Golden (3 page)

“I grew up on the near Northwest Side of Chicago in the neighborhood around Cicero and Armitage,” said Blagojevich, who was fifty-four years old that summer of 2011. “It was a working-class neighborhood back in the 1960s, a lot of small manufacturing companies and ethnically a diverse neighborhood.”

The city Blagojevich knew was one filled with such sections. The kind created by blue-collar families who weren't looking for much beyond a job they could count on to help raise a family in a tidy house on a street filled with people they knew. Blagojevich came from LaCrosse Avenue, just south of Armitage Avenue in a neighborhood called Cragin, named for the Cragin Brothers' tin plate and sheet iron company that moved into the area around the Civil War. The streets were lined with two-flats and modest bungalows, and for decades served as a crucial base for white ethnics who couldn't afford to live closer to downtown but sought a stable family life. In 1960, when Rod Blagojevich was four years old, 99 percent of the neighborhood was white and nearly 40 percent were first-generation Americans.

Seventeen percent were foreign-born, like Blagojevich's father, Rade. Born in 1911 in a small town outside Belgrade, Rade Blagojevich lost his father at a young age and was sent off to military school when he was twelve to join his brother Milorad (after whom Rade would later name his younger son). Nazis had captured Rade, an officer in the Yugoslavian Army, and confined him to a POW camp for four years. After the war, he spent another three years in a refugee camp in Austria before coming to the United States in 1948.

He first moved to Waukegan, a northern suburb of Chicago, where a woman had set up a home taking in new immigrants. She was Croatian and Rade was Serbian—two ethnicities that often clashed—but in the New World they both recognized their shared roots and got along all right. Rade Blagojevich had come from a rough background, but America inspired a new energy inside of him. He quickly joined a Serbian church, and at an event there about a year later, the thirty-eight-year-old met a warm, handsome woman eleven years his junior, who quickly caught his eye.

Millie Govedarica was a Chicago girl with Serbian roots. Her father, Ilija, was a tall and slender man born in Serbia. He arrived in the United States in 1905, eventually working in Chicago as a bartender at a saloon on Fullerton Avenue just west of Ashland Avenue, right down the block from where he lived with his wife, Clara, and later at a coffee shop. Millie was a younger daughter of the couple and one of more than a half-dozen children. Her parents died when she was young, and she moved in with an uncle, Obren, who ended up taking care of several of the Govedarica children. She attended Lake View High School for a few years but dropped out to make money for the family. She had been bouncing around from factory job to factory job during World War II when she met Rade in 1949.

The two quickly fell in love and a year later got married. Five years after that, their first son, Robert, was born, followed a little more than a year later—on December 10, 1956—by Rod.

Rade wanted to give Robert a traditional Serbian name, Bozidar, after Rade's father. It means “God's Gift.” And he wanted Rod's formal name to be Milorad, after his uncle. It means “Happy Worker.” But Millie refused. She was born in America, and she knew American culture and wanted her children to think like and be treated as Americans, not as immigrant children. Her children would have American names.

In the early years, the Blagojeviches lived with Millie's family in an apartment building on that same stretch of Fullerton, just west of Ashland. On the street level, two of Millie's brothers ran a diner. But Millie eventually decided she wanted her family to strike out on their own. They moved several miles west to a five-room apartment on the top floor of a two-flat at 1925 North LaCrosse Avenue. It was next door to a small, white Pentecostal church built in the middle of the block. About a half-mile away was Blackhawk Park, where later in life Rod spent countless hours hanging out with friends and playing basketball.

Millie got a job doing clerical work across Cicero Avenue at the Ecko utensils factory and later took a job as a ticket taker for the Chicago Transit Authority, working mostly at one of the CTA's largest El stops at Jefferson Park on the Northwest Side. Rade also worked factory jobs, including at the A. Finkl steel factory on the North Side. But Rade dreamed of more. He decided to give his best shot at the American dream and try his hand at being an entrepreneur, owning hand-washing laundromats.

After working his day job at the factory, Rade would make his way to his laundromat. Almost right away, the business was successful. Rade didn't see his wife or children much, but he was making money. He quickly bought two more, including one at Ashland and Grace on the city's North Side.

Unfortunately, hand-washing laundromats were quickly going the way of the horse-and-buggy. By the late 1950s, coin-operated laundries were popping up all over the city. A friend and business associate pulled Rade aside one day and told him he needed to change with the times. But Rade was still doing well enough financially that he didn't heed his associate's advice, not believing people would want to do their own laundry.

Instead, he decided to buy yet another laundromat, pushing the family's finances past the tipping point and driving him into bankruptcy. It was a major turning point for Rade and Millie and their two sons and would be
a touchy subject for years, as Rod's parents argued about it in front of their boys. Even years later, a very stubborn Rade would try to explain to Millie why he didn't think he had made a mistake.

“No dead capital,” he uttered over and over again as his business philosophy.

Rade was strict with his boys. Having survived the atrocities of World War II, he felt discipline was important and constantly forced his will and their Serbian roots on his sons. He spoke only Serbo-Croatian in the house, and both Robert and Rod learned the language at a young age. The family also regularly attended Old Holy Resurrection, a Serbian East Orthodox church on Palmer Square a few miles away. In Rod's preteen years, Rade made him become a member of a local Serbian singing group along with other younger boys whose parents were recent Eastern European immigrants. Rod learned the tamburitza, similar to a mandolin, and in the summertime, he was sent to a Serbian camp in the northern suburbs.

Although he quietly despised some of the activities his father made him join, young Rod was always happy-go-lucky with other kids in the neighborhood and quick to make friends. But he also yearned to be free from his father's control and tried to embrace all things American.

He found the embodiment of all of it one night watching television with his mother. On the screen was an Elvis movie. And just like that, Rod was in love.

For years, mother and youngest son bonded as the two sat in front of the television watching the King's films. Rod would memorize Elvis's songs and sing them around the house, sometimes to the disapproval of his father. Eventually it grew to an obsession. Rod loved Elvis because he was cool, had great hair, and always got the girls. But unlike so many Americans, Rod's fixation never diminished, and he never permitted himself to view Elvis as the bloated, pill-popping, over-the-hill washout in a white jumpsuit that so many saw after his death. To Rod, Elvis was still the soulful singer on stage making the girls swoon or the rebel in the movie who had come to the beach town to shake things up and have some fun. Elvis was the embodiment of the American story. The rags-to-riches tale wasn't a cliché to Blagojevich. And, in Blagojevich's view anyway, Elvis's life would be his life. The poor kid who loved his momma, grew up with little, but made something of himself.

As governor, Blagojevich dragged one of Elvis's closest friends to a press conference about, of all things, prescription drugs. He also constantly quoted Elvis as an adult, tossing in phrases like “hang loose” and “a little less conversation, a little more action.” After being kicked out of office, he actually got paid to do an Elvis impression, singing “Treat Me Right” on a loading dock for an office party being held in the street behind the Tribune Tower.

The real Rod Blagojevich could hide just fine inside the King's outsized personality. He could be as over-the-top as he cared to be, though those closest to Blagojevich often saw his flaws through some of his outlandish acts. There was the constant need to be reassured, the private self-doubt, and the inability to steer himself from the abyss when others could see his life coming down around him.

Rod and his older brother were inseparable as young children, mostly because Rod looked up to Robert so much. By many accounts, Rod idolized his older brother and followed him around the neighborhood wherever he went. But the two boys were dissimilar in almost every way. Robert did better at school and was a superior athlete who carried himself with more confidence. Physically, he showed off a cut figure, from his defined jaw line to his thoughtful, sometimes piercing eyes. Rod's face was rounder, with chubby cheeks and inset eyes that looked just a little too close together.

To make up for these inequities, Rod summoned a gregariousness to get attention and be liked. He became the funny, personable Blagojevich brother. It worked. Once while performing a tamburitza routine at a show where his brother also had been on stage, Rod got applause not for his musical ability but for hamming it up for a laugh. But the feeling of being second best caused Rod to develop a chip on his shoulder that he would never lose. Even when he was governor of the fifth-largest state in the nation, Rod always acted inferior to Robert, deferring to him and calling him “my older, more successful brother.”

By 1966, Rod followed his brother around the Cragin neighborhood shining shoes. After school at Henry D. Lloyd Elementary School, a few blocks from their home, the Blagojevich brothers made their way to their mom's factory job at Ecko. For two hours nearly every day, the boys charged twenty-five cents a shine, plus tips. Rod eventually raised the rate to thirty cents.

Even on the witness stand decades later, Blagojevich recalled how one of his customers didn't like how he would rush through jobs. Rod got sloppy once and splashed polish onto the man's white socks. So the next time the worker arrived with cardboard to protect them.

Like so many children in the neighborhood, Rod obsessed over sports. In the winters, he played basketball; in the summers, little league baseball. When he was twelve, Blagojevich wrote a report about what he wanted to be when he grew up, a report he kept in his private possessions while he was governor. “When I grow up, I would like to be a lawyer,” he wrote. “But moreso a baseball player. What position. Well maybe an outfielder. What team. Any team that will accept me.”

On the witness stand in federal court, it was clear how much those days had meant to Rod Blagojevich the Chicago boy.

“Generally, how did you do in little league?” Blagojevich's lawyer, Aaron Goldstein, asked him.

“I was not anywhere near where I wanted to be. I was actually—they [had] a rule in little league where every boy had to play [and] at least get one at bat every game and there were twenty games a year, and I kept the statistics. I was one for twelve that year, which meant I couldn't even play in eight games,” Blagojevich answered. “And when we would be ahead, the coach would exile me to right field because that's where fewer balls were hit. And I would hustle out there to try to impress him, and I just kept thinking that maybe if I could change my batting style I might actually be able to hit the ball, and it never quite worked out.”

His one hit had been a roller between shortstop and third, Blagojevich recalled.

Even though he wasn't headed for the major league diamond, Rod demonstrated other skills and an early inclination for politics. One year he didn't like the team he was placed on, so he requested a trade. It was against the park district rules, but it went through anyway. Everybody at the park knew Rod through his brother, who was of course a park superstar. And while Rod wasn't nearly as good, he got by with his friendliness, charm, and upbeat personality. A North Sider, Rod also obsessed over the Cubs. On some summer days, he and his friends would board the Fullerton bus headed east and wend their way to the El stop at Armitage and Sheffield before heading north to Wrigley Field.