Golden (7 page)

“Those are little things that bond you with somebody. And that just— that and the previous experience with him began what I felt was a very close relationship. There are friends that you love in a real friend way, not—you know what I'm talkin' about. I loved Lon that way.”

Rod and Lon lived together for their final year of law school. They lifted weights and ran together. Rod visited Lon's family in Palos Verdes and jogged with Lon's father, who still ran marathons despite being in his sixties. After graduation, Lon headed to Washington, DC, while Rod packed up his bags and headed back home to Chicago. But the two promised to stay in touch.

Back in Chicago, one of Blagojevich's first stops was to see Vrdolyak. He wanted to know if that promise to make him “part of the family” still held.

By May 1983 the city's political landscape had changed dramatically. Just weeks earlier, Harold Washington had been sworn in as Chicago's mayor, the first African American to hold office in the city's history. And Vrdolyak was leading his contingent of white aldermen in a power struggle with Washington. In the fifty-member Chicago City Council, the “Vrdolyak 29,” which included a brazen Northwest Side alderman named Richard Mell, was routinely defeating the “Washington 21” and stalling the mayor's initiatives. When Washington wanted to pass a piece of legislation to reform the city's infamously corrupt government, the Vrdolyak 29 blocked it. When Washington wanted an appointee to his cabinet approved, the twenty-nine aldermen wouldn't do it. City government was quickly coming to a standstill, and Washington couldn't do anything about it. Chicago was soon dubbed Beirut on the Lake.

Although Rod liked to think of himself as an anti-machine contrarian (and a Republican no less), he was quickly realizing political philosophy mattered little in Chicago. Connections, relationships, and getting ahead were all that really counted. Rod's only in was Vrdolyak, who did in fact bring Blagojevich out of law school to clerk on personal injury and workers' compensation cases. Lawyers in the alderman's office soon realized just how little Rod knew about the law.

“I gave one of the lawyers a case that was dated 1876, I thought it had a historic context,” Blagojevich remembered on the witness stand. “It was ridiculous because it's no longer law, it hadn't been law for over a hundred
years, and it was so not appreciated by the lawyers that they had me do other things like drop campaign literature in Hegewisch.”

Vrdolyak soon made Blagojevich little more than an errand boy. He dropped off envelopes to Vrdolyak associates and picked up desserts for Vrdolyak's driver. It seemed unlikely Vrdolyak was going to hire him as an attorney for the firm. But the alderman still liked Blagojevich and promised to see if he could get him something with the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, where many young lawyers got their starts. By then, though, the office was being run by Richard M. Daley, son of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, and Vrdolyak and the Daleys didn't get along.

“You've got to understand something about the Irish, the Daley Irish,” Vrdolyak once remarked. “It's the Irish first, and everybody else is a Polack.”

As Blagojevich killed time with Vrdolyak, he lived at home and studied for the bar exam. The first time he took it, he flunked. He studied more the second time, ensconcing himself at the august Harper Library at the University of Chicago even though it was miles away from his home. To him, the library, with its wood-paneled walls,
felt
like a law library and motivated him. Blagojevich passed the second time.

Done waiting for Vrdolyak, Blagojevich took a job with a firm in suburban Elk Grove Village in the shadows of O'Hare Airport, where he did mostly real estate work. Rod was quietly bitter about Vrdolyak not following through on his promise but also knew burning bridges with the alderman wasn't necessarily the smartest move for an upstart politician.

“He had promised the job in his firm, but apparently it never came through,” Rod later said in an interview. “I sort of felt I was exiled in Elk Grove…. I just felt like I was Napoleon at Elba.”

Blagojevich joined social groups and clubs in Elk Grove and discovered he was good at selling himself to clients. But he quickly tired of the suburbs and found a general practice to join run by well-respected Chicago attorney Marshall Moltz. Moltz's office was at Ashland and Addison, less than a mile west of Wrigley Field and just blocks from the gym where Rod had been pummeled as a senior in high school in the Golden Gloves.

While working for Moltz, Blagojevich's charming personality and ability to spin yarns were good for more than making friends or picking up girls. One of Blagojevich's first clients was a “little old lady” fighting her adopted daughter and sonin-law who were seeking conservatorship of the woman's estate because they felt she was squandering it.

In court, Blagojevich soon found himself in the middle of a jury trial. Blagojevich hadn't even participated in a moot court at law school and didn't know the rules of evidence or how to properly make an opening statement. But that didn't stop him. He decided to wing it.

While the daughter's attorneys introduced two dozen pieces of evidence and got doctors to testify against his client, Blagojevich had trouble introducing any evidence in court and had no witnesses. All he could do was establish that the daughter and sonin-law hadn't seen his client in over a year. But he made up for his poor performance with an hour-long closing argument where he paced the courtroom floor and yelled about evidence being kept from the jury due to “technicalities.”

“Please don't hold her accountable for the rookie mistakes of her lawyer,” Blagojevich recalled telling the jury. A little more than hour later, the jury came back in favor of Blagojevich's client.

Excited, Blagojevich ran back to Moltz's office and told his boss the story. Moltz smiled but weeks later fired Blagojevich, saying he was good at getting clients and he should go out on his own. Moltz didn't think Rod was focused enough on his work.

Dismissed but undaunted, Blagojevich began his own private practice. He did a little bit of everything—real estate closings, traffic cases, and criminal misdemeanor work. When neighborhood guys got into trouble, they hired Blagojevich.

He also got more involved in running, which he still talked to Monk about. On the witness stand years later, Blagojevich would say he ran the 1984 Chicago Marathon in a blistering time of two hours, fifty minutes, and thirty seconds. He said he did it wearing a T-shirt with the image of boxer Roberto Duran on the front, inspired not to repeat Duran's famous “AO
mas”
line when he lost to Sugar Ray Leonard. Unfortunately, he could never prove his time. He said he didn't know the rules of marathons and tore his number off his shirt, so judges never registered his finish.

While he enjoyed private practice, Blagojevich decided it was time to get a job with the Cook County State's Attorney's Office. He desperately needed the legal experience, and being an assistant prosecutor would give him the background he needed, not to mention possible political contacts in the office. Rather than go back to Vrdolyak, Blagojevich asked a favor from
another neighborhood friend, Danny Angarola. His older brother, Michael, was first assistant in the office, Daley's right-hand man. Rod asked Danny if Mike could get him a job, providing another early lesson of the rewards of Chicago politics and the world of government favors.

In March 1986, Blagojevich got the job. His first assignment was anything but glamorous. He worked traffic court, often considered the lowest rung on the office ladder. Blagojevich prosecuted drunken drivers and suspended licenses—petty cases that didn't stir his soul. But Blagojevich struck his coworkers as ambitious, even overly so. Always energetic, he was a buzz of activity inside traffic court, running from case to case and always glad-handing with those around him—from public defenders and defendants to victims and even judges.

He was making connections, and that was important because politics were still at the forefront of his mind. On one Friday night after work, Blagojevich told his supervisor, John Budin, he wanted to be president of the United States one day.

As Blagojevich built his resume, Chicago's political scene remained in turmoil. The Vrodolyak-Washington battle was still raging, and Blagojevich was being asked to take a side. Rade Blagojevich had done campaign work for Vrdolyak, and even though he didn't hire Rod as an attorney for his firm, the alderman asked Rod if he could help in the Twenty-Sixth Ward, a heavily Latino area on the city's near Northwest Side.

The Vrdolyak-Washington clashes had found their way to federal court, where a remap of the city's wards was debated. In May 1986, the courts ordered that special elections be held in seven wards that had been reconfigured to better enable blacks and Latinos to be voted onto the city council to reflect the increased population of both. One of those wards was the Latino-leaning Twenty-Sixth, where Washington had a candidate—Luis Gutierrez. Vrdolyak had one too—Manuel “Manny” Torres.

While the Twenty-Sixth Ward was geographically nowhere near Vrdolyak's Tenth Ward, the balance of power on the council was at stake, and each of the seven races mattered. “Do you have any friends who can help us in the Twenty-Sixth Ward?” he asked Rod. Blagojevich said he did. Vrdolyak told him to go visit another alderman on the Northwest Side to get his orders.

Rod called up thirteen friends—including Ascaridis and Stefanski—and they drove up to 2810 W. Fullerton Avenue. Inside was a rush of activity. Telephones rang. Dozens of men walked in and out the front door carrying piles of pro-Torres/anti-Gutierrez leaflets and signs.

A few feet away stood the man running the operation. Average-sized and in his late forties, he had a round face topped with a pile of white hair parted on the left. He had black eyebrows and piercing blue eyes. As he talked, his head bobbed up and down and his double chin wobbled. Not only was he talking a million miles a minute, he was talking about a thousand different topics. He needed no introduction to Blagojevich.

“Alderman Mell,” he said. “I'm here to help.”

Mell was a bundle of nerves and energy. It was his usual disposition.

A native of Muskegon, Michigan, Mell had moved to Chicago after graduating college. He landed in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood after meeting a woman, Marge, who soon became his wife. In the 1960s, Mell was in Chicago when strife ruled the streets. But he was not a protester. He chose a path to power, joining a group called the Young Democrats of Cook County, which served as a sort of farm team for the city's politicians even though many of the Young Democrats viewed themselves as more independent-minded than those with the city's machine.

During the historic Democratic National Convention in 1968 in Chicago, Mell—then thirty years old—got a job through his post with the Young Democrats as a driver for US Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine. He drove Muskie around town in a Cadillac, wheeling over curbs as he steered through the crowds to deliver the senator for his speeches. When Democratic presidential nominee Hubert H. Humphrey picked Muskie to be his vice presidential candidate, Mell celebrated with Muskie, his wife, and his staff at the Conrad Hilton, dining on lobster brought in from Maine. Seven floors below, protesters battled with police in televised clashes that would stun the country, but Muskie, Mell, and the others didn't notice until several people at the table started crying. Teargas from police had begun wafting through the hotel's open windows.