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Lebed visited Burris the following day at his South Side home. He knew Burris badly wanted to take the job, but the real question was whether he could endure the media onslaught for accepting a Senate seat from an embattled governor accused of selling that seat for money.

“Can we stand it?” Lebed asked Burris.

“Yeah,” Burris responded.

The formal pitch from Blagojevich and the Adams came soon after, and the plan they hatched when Burris accepted was fairly simple: try to get out in front of the story as much as possible. As soon as the governor's press conference announcing the pick was over, Burris would do every national media television show he could.

The decision was set to make the announcement at the Thompson Center on Tuesday.

Word was leaking to the press that Burris was going to accept the appointment and that he was on the phone with Illinois members of Congress and their staffs. Senator Dick Durbin told Burris not to accept the appointment. But Burris was unconvinced. This was his opportunity, and he wasn't going to waste it. He, Lebed, and his friend and attorney, Tim Wright, walked out a side door of their fifth floor offices and down the hallway. Secretaries and staffers saw him leaving and applauded.

“Good luck, Mr. Burris! You make us so proud,” one said. Burris stopped, hugged the woman, and quickly proceeded toward a freight elevator where they could get into an awaiting car to make the short drive over to the Thompson Center without being seen by the media and photographers waiting for him outside.

After Burris and his entourage took a quick ride up the governor's elevator to the governor's offices on the sixteenth floor, Blagojevich greeted Burris with a wide smile and a warm handshake. The governor seemed amazingly relaxed. Naming Burris to the post was a smart political move. With Obama gone, there were no African Americans in the Senate and those who tried to stand in Burris's way would face criticism of being racist.
In an effort to pound home that point, US Representative Bobby Rush, a leader in Chicago's African American community, arrived for support.

In the governor's office minutes before the press conference was about to start one floor below, Blagojevich crossed the room like a man who had retaken the high ground.

“You just wait. Just watch,” he said, spitefully predicting the senators in Washington would eventually fold and accept Burris. “Those racist bastards. Those racist motherfuckers.”

Burris would be appointed, promising he was a “tool of the people of Illinois” and not of Blagojevich. But it would be a rocky road to taking the seat. Senators first planned to have armed officers ban him from the Capitol and then turned him away claiming the paperwork to install him was not in order. It would be mid-January before he was finally sworn in as Obama's replacement, and he would quickly face an ethics probe into his dealings with Blagojevich. When he testified at the Blagojevich impeachment proceedings, he minimized his contacts with the Blagojevich camp on the Senate seat. After he was sworn in, he sent in a written affidavit amending what he had said to the impeachment panel, and the
Sun-Times
made the discrepancy public. It was later revealed that Burris had been taped talking to Robert Blagojevich and promising to make a campaign donation, though he was nervous about the timing of being chosen as the senator and giving the governor money. “And if I do get appointed, that means I bought it,” he had said on the tape, guessing at the public reaction. Burris eventually was able to weather the publicity storm, pushing aside calls for his resignation, and served in the Senate until the next regular election was held in 2010.

Blagojevich made good on his promises to tour the country claiming he was innocent and fighting the impeachment process in the court of public opinion. For days he was seemingly omnipresent, making it difficult to walk near a television without seeing him complaining about being railroaded in Springfield.

The strategy of Sam Adam Sr. and Jr. was to let their client talk, though not specifically about the details of the tapes. The idea was to make Blagojevich a celebrity, believing the bar would then be higher for getting a conviction. American history showed time and time again that convicting a famous person was simply more difficult. O. J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, R.
Kelly, Robert Blake. The list went on and on. “Beyond a reasonable doubt” seemed to become “beyond a shadow of a doubt” with a celebrity defendant. The Adams wanted to make Blagojevich larger than life and raise the bar for a starstruck jury. Most of the TV appearances went about as planned, until Joy Behar on
The View
asked Blagojevich to do an impression of Richard Nixon promising, “I am not a crook.” The governor declined, but it was close. To some, including Sam Adam Jr., who was waiting just off stage, it seemed for a second that Blagojevich might take the bait. Adam later said he had serious thoughts about charging the set and knocking Blagojevich out of his chair if he started doing his best Nixon. Other times the governor didn't show as much restraint. He told the
Today
show he had some interesting thoughts when he was taken into custody. “I thought about Mandela, Dr. King, Gandhi, and trying to put some perspective in all of this,” he spouted.

After one TV appearance, Blagojevich had just arrived at the Trump Tower in New York when he spotted former New York City mayor Ed Koch. Like a shot, Blagojevich left Adam Jr. and ran right up to Koch, telling him he was his favorite mayor. A somewhat startled Koch gave him a concerned, fatherly look in return.

“Are you listening to your lawyer?” Koch asked.

Blagojevich broke from his PR tour long enough to head to Springfield for the impeachment proceedings and make an emotional closing argument on his own behalf on January 29. Before giving his speech to the state senate, Blagojevich sat quietly in his ornamented office, bopping his leg up and down and tweaking his speech, making notes in longhand. With
New York Times
reporter Monica Davey and a photographer accompanying him throughout the day, Blagojevich called Patti several times and combed his hair once. Then, minutes before he was supposed to speak, he stood up and told an aide, “Let's go home. Screw it. It won't matter.”

But Blagojevich was nothing if not indecisive and ultimately chose not to listen to himself. He went ahead with the speech, pointing his finger and promising he had not let the state down. He spoke for forty-seven minutes but didn't stick around long enough to see the result. He slipped out of the Capitol through a private tunnel and made his way to the state's nine-seat airplane. He took his usual spot, a front-facing seat on the left side, and headed back to Chicago.

As the plane soared thousands of feet above Illinois, the telephone on board rang. Blagojevich ordered everyone not to answer it. If it was the news that the Senate had removed him from office, he didn't want to hear it. “I'll tell you what,” he laughed. “I'm not jumping out. Not for those people, no way. I don't like heights.”

He landed in Chicago before 2:00 P
M.
The senators still hadn't voted, so his security detail, still intact, took him home. A short time later, though, they were gone. For the first time in Illinois history, an Illinois governor had been convicted in an impeachment trial. Rod Blagojevich was no longer governor and was forbidden to hold a public post ever again in Illinois. The vote was 59-0, and Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn was sworn in as the state's forty-first chief executive.

Reporters, television crews, and even a few supporters gathered at Sunnyside and Richmond. Blagojevich stepped onto the front stoop of his home, where he made a brief statement before wading into the crowd. He grabbed a boy who asked if he wanted to play basketball in the summer. Then he oddly grinned as he demanded photographers take pictures of him with the child.

Choking back emotion, he said: “I love the people of Illinois today now more than I ever did before.” He continued, “The fight goes on.”

And so it did, in public. Blagojevich went back on the talk show circuit, giving shortened versions of his impeachment speech about how he had been cheated out of a fair process and taken from the people of Illinois. He was right back in New York, doing more appearances and hoping to turn the tide in his favor.

One of his appearances was on
The Late Show with David Letterman.
It was probably the show he had wanted to do the most, and he all but gushed over its legendary host.

“Well, you know, I've been wanting to be on your show in the worst way for the longest time,” he told Letterman, setting himself up perfectly.

“Well, you're on in the worst way,” Letterman answered. “Believe me.”

Two months later, Blagojevich was formally indicted on sweeping corruption charges that essentially accused him of running the state of Illnois as a criminal racket. Lon Monk, who was by then talking with the government himself and planning to plead guilty, was named as a defendant, as were
John Harris, Robert Blagojevich, and Chris Kelly, who already had been charged in two federal cases of his own. Using the version of events provided by Monk and Rezko, prosecutors claimed that Blagojevich was interested in corruption before he was even sworn in for the first time in 2002. He and his closest advisers had plotted to make as much money as they could through state business and split it up when the governor left office. There were sixteen counts in all, ranging from broad racketeering charges to specific counts of fraud and extortion tied to instances when Blagojevich had allegedly cheated the state. Included were accusations the governor had tried to sell the Senate seat, shaken people down for campaign contributions, tried to get
Tribune
editorial writers fired, and attempted to hold up the funding for a North Side school so he could get another fundraiser. Prosecutors dubbed the governor's illegal ring the Blagojevich Enterprise.

“The primary purpose of the Blagojevich Enterprise was to exercise and preserve power over the government of the State of Illinois for the financial and political benefit of Rod Blagojevich,” the indictment stated, “both directly and through Friends of Blagojevich, and for the benefit of his family members and associates.”

Meanwhile, there was a housecleaning of sorts under way in Springfield. Blagojevich appointees all over state government saw the writing on the wall and either stepped down or were dismissed. Christopher Corcoran, who had handled Blagojevich's account at the high-end Oxxford Clothes suit store, was fired from the state job the governor had helped him get, and Rajinder Bedi resigned from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity. Historic sites that Blagojevich had ordered closed in the face of tough economic times were reopened, and there was talk of overturning some of his signature programs—such as giving seniors free access to public transportation.

But even with much of what he had done in state government being unraveled, it's no stretch to say Rod Blagojevich had never been such a household name. He was a comedy stage show—“Rod Blagojevich Superstar”—and a shampoo. He was fielding a variety of offers for work, including as an ambassador of sorts at Nevada's infamous Bunny Ranch, and as a contestant on the reality TV show
I'm a Celebrity, Get Me out of Here!
The show paid $80,000 a week (about half Blagojevich's yearly salary as governor), which made it attractive to Blagojevich despite the fact he would have to slog through a jungle location and participate in gross challenges on TV. The only problem was the show's producers planned to shoot it in Costa
Rica, and US District Judge James Zagel refused to let Blagojevich leave the country before his trial.