Webb told reporters that his office referred allegations of wrongdoing by Ryan to the FBI "for the purpose of conducting preliminary Interviews to determine the merit of those allegations." Webb said the U.S. Attorney's office would investigate if asked to do so. Webb said he would remove himself from the probe because he served on Gov. James Thompson's cabinet from 1969-70.

Attorneys for Illinois Secretary of State George Ryan moved Wednesday to try to silence personal- injury attorney Joseph Power.

Statements by Power, who represents the Rev. Duane ^Jid Janet Willis in a wrongful death case of a fiery accident that killed the couple's six children, have gone too far, contended Steven M. Puiszis, attorney for Ryan.

The minivan explosion that killed the children occurred near Milwaukee after the van struck a part that fell off a truck. Power has alleged that the trucker, Ricardo Guzman, obtained a fraudulent commercial trucking license at the Illinois Secretary of State's McCook facility because he didn't speak English. That has been disputed by Ryan and Guzman's employer. Guzman was never ticketed and was properly tested orally in Spanish, Ryan said. The case has received considerable media attention as Election Day nears.

However, Puiszis, a personal attorney for Ryan, told a Cook County judge that limits should  be put on information being given out about the Willis case. "Mr. Power is using the case as political fodder in the month before the gubernatorial election," Puiszis said.

Cook County Judge Julia Nowicki said she's willing to consider legal arguments for and against placing publicity restrictions on the case. However, a decision on limiting the information likely won't be made before the end of the month.

Meanwhile, Power denied charges he's turning the case into a political football. "My object is to achieve justice for my clients, the Willises — period," Power said.

The secretary of state's call for a lid on information came as Ryan's office turned over eight more files requested by Power on the Guzman licensing situation. Power had asked earlier that Ryan be held in contempt of court if he didn't turn over the documents.

Attorneys for the secretary of state also are promising to search in coming days for more records being requested by Power.

A court motion filed this week by Ryan's office suggested secretary of state police had been probing licensing problems with federal authorities prior to the Willis accident.

"If we start disclosing who the targets are and what techniques are used, how are you ever going to be able to ferret out employee misconduct?" Puiszis asked.

Guzman's attorney, Peter Magnani, also said he feared all the pretrial publicity in the case may interfere with Guzman's right to a fair trial.

The Willis case is scheduled to go to trial in January. Rules blocking prejudicial statements usually apply in criminal cases and/or after a jury has been selected, Power said.

"I think it's a lot of posturing. They don't want me speaking to the media at all—period," Power said.

"There are a lot of other cases that have had more publicity than this, and they've gotten a fair trial, he said.

Vincent Toolen, the first Thompson administration official to quit in a major scandal, Friday surrenderred to Jackson County authorities on charges of perjury, official misconduct and obstructing justice.

Toolen's resignation, which Gov. James Thompson demanded, came just a short time before the indictment was announced Thursday. He was paid $45,000 a year as Illinois' director of administrative services. Judge Richard Rlchman scheduled a March 18 arraignment for Toolen after reading the charges and advising him of his rights. Toolen was freed on $250 bail.

Toolen, 45, dapper in a gray pinstripe suit, was smiling and talking to his attorney, Richard White of Murphysboro, as he walked up the courthouse steps on the way to the courtroom. He was before the judge about five minutes.

HE DID NOT comment on the charges at his court appearance, nor has be been available at his office or bis home in Springfield. Rlchman said the maximum penalty upon conviction would be a 110,000 fine on each count and up five years in prison.

Thompson said, he had asked Toolen, the state's chief purchasing officer, to step down earlier this week. The governor said be had asked for the resignation because Toolen showed "a conduct that was inconsistent with being a member of the Thompson cabinet"

Toolen was indicted Thursday on charges of lying to a grand jury and state investigators about the delivery a year ago of campaign fund-raising money for Republican House Speaker George Ryan of Kankakee.

Jackson County State's Attorney John demons said Toolen told investigators he delivered the money to Ryan's Springfield office when evidence showed be did not

OFFICIALS HAVE cleared Ryan and his campaign staff of any wrongdoing. Investigators were led to Toolen by a year-long Investigation by the state's attorney's office and the Department of Law Enforcement into the alleged soliciting of campaign funds in return for state jobs and the theft of auto parts at a Department of Administrative Services garage in Carbondale.

"We followed the money up the chain from Carbondale to Springfield and it led to Toolen," said John demons, Jackson County state's attorney.

Four state employees and a Carbondale businessman were indicted last month in Jackson County. They are accused of participating in a kickback, bid-rigging and job-selling scheme at the garage. In Chicago, Attorney General Tyrone Fanner said he is investigating whether there was criminal wrongdoing in the negotiation of so-called sweetheart leases for public aid offices.

BUT FAHNER DENIED published reports that he is trying to determine whether Toolen is criminally liable in the matter. "We are looking at various individuals for criminal liability," Fanner said. "But Vince Toolen is not among them. He wasn't even around when most of this was going on."

Fanner last summer filed suit to void the lease of one office after the Better Government Association charged five public aid offices bad been improperly leased from Maurice Kay.

George Homer Ryan Sr. was a small-town druggist who became one of the most important state governors in U.S. history. Shortly before leaving office in January 2003, he pardoned four Illinois death row prisoners and commuted the sentences of all 167 others—171 convicted killers in all. This action was widely hailed as a moral sunburst. It won him worldwide acclaim and nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize.

At the same time, Ryan was a crook. In 2006 he was convicted of eighteen counts of official wrongdoing. Under Ryan the state of Illinois itself was, the federal government alleged, a racketeering enterprise.

The paradox of a petty and ruthless grafter who was also a moral entrepreneur against capital punishment makes a story that might challenge a Dostoevsky. Ryan's motives and character in both areas, the moralist and the thief, are hidden in the corkscrew of the human heart. Maybe he emptied out death row from honest revulsion against the failures of a criminal justice system that had sentenced some innocent people to die. Or maybe he devised a spectacular public relations ploy, the ultimate grand gesture, to divert attention from the sheriff’s posse riding after him. Maybe, too, he wanted to build a case in his defense that prosecutors simply cannot be trusted. If they would hound innocent people to the gallows, surely they would persecute a governor just for political reasons.

Ryan's motives might be puzzling, but they are not opaque. The key to understanding George Ryan is that he is the son of a political machine. A machine runs on an intricate system of rewards and coercions, based on the values of loyalty and tribalism. To outsiders, a machine can appear to be insulated from reality. Ryan’s machine was located in Kankakee, Illinois, where he grew up.

Many political scientists hold that such machines are dead. They were nationalized, eclipsed, made irrelevant by the New Deal and the subsequent expansion of the welfare state. And by television, of course. Television is the new precinct captain and all that.

Perhaps these political scientists should visit Chicago. Somebody should buy them tickets to O'Hare International Airport. There they might notice boutiques in the terminals and bulldozers plowing runways out on the field. These businesses won city contracts under a Democratic machine run by a mayor named Daley. Then put the professors in a rental car, have them drive an hour south on Interstate 57 to Kankakee. There they might observe a parallel, though smaller in scale, Republican machine.

"Will it play in Peoria?" was an old vaudeville saying and a slogan of the Nixon White House. It might just as well have been, "Will it carry in Kankakee?" Both are small cities downstate from Chicago, farming and decaying industrial communities holding all the fabled virtues and vices of the heartland.

In Kankakee, industrial rust so encrusted the city that in 1999, the acme of the national dot-com economic boom, the Places Rated Almanac judged it to be the worst place to live among 354 metropolitan areas in the United States and Canada. Naturally, the city fathers denounced this ranking as execrably erroneous. Still, it seems clear that the baggage of old political machines is unhelpful to cities seeking to modernize.

The old machine had kept Kankakee corrupt for generations. A former member of the Kankakee County board of supervisors, Len Small, became governor of Illinois during the era of Prohibition gangsterism in the 1920s. Small was indicted for embezzling a million dollars of state interest money. After he was acquitted, jury-tampering was alleged. Two of his associates were subpoenaed but fled the state to evade indictment for tampering with the jury. Then Governor Small pardoned them. (George Ryan was the fifth incumbent or former Illinois governor to be indicted on corruption charges in eighty-one years.)

In the early 1960s the Kankakee County sheriff was indicted for allowing prisoners to escape, making false claims for expenses, and conspiring to operate whorehouses. The sheriff pleaded guilty but soon won a do-nothing state patronage job as a meat and poultry inspector. Such was the culture in which George Ryan entered public life as a member of the Kankakee County board of supervisors in 1966.

Ryan's political sponsor Edward M. McBroom showed him how patronage jobs were awarded at the Manteno Mental Health Center. Through unwritten agreements under the informal welfare system of political machines, people who wanted Manteno jobs first had to buy a car from McBroom's Cadillac lot. Sometimes McBroom would have a new car driven to the mental hospital to persuade the favored payroller that it was time to trade up. If the payroller had a blue-collar job and could not afford a Cadillac, he still was expected to buy his toasters and other household items at McBroom’s hardware store. In like manner, Kankakee city employees were expected to get their prescriptions filled at Ryan's pharmacy. The matrix of coercions and favors, the handshake deals behind closed doors—that is how things often get done in our democracy. Ryan always kept a sharp eye out for making a deal, achieving a compromise, assuring that every friend gets rewarded and every enemy punished.

Throughout its seven-year investigation of Ryan's actions in office, the U.S. Justice Department never directly accused him of extorting cash for specific favors. Rather, he and his friends took care of one another in an exchange of loyalties and gains.

Exactly what constitutes public corruption remains an unsettled question. Ryan and many other indicted public officials have offered the defense that ordinary political transactions have been unjustly criminalized under an excess of reformist zeal. This defense, however self-serving, has some merit, which this book will try to assess. The anticorruption project features its own excesses and abuses. 
 

Whatever the issues of public policy and criminal justice at stake, George Ryan’s improbable path from Kankakee to the governor’s mansion directly helped or harmed the lives of many people along the way. The stories of three truck drivers and three accused murderers might help to explain much about his career.

The first truck driver, whose name is not recorded, was a Kankakee city employee. He merrily drove a city truck along the streets, carrying nothing but an old chair in the back, in a do-nothing patronage job. A resident, Russell Johnson, noticed and grew angry enough at such "ghost payrolling" to run for mayor. In 1985 he upset Republican Mayor Thomas Ryan, who was George's brother and had served in that office for twenty years. After two terms, Democratic Mayor Johnson himself was ousted as the local Republican machine regained control. (Upon George Ryan’s conviction in 2006, Johnson remarked, “The things they accused him of happen every day in Kankakee.”)

Our second truck driver, unlike the anonymous Kankakee payroller who so incensed Russell Johnson, has a known name: Ricardo Guzman. A Mexican native, he obtained a truck driver's license through a bribe paid to an examiner for the Illinois secretary of state's office. Such bribes were funneled into Secretary of State George Ryan's campaign fund. After all, that was how things always seemed to be done in Kankakee. And Chicago and all over Illinois.

On November 8, 1994, Ryan was reelected secretary of state. That same day, Guzman was driving a truck on I-94 near Milwaukee. A bracket over a mud flap/taillight assembly dangled dangerously from the rear of the vehicle. Other truckers tried to warn Guzman over CB radio, but he did not understand English. The metal assembly fell off the truck onto the pavement.

Following in a Plymouth Grand Voyager were the Reverend Duane “Scott” Willis, his wife Janet, and six of their nine children. The debris from Guzman's truck punctured the van's gas tank. A spark caused an explosion that killed the children, five of them in an instant. The eldest, twelve-year-old Benjamin, managed to extricate himself from the van along with his seriously burned parents, but he died the next day.

That horror provoked the Better Government Association of Chicago to investigate the secretary of state's office. An attorney for the Willises and the U.S. Justice Department likewise investigated. By 2005, as Ryan's racketeering trial impended, the government's "Operation Safe Road" probe had netted seventy-two convictions or guilty pleas with no acquittals. Ryan continued to maintain his innocence.

The news media naturally focused on the political implications of the Operation Safe Road scandal, but as the name of the investigation suggests, unqualified truck drivers who obtained licenses by bribery threatened public safety. Just in the first year of Operation Safe Road and just at one licensing facility in Melrose Park, a Chicago suburb, supervisors admitted helping more than two hundred truckers grease their licensure with bribes. Only nine months after the scandal broke, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that, apart from the Willis family tragedy (not then directly linked to the scandal), falsely licensed Illinois truckers had caused fifty-nine accidents that injured at least twenty people. Two truckers died in their own fatal accidents. Eventually, federal investigators estimated “very conservatively” that nine people were killed in accidents involving falsely licensed truckers (the author’s count is eleven).

No truck drivers were indicted because federal extortion laws treat them as victims of a bribery scheme, not its perpetrators. Thus, our third trucker is not exactly a driver but the owner of a truck repair business, Miodrag Dobrosavljevich. He is named here because he was the first trucking industry figure to be indicted in Operation Safe Road.

Safe Road became public knowledge in September 1998 when state and federal officers raided the Melrose Park office. Such publicized raids against centers of vice and crime are a staple of Chicago-area history, dating at least to 1857. The Melrose Park raid prompted some of Secretary of State Ryan's associates frantically to shred documents and try to burn others over a barbecue grill.

Dobrosavljevich was indicted in October 1998 for racketeering conspiracy, extortion conspiracy, and mail fraud. He pleaded guilty to racketeering and was sentenced to fourteen months in prison and a fine of $4,000. For the next seven years, grand juries were impaneled, U.S. attorneys called news conferences, indictments were issued, the scandal steadily expanded, more people were indicted, more headlines blared.

Ryan’s successor as secretary of state ordered the retesting of 550 holders of dubiously obtained commercial drivers licenses. One driver stopped at green lights instead of red. Another did not know how to start his car. Of the 550, only 171 passed the test—many others, including Guzman, simply did not show up for the examination and their licenses were voided. Eventually, the state demanded retesting of more than 1,200 truckers.

Dobrosavljevich, Guzman, and the anonymous Kankakee trucker all had their connections to George Ryan, though he might never have met any of them. Toward the end of his four-year term as governor, the Illinois political community was convinced that Ryan would be indicted before he left office in January 2003 because an incumbent governor presents a bigger scalp to prosecutors than a mere retired hack. In the way that investigations of public corruption now seem to take forever, this belief was premature. Ryan was not indicted until December of that year. By that time even many of his enemies recognized how tough he was, how he stood up under the punishment, took the blows.

The first murderer for our consideration is J. B. Hairston Sr. of Kankakee. He was convicted in 1974 of killing his girlfriend. She cowered in a public restroom while he fired a fatal shot through the door. Hairston then cradled her in his arms and when police arrived admitted his guilt.

At the time, Ryan was a state representative. The imprisoned Hairston appealed to him for clemency. Ryan wrote letters to state officials supporting the appeal. After all, Ryan explained, Hairston had been a customer of his pharmacy. Further, he knew him to be "hard-working and conscientious."² Later, while running for governor, Ryan proposed legislation mandating an automatic life sentence for anyone who shoots somebody during the commission of a crime. Challenged about Hairston while pushing that bill, Ryan said he did not remember the case. As for Hairston, clemency was denied but he was released from prison in 1982.

The second alleged murderer—he was falsely accused—is Anthony Porter. During his 1983 trial for a double murder in Chicago, Porter's defense attorney fell asleep. The trial judge woke him up. (That judge, upholding a tradition of the Cook County judiciary, later was caught in an unrelated financial scandal and resigned.)

Anthony Porter came within fifty hours of execution. His family made funeral arrangements. But the Illinois Supreme Court granted a reprieve in late 1998 because Porter scored so low on an IQ test (fifty-one) that he probably did not understand what would soon happen to him or why. The delay gave the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Law School and Northwestern journalism students time to investigate Porter's case. Incredibly soon, the real killer confessed to the Northwestern team. Porter was released from prison on February 5, 1999. George Ryan had just become governor.

The first capital case to cross Ryan's desk was that of Andrew Kokoraleis. His crimes were so ghastly that they scarcely bear thought. He confessed to killing as many as eighteen women as part of a four-member satanic cult that kidnapped them, stabbed them with knives or ice picks, mutilated the corpses, and hid the remains. Sometimes they amputated a victim's breast with piano wire, masturbated on it, then ate the breast. Arrested in 1982, Kokoraleis was sentenced to life in prison for one murder, sentenced to death for another.

The most feverish advocate of the death penalty could hardly invent a seemingly more worthy candidate for the ultimate punishment than Kokoraleis. His appeals were exhausted in 1999. However, early that year, the Chicago Tribune published a five-part series documenting 381 examples of Cook County cases, dating to 1963, in which courts reversed murder convictions because of prosecutorial misconduct or errors.

By March 1999, eleven men sentenced to death in Illinois had been cleared since the state had reinstated capital punishment in 1977. The new capital-punishment law had been supported by then-Representative George Ryan.

Governor Ryan agonized over whether the state should kill Kokoraleis. Ryan had never been much concerned with the issue of capital punishment—he was “for” it in the sense that it was a solid plank in the Republican law-and-order platform. After Anthony Porter and the Tribune revelations, though, capital punishment suddenly had a face. It was that of Kokoraleis, a shave-headed, mustachioed, olive-skinned fiend whose life or death was in Ryan's hands. Ryan directed an aide to write the papers for a ninety-day stay of execution. At length he decided that the law had been duly followed and the murderer was undoubtedly guilty.

Korkoraleis was taken to a new super-maximum-security prison in Tamms in deep southern Illinois. To the last minute, he apparently believed that Ryan would grant a reprieve. He spent his final day praying with his brother. When the lethal shot was injected, he sighed three times and muttered softly to himself before he died on March 17, 1999, at the age of thirty-five. He was the last person to be executed in Illinois. Even after Ryan was sentenced to seventy-eight months in prison he said, “I guess if I have any regrets as my time as Governor, it’s that I executed a guy.

Hairston, Porter, Kokoraleis—again with their connections to George Ryan. What do Ryan, the truckers, and the accused killers have in common? The politics of crime. In a larger sense, the operations of the criminal justice system and of American democracy. The rise and fall of George Ryan might tell us much about how our democracy works and how it stumbles.

On the last working day of his administration, Friday, January 10, 2003, Ryan went to DePaul University Law School in Chicago to announce the pardons of four death row inmates. Their murder confessions allegedly had been tortured out of them by Chicago police. One of the favored torture techniques was called “bagging,” covering the victim's head with a plastic typewriter cover until he struggled for breath and then lost consciousness. In this manner there were no visible marks of abuse on the body. Other methods included electric shocks to the genitals and plain, old-fashioned beatings.

Bill Kurtis, a noted television journalist and producer of documentaries, described the scene at DePaul in a book published in 2004, The Death Penalty on Trial. “Ryan looked up at their eager faces,” Kurtis wrote. “He was an approachable, jolly sort of man. His short-cropped gray-white hair topped a round face giving him the warm look of a beloved grandfather. But today his face was rigid and serious. He frowned down at his notes. Then George Ryan took a deep breath and made history.”⁴

A reader might wonder whether Kurtis ever met Ryan. “Beloved grandfather” indeed. Ryan's public persona was not that of a kindly grandfather. Instead, he seemed to be always grumpy and sour, appearing to frown even when smiling. He looked like the old man on your block who, when you were a kid, always yelled at you to keep off his lawn and don’t touch his rose bushes. Ryan grew progressively more crabby as Operation Safe Road inflated.

Political consultants normally resent it whenever the opposing candidate gets "free media," his face and statements on television news. Advisers to Ryan’s Democratic opponent in the gubernatorial election of 1998 actually were gleeful whenever Ryan got free media. They figured that his public image as a mean old man could only put voters off.

Even so, Ryan's persona was also that of a regular guy, an ordinary businessman-politician, a Kankakee everyman who talked straight—not one of what former U.S. Representative Dan Rostenkowski of Chicago called "the blow-dried guys," those modern media politicians afraid to say anything unless it is first tested by polls and focus groups conducted by expensive consultants. Ryan’s unpolished persona as a regular guy, just like you and me, might well have contributed to his popularity with voters during his thirty-six years in public office. He was, after all, the senior longest-serving public officer in Illinois. He never lost an election, at least not until a jury voted him down.

Ryan's defenders describe him, for all his gruffness, as a sentimental fellow at heart, a Teddy Bear underneath the belligerence, a softie who made late-night visits to his pharmacy customers to make sure they were all right. Two men who were no friends of Ryan—one a journalist, the other a powerful Democrat—told the author that Ryan had intervened to rescue their seriously ill family members from the health-care bureaucracy and never asked for a payback. That is what Ryan loved, being a big shot, getting things done, building allegiances.

Ryan apparently was part of what the sociologist David Riesman famously called The Lonely Crowd. As a politician Ryan was lonely because he had few true friends, only fellow politicians obsessed with their calculations of self-advancement. Apparently, there was no friend to tell him that what you are doing, scamming all this money, is wrong—or, if there was, Ryan could not hear him.

In any case, Ryan said at DePaul, "Three years ago, I was faced with startling information. We had exonerated not one, not two, but thirteen men [by that date] from Death Row. They were found innocent. Innocent of charges for which they were sentenced to die. Can you imagine? We nearly killed innocent people. We nearly injected them with a cocktail of deadly poisons so that they could die in front of witnesses on a gurney . . .

"Half of the nearly 300 capital cases in Illinois had been reversed for a new trial or re-sentencing. Nearly half! Thirty-three of the Death Row inmates were represented at trial by an attorney who had been disbarred or at some point suspended from practicing law.

"I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think you need to be one to be appalled by those statistics. I have one question: How does that happen?"⁵

Notice how he presented his dilemma not as a governor, a high public official, but just as an ordinary man from the heartland confronted by a broken system that seemingly could not be fixed. They want me to put people to death? When the number of exonerated inmates on Illinois death row (thirteen) now exceeds the number of people we have executed (twelve) since 1977? No way. I am going to pardon or commute the sentences of each and every one. OK, the families of their murder victims are going to go ballistic. So be it. Let them revile me. And meanwhile let the federal government come after me for Operation Safe Road. They can't prove that I ever pocketed a dishonest dollar. My conscience is clear. I sleep well at night.

"Fix" charge a "damnable lie": Ryan

by Joann Van Wye - Harold staff writer

Illinois House Speaker George H. Ryan, R-Kankakee, Tuesday labeled charges that he had "put in the fix" for a nursing home owner "an outright, damnable lie" and denied rumors he plans to step aside as Gov. James R. Thompson's running mate.

In a tersely worded statement, Ryan called on the Better Government-Association to either prove charges it made over the weekend or admit they are unfounded. The EGA accused Ryan of using his political clout to set up a meeting between Morris Esformes, the principal owner of Elmhurst Terrace Convalescent Center, and Illinois Director of Public Health, William Kempiners, to circumvent administrative hearings on charges of patient-neglect at the Elmhurst nursing home.

The EGA charged that after the meeting, a pharmacy Ryan owns in Kankakee regained its lucrative $60,000 annual contract with Westview Terrace, a Kankakee nursing home in which Esformes also has an interest. Esformes had taken the business away from Ryan's Pharmacy after purchasing the Kankakee nursing home earlier last year.

AT A NEWS conference in the State of Illinois building, Ryan denied any connection between his arranging the meeting and his pharmacy regaining the contract with the nursing home.

"I welcome any investigation by any proper authority. I repudiate every allegation and demand that those who allege I have done wrong either put up or shut up," Ryan told reporters. "I don't intend to roll over and play dead to a self-appointed investigator judge-and-jury," he added.

Ryan acknowledged he had set up the meeting between Esformes and Kempiners and other state officials to discuss the charges. He said he made Kempiners aware he was attempting to regain a contract with Esformes when he arranged the meeting. Ryan denied he supplied the information to put pressure on Kempiners and said he wanted to keep everything "above board." He added he never even followed up to see what happened at the meeting.

In addition to Elmhurst Terrace and Westview Terrace, Esformes owns two or three other nursing homes in Kankakee that have contracts with a different pharmacy.

"If I have done something wrong to get the business, why didn't I get all the business?" Ryan said.