duds and doughnut holes to those waiting in line. Almost embarrassed, Ryan acted like he didn't want to intrude on patrons enjoying their breakfast. He gave a few television interviews for the morning programs before cutting the visit short and jumping into his campaign van.

It was a telling difference between the two men and was a scene that would repeat itself over and over throughout every corner of the state. But on top of retail politicking, Blagojevich felt he had another advantage. He had learned to fundraise with the best of them, and he wasn't going to slow down now.

Kelly, Petrovic, Wyma, and another fundraiser emerging onto the scene—Antoin Rezko—were spearheading Blagojevich's general election push for cash.

A savvy businessman who dressed in tailored suits and sported a trimmed mustache and a calm demeanor, Rezko became wealthy with a pair of enterprises. He developed housing in low-income neighborhoods, and he owned dozens of Panda Express and Papa John's pizza franchises. Tony, as most people called him, wasn't a Republican or Democrat. Instead, he subscribed to an anti-political philosophy that infused the state's character: “What's in it for me?”

For those in power, especially those of Rezko's ilk who orbited in the close circles around elected leaders, government was rarely about ideology. Rather, politics was a marketplace operated in the gray areas of power where Democrats and Republicans made deals away from the limelight. Elected officials, of course, officially belonged to one party or the other, but many of those close to them, like Rezko, moved seamlessly between Republicans and Democrats. All that mattered was who was in power at the time and how to gain access to them. Of course, what men like Rezko could do in return for politicians like Blagojevich was raise money.

But Blagojevich also liked Rezko personally. In Blagojevich's eyes, Rezko's story was much like his own and that of his parents—another great American rags-to-riches tale of success. Rezko was born in Aleppo, Syria, a historic city north of Damascus with a sizable Christian community. It was one of the country's larger cities, but Rezko dreamed of more. As a student,
he became interested in engineering, and a teacher suggested he leave his native land to attend a good engineering school in America—the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

When Rezko arrived in the city, he was amazed at its size and how modern it looked. A good soccer player in Syria, he played at IIT but focused mostly on his studies. He dreamed of staying in America and making a life and career amid all the opportunities he saw around him.

After graduating from IIT, Rezko met Jabir Herbert Muhammad, the son of the famed and recently deceased Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. Since 1966, Jabir Muhammad had been managing the boxing career of Muhammad Ali, who became a member of the NOI. Rezko soon joined Muhammad in business, became a member of Ali's entourage, and helped manage the champ's affairs, including endorsement deals.

In the boom decade of the 1990s, Rezko formed a development firm with Chicago businessman Daniel Mahru. They called the company Rezmar, using portions of each man's surname. They quickly made millions, sometimes working with a well-known developer, Allison Davis, building and selling properties in the Woodlawn neighborhood on the South Side. As the development business grew, Rezko got involved in politics, an occupational hazard in a town where developers constantly need government help on everything from zoning matters to tax breaks.

Rezko had already dabbled in the world of local politics. In 1983, as Harold Washington was on his way to becoming Chicago's first black mayor, Jabir Muhammad encouraged Rezko to help. Rezko was instantly drawn to politics and fundraised for Washington. In 1994, he donated nearly $70,000 and loaned thousands more to the Cook County Board presidential campaign of John Stroger, a Democratic ally of Mayor Daley, and then turned around and raised money for Republican governors Jim Edgar and George Ryan and later President George W. Bush.

Rezko also saw talent in a young man running for Illinois Senate from one of the neighborhoods where Rezmar worked. So when Barack Obama decided to run for state office, his earliest donations—$2,000 total—came from two firms Rezko controlled.

Rezko viewed getting involved in politics as good for business. What's more, he liked the feeling he got when the most powerful men and women in the city and state came to him looking for assistance. To him, politics and business were two sides of the same coin. You do favors for friends, you get something in return.

As Rezko got rich, he got to know Blagojevich. Rezko and his wife, Rita, regularly joined Rod and Patti for dinner and social events. In the late 1990s, Rezko even started using Patti as an agent for real estate work. Amy Blagojevich got to know Rezko's children.

Rezko stood on stage alongside Blagojevich on the night he won the primary, but few in the campaign were keenly aware of him. To them, he was just one of the dozens of faceless fundraisers involved in Blagojevich's campaign.

And that's exactly the way Rezko liked it. Unlike Kelly, who craved attention and wanted a high-profile post with the campaign, Rezko enjoyed working behind the scenes and being the man sitting in the corner of the room barely noticed by others but whispering in the ears of those in charge.

Kelly and Rezko were soon becoming known to Ryan's campaign as well.

Sitting inside Ryan's campaign headquarters on the twenty-second floor of an old Loop office building next to the Oriental Theater, John Pearman had been talking to sources and looking at numbers and determined that Blagojevich's fund-raising wasn't just through Dick Mell. Two other names kept popping up over and over: Kelly and Rezko. “Everything goes through these two guys,” Pearman told them.

Nobody in the room knew Kelly, and a few knew Rezko. The Ryan campaign had so far focused much of its attention on Mell and his associates, including the now infamous Dominic Longo and his Coalition for Better Government. Run by operatives with shady pasts, the coalition raised money and supported select candidates. They had helped Blagojevich but nowhere near what Kelly and Rezko were doing.

So now not only does Blagojevich have Mell's people helping him, he's got these two guys? We need to learn more about both men, Curry said. And we need something more to attack Blagojevich with.

A few months later, Pearman and others in the campaign thought they might have an answer on what to attack Blagojevich with. While chasing down tips from the six-year-old
Tribune
story that raised questions about Blagojevich's work at city hall, they kept hearing whispers that Blagojevich
collected gambling debts for people with ties to organized crime. Nobody had any hard evidence, but it was an intriguing tip.

The campaign contacted Quest Consultants International, a suburban firm founded by four ex-FBI special agents. One of them, Jack O'Rourke, had been one of the agency's top organized crime experts. The guy you need to talk to, he told Pearman, was Robert Cooley.

Cooley was well known in Chicago's legal and political circles. In the 1970s and early 1980s, he was an organized crime fixer, an attorney who represented his clients during the day, partied with them at night, and in between doled out bribes and intimidation. He even bought off judges to fix murder cases. A former Chicago cop, Cooley was introduced to the mob through his police partner, who was a cousin of Marco D'Amico, a mob street crew boss on the rise. D'Amico took Cooley under his wing and taught him about bookmaking. It was a decision that would ultimately cost D'Amico—and many others—his freedom. In 1986, the bald, eccentric attorney who was once described in the
Chicago Tribune
as having a “near-photographic memory” began wearing a wire. For three and a half years, Cooley recorded mob bosses, their underlings, and politicians committing an array of crimes.

When the Ryan campaign tracked Cooley down, he had a tale both titillating and frustrating.

Cooley told them that while he was working undercover for the FBI, he witnessed Blagojevich meet Bobby Abbinanti, a mob-associated bookmaker, in a Northwest Side restaurant during the 1980s. Blagojevich was there to straighten out his bookmaking accounts, Cooley alleged, adding Blagojevich was likely a bookmaker and meeting Abbinanti to pay street tax to the mob.

Cooley acknowledged that while Blagojevich and Abbinanti never said outright that they were engaged in illegal sports gambling, it was clear that's what was going on. What's more, Abbinanti had a relationship with Dan Stefanski, Blagojevich's boyhood friend. Abbinanti had worked for D'Amico but was also active in Teamsters Local 726, which represented hundreds of city truck drivers. Stefanski ran Local 726, which donated thousands of dollars to the Coalition for Better Government.

What Cooley was saying made sense to Pearman. He learned Blagojevich was a sports freak, and his tricky way of remembering facts and figures (including that odd ability to memorize things based on the presidents) would be a perfect skill for a bookie to have, remembering bets without
writing anything down. On the campaign trail, Blagojevich often showed off his memorization skills publicly by reciting Cubs starting lineups and individuals' batting averages from a quarter century prior. And while campaigning on Sundays he still took time to keep track of professional football scores, especially for his favorite team, the Dallas Cowboys. Ryan's campaign quickly determined that if they could confirm it, this story could end Blagojevich.

Ryan clearly needed the help.

Not only was he struggling to keep up in fund-raising with the Kelly-Rezko sleek jet Blagojevich had created, members of his own party kept getting into hot water.

Just weeks after the primary, federal prosecutors laid bare a grand scheme Ryan's fellow Republicans hatched four years earlier to get George Ryan elected governor. The indictment alleged some of the governor's closest friends and advisers diverted state employees to work on campaigns on state time, shredded documents, and tried to undermine an internal investigation into the licenses-for-bribes scheme. The feds even made the historic step of indicting George Ryan's campaign fund, though not the governor himself.