Analysis: Corruption was business as usual
By Al Swanson
UPI Urban Affairs Correspondent
CHICAGO, Dec. 19 (UPI) -- Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan once condemned a "culture of corruption" in state government.
Now, he's accused of being an integral part of it for more than a decade.
The 22 federal charges filed against the ex-Republican governor this week had their genesis in a tragic 1994 highway accident on a Wisconsin freeway that killed six children of the Rev. Scott and Janet Willis.
Ryan, 69, was Illinois secretary of state at the time with ambitions to win the top state job like his predecessor, Jim Edgar, had. In his way stood nagging allegations of illegal license selling at some drivers' testing facilities under his control.
What became known as the licenses-for-bribes scandal drew little interest outside good government groups -- derisively called "the goos-goos" by political cynics in Chicago and Springfield -- until the Willis tragedy.
Ricardo Guzman, a trucker who fraudulently obtained a license despite his inability to understand English, lost a light assembly off a truck near Milwaukee. Passing drivers tried to warn him the metal light bar was dangling on the highway but he didn't understand them. The part fell and was struck by the Willis' van, piercing the gas tank and causing a fiery explosion. Six children burned to death.
A federal grand jury handed up a 91-page indictment against Ryan Wednesday, the 66th in the five-year-old Operation Safe Road investigation. The likeable, grandfatherly Ryan was charged with racketeering conspiracy, mail fraud, tax fraud, making false statements to FBI agents, and accepting illegal cash payments, gifts, vacations and personal services in far wider corruption lasting more than 10 years.
"Basically the state of Illinois was for sale, for friends and family at times," U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald charged.
Fifty-nine people pleaded guilty or were convicted on charges stemming from the license-selling scheme that allegedly benefited the Ryan campaign fund. Ryan's close friend and co-defendant Larry Warner allegedly collected $3 million in payments and kickbacks from state vendors and shared the money with Ryan and another lobbyist.
Ryan's family allegedly received cash, loans and gifts worth $167,000.
If convicted, he faces prison, $250,000 in fines and could be ordered to pay $3 million restitution.
"These 59 were supposed to have the best interests of the people of Illinois at heart -- not their own interests," said former Better Government Association head J. Terrence Brunner, who wants Attorney General Lisa Madigan to sue Ryan and his cronies for restitution. "Those 59 crooks were really working for themselves."
Brunner also asked Madigan to seek an independent investigation of lucrative contracts awarded for the expansion of Chicago's O'Hare International Airport and McCormick Place exposition center.
Early in 1993 an employee at the secretary of state's drivers' facility in Libertyville, Ill., blew the whistle on the selling of commercial trucker's licenses.
Law enforcement officials raided the facility.
Dean Bauer, Ryan's childhood friend from Kankakee, Ill., who was inspector general of the secretary of state's office, allegedly removed a briefcase filled with cash and Ryan campaign fundraising receipts during a search.
The evidence disappeared.
The first arrests didn't come until September 1998, when two people were charged with extortion and conspiracy for sending drivers to the Melrose Park secretary of state's office, the same place Guzman had obtained his trucker's license.
Campaigning for governor, Ryan ordered the re-testing of as many as 3,000 drivers who were licensed at five Chicago-area testing facilities. A month before the election, five secretary of state office staffers were indicted for selling trucker's licenses in exchange for cash.
As Election Day neared, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Glenn Poshard aired a controversial television commercial directly linking Ryan to the deaths of the Willis children.
The powerful spot was roundly condemned because Ryan had not been implicated in two earlier investigations, one conducted by Bauer. Poshard pulled the spot and lost the election, but the investigation continued, eventually leading to passage of the most sweeping ethics reform law in state history this fall.
Poshard is thankful the truth is finally coming out.
"I haven't been bitter about this. I haven't been angry about it. But I've struggled with questions no one could answer," he told the Chicago Sun-Times. "How could you have those people doing investigations and telling the public nothing is going on, when obviously all this was going on?"
In April 1999, the number of indictments reached 12 with federal bribery charges filed against two former supervisors at the McCook licensing facility, three state Transportation Department workers and a trucking company employee.
Five months later, a former trucking company official admitted making payoffs for a commercial driver's license for Guzman.
A contrite Ryan apologized for what he called "a culture of corruption" in his former office and proclaimed his innocence even though Bauer faced indictment. Bauer pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in 2001 and was sentenced to a year and a day.
Prosecutors Wednesday called the licenses-for-bribes scandal part of a pattern of corruption that continued throughout Ryan's four-year term as governor. With his former campaign director and chief of staff, Scott Fawell, facing indictment, Ryan did not seek re-election.
His former deputy chief of staff, Richard Juliano, pleaded guilty to mail fraud.
At the same time Ryan was becoming a national figure by declaring a moratorium on executions after innocent men were found on deathrow. He pardoned four inmates and granted clemency to 167 condemned prisoners shortly before he left office in his last days in office and was nominated for the Nobel Prize for leading a one-man crusade against capital punishment.
University of Illinois law professor Francis Boyle said he plans to nominate Ryan for the 2004 Nobel Prize.
Fawell and Citizens for Ryan, a campaign organization, were convicted of racketeering and using state resources to benefit the political campaigns of Ryan and others.
Fawell is serving a six-and-a-half-year sentence.
Prosecutors reportedly are putting pressure on Fawell to testify against his former boss by threatening charges against him in the McPier investigation of corruption in the multimillion-dollar redevelopment of Chicago's Navy Pier, a major tourist attraction.
Corruption is nothing new in Illinois. Ryan is the sixth of 40 governors to face charges. The last was former Democratic Gov. Dan Walker, who was sentenced to seven years for bank fraud in 1987. It was 24 years before another Democrat, former Rep. Rod Blagojevich, won the governor's office.
The scandals have devastated Illinois' Republican Party, which won a single statewide office in 2002, state treasurer. Ryan's indictment will not help the party in the near future.
Republican supporters reportedly told Ryan they will not contribute money for his defense.
Ryan, who has raised more than $21 million for his political fund since 1997, has spent $2.7 million on legal bills and has only $10,358 in cash left. The campaign fund had to pay a $750,000 fine when Fawell was convicted.
Ryan could lose his pension of $185,727 a year -- more than he made as governor -- if he is convicted of a felony.
His lawyer, former U.S. Attorney Dan Webb, said his client does not live lavishly and his modest lifestyle would be part of his defense.
Webb is a protege of former three-term Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson, principle of Winston and Strawn, the state's powerhouse law firm.
Former state Secretary of State Paul Powell, a legendary figure in Democratic circles, illustrated the entrenched level of corruption in state politics when $800,000 in cash was found in shoeboxes in a hotel room closet after his death in 1970. Powell never made more than $30,000 in his life but left an estate worth $4.6 million.
In recent years, prosecutions put former Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, once chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and former Cicero Mayor Betty Loren-Maltese in prison for public corruption. |
