Golden (68 page)

“He said it better be a job where I can make some money,” Ata recalled.

An investor in Rezko real estate, Ata said he was at his political godfather's office about twice a month, and it was easy to get the message about doing what Rezko wanted after Ata became head of the IFA. He said once, while waiting for an audience with Rezko, he saw Kelly King Dibble, head of the Housing Development Authority and a onetime Rezko employee, leaving his office, upset. Rezko had sent her a message to follow up on some state action, and she had apparently ignored the order. Rezko had gotten her a message through the chairman of the authority's board congratulating her on her new assignment.

“She was very concerned about that, because she did not have a new assignment,” Ata testified, saying Dibble wasn't being a team player. “She thought she was going to be fired.”

It was clear through Ata's testimony that he definitely was part of Team Rezko, saying he lent Rezko tens of thousands of dollars he never got back and didn't seem too upset about. There was the sham loan for the pizza business. And in another instance, when a building Ata owned that was being leased to the state was in danger of losing that lease, Rezko stepped in to help. All it took to have Rezko keep the lease from being terminated was giving him 25 percent of its ownership.

Throughout the earliest parts of the Blagojevich trial, it was clear Rezko seemed to be the chief among schemers in the case. In every scenario discussed, it appeared that Rezko worked to have the best angle, and it was not hard to imagine him worming into lots of places that Blagojevich may not even have been specifically aware of. Monk had made it clear the governor had essentially given his blessing to Rezko and Kelly to set up what they
needed to as they tried to bring in money for the secret group of four. But Ata testified that he had seen cracks in Rezko's normally stoic and in-con-trol facade. Ata had been shown equipment that had been placed in Rezko's offices to alert him to the presence of any federal recording devices. And Ata said he received calls from Rezko friends urging him not to cooperate. Once, in a car, Rezko himself asked Ata if the FBI had approached him, Ata remembered, and Rezko had mouthed “FBI” as he said it. And on another occasion, Ata said he had been told that Rezko was planning a nuclear option of sorts. He was working through Kjellander, a Republican and longtime friend of Bush White House adviser Karl Rove, to get then-president George Bush to replace Chicago's US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, thereby derailing the federal probe that was closing in on him.

Ata's testimony had been fairly uneventful during his direct examination. He had stayed about on script, telling the jury essentially the same things he had said when he testified against Rezko in 2008. But during that trial, he had been cross-examined by Joseph Duffy, a seasoned veteran of the federal court who picked through Ata's complicated financial picture to try to show the jury what Ata stood to gain by testifying against Rezko and avoiding further prosecution himself. Questioning Ata for the Blagojevich defense would be Sam Adam Jr., who had last stood up to question Monk and had scored some points with his freewheeling and confrontational style. But Zagel had become increasingly agitated with the defense since, stopping questioning at times to give advice about proper questions, sometimes in front of the jury. His fuse was clearly shortening quite a bit, and it would not take long for Adam Jr. to light it.

“You're a proud American, aren't you?” Adam started, making it immediately clear where he was going. “It was the FBI that came to your company in 2001 and intimated that you were not a good American?”

Ata said that wasn't quite right. But the government was already objecting. Adam told Zagel he wasn't trying to get too close to a sensitive topic.

“Yes, you are. Don't do it,” the judge said sternly.

Adam may be a lot of things, but timid is not one of them. So he simply went right back at it, asking Ata whether the truth of the matter was that he shared only a name with someone who took part in the 9/11 attacks.

That was it for Zagel, who didn't appreciate Adam's attempts to suggest the FBI might have picked on Ata in some way, thus drawing the jury's sympathy and hinting Blagojevich was in the same category. He stopped things and asked the jury to leave the room while Adam retreated toward
the defense table. With the jury gone, Zagel insisted to know what Adam's independent knowledge was of what the FBI had said to Ata. Adam tried to talk up an answer, but Zagel stopped him and told him to answer the question. Finally, Adam said he had no independent knowledge.

“That's the end of it unless you have concrete evidence other than what he thought about what the FBI did,” Zagel said, flashing more anger than he had at any point during the trial. “Usually if I sustain an objection, that means you don't repeat the question.”

The jury was brought back in, and Adam tried to get his feet back under him as quickly as he could. He started asking about Ata's fund-raising for Mell and Blagojevich.

“You would agree that hosting fundraisers had nothing to do with you getting a job?” Adam asked.

“I don't know how to answer that question,” Ata replied.

Adam's point was that no one, not even Rezko and definitely not Blagojevich, had told Ata he'd better have a fundraiser if he wanted to work for the state. But the questions were coming quickly, and through and over government objections. Adam said Ata was going to tell the truth about what had happened, right?

“Don't do that,” Zagel said, sounding like he was trying to keep his exasperation in check. Adam had come from the school that said it didn't matter how many objections came during cross-examination, the point was to talk to the jurors and plant seeds in their minds while getting the witness disoriented. Zagel was clearly tiring of it. Adam was trying to ask whether anything about the fund-raising was an explicit quid pro quo, but the judge didn't want Ata being forced to give a legal conclusion he wasn't qualified for.

“It was not a job for the money,” Adam declared, apparently trying a statement that would have the combined effect of telling the jury that and getting Ata to agree in some way. But Zagel cut it off.

“It's a nice argument and feel free to make it in closing arguments,” Zagel said. “But it's not a question.”

Prosecutors moved next to the alleged shakedown of Rahm Emanuel over a grant for Chicago Academy High School. The school's leader, Dr. Donald Feinstein, was called to the stand to tell the jury how his worries nearly turned to panic when, in September 2006, some of the crews that had been
at work on the fields prepared to walk off the job for lack of payment. Feinstein frantically called the governor's office but to no avail. Staff there didn't even know where the money was supposed to be coming from.

“I felt that it consumed me,” Feinstein told the jury about his search for the money. The cost of the project would skyrocket without the cash. Athletic seasons would be lost and the headaches of a partially finished project would only increase as the site sat through the winter. Finally, Feinstein said, he went back to Emanuel's office before money eventually started to trickle to the project. Only as bills came due would money be released from the state. It didn't come all at once as most grants would.

Prosecutors called Bradley Tusk to the stand to tell the jury what was happening on the other side of the curtain. He was introduced as a bit of a wunderkind. In addition to his years in DC and New York, he had joined the Blagojevich administration as a deputy governor in 2003, before age thirty. Tusk said he remembed Kelly seemed to be everywhere all the time, appearing with Rezko in key strategy sessions, even though the two men had no formal role. And while they seemed to be around too much, Tusk said the governor wasn't around enough. He talked about how his boss often couldn't be found, even when bills were sitting on his desk for weeks waiting for his signature. Tusk said he was often left to seek authorization to sign bills for Blagojevich, making key decisions in state government even though he was only twenty-nine when he started with the office.

But Reid Schar didn't waste much time getting to the real reason Tusk was called. He asked about the time Tusk had spoken to Emanuel and Emanuel had been upset about money for a school. Tusk recalled it immediately, the Chicago Academy. He said he had spoken to Emanuel and then to Blagojevich, who told Tusk why the grant was slow in coming.

“He said that before the grant could be released, he wanted Congressman Emanuel's brother to hold a fundraiser for him,” said Tusk, who told the jury he remembered wanting off the call as fast as possible. The demand was both “illegal and unethical,” Tusk said, and he wanted no part of it. Ari Emanuel was a wealthy Hollywood agent and the inspiration for the Ari Gold character on HBO's
Entourage.

The call so rattled Tusk, he said, he quickly worked to give a warning to other staff members that Blagojevich might ask them to make a similar pitch, starting with Wyma. And he remembered calling Quinlan, the governor's general counsel, to tell him, “You need to get your client under control.”

On cross-examination, Sheldon Sorosky asked whether Tusk had been hired because the Blagojevich administration wanted “an independent, intelligent young man.” It was in keeping with the defense idea that Blagojevich was surrounded by smart, law-abiding people, many of them lawyers who would do nothing illegal themselves and, while they would listen to Blagojevich spout off, would do their best to keep him from crossing lines.

Blagojevich was much more of a “big picture guy,” Sorosky said, right? He didn't much care for the nitty-gritty parts of running the state. Would that be accurate?

“It would,” Tusk said, in a tone that made it clear that was a fairly monumental understatement. Is that why you were hired? Sorosky asked, drawing an objection from Schar.

“No mind reading,” said Zagel, whose law enforcement background included leading the state police and time in the Cook County state's attorney's office, where he had been a veteran when Sorosky was a junior prosecutor.

Very well. Wasn't it true that Blagojevich also was just a hothead? He would say whatever came into his mind?

“Once in a while, he says things and blows off a lot of steam?” Sorosky asked.

“Yes,” Tusk answered.

Sorosky suggested that maybe Tusk had never even explained that there was a problem to Blagojevich, who was normally at home and maybe not fully engaged. Was such a fundraiser really what the governor was concentrating on? But the judge sustained a government objection.

“They were in different places, so now we have mind reading over the telephone,” said Zagel.

Fine, Sorosky said. But if this was so bad, when did Tusk quit his job? Certainly not right away. He hadn't rushed off to the FBI or the US attorney's office to report the supposed shakedown.

“I took a lot of reasonable steps to deal with it,” Tusk said.

When Schar questioned Tusk again, he asked about Sorosky's claim that the governor was just expressing himself in some fiery way, asking about a fundraiser in some half-joking rant instead of being serious about connecting the school grant to Ari Emanuel hosting some swanky fundraiser in Los Angeles. Tusk had taken things seriously enough to attempt to stop Blagojevich.

But Sorosky wouldn't drop the point about Blagojevich maybe just bursting out with something a single time in one conversation that never was followed up on.

“Just because he said that once, that's why we're here on this issue?” Sorosky said, prompting Zagel to sustain an objection from Schar even as the prosecutor was still getting out of his chair.

“Now we're into mind reading of the prosecution,” the judge said.

In many ways, John Harris's life was ruined by crossing paths with Blagojevich. He had attended Northwestern University and Loyola Law School. He had been a US Army officer, including working as a judge advocate general. While working for Mayor Daley, Congressman Lipinski recommended him for secretary of transportation, and he first came into contact with the Blagojevich crew while interviewing for the job with Lon Monk, Chris Kelly, and Tony Rezko. He was also approached about being the executive director of the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority, but neither state post panned out. It wasn't until 2005 that the Blagojevich administration tapped him for a job he took. With Monk leaving to join Blagojevich's reelection campaign, Kelly came to Harris about the chief of staff spot. He dangled the fact that Blagojevich was considering a White House run and suggested Harris could go along for the ride. Harris would only commit to two years at first, meeting with Blagojevich and Bradley Tusk about coming on to replace the outgoing Monk. He would spend more than three years with the governor, who came to rely on him heavily for advice.