Golden (34 page)

Beck told Levine he had called Orr to welcome her and to tell her not to be concerned about anything.

“Just vote the way we tell you to,” Beck said, probably only half-joking.

Beck said he had spoken to Rezko about the meeting coming up on the twenty-first, telling Levine he had Rezko's “marching orders.” Mercy was on the agenda and had come up in their conversation. “Our boy wants to help them,” Beck said.

Levine answered with a calm “uh huh,” giving no hint that he and Rezko already had their secret arrangement working on Mercy and that he knew Rezko was giving it a thumbs up because of the kickback. Beck thought he would just be doing the wishes of Rezko and the Blagojevich administration, and he did not know Levine and Rezko were to split Kiferbaum's bribe on the project.

Mercy had been given its cursory denial in December, but under the rules, they had been granted another six months to resubmit their plans. By that spring they had done so but had offered no changes, leading to a negative staff review not long before the scheduled board meeting. Altering the plan so close to the meeting would effectively knock Mercy out of the box for April and would mean having to call a special meeting in May just for Mercy, possibly drawing attention to it. So Beck and Levine discussed how they could ram the hospital through at the upcoming meeting without making things seem too blatant.

After hanging up with Beck, Levine immediately called Loren, who explained the hospital already addressed questions about whether the population in the area was large enough to warrant a hospital. Mercy was using newer standards on how to calculate whether a facility was needed, as recommended by the American Hospitals Association, not the older standards that the planning board's staff was using. Levine saw his opening to push the Mercy plan through. And as the FBI continued to listen, he called Beck back to tell him Loren dropped off a copy of the statement Mercy would be submitting at the meeting. Loren had brought his only copy to Levine's house and asked Levine to fax a copy back to him. Fine, Levine said, but it would have to wait.

“Spartacus is getting ready to march on Rome,” he said. “And this is a very serious situation.”

It wasn't some code that he was taking over the planning board or that Rezko was laying siege to Springfield. The odd Levine was actually watching the famous 1960 movie starring Kirk Douglas. He didn't want to be interrupted during what he later would call “an exciting time of the movie.”

On April 20, just one day before the hospital planning board meeting, Levine and Beck spoke again. Eight of the nine board members were expected to be in attendance. The two talked about how they would manage the argument of the plans before the panel, which included both the Mercy proposal and another for a hospital in southwest suburban Bolingbrook. Even after their previous discussions, Beck sounded like he was leaning toward approving the Bolingbrook plan, a Mercy rival, and with a good reason of his own. Bolingbrook's consultant was lawyer and lobbyist Jeff Ladd, a former chairman of the board of Metra, Chicago's commuter rail system. He had gone to Beck about protecting his clients' interests in the face of Rezko's political dominance. Beck had a recommendation he thought could provide that protection—his cousin Ed Kelly, the renowned Forty-Seventh
Ward Democratic committeeman who knew Rezko—and Ladd had taken the advice. Beck told Levine he was going along with the program as they spoke the night before the meeting, but on the twenty-first, with the panel convening at a downtown hotel for its vote, Beck changed his mind and told Levine he was getting off the train. He couldn't go along with the plan.

Not so fast, Levine countered, and confronted Beck with the marching orders from Rezko. Beck said he hadn't been able to reach Rezko to discuss the situation one last time, but Levine pulled out a cell phone and got him immediately.

Beck later recalled telling Rezko that he didn't know how they could go against Ladd and his cousin Kelly. The pair had been promised that Mercy wasn't going to go ahead. Rezko answered that he understood but the pair couldn't get what they wanted all the time. There would have to be an IOU of sorts.

Beck was still upset.

“You can take this job and shove it,” he would later recall telling Rezko as Levine looked on, watching Beck's half of the phone call. Beck was throwing in the towel if he had to approve Mercy over Bolingbrook. That would be the last straw, he told Rezko; he would resign.

Rezko called the bluff.

“You do what you have to do,” came the answer from Rezko. Just get Mercy through the board vote as you were told.

Beck relented and handed the phone back to Levine. A short time later, before the vote, he was talking to Anne Murphy, the planning board's lawyer, and told her Mercy was going to get its approval and the board was probably going to be publicly flogged for it in the press.

“We're going to get creamed,” he said. Murphy pointed out that the Mercy vote could be delayed, but the beaten Beck never answered.

When Mercy's proposal was up for its vote, the meeting was well attended. News reporters and the board's staff were there, as well as lawyers and staff of the various hospital plans, who started to weigh in on the plan. Levine was up first, immediately voting yes.

Two of the board members, Massuda and Malek, followed suit, throwing their support behind the plan. They were Rezko backers, even though they had no hint of his secret stake in the outcome. Next, Orr, the newest member, voted no, as did two board members who were not in the Rezko bloc.

Then the vote hit a snag. Dr. Imad Almanaseer was somewhat confused. Mercy still had an overwhelmingly negative staff review, leaving Almanaseer
thinking it was something he should vote down. He was concerned enough about the situation to try to call Rezko earlier in the day, but he had been unable to reach him. So when it came to be his turn to vote, Almanaseer passed.

That put the Mercy plan in front of Beck, who also seemed confused. The plan was stuck with just three yes votes—two shy of approval—and the three nos. “Where are we?” Beck said out loud, looking down at his tally sheet in front of him. He leaned over to ask Murphy whether Mercy could be deferred at the last moment if need be. Even if Beck voted yes, it wouldn't be enough, and Mercy would be locked in with a denial and defeated.

So with scores of onlookers scratching their heads, Beck got up from his seat and walked over to whisper to Levine, telling him what was going on, and Levine in turn got up from his chair and walked over to whisper to Almanaseer.

Beck had already told Almanaseer to follow Levine's lead on the Mercy plan because “Tony” wanted it that way, and Levine whispered to the doctor that Beck wanted him to vote now. An embarrassed Almanaseer answered, “Fine, I'll vote,” and changed his abstention to a yes. A moment later, Beck gave the Mercy plan its fifth and decisive approving vote, sending up an audible gasp from those watching the meeting.

Afterward, a shocked Murphy went up to Levine to try to find out what in the world had just happened. Levine just shrugged.

“Sometimes you have to be a good soldier,” he said.

With the meeting behind them, Levine and Beck drove to Rezko's office on the North Side to try to straighten out the issue that had nearly led to Beck scuttling the Mercy plan and ruining Levine and Rezko's secret payoff. He had been afraid his cousin's reputation of having political influence would be ruined because he had been hired to try to stop Mercy and promote the Bolingbrook plan. Both proposals had come before the board in a political shoving match.

Levine later remembered being ushered into a conference room, where Rezko soon joined them.

“We'll make it up to him,” Rezko told Beck, a comment Levine took to mean that Ed Kelly could get taken care of the next time around. Ladd also would be taken care of, because he was an attorney for a hospital group wanting to build in Bolingbrook and that project was on Rezko's radar.

That night, a prideful Levine was still relishing his victory. Aside from the theatrics, things had gone well. Even inside observers might believe that Mercy had been pushed through by a consultant the hospital had hired for its plan, Victor Reyes, a former close adviser to Mayor Daley. They would assume his clout had led the governor to push buttons for Mercy. Levine called Mercy's lawyer, his friend Steve Loren, starting the call with “You have no idea” instead of saying hello.

“From the minute I walked in there, Beck—wanted to resign,” Levine tried to explain, stuttering through the dramatic tale. “And of course nobody, nobody knows that it's me. And nobody really knows that it's Tony for the reason that it's Tony.”

“I kept the whole thing together, boy,” Levine said.

A few days later, on April 24, federal agents tapping Levine's home telephone captured one of the few calls where the careful Rezko could be heard speaking about any of the business involving Levine and the boards he controlled. There wasn't much to it, just Levine inviting Rezko out for coffee sometime that weekend. Levine had heard that Children's Memorial Hospital was looking to refurbish or even replace its facility—and the tab could be $500 million. It was a ripening fruit that had Levine salivating, and he was eager to tell Rezko about it.

“I wanted to uh, to talk a little bit about, about uh, some stuff that happened I think needs to be done and may be a giant opportunity also,” Levine said.

“Very good,” Rezko answered. And although a meeting on the topic never materialized, it wouldn't be the last time the children's hospital was targeted by members of Blagojevich's inner circle or even the governor himself.

Two days later, on April 26, Levine was back on the phone with Joe Cari, the former finance chair for Al Gore who Levine was trying to use to pressure JER Partners into paying a finder's fee to get TRS business. Levine didn't yet have a name of a consultant for him to pass to the firm, but maybe he would that afternoon. Levine's talent for keeping multiple plates spinning was apparent to anyone who listened to his calls, as three minutes later, he was talking to Sheldon Pekin, who had done the first crooked TRS deal with him. Pekin was a little late in getting a payment from the deal involving the investment firm Glencoe Capital to Joseph Aramanda, the Rezko associate who was getting cut
in on Rezko's share. An agitated Levine heard Pekin was sarcastic with Aramanda, joking about getting him a check by asking whether Christmas was coming early. Word had gotten back to Rezko, who apparently wasn't amused.

“If we don't get it finished today, uh, Tony's gonna, not gonna do business anymore like that,” Levine told Pekin, who promised to fix things quickly and make the payment.

On May 1, agents recorded Levine and Weinstein talking about what would be the largest TRS investment that Levine and Rezko would try to influence. Capri Capital was an investment firm with a history of doing business with TRS. But one of its principals, Thomas Rosenberg, a Chicago businessman and Hollywood film producer best known for bankrolling the movie
Million Dollar Baby,
had a very chilly relationship with Levine. Levine thought Rosenberg had previously stiffed him out of $500,000 in one of the firm's TRS deals. So in early 2004, when Capri had a $220 million investment from TRS lined up, Levine made sure it went nowhere. One of the ways he had derailed it was to tell Rezko and Chris Kelly about all the business Capri was getting from the state—all while contributing zero in campaign funds to Blagojevich. Levine was recorded telling Weinstein he had told Rezko that Capri had gotten nearly a billion dollars in TRS business and not done anything for the administration.

“He said, you know, fuck him!” Levine said.

Rosenberg later said he called Cellini to find out what was going on and that he was told Rezko and Kelly had found out that Capri wasn't doing anything under the table to support the level of business it was getting from Illinois. He would eventually be given a choice. Make a $1.5 million campaign donation or agree to pay a $2 million finder's fee to whomever was dictated to him.