Golden (47 page)

On October 8, Wyma was back at Friends of Blagojevich with the governor, Lon Monk, and Robert Blagojevich. Another Wyma client, Children's Memorial Hospital, was on the agenda. Blagojevich had been called on behalf of the hospital by former Cubs manager Dusty Baker, who had connections to the hospital. Baker asked the governor to back a pediatric rate increase that would mean more money for the facility to care for sick children.

Blagojevich's decision was that he was going to approve an increase that would mean another $8 million a year for the facility. But again, there was a catch. “I want to get the CEO for fifty,” Blagojevich had said, meaning the governor wanted $50,000 in campaign cash from CMH executive Patrick Magoon in exchange for the rate increase. It might be better to wait a year after the hospital got its boost for Blagojevich to get that kind of thank you, so Wyma told Blagojevich to maybe give the request some time.

“How much time do you mean, ten days?” Blagojevich answered.

It was at the same meeting that talk had turned to whether Rezko had actually begun helping the government, as Chicago's newspapers were starting to report. There was nervousness but not too much worry. Blagojevich thought he had kept his nose clean enough, he told the three. “Unless, prospectively, somebody gets you on a wire,” Robert replied.

The meetings were a graduation for Wyma, who had a just received the subpoena and was scheduled to meet with federal prosecutors. He knew it was time for him to get out of the way. The Blagojevich express was headed for a cliff, as it were, and the last place he wanted to be was on the train. Within days, he told prosecutors all he knew about Blagojevich's aggressive moves to make money that was attached to his duties as governor and
that Blagojevich wanted some $2.5 million by the end of the year when new ethics legislation was going into effect. Prosecutors were impressed and wanted more of Wyma's help. The October 22 fund-raising meeting at the Friends of Blagojevich was coming up, and prosecutors wanted Robert's premonition about a wire to come true. If Wyma would agree to wear one, they might capture some of what Blagojevich said on tape and launch their case into overdrive.

Wyma was trying to protect himself, but he decided that wasn't going to include wearing a wire against a longtime friend. Instead he let prosecutors record his voicemails. One became especially important in the early stages of the government's final efforts against the governor.

“I know that you're gonna be following up with Children's Memorial and just wanted to know what the next steps are and what it is kind of we're looking to accomplish there,” Robert Blagojevich said in the message. “So when you get a chance, give me a call so that I can at least kind of document it and you know make sure I'm following up on you so you get it done. Hey man, you know I'm jerking your chain, but I think they have potential to do well by us. Give me a call.”

To investigators it was a link between the fund-raising request and the state action Rod Blagojevich was promising. Wyma was supposed to hint to the hospital that if a donation were made, they had the chance to get what they wanted from the administration. That message, along with what Wyma had told them about Blagojevich's fund-raising tactics, gave prosecutors enough ammunition to get approvals from the Justice Department in Washington to approach a judge and receive approval to plant hidden microphones at the Friends of Blagojevich offices. In some ways, Wyma's refusal to wear a wire wound up forcing the feds to write up an extensive affidavit on why Blagojevich should be recorded with no willing party helping them.

Their plan was successful, but there was one problem. Chicago's chief federal court judge approved the bugging request just a day before the October 22 meeting. An FBI team was quickly assembled from Quantico, Virginia, to get bugs in place. They would be able to record conversations for thirty days in two rooms at the Friends of Blagojevich headquarters—Blagojevich's personal office and a conference room.

In Chicago, coordinating the planting was left up to longtime supervisor Pete Cullen, who quickly got the bureau's assistant special agents in charge in Chicago into a meeting. On the phone were technical advisers, as Cullen
sought to get as much expertise into one room as he could. Some knew locks and security cameras. Others had experience defeating alarms, and still others were acquainted with where to plant hidden microphones. The FBI had to establish a contact on the Illinois State Police to give Blagojevich a bogus all clear when he asked for a sweep for bugs, which he had done that very week. Late at night on October 21, the team made what the FBI calls an “orchestrated entry” into the building, surreptitiously planting small microphones inside the offices, including in the phone right on Blagojevich's desk. It wouldn't record calls but sounds in the room and at least Blagojevich's half of anything said into the phone.

At 10:17 A
M,
October 22, the government bugs had been in place for hours before Wyma arrived. FBI agents were monitoring their equipment from a car outside and could hear as the Blagojevich brothers and Monk were making fund-raising calls. On their list was Gerald Krozel, a roadbuilding executive who often represented the state's road companies collectively when it came to politics and Blagojevich. The governor told Krozel he was excited about the plan to expand the state's tollway system, and there were pauses as Krozel answered. Blagojevich said things were going ahead and then asked for money. The new ethics law was coming online at the end of the year and would make it illegal for the governor to raise money from companies and organizations that were doing business with the state.

“The good news is, we're off and running, we've got something going, and there's gonna be more,” Blagojevich said into the phone. “And the good news for you guys is—which is the bad news for us—is after the first of the year, this level of it will, you know, pretty much be over, we won't be able to bully you guys.”

Blagojevich hung up, immediately telling Monk to be the one to follow up. He hadn't given Krozel a number, he told them.

On October 28, investigators scored another hit. This time, Robert was taped in the conference room on the phone with his brother. The 2008 presidential campaign was drawing to a close, and signs were pointing to Obama emerging as the winner. To say the least, this was expected to have an enormous effect on Illinois and Chicago, and Blagojevich would be expected to appoint someone to replace Obama when he gave up his seat in the US Senate and headed for the White House to become the country's forty-fourth
commander in chief. Investigators weren't even exactly sure what they were hearing when they captured the half of the conversation they could hear from Robert.

“Now here's the big issue he came up with, and I don't know if you want to listen to this or not,” Robert was heard to say.

“But it has do to with a particular person who is lobbying to be the senator, um, and wants to talk to you about his resume, Jackson,” Robert said, talking about Jesse Jackson Jr. “And Raghu Nayak evidently supported it, and he had communicated through Rajinder that if in fact, um, that would be the case, ah, there would be some accelerated fund-raising on your behalf between now and the end of the year, through his network. And I said look, and, uh, they haven't even, and I, I completely told him, you know, we don't even know who the president is gonna be yet.”

The men Robert was talking about were Raghu Nayak and Rajinder Bedi, two players in Chicago's Indian community who had become major Blagojevich supporters.

Nayak was a businessman from west suburban Oak Brook who owned surgery centers all over Chicagoland. He had been friends with Blagojevich and Jackson for years, donating more than $200,000 to the governor and $22,000 for Jackson. Bedi was a Blagojevich fundraiser and had received a state job after Blagojevich became governor.

Prosecutors were constantly adding new information to their requests to expand the recording operation. And the day after Robert's call, October 29, the judge approved the broadening of the taping to permit the interception of telephone calls to Robert's cell phone, to the governor's Chicago home where he was conducting most of the state's business, and to the campaign offices. He would occasionally conduct meetings at the James R. Thompson Center, the state's main government building in Chicago, but liked to avoid it if he could. An appearance in Springfield was an even rarer occurrence, as Blagojevich stayed away from the capital as much as possible.

The wiretaps were activated that same day by 6:00 P
M,
with calls to both numbers being routed into the FBI's satellite office in Lisle, a suburb west of Chicago. It was from there that Supervisory Agent Pat Murphy and Agent Daniel Cain and others had been running Operation Board Games. All of the files were there, so it made sense to have Lisle be the center of the listening effort. The FBI suddenly found itself monitoring a total of nine phone lines, needing two agents available for each from early in the morning until around eleven o'clock at night. It didn't take long to run through
one hundred agents a week, and Cullen found himself shifting agents from squads handling health-care fraud and bank fraud to cover listening shifts. Agents from all over the bureau in Chicago were volunteering because of the high-profile nature of what was happening and because of how profitable to the investigation the calls quickly became.

The idea that Blagojevich could be illegally attempting to get something for himself for the Senate seat was still a new concept. Some agents on the case were listening only for calls about fund-raising irregularities. The rules on wiretapping require agents monitoring phone lines to stop recording, or “minimize” the calls, when something personal or unrelated to the investigation comes up. So as the taping began, prosecutors who were getting discs of the calls were finding that the new agents to the case were minimizing when Senate discussions began. The assistant US attorneys quickly rectified the situation. They told the agents to let the recordings continue when a replacement for Obama came up.

The Rod Blagojevich who would be captured on hundreds of federal recordings was becoming a desperate man, a politician at a crossroads who was seeing the best years of his career ending and only questions ahead. His original presidential aspirations had never developed, and worse yet, another dynamic politician from Illinois was riding the wave to the office that Blagojevich himself had hoped to catch. And Obama was taking some of the state's best and brightest with him for his cabinet, adding to Blagojevich's sense that he was being left behind. Obama was headed for Washington and the history books Blagojevich loved so much, while he seemed destined to be a historical footnote.

Blagojevich was also simply tired of being governor. He felt underappreciated, as polls showed just a fraction of the state's voting public liked what he was doing. He had taken to political gimmicks, like giving seniors free passes to public transportation, to try to recover his image. Meanwhile, he was feeling the pressure of the federal investigation, reading regularly about Rezko's possible cooperation. His own legal bills were mounting, as he was paying some of the city's top lawyers to handle federal requests for documents. It was a tab he could pay from his campaign fund, but he was facing problems there, too. His coffers were dwindling, and his ability to refill them was about to be seriously curtailed. With the new ethics bill going
into effect at the end of the 2008, firms doing business with the state would no longer be allowed to make large campaign donations.

By the fall of 2008, Blagojevich was separated from his lawyers at Winston & Strawn, as he had become embroiled in a dispute over their pay. Also factoring in the split from Winston's perspective were complaints from federal prosecutors that the same law firm should not be representing Blagojevich and Cellini, who remained under investigation and was represented by one of its top lawyers, Dan Webb. Blagojevich was left with Sorosky, who had previously remained on the sidelines for the governor and now found himself front and center. “I may just be a finger in the dike, but I'm his lawyer,” he told federal prosecutors.