Golden (74 page)

Rumors swirled about what was going on when court ended for the day after Robert's testimony, and the ex-governor wasn't called to the stand. Despite Adam Jr. promising Blagojevich would defend himself, and despite Blagojevich promising on seemingly every television show in the country that he couldn't wait to testify, he decided in the end that he would not address the jury. The Adams made it look like they were fighting over the choice, with the younger Adam wanting Blagojevich to answer questions and his father being more conservative, but they were in fact in agreement. The public rift was just another example of Twenty-Sixth Street fakery, designed to give Adam Jr. a little cover. In reality, the defense team was confident in the choice to keep Blagojevich back. When he had practiced being cross-examined, it had not gone well. Blagojevich had spent time prepping with Adam Jr. and Sr. and lawyer and friend Jay Wallace, going to a local park to rehearse his answers for fear of continued government bugging. Then, as
Adam Sr. took a final day of getting ready himself, he made what he later called a big mistake. Lawyer and legal team member Michael Gillespie had told him that his father, Terry Gillespie, would work on a mock cross with Blagojevich. The Adams said yes, not knowing that Genson, away from the case for so long, also would be present. Genson had appeared and given the opinion that Blagojevich wasn't ready. It had shaken the governor and became a self-fulfilling prophecy. “Genson said I better not go on,” Blagojevich told his other lawyers.

His client's lack of confidence weighed on Adam Sr., as did the belief that despite promises from Zagel that Blagojevich would be allowed fairly free rein to testify as he pleased in his own defense, the judge would not live up to that bargain. He recalled the Family Secrets mob case, when Zagel had told lawyers he would allow mobster Frank Calabrese Sr. room to talk about his view of the case, only to repeatedly cut him off. Adam sensed a trap. “He's a copper. That's it,” he later recalled saying about Zagel.

The decision to keep Blagojevich off the stand was iced when the father and son attorneys talked and came to the opinion that the government had held back some of what it might bring against Blagojevich, believing they would use it when he took the stand, and it turned out that Schar had in fact been preparing for the cross one day each weekend for more than six months. The lawyers also feared Rezko could be called in rebuttal if he testified. And finally, Robert's testimony had gone remarkably well, and they hoped it had rubbed off on their client. If Robert acted as the de facto spokesman for the brothers before the jury, that was a situation they were inclined to accept.

“It is my decision, under the advice of my attorneys,” Blagojevich told Zagel the next day when he officially said he would not take the stand. “I make the decision fully and voluntarily.”

He had still been sitting at the defense table as the announcement was made, but he turned slightly and gave a wink to Patti. Afterward, he would try to explain what had happened, citing the “dispute” between Adam Jr. and Adam Sr., with the younger Adam wanting him to defend himself as the lawyer had promised he would and the older Adam taking a different tack.

“Sam Adam Sr.'s most compelling argument and ultimately the one that swayed me was that the government in their case proved my innocence,” Blagojevich told the press. “They proved I did nothing illegal and that there was nothing further for us to add.

“In fact they proved that I sought the advice of my lawyers and my advisers,” he continued. “They proved that I was on the phone talking to them, brainstorming about ideas. Yes, they proved some of those ideas were stupid, but they also proved some of the ideas were good.”

If he had learned one thing from his ordeal, it was that he talked too much, Blagojevich said. So he took Patti by the hand and turned toward the door, waving over his shoulder as he walked out onto busy Dearborn Street.

The first note from the jury was nothing abnormal. As many juries do, the panel asked for a transcript of one of the closing arguments. This jury wanted a copy of Niewoehner's final remarks, which had come with a focused presentation on the overhead projector about how the evidence and testimony could be processed if Blagojevich were to be convicted. It wasn't a great sign for the defense, as they would rather have had the jury request the argument of Adam Jr., who had called his client a victim of sorts. “Think about who they're telling you he extorted,” he had said. “The president of the United States. Give me a break!”

No one on either side had panicked at first, but that turned out to be the wrong reaction, as the wheels quickly came off the wagon. The jury members seemed to be having a hard time agreeing on anything, including lunch. One day they ordered eight different kinds of pizza, including taco. The next substantive jury note was more ominous.

“Is it permissible to obtain a transcript of the testimony?” read the note, signed by the jury's foreman, James Matsumoto. “It would be helpful.”

It was unclear if the jury was asking if it could get transcripts of the testimony of particular witnesses or if it was essentially asking for a transcript of the entire trial. If it was the second one, it wasn't hard to imagine the jury setting a new record for length of deliberations. In the end the request wasn't clear, but Zagel certainly wasn't going to send back hundreds of pages. Time dragged, and it was more than three weeks before the note
that signaled very serious discord on the panel. A note came out asking for the oath the group had taken as jurors to deliberate with an open mind and so on. At least one person was apparently holding out and possibly refusing to engage the rest of the jury.

It was no surprise when the panel finally filed in to deliver its split verdict. They were divided on every count but one, and Blagojevich's head dropped when he learned he had been convicted of lying to the FBI about fund-raising. The jury had decided he had been untruthful when he told Agent Murphy that he kept politics and fund-raising separated by a firewall.

Matsumoto, the foreman, was the veteran with the family links to the Japanese internment camps. That he would be selected the leader was no surprise, as he had been seen in the jury box drawing his own detailed maps and charts of the evidence that were so intricate they almost seemed suitable for framing. More mysterious was the identity of the holdout. While the group had been more evenly divided on some of the alleged shakedowns in the case, they had fallen 11-1 on the alleged Senate seat sale. Someone had held steadfast under the weight of the entire case and the wishes and beliefs of the rest of the jury panel. It was Juror 106, a grandmother and retired state official, and the first to interview her was the
Tribune
's Stacy St. Clair.

JoAnn Chiakulas had ridden the train each morning to hear the evidence and finally the arguments and had developed stomach pains and insomnia under the stress of knowing that she would not bend from her own finding on the evidence in the case. She was not convinced Blagojevich was guilty, and no amount of pushing and prodding by her fellow jurors was going to move her from that opinion.

“I could never live with myself if I went along with the rest of the jury,” Chiakulas told St. Clair. “I didn't believe it was the correct vote for me.”

It was a pretty straightforward explanation. Her former state job had nothing to do with her choice, Chiakulas swore. Besides, she had retired before he even took office. Her ex-husband had donated to Blagojevich, but it was decades after they had divorced. She wasn't a fan of the former governor, either. She said she had all but ignored his television “shenanigans” before the trial.

The Blagojevich Chiakulas said she heard on the tapes was practically incapable of having the focus of thought to organize a criminal conspiracy. There was no decipherable plan, she said, telling St. Clair that while she had voted “not guilty,” she had not meant it as a vote for “innocent.” In fact, there
didn't seem to be much about Blagojevich that she actually liked, calling him narcissistic and essentially scatterbrained.

But whatever the reasons, Chiakulas and the division on the jury had left twenty-three counts on the table and forced the case to a crossroads. Schar wasted no time answering for the government. Blagojevich would be tried again, preferably as soon as possible. Prosecutors were ready to pick a new jury immediately.

Luckier was Robert Blagojevich. The jury had been unable to decide his case either, and the government had a different message for him. He would no longer be pursued. Robert's prosecution was dropped “in the interest of justice” as prosecutors tried to clean up their case and focus on the ex-governor. Even jurors who had voted to convict Blagojevich had been quoted in the press saying they were confused by the massive amount of evidence, the minute detail in the criminal circuitry prosecutors had asked them to consider, and the dozens of pages of instructions. Losing Robert Blagojevich would remove his testimony from the case and streamline things. The ordeal that had begun for Robert when he agreed to come to Chicago to help run his brother's campaign fund was finally over. He planned to return to Tennessee after having dinner in Chicago with a son who was living there.

“We're going to have steaks,” he said.

Sam Adam Jr. had immediately hung his head after the split verdict was read. He had given the case his all and knew he could most likely not improve on that result. The case had worn on the ebullient Adam emotionally and financially, and the last thing he wanted was to have to do it all over again.

“I can't. I'm not kidding,” he said just after the verdict. “I'll go to jail. I can't do it again.”

With little haranguing, Zagel let the father-and-son team off the case, probably as happy to see them go as they were to be hitting the exit. There was very little for Adam Jr. to gain by staying. His practice had taken a financial hit, and there was a real sense in Chicago legal circles that he had taken the case about as far as he could. He was the guy who had run the government to a tie on many of the major counts, and that was going to be hard to repeat a second time. Getting out when he did, he preserved what many saw as a win for him personally and professionally. In addition, Adam Jr. didn't expect that his act would play twice in federal court. He was
emotionally exhausted and had depleted whatever currency he had with Judge Zagel. He felt he had been shut down at every turn by the judge late in the trial, leaving him feeling ineffective. In short, Zagel was trying to force him to adhere to a stricter set of rules than he was used to.

The verdict sent the case into a holding pattern, leaving both sides to consider how to get a different result the next time around. In addition to jettisoning Robert Blagojevich from the case, prosecutors dropped the sweeping conspiracy counts that had led the prior case. The counts were good because the government could use them to connect the dots between lots of alleged acts, but they could feel amorphous when it came time to argue before a jury. Some jurors seemed to think that Blagojevich had done
something
wrong, but they didn't exactly know how that belief corresponded with the actual criminal statutes the government was trying to use.