Golden (38 page)

Scandal was now coming from seemingly every direction, and some of Blagojevich's backers were worried it would hurt his ability to raise money.

Kelly was also acting paranoid, refusing to talk to fundraisers on the phone and demanding they talk to him only in his car. Sometimes, while they talked, he even demanded they remove the batteries from their Blackberries so he was sure he wasn't being recorded.

During one fund-raising meeting in 2005 at the Friends of Blagojevich campaign headquarters, Blagojevich met with more than a half-dozen advisers, including Kelly. At one point during the meeting, Pete Giangreco suggested the governor stop accepting campaign contributions from state contractors. It would help Blagojevich stem the tide of negative stories about scandal and help retell the story that won him the first election—that he was a reformer.

But Kelly would hear none of it. He stood up, clearly angry, his face beet red.

“We've built a money-making machine in there!” he screamed at them, pointing to the pair of windowless rooms containing computers jammed with data of state contractors and contributors. He wasn't going to just give
that up for one positive story in the press. Blagojevich sat silently, and the idea was dropped.

Federal authorities were still pushing hard as well.

In March 2005, agents finally got access to Blagojevich, whose lawyers allowed him to meet with investigators and answer some basic questions. Investigators, including Cain, met with the governor at the offices of his high-powered legal team from the Chicago firm Winston & Strawn, sitting across from him at a conference table. The agents were prepared to record the gathering, but the lawyers told them that wouldn't be happening. Not much was expected from the interview, but investigators hoped to lock in some statements the state's chief executive might make on how money was raised inside his administration.

It was the day before St. Patrick's Day, and supervisory agent Patrick Murphy was doing most of the questioning. Murphy, like Cain, worked out of the FBI's satellite office in west suburban Lisle, which had begun leading the probe because the first complaint had come from Edward Hospital CEO Pam Davis in nearby Naperville.

Blagojevich's chief lawyer, Brad Lerman, had prepped the governor, but Blagojevich also had occasionally sought the advice of Sheldon Sorosky, his old friend who had given him one of his first law jobs. Sorosky would hang around Winston meetings and basically help translate Blagojevich for the firm's attorneys, but he wasn't there when Blagojevich met with the FBI.

Murphy wanted to know whether it could be true that illegal pledges were being made by Blagojevich's office. Did it take a sizable campaign donation to do business with Illinois under him?

As he had done many times before when answering similar questions put to him by reporters, Blagojevich told the FBI that was simply not the case. He stayed a million miles away from the handing out of contracts. He didn't keep track of who was giving him money and didn't know how much he might be getting from each individual donor, Blagojevich told Murphy and Cain. The way he described it, there was a “firewall” between fund-raising and governing. And under him, Blagojevich said, the two did not mix.

There were times when information might splash up on him, Blagojevich said, such as when he went to a fundraiser and noticed someone there who was more than likely going to be giving money to the campaign. Sometimes campaign staff would tell him how an event was going, he said, but wouldn't give him details. When he was running for office that kind of stuff was important to him, but not when he had the business of the state to attend
to as its leader. Politics was politics, and when it came to campaign cash, Blagojevich told the agents he simply didn't want to know.

Word of the FBI interview wouldn't become public for some time, and, despite the swirling probe, Blagojevich's fund-raising momentum continued unbroken as he racked up millions of dollars for his 2006 reelection bid. By the time January 1, 2006 arrived, Blagojevich had $15.5 million in the bank.

It was enough to scare off the few Democrats who whispered about running against him. The only one who did was Edwin Eisendrath, a former Chicago alderman from Lincoln Park. In 1990, Eisendrath was an up-and-comer who had moved too fast when he took on US Representative Sidney Yates for Congress and got thumped. He eventually left city government to work for the Clinton administration's Department of Housing and Urban Affairs and hadn't really been heard from since. But Eisendrath was deciding to run because he was sick of the scandals. He was massively underfunded and being ignored by Blagojevich, who refused to debate him, but he didn't seem to care.

In March, just days before the primary, Dick Mell invited Eisendrath to attend his bingo fundraiser at Gordon Tech. It was an obvious tweak to Blagojevich even though Mell wasn't endorsing Eisendrath over his sonin-law. It didn't matter, of course. Blagojevich won with 70 percent of vote.

With the primary in his rearview, Blagojevich was facing Judy Baar Topinka in the fall. The state treasurer and Illinois's only Republican statewide officeholder, Topinka had excelled in Illinois politics because voters thought of her as a solid financial steward of their dollars who talked straight just like Aunt Judy who lived across the alley. Unfortunately for her, as voters got to know her better many began to think of her more as Crazy Aunt Judy.

At sixty-two years old, she had flaming orange hair and wore dark makeup around her eyes and clothes from thrift stores. She tripped up several times on the campaign trail, giving flippant answers to serious questions and making fart jokes. Even when she tried to criticize Blagojevich she ended up insulting millions of voters by comparing him to the Chicago Cubs, saying, “They're a bunch of losers too.”

That was really all Blagojevich and his millions of dollars needed. One of her quirky responses in a discussion about gun control found its way into
a Blagojevich television commercial when she said “a rolling pin” could be considered an assault weapon. Another time she compared the state's minimum wage to a government “giveaway” program. Blagojevich's DC strategist Bill Knapp took the sound bites and placed them in short, light-hearted, but still negative fifteen-second television ads that repeated Topinka's words and asked a simple question: “What's she thinking?” Blagojevich ran the rolling pin commercial five hundred times in two months in the Chicago area.

At the same time, Topinka couldn't respond in kind because she couldn't raise the kind of money Blagojevich had.

Between January and July, Blagojevich raised $6.5 million and spent nearly $10 million, much of it on those commercials. It still left him with $12.2 million to spend between the summer and November. During the same time, Topinka raised $3.1 million but spent almost all of it, leaving her with only $1.5 million in the bank for the final months of the campaign.

Blagojevich had brought back much of his winning team from 2002. Monk left his post as the governor's chief of staff to be campaign manager again. He was replaced by John Harris, who was recommended by Kelly and came over from Mayor Daley's administration. Scofield, who since leaving had done public relations for nonprofits and the pro-Blagojevich labor group, Service Employees International Union, also returned. He helped train the campaign's new spokeswoman, Sheila Nix, who had worked for Hull's failed 2004 Senate bid. Wyma was always a phone call away. Tusk and Blagojevich's newest general counsel, William Quinlan, never officially joined the campaign but assisted whenever they could.

And Blagojevich still had his political charm, gracefully manipulating crowds wherever he went, even children. When speaking to parents and youngsters about his All Kids program, he tried to connect with white audiences by asking if the kids watched
Hannah Montana.
When it was a group of mostly African American children, he asked if they watched
That's So Raven.

While keeping his offices on Ravenswood intact, Blagojevich opened up a campaign headquarters above a bank in an old building at Milwaukee and Division, just around the corner from where he bought that black leather jacket and white T-shirts he wore in college.

But the 2006 campaign lacked the energy of his first run. Blagojevich went through the motions but essentially counted on his massive campaign fund and sharp television commercials to carry him through. In the last
six months of the year, Blagojevich spent $16.4 million; Topinka spent $6.2 million.

The one arrow Topinka had in her quiver, though, was what Blagojevich himself gave her: his scandals.

In May, the hiring investigation that had been highlighted the previous year made its way back to the front pages when a list of people recommended for state jobs—and their political sponsors—was leaked.

Both Chicago newspapers began digging into the quickly growing story. The
Tribune
's Ray Long disclosed a 2004 report by Blagojevich's inspector general, Zaldwaynaka Scott, that stated Blagojevich's office tried to circumvent hiring laws in myriad ways. She said they falsified hiring records, found work-arounds to ensure veterans didn't get priority, hired unqualified employees, and faked some workers' experience. She said the administration's strategy “reflects not merely an ignorance of the law but complete and utter contempt for the law.”

Curry and Pearman from Jim Ryan's campaign were working behind the scenes too, pushing tips to reporters and even feeding information they found hinky to the feds. Curry would end up speaking to FBI agents twice.

The next month Attorney General Lisa Madigan made public more details about the federal investigation into hiring. Madigan's office was stepping back on its own probe into the matter to allow federal prosecutors to take the lead. To prove her point, she released a letter from US Attorney Fitzgerald that said the feds were probing “allegations of endemic hiring fraud” and that they had “developed a number of credible witnesses.”

Little of it, though, had much impact. Legally, Blagojevich didn't think anybody could make a connection to him, and politically, the stories were difficult for voters to get their heads around, which was reflected in Blagojevich's internal polling.

But just two months before the election, the questions about hiring came into quick focus when the
Tribune
wrote a story about the Beverly Ascaridis job and the $1,500 birthday check. Having been bothered by the check, Beverly Ascaridis told the FBI of her suspicions she received her j ob because of it. The story quickly gained traction because it was so easy to understand and highly questionable. Who gives a young girl a $1,500 check for her seventh birthday?

Privately, Blagojevich was stunned by the story and worried it could hurt him. He stopped talking to Lou Nova, especially after he read quotes from his wife in the
Tribune
in which she said she hated Blagojevich with every fiber of her being. After the story broke, Blagojevich attended an event at a downtown Chicago hotel and faced reporters, defending his decision to accept the check and then muddying up his original story that the money was for Amy. He said he also thought it could have been a christening gift for Annie.