Golden (9 page)

Rod didn't think twice. Workers' comp cases were boring him, and while he liked the firm, he told them he was going to leave just five months in. He hoped Kaplan and Sorosky understood.

As 1988 drew to a close, Rade grew frailer. Doctors at his nursing home couldn't do much more for him. On a cold Thursday night, December 29, Rod got news his father was having trouble breathing. He and Patti and Millie rushed to Columbus Hospital on the North Side. All three stayed there for hours, into the following morning. Doctors urged Rod and Patti to take Millie home. There was nothing they could do. At 7:30 in the morning, the doctors at Columbus called with the news that Rade had died.

In early 1989, Rod Blagojevich walked down Fullerton Avenue on the city's Northwest Side. Trucks, cars, and buses rumbled down the busy street just west of California Avenue in the city's Logan Square neighborhood as Blagojevich approached an unremarkable, single-story building with a wooden facade and glass front door.

“2810” read the address, and on the glass door were bold letters informing passers-by of the occupant:

33RD WARD

REGULAR

DEMOCRATIC ORGANIZATION

RICHARD F. MELL

ALDERMAN-COMMITTEEMAN

Three years earlier, Blagojevich had been here helping the white majority aldermen fight Harold Washington. That day, he was working as Mell's top staffer.

The office was typically a hive of activity. City workers hung out there for hours at a time. The phone was constantly ringing with politicians, neighborhood activists, and government bureaucrats all wanting something—or answering Mell's demands.

The office was nothing to look at. It was dusty, littered with paperwork and infested with mice. But to Blagojevich, it was exciting. He was finally really seeing Chicago politics from the inside, and he was part of it.

Beyond the front lobby area, Blagojevich looked down a long hallway dotted with doors on both sides. The first door on the right was the offices of a neighborhood newspaper, the
Chicago Post,
which Mell owned with James Boratyn, a precinct captain. The free, twice-a-month publication was
a propaganda sheet filled with positive news about Mell's efforts to rid the neighborhood of crime, litter, and abandoned cars.

Across the hallway from the
Post
's headquarters was Mell's wood-paneled personal office. His desk, also dark wood, was kept tidy. Slid under a glass topper sat a map of the city's Thirty-Third Ward, detailing every precinct, block, and alley. But there was no sign of what Mell was most famous for.

Mell's picture had been splashed around the country after the November 1987 death of Mayor Harold Washington. Chicago and the nation were stunned by the loss, and the days that followed shook the city to its core. With both allies and foes seeking to fill the resulting political vacuum, emergency meetings of the Chicago City Council suddenly became must-see local television as aldermen elbowed one another and lobbied behind closed doors to pick the next mayor.

As thousands jammed the streets outside city hall during the debate to pick Washington's successor, Mell stood up on his desk in the council chambers, waving several pieces of paper in an effort to be heard. Photographers captured the bizarre scene, which became symbolic of the city's wild and outrageous political landscape. Alderman Eugene Sawyer was eventually selected to replace Washington. He was an African American that white aldermen could agree on.

The next office down the hallway was Rod's.

As Mell's number one, Blagojevich's job was to show up at the ward office on Monday and Wednesday nights as well as Saturday mornings to deal with constituent complaints and services. On those weekdays, Blagojevich arrived around four in the afternoon and would stay until nine at night. On Saturdays, he would work from nine in the morning until two in the afternoon. Blagojevich loved the job and came off as earnest and interested. And his law degree didn't hurt either, helping him talk his way through the city's and county's bureaucracies. But at $13,000 in his first year, it wasn't a fulltime career, and Rod was still trying to get his law practice off the ground. He opened storefront legal offices on the North Side, a little east of Mell's ward, at Montrose and Lincoln avenues, overlooking Welles Park, then at Lawrence and Ashland avenues. Millie answered telephone calls and helped organize things. He later rented space from his previous employers, Kaplan and Sorosky, downtown at 415 N. LaSalle.

Romantically, Rod and Patti were getting closer. The pair joined Perdomo to go skiing, their first time together, in Alpine Valley in Wisconsin. Mell was also getting closer to Rod. Mell was telling close friends and associates
he was growing fond of the young man and felt like he was doing a good job at the ward offices.

“The kid has a knack for politics,” he would say.

In Mell's family, Blagojevich at the time looked to be the closest thing there was to a successor to the alderman. Dick Mell's son, Richard, showed little interest for politics. Patti majored in economics at University of Illinois and was helping out the family's spring factory. She also was showing a little interest in real estate. Youngest daughter Deb was young and still trying to figure out what she wanted to be. Still, the Mell clan had several connections to government. Richard had a job with the city's aviation department. Patti had worked a summer at city hall, and even Mell's mother was on city payroll. Over the years she held numerous city jobs, despite questions about how often she showed up at work.

Blagojevich's job never entailed him going to city hall or working out of anywhere except Mell's ward office. But for a two-month period in 1989, his paychecks showed him being paid by four different City Council committees that did their work downtown, which indicated Blagojevich may have been paid for work he never did. Blagojevich later said that he never worked at city hall and never noticed he was being paid from the different City Council funds.

It was an oversight that wasn't going to be unnoticed forever.

At least one friend does remember Blagojevich being at the Hall in 1989. Judge Perdomo was at city hall with Blagojevich in July 1989 on the day when the thirty-two-year-old Blagojevich walked a few blocks east to Marshall Field's on State Street to buy an engagement ring for Patti. Blagojevich had already flown out to Washington, DC, to ask Monk about the idea, and Rod moved ahead with his plan.

Blagojevich scoured the jewelry case for the perfect ring. Scanning the shelves he finally found it. It cost about $5,000. The next day, Blagojevich was back at city hall, this time visiting Mell and telling him—not asking for permission—he was going to ask Patti to marry him.

“He was ecstatic,” Perdomo recalled of the alderman's reaction. “He truly liked Rod and thought he would be great for Patti.”

Later that night, Rod asked and Patti said yes. They set a date for a year away—August 25, 1990.

They married inside the Alice S. Millar Chapel at Northwestern University in Evanston, at the bend of the road leading into the heart of the campus. It was not a particularly political affair, especially for the wedding of a powerful city alderman's daughter and the man who would twice be elected governor. Only a few of Cook County's political class were invited, and Blagojevich invited Sorosky.

About one hundred people gathered inside the large chapel. Robert Blagojevich, Mike Ascaridis, and Danny Angarola all stood up as groomsmen, and Lon Monk served as an usher.

When father and daughter reached the end of the aisle, Mell looked at a smiling Rod Blagojevich. Rod took Patti by the hand and Mell walked back to his seat, where he watched the Reverend Thomas Parker take over the ceremony and marry the happy couple. During the ceremony, Monk read the Twenty-third Psalm: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”

Like the ceremony, the reception was not grand, held in a side room next to the chapel. But Rod and Patti looked overjoyed. Always outgoing, Mell stepped back for a few moments to take in the scene. His daughter was married, launching a new stage of her life with a man who seemed to share the same passion for politics and government as he did.

“He's made me a happy man,” Mell told one guest about Rod. “They're an amazing couple.”

Rod and Patti walked through the front door of Mell's Northwest Side bungalow and found the powerful alderman in the living room on his hands and knees.

It was early January 1992, and Mell had scattered maps all over the floor. He was clearly in a quandary. “Ronan left me,” he told the couple, and they knew exactly what that meant. Every decade, the state deals with the results of the national census by redrawing Illinois's political maps. The shapes of the state legislative and congressional districts change to reflect shifts in population, but they also have a major political element. The Republicans had redrawn the maps after the 1990 census, leaving Democrats to battle it out in several legislative districts in Chicago. The 1992 election would be the first under the new maps, and Mell and his longtime ally, Alfred Ronan, couldn't agree on who should run where. Ronan wanted to run in a neighboring district and let his friend, incumbent Myron Kulas, take the seat in Mell's neighborhood. But Mell didn't care about Kulas. He thought it was time for Rod Blagojevich's entrance into politics.

“The kid could run,” he had told Ronan.

The two men had been arguing about it for weeks when Ronan finally decided he'd had enough. He was packing his stuff up from the offices he shared with Mell and moving. He would run in the lakefront district, and Kulas, a seven-term incumbent, would run in Mell's neighborhood. If Mell
didn't like it, then his sonin-law would have to challenge Kulas—which is exactly why Mell had invited Rod and Patti over to his house.

“You interested in running?” Mell asked Rod as the alderman continued to pore over the political maps that detailed the new boundaries.

Without hesitating, Rod said yes. He only had one reservation. He wanted to take his own positions on the issues and didn't want Mell telling him how to vote.

“I don't give a fuck about that,” Mell answered.

It was decided then. Rod Blagojevich would run for the seat of Illinois Representative from the Thirty-Third District. But there was one other problem. Blagojevich didn't live in the Thirty-Third District. Mell and Blagojevich called Michael Madigan, the Speaker of the House and one of Illinois's most powerful politicians. They asked Madigan about the residency issue, and he told them that because the political boundaries were newly drawn, Rod was indeed allowed to run.

While dramatic and life-changing for those involved, especially Blagojevich, the decision amounted to little more than another daily twist in the city's political soap opera. The
Chicago Tribune
covered the unveiling of Candidate Rod Blagojevich on January 14, 1992, with a story that appeared in the “Chicagoland” section. They spelled his last name Blagojewevick.

For Mell, the 1992 campaign was about more than getting Blagojevich elected. Due to his split with Ronan, he feared his political powerbase was threatened. While not front page news, when an alderman and ward committeeman like Mell has a falling-out with a high-profile state legislator like Ronan, the city's political types were left to wonder if Mell was losing his grip. Mell needed to answer that question immediately. Not only did Rod have to win his race, but Ronan had to lose his.