Golden (77 page)

Just two weeks into testimony at the second trial, it was very apparent that prosecutors were aiming a much leaner and meaner case right at the governor and his machinations over the Senate pick in 2008. Their sprawling original case had wound through Operation Board Games toward the Senate, while the second round
started
there and concentrated on major witnesses and key recordings. It took just three weeks total for prosecutors to present their case the second time—or about half the time it took in 2010. Many of the off-point details that had made headlines in the first trial were dropped, like that Blagojevich hid in the bathroom when he didn't want to see his budget director, that he loved expensive suits, and that Obama's team didn't want him at Obama's Grant Park victory rally.

But before the government would rest its case, Rajinder Bedi returned to the stand, again recounting how he had wound up as a go-between telling Robert Blagojevich about the plans of Raghu Nayak and an offer of campaign money if Jesse Jackson Jr. were made the senator. Bedi testified without much detail of the Jackson meeting where he said decisions were made to offer money, seemingly leaving it up in the air whether the jury would think Jackson was behind the offer.

Greenlee testified again about the last few calls he had with Blagojevich and how he didn't believe Blagojevich when the governor told him to relax about what he had heard him say to Fred Yang and that he was just trying to leverage a Jackson Jr. pick with the national people. And Wyma was back as well, telling the jury about his decision to flip, again describing how the fund-raising inside the Friends of Blagojevich had grown too aggressive for him to stomach just as he had gotten a federal subpoena for his own dealings representing hospitals before the corrupt Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board.

“To hear him lie like he is lying is like a dagger in my heart,” Blagojevich said as he left court after listening to Wyma testify against him for a second time. “But tomorrow is another day and next week is another week as we get closer and closer to sorting it all out.”

Blagojevich would continue to come and go from the trial on most days carrying a large black briefcase, looking like he was doing more than just sitting idly by as his lawyers ran the case. But that didn't stop him from greeting people who were waiting to get into court on any given day. He often headed down the hall to the men's room just before the trial began and stopped to chat with people lined up outside the room. He would happily give an autograph to anyone who asked, signing notebooks, loose slips of paper, and copies of his book. “Birds always sing after the storm,” he wrote in one note. Another day just outside the building, he tried and failed to sign an orange.

The week of May 16, 2011, was historic in the city of Chicago. Rahm Emanuel was sworn in as the city's forty-sixth mayor in a chilly ceremony at the Frank Gehry-designed band shell in Millennium Park. Chicago's first Jewish mayor had won the office in a landslide and promised change that would sweep the city away from financial disaster and from the “old way of doing things.” Emanuel acted like he was a million miles from his entanglement with Blagojevich, even though he was just blocks from where Blagojevich was sitting in court. And he was not yet free of the case's gravitational pull. More and more, as Zagel sustained government objections and told the defense to recall witnesses in its own case, it became clear Blagojevich's lawyers would call witnesses of their own and that Emanuel would be near the top of their list.

Obama's name came up at the start of that week as well, though not in the way Blagojevich wanted. His lawyers again asked Judge Zagel for access to the FBI report of an interview agents had with Obama in February 2009. They were looking for any indication Obama was aware of Blagojevich's alleged “asks.”

Zagel said no but offered a few clues to the report, which he had read closely. The interview suggested Obama—who was fairly busy at the time— didn't know to any useful degree what Blagojevich was doing.

“The premise [Obama] was aware of the asks is not supported,” the judge said, reminding the defense that it didn't really matter anyway whether the incoming president knew or didn't know of Blagojevich's ideas.

“There is a longstanding rule of law that a planned victim does not have to know he was the target of an attempt,” he said. “You don't get to argue that you should be acquitted because your plan to rob a bank was unknown to any teller.”

Also back on the stand that week repeating his testimony was Patrick Magoon of Children's Memorial Hospital. The defense asked to be able to cross-examine him on his history of giving money personally to politicians and to point out he had a post on the board of the Illinois Hospital Association, a lobbying group that contributed generously to Friends of Blagojevich in the past.

With the jury out of the room, Goldstein questioned Magoon about that history but didn't draw out anything the judge found useful. Nice try, Zagel said, but he thought the defense had “cratered” in the effort to show they should be allowed to get into that area with Magoon. It was a term that confused at least Goldstein.

“That's like crashing into the ground and making a crater,” Zagel explained, dryly.

So, which would the defense team be to Zagel, Goldstein said, the meteor or the crater?

“Either one,” the judge said.

The blocking of the defense from getting into such background quickly became a theme. There were three witnesses that Blagojevich's lawyers wanted to paint as political creatures who were familiar with the fund-raising world: Magoon; Gerald Krozel, the road builders representative; and John Johnston, the horse racing executive. None of them were babes in the woods who would have been shocked by any outreach from the Blagojevich camp about fund-raising, even while they had items in front of the governor that they wanted action on. The defense wanted to show that Magoon and the others should have known where the fund-raising line was and that Blagojevich was walking right up to it without going over it. Without the context of the men's histories, they were in essence testifying in a vacuum, with the jury thinking Blagojevich came out of nowhere and just asked for cash. It just wasn't credible that they would now be feeling some extraordinary pressure from the governor or his operatives, the defense argued.

Krozel was the next to take the witness stand. Goldstein questioned him outside the presence of the jury, too, asking whether he had been a chairman of the Illinois concrete pavers' group and vice chairman of the American Concrete Paving Association. Krozel said he had been politically
active since the 1980s, back to when Jim Thompson was governor. Krozel recounted how he had heard from Thompson that he should become more “politically involved,” which he took to mean more active in fund-raising. He did so, Krozel said, and Thompson agreed to a repaving project on the Eisenhower Expressway that would benefit Krozel's organizations. It was an odd story about a Republican governor who was the former US attorney who had put Governor Otto Kerner behind bars.

Regardless, Zagel again said the defense couldn't go there during cross-examination, upsetting Goldstein. Much of the case was based on the understanding of three men who were used to fund-raising for others when they stood to gain something from state action, he said.

“The only difference in the level of uncomfortableness is we have now a man on trial,” Goldstein said. “They have a bias and motive to give an understanding. How do we test what someone's understanding is? We look at their personal experiences because it's a very subjective thing.”

These were men who had played the game, and now just because the government was telling them to say something, they were doing so, he said.

“Nine hundred times before it was no problem,” Goldstein said. “Now it's, ‘Oh, I felt all this pressure.'”

The jury hadn't been there to hear Goldstein explain, but many in the press corps looked at one another and thought the argument was about the most cogent vision of the defense case that they'd yet heard, at least at the retrial. To get at it, the defense was going to have to call its own witnesses and probably even the former governor himself.

But the jury heard only what Krozel was allowed to tell them. He was seventy-one and basically retired and had been dealing in recent years with a very ill wife who had an undiagnosed mental condition that left her bedridden. He had last worked fulltime for Prairie Materials, a large construction-related firm. He had been summoned to a meeting with Monk and Blagojevich on September 18, 2008, and didn't really want to go. It was obvious he was going to be asked for money again, and it was a terrible time to have to turn around and try to raise money for Blagojevich. The economy was steadily worsening, and the shadow of federal investigations had tainted the governor. Niewoehner asked why he had gone, then.

“He was the governor,” Krozel said.

Blagojevich had talked about the progressive tollway program, Krozel recalled, which would start with a $1.8 billion expansion plan. There could later be a follow-up plan as large as $6 billion, which perked Krozel's ears.
The industry was down, and that amount of work would have meant a lot. At the very least it would have saved dozens of jobs at a concrete plant in Dixon, Illinois, that was slated for closure. As he had at the first trial, Krozel then described how Blagojevich floated the idea of a campaign donation, seemingly linking the tollway program to whether Krozel would contribute.

Krozel said he was still in the meeting with the governor and Monk when Blagojevich had started talking about the ethics law that was going to make it illegal to collect campaign cash from companies doing business with Illinois. So, good news, Blagojevich said sarcastically, he wouldn't be able to ask Krozel for money any longer after January 1. So this was it, Krozel recalled; Blagojevich wanted him to fundraise before then.

He got the message, Krozel said. Only the governor had discretion over the tollway proposals, and Blagojevich had mentioned them almost in the same breath as asking Krozel to raise campaign money. In politics, something like that wasn't happening by accident.

“I felt there was a connection between the amount I was going to raise and the project itself,” Krozel said. “I thought if I couldn't raise any money then there wouldn't be a tollway bill.”

At the first trial, Lon Monk had been the first key prosecution witness, and he had been the voice to tell jurors about the early years of the Blagojevich administration. At the second trial, he wasn't quite an afterthought, but he was called after Krozel and seemed to be relegated to the abbreviated role of backing up the accounts of others.

Cross-examination was a slog right out of the first trial, with Sorosky offering lines of questioning that seemed partly designed to plant ideas in the jury's heads and partly intended as a filibuster to ensure the defense wouldn't have to start putting on evidence before a weekend that was approaching. It started off with the classic attempt at making a cooperating witness look like a weasel who was a serial liar. Monk agreed he'd had no experience with campaigns before Blagojevich hired him as his campaign manager in 2002 and then his chief of staff. The new governor had simply trusted him because they had a solid friendship that went back decades.

“Yeah, he trusted me,” Monk said.

Sorosky also thought he could score some points on the Rezko front. It was becoming clear Operation Board Games and Rezko were taking a back
seat at the second trial and Rezko wasn't going to be called, so there was little risk dragging his name around. Monk again testified that he took cash from Rezko when he was chief of staff and that he hadn't told Blagojevich. That was one thing, but with news swirling of investigations, couldn't Monk have at least warned his “friend” to steer clear of the fundraiser?

“This would clearly be a time when Rod would want your advice and counsel,” Sorosky said, drawing one of more than one hundred objections that flew as he questioned Monk. The point was, that advice had never come as Monk just kept pocketing money. Didn't he go to law school? Wasn't he an intelligent person?