Golden (71 page)

Robert Greenlee was seemingly the kind of guy Rod Blagojevich wanted around him in government. He was smart, very capable, and willing to do what the governor said almost to the point of being a mindless drone. He sat on the stand looking the part of a somewhat doughy wonk, obviously intelligent but seeming more than a little nervous. During his closing argument, Sam Adam Jr. said Greenlee looked like “Tom Arnold and Buddy Holly had a kid.”

He had a degree from Yale, had gone to law school with Tusk at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1999, and since his odyssey with Blagojevich had returned there to study religious history. He had only ever used his law degree working in mergers and acquisitions, and he worked his way out of the state budget office to become a deputy chief of staff for Blagojevich in 2007 and finally a deputy governor in 2008. Like Tusk, he was young and bright and eager to take on government challenges. So he wound up being the administration's point person handling legislative matters and policy.

Greenlee told the jury his responsibility was to figure out how to take a legislative idea through the system, from determining how to pay for it and get it passed by the General Assembly to seeing it was implemented. Like the other former aides who testified before him, Greenlee described a fairly dysfunctional office where Blagojevich was most often missing or not wanting to be engaged on the day-to-day activities of running Illinois. He told the jury the governor once hid in the bathroom to avoid having a budget discussion with John Filan and said from his perspective, Blagojevich was
either nowhere to be found or calling constantly on things that didn't really affect him. But Greenlee knew to keep his boss happy and take the phone calls when they came and bend over backward to agree with his boss while he was on them. As he explained it, he just didn't have the luxury of getting Blagojevich too bent out of shape at him. Being too contradictory could get you cut off, and Greenlee needed to be able to get Blagojevich to talk to him when there was an emergency.

And there often was, Greenlee said. After sixty days, legislation that had been sent to the governor's desk for a signature would automatically become law if it went unaddressed. There were times when bills the administration was opposed to were about to go into effect without Blagojevich imposing an amendatory veto, so Greenlee said he would have to “capture” the governor in a plane or a car and push the legislation under his nose to get his attention.

“When he had nothing else to do,” Greenlee said with an affected tone that made it clear he had often been really annoyed with his boss and was relishing that he got to call him out publicly for being a jerk.

Once Greenlee said he was forced to catch up with the governor during a Blagojevich family dinner at Southport Lanes on the North Side. As the governor ate with his wife and daughters, Greenlee said he went over some twenty pending pieces of legislation that had piled up awaiting Blagojevich's attention.

“Southport Lanes,” Reid Schar said snidely, “isn't that a bowling alley?”

“It's a bowling alley, bar, and grill,” Greenlee answered, as if that somehow made a difference.

One of the stretches when Blagojevich had been hard to shake was late October and early November 2008. The governor was fixating on the Senate seat that Obama was giving up, and Greenlee was among the people being pulled into the orbit of the schizophrenic governor. Ambassadorships. Secretary of health and human services. Appointing himself senator. All of it swirled in the governor's mind as Greenlee sat on the phone and agreed the ideas sounded good. He remembered one talk when he was going to work out at Crunch Gym. Instead he sat in his car and talked to Blagojevich for an hour. His boss carried on and on about the Senate seat “and how the choices he could make regarding the seat could place him in a position to be relevant on the larger stage,” which Greenlee took to mean coming up with a way to launch a bid to be elected president in 2016.

Blagojevich had a laundry list of ways he could rebuild his political future and boost his fortunes through making the appointment. They were the
familiar moves the jury had heard a number of times by that point. The entire process was moving around those imagined options and how Blagojevich could help himself out, Greenlee said. But still, the governor ordered what amounted to a sham selection process set up. There was much talk about a search team for weighing the qualifications of candidates. And there were meetings in which there were discussions about the priorities the pick should have. They should have an interest in health care, the thinking went, and they should care about things like infrastructure improvements and economic development in Illinois. They should have “exceptional skills” and an affinity for the people of the state. But in the end, none of it really mattered.

“In name we picked a search team, but there was no process,” Greenlee told the jury. “We never actually had any meetings or conducted any search activities.”

With Greenlee on the stand, prosecutors played a series of tapes that set up both the Senate seat shenanigans and Blagojevich's alleged attempt to force the
Tribune
to fire negative editorial writers if the company wanted state involvement in the sale of Wrigley Field. The jury heard the recording where Blagojevich was on the phone telling his brother they had been approached to “pay to play” by Jesse Jackson Jr. supporters. On one call from November 3, 2008, Blagojevich could be heard telling Greenlee to put together a list of ambassadorships the governor might seek in exchange for the Senate pick. Greenlee said he did organize a sheet of posts Blagojevich could use as a cheat sheet, going to Wikipedia before work and printing out sheets for countries such as United Kingdom, France, and Italy. Each entry showed who the current ambassador was and what their qualifications were, as well as lists of notable people who had held each post. For example, the United Kingdom entry noted that five men who would go on to be president had held the position. That was the kind of information Blagojevich wanted to hear.

The government had been presenting evidence to the jury for more than five weeks before they called to the stand the man who had propelled the investigative endgame in the fall of 2008. John Wyma was boyish and blond, telling the jury he was forty-three. He described his job as a lobbyist in Washington in the simplest of terms, saying he represented corporations and entities, “helping them with the federal government.”

He had been Blagojevich's chief of staff for more than three years when Blagojevich was in Congress, and when Blagojevich first ran for governor of Illinois, Wyma had the title of political director. That meant he traveled with Blagojevich on the campaign trail and was the liaison between him and his campaign staff. He recalled that Lon Monk was running the campaign, with the help of Blagojevich's Washington advisers, Bill Knapp and Fred Yang.

As they had with many of the other witnesses who had come before him, prosecutors had Wyma talk about the roles that Chris Kelly and Tony Rezko played in the governor's transition to power. Kelly was among those with instant, direct access to Blagojevich, Wyma said, and Kelly and Rezko came to be important after the election, having a say in who was named to boards and commissions. As for Wyma, he took on a less formal role, working as a very successful lobbyist who had the governor's ear and sat in on regular fund-raising meetings from 2003 all the way up until 2008. A core group close to Blagojevich that included Kelly, Monk, and others would look at lists of past donors and fund-raising targets and make decisions about who was best to reach out to them about contributing to the campaign. Wyma said he was typically pointed toward people he knew.

“Either a client of mine or it was an individual I had a historic relationship with from working with Rod,” he said.

Blagojevich was engaged in the meetings and asked questions about particular people, Wyma said, and would sometimes provide the fundraisers with amounts he thought should come in from those individuals.

Wyma kept his official residency in Washington, DC, but opened a lobbying office in Chicago. He had a group of heavyweight clients, including AT&T, Nicor, and Philip Morris, as well as governmental clients such as the Chicago Transit Authority, and made $1 million his first year. By 2004, Wyma was looking to hook up companies with investment funds from Illinois organizations such as the Teachers' Retirement System, which of course pulled Wyma into the orbit of Stuart Levine, who by then was seizing control of TRS and handing the reins to Rezko. Wyma said what he came to learn was that there was a list of companies that would be considered for getting investment funds. He reached out to Chris Kelly, who told him Rezko was involved in the situation.

“It was $50,000 to get on this list,” Wyma said Kelly eventually told him, meaning a $50,000 campaign contribution to Blagojevich in order for a state board controlled by Rezko to even have a company looked at for state investment. Once again, it was an example of state government being
corrupted from the inside out. Wyma said he never took the information to his clients, believing it was “obviously wrong.”

When it came to the specific charges against Blagojevich, prosecutors first had Wyma discuss the school grant Blagojevich allegedly sat on in 2006 to try to get Rahm Emanuel's LA brother to hold a fundraiser for him. Emanuel was someone Wyma was close to, he testified, saying he remembered getting a call from the then-congressman who was wondering if Wyma knew anything about why the school was missing its money and if anything could be done about it. Wyma said he spoke to Bradley Tusk, another friend, who told him what the problem was. Wyma's testimony corroborated Tusk's version of events.

“He believed the money was being held by the governor because he wanted Emanuel or his brother to hold a fundraiser,” Wyma recalled. Once Blagojevich dug in on something—as he clearly did on the school—nothing could change his mind. “The timing was horrible,” he said. While Wyma knew Emanuel was looking for some help from the state for the school, he said he was not going to go to him and ask for the fundraiser, calling it “poor judgment.”

Even so, Wyma said he stayed in the regular fund-raising meetings into 2008 and would sometimes advise his clients to make donations to the governor. By that summer, he said, the change in state ethics law was bearing down.

“We had to get as much as we could as quickly as we could,” Wyma said, telling Carrie Hamilton it was fair to say there was pressure on him and the others who were close to Blagojevich. One of his clients in October 2008 was Michael Vondra, a wealthy construction executive who also ran waste management facilities. Vondra had Wyma set up the October 6 meeting with the governor to talk about possible state incentives to offer to BP to lure the oil giant to bring a project to Illinois. The meeting seemed to go fine, and afterward, Wyma stayed behind and said he spoke to Blagojevich about what they had just heard.

“He said he liked Vondra a lot, and he wanted to get $100,000 from him by the end of the year,” said Wyma, who remembered reminding Blagojevich that Vondra had held a fundraiser for him just a month or so earlier. And regardless, Wyma said he told the governor, the six-figure request was totally unrealistic.

But fund-raising and the year-end deadline that the ethics legislation represented were on Blagojevich's mind, apparently, as Wyma said he next
bridged into trade association president Gerry Krozel and the tollway plan. Wyma said the governor filled him in on his planned announcement of the $1.8 billion expansion and that Monk was going to Krozel for half a million dollars. Blagojevich had the power to announce a much broader package but told Wyma he was going to wait and see how Krozel and his roadbuilder contacts did on the fund-raising front.

“If they don't perform, fuck ‘em,” Wyma remembered the governor telling him, telling Schar he wasn't confused about whether the governor was saying he was in effect holding back money to see if campaign contributions would come in.

At the same meeting, another of Wyma's clients, Children's Memorial Hospital, was among the topics of conversation. Blagojevich mentioned that Dusty Baker had called about the reimbursement rate, and the governor said he was going to listen to the hospital's request and do something about it.

“He was going to give them eight million bucks,” Wyma remembered Blagojevich telling him, “and he wanted to get Magoon for fifty.”

That was $50,000. As in a campaign contribution from the leader of a children's hospital who had come to the governor's attention because he was seeking an increase in the amount of money the state gave for the treatment of ill children who couldn't pay for their medical care. Wyma said he pointed out that CMH was a nonprofit and that the $50,000 goal was “way out of balance anyway.” And furthermore, the deadline at the end of the year related to businesses and companies that made state donations. It didn't even apply to the hospital. So Wyma said he told the governor he should go ahead with the reimbursement plan and wait and possibly come back to the fund-raising idea later.