Golden (63 page)

Picking a jury to hear Blagojevich's trial was something Sam Adam Jr. had joked about before.

One day in the courthouse lobby after a pretrial hearing, an older and fairly deranged looking African American woman wandered past a gaggle of reporters Adam was chatting up about the case. One reporter elbowed him and whispered that maybe she would make a good juror. Everyone around the courthouse had been making jokes that the defense was looking for alternative personalities to try to convince that the ex-governor, featured on scores of tapes talking about crimes, was not guilty.

Adam didn't miss a beat.

“Foreman,” he had said out loud that day, referring to the scraggly woman, throwing his head back with a belly laugh.

For Blagojevich, the first day of jury selection—June 3, 2010—must have felt eerily familiar for him as he arrived at the Dirksen US Courthouse. He was dressed in a dark, sharp suit as he stepped from a car and made his way toward a rope line at the front of the building. Seemingly physically unable to walk past without working the crowd, he moved toward onlookers waiting for his arrival and began shaking hands as news cameras swarmed him. It looked very much like he was on the campaign trail and not headed for a courtroom.

People calling themselves supporters carried signs. “If a man can't talk crap in his own home, take my husband please!” one read. Steps inside the courthouse lobby, Patti Blagojevich stopped to say it was a good day.

“The well wishes, e-mails, and rosaries left on our doorstep … have helped us through a rough time. But today is a good day because today is the day that begins the process to correct a terrible injustice that has been done to my husband, our family, and to the people of Illinois,” she said.

Upstairs it was more of the same. Blagojevich got off the elevator and swept around the corner toward the courtroom. He quickly walked by the head of a line of people getting ready to go into the room and again stopped to shake hands.

It took Patti to literally pull him away, leaving him walking sideways toward Zagel's room as Patti yanked on his arm. He nodded and gave a “hey” to a line of reporters near the door, while nearby, a woman shouted at him that she was having custody problems with her children and asked him to investigate.

“Catch me after court,” he called over his shoulder.

Once inside, Blagojevich sat with his hands folded, chuckling with his lawyers and looking like a ball of nervous energy. At one point with everyone still milling around and getting ready, Patti sat at the head of the table making some kind of point and rapping her fingers on the table. From a distance it appeared as if she were probably the one running the show.

In the courtroom gallery, reporters needled one another to pass the time. Zagel was a notorious slow-starter, and this was no different. Some in the press gallery passed around a
Tribune
editorial cartoon from the day. It was a silhouette of a circus scene, with clowns and jugglers, and carried the caption: “I see the defense is ready.”

Adam Jr. loped over, always one to laugh with reporters when the chance was available. “At this rate we'll start in July,” he said. Nearby, Assistant US Attorney Reid Schar sat as still as a stone, resting his head in one hand with his eyes closed, looking like he was trying to shut out what was happening around him and meditate on what he had to do.

Suddenly the potential jurors were in the room. They filed in a row at a time. Blagojevich looked up briefly but seemed afraid to nod or raise a hand. He quickly looked down at the defense table and then partially turned his back toward the group to say something to Adam Jr. Zagel greeted the group with a message about how important what they were doing was in a democratic system. It was a message not unlike what would-be jurors receive in courtrooms all over the country every day, but it had that extra Zagel flair.

“We fought a revolution so you could sit here today,” he told them. The colonists had been subjected to kings but had taken it upon themselves to
change that and deliver something new to the earth. “Your presence in this courtroom is a living symbol of the birth of our nation.”

Blagojevich took notes with a silver pen, sometimes underlining things emphatically as if it were really, really important, and sometimes glanced around the room.

“The defendant, Rod Blagojevich, while governor of Illinois, engaged in various criminal acts,” Zagel said by way of introduction, stating the prosecutors' accusation. The jurors by then knew what case they had been called to potentially serve on, but now it was really sinking in.

And it was registering with others, too. Patti sat in the first row looking around with a frown, with her heavy bangs hanging in her eyes. As she blinked, they moved.

The first prospective juror questioned was a CPA in her sixties. As he would each time he questioned a new juror, Zagel asked about her habits when it came to reading and watching the news media. It was important to weed out some who may have been too immersed in Blagojevich news and who had formed their own firm opinions. As it turned out for number one, the CPA said she didn't watch much TV news.

“Smart woman,” a TV reporter in the gallery mumbled.

The next woman recalled something about bugs—an apparent reference to Patti's jungle adventure on television.

The panel of six men and six women eventually would include a Japanese American born in 1944 in a California detention camp. He had become a marine who served in Vietnam and had worked as a videotape librarian. One man was college-aged, working at a Best Buy and trying to figure out his life. Another was another former marine who suffered a bad hip injury while serving in Lebanon. He had already had one hip replacement and was concerned about how long he might have to sit while listening to evidence.

One woman was a graphic designer who did direct mail work. Zagel had asked her about a pet she had mentioned on her form, a hybrid Yorkiepoo. “She's awesome,” the woman had said.

Few had really paid attention to one of the older women who was selected. She was prospective juror number 106. She was in her sixties and a retired official for the Illinois Department of Public Health. She had once been director of teen counseling for the Chicago Urban League and said she had once handed out campaign literature for a relative who ran for public office. Liberal talk shows were her favorite thing to listen to. Nothing in what she said had sounded any alarm bells for prosecutors, who did not save
one of their challenges to have her struck from the jury. Like all the rest, she had promised that she could be fair and had said that nothing in her background would prevent her from making her own choices and reaching a verdict based on the evidence alone.

Rod Blagojevich arrived for the real start of his trial to the normal throng of onlookers at the federal courthouse, waving and nodding his way toward one of the metal detectors. He fumbled for an ID to show security—not that he wasn't instantly recognizable—and piled through the checkpoint with an entourage of attorneys, Patti, and notable New York author Jimmy Breslin, who was following him around for a book project and described accompanying the governor as an “honor.” Patti was accompanied by her brother, Richard, who often showed up as a sign of support, as did Patti's sister, Deb. Missing, of course, was her father, who stayed away from the proceedings entirely and wouldn't discuss it with reporters at city hall. Dozens of people in the lobby stopped what they were doing and watched as the state's former leader flipped his tie over his shoulder to put his belt back on. It wasn't exactly a low-key entrance, and Blagojevich went right up to reporters waiting for him in the lobby.

“I'm not the governor anymore, so I actually have to be on time,” he said.

Not that Blagojevich ever seemed to be lacking energy, but on this morning he seemed especially electric. He was doing his best to amp himself up, to put a good face on a day that had been bearing down on him for months. Blagojevich said that frankly he felt like the trial was a new beginning and that the truth had been kept for too long in a “lock box.”

“Finally you'll get to hear the things I've been dying to tell you for a year and a half,” he said, as Patti nodded behind him.

Well, there were a few things that prosecutors had been dying to say as well, and the task fell to Carrie Hamilton. She was tough and direct and had led off the Rezko trial in sharp fashion two years earlier. Hamilton, Niewoehner, and Schar, the three-member team from that case, were going ahead against the governor in the same order. Hamilton, the group felt, was the best person to deliver the opening statement. She was a female face talking to the jury about one part of the case that was among Blagojevich's least favorite: the alleged shakedown of Children's Memorial Hospital, with the governor withholding state money from the storied facility because its
leader hadn't given him a campaign donation. If you were a politician, that went into the category of very, very bad public relations. The hospital helped children “without considering where they come from and if they can pay.” Rod Blagojevich. Stealing from sick kids.

And that was just one scheme in the case, Hamilton said. Another involved a plan for the state to borrow $10 billion to deal with its budget, and another whether a school would get a state grant. The governor had the power to decide if tollways were built and who would sit on state boards.

“With all of this power came responsibility,” Hamilton said. “And when he made those decisions, he was not supposed to do so because of how much money went into his campaign fund.

“Instead of asking, ‘What about the people of Illinois?' he was asking, ‘What about me?'”

The pattern started early in Blagojevich's first administration, when a ring of men around the governor found a way to extract $500,000 from a plan to borrow $10 billion and give it to state pension funds to invest, Hamilton said. The conspirators found an investment company willing to pay a secret kickback for the state business, and Blagojevich, Rezko, Kelly, and the then-governor's chief of staff, Alonzo “Lon” Monk, agreed to split the money once Blagojevich left office. Blagojevich knew full well what was happening when inside deals were put together by stacking state boards and commissions with loyal members who would do the administation's bidding, Hamilton said.

Hamilton painted the picture of an increasingly desperate Blagojevich who had swept into office but saw his inner circle dissolve over time. Rezko and Kelly had faced federal charges and had been taken away from Blagojevich's fund-raising machine. In his first campaign and the early stage of his administration, Blagojevich rarely had found himself having to communicate directly with donors, but that was changing by the fall of 2008. He had been reduced to speaking with some people directly, and his list of middlemen had shrunk to Monk, Wyma, and his brother, Robert.

In 2004, when Rezko was still able to get money to Rod and Patti Blagojevich by attaching Patti to real estate deals and paying her $12,000 a month as a bogus “consultant,” their family was financially stable. Detailing what they had learned years earlier, Hamilton said Rezmar took in a $40,000 commission, and that same amount was paid to Patti Blagojevich's company, River Realty, the very next day. The $40,000 was then paid to Patti herself from River Realty another day later. That kind of arrangement, Hamilton said, was a clear example of pay-to-play funds winding up in the pockets of
the state's first couple. It had meant that the Blagojeviches' income that year was more than $300,000 and their debt was under $100,000.

But by 2008, with Rezko gone, the Blagojeviches subsisted on the governor's salary of $170,000, and their debt more than doubled.

Financial disaster was looming, Hamilton said, until …

“His golden ticket arrived on November 4, 2008,” she said. Barack Obama was elected president, and that meant Blagojevich had to appoint a replacement. It was a significant official act, and Blagojevich had decided to cash in, she told the jury. To appoint Obama's friend, Valerie Jarrett, Blagojevich had demanded a cabinet position or millions of dollars being put into a charitable organization that Blagojevich would head when he left office. US Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. had been considered as well, but not because of what Jackson might be able to accomplish for people in the Senate, but “because of what Blagojevich thought could be done again, for him.”