Golden (58 page)

Blagojevich gave the public a version of that sentiment the next day: taping him was not a problem. It was December 8, and the governor of Illinois thought he was dealing with just another media crisis and potentially with a tentacle of a federal probe that had dogged him for years. There was nothing but sunshine on him, he told reporters. Any covert recording would catch some colorful language, but nothing more. And he met with Jesse Jackson Jr. that day at his state offices downtown, where there was no federal microphone. That night, while showing up for a taping on CNN at the Tribune Tower, Blagojevich ran into the
Tribune
's Rick Pearson, the paper's chief political reporter, and said maybe he'd make him senator.

The next morning Blagojevich was scheduled to wake up early and head downtown for a 6:10 A
M
remote taping of the
Today
show to discuss a sitin by laid-off workers at a Chicago window factory. But late that night, word came that he got bumped from the show, which Blagojevich said he was actually relieved about. “I don't have to get up that early,” he said.

Listening in, though, were federal agents who were deciding to move forward with their plan. Had there been no
Tribune
story, the federal government might have run their recording effort longer, hoping to see if they could somehow net an actual bad deal for the seat with someone in the Jackson camp. Instead, they decided they had enough. They would arrest a sitting governor in the early morning hours of December 9. They would take him into custody at his home, the blond-brick bungalow he had run the state from for six years.

The state police cruisers idled in front of the Blagojeviches' home much as they had every day for nearly six years.

It was a chilly Tuesday morning on December 9, 2008, and before dawn broke a steady early winter rain began to fall across the city. A car alarm went off briefly in the gloom nearby, but none of the troopers stirred.

It was nearly 6:00 A
M
when a pair of dark sedans and an SUV raced north on Richmond Street and turned left on Sunnyside Avenue, stopping in front of the house of the governor of the state of Illinois. It was an FBI arrest team, and a man jumped out of one of the vehicles and knocked on the window of one of the state police cars. Rod Blagojevich was going to be taken into custody.

The phone rang inside the dark home, startling Blagojevich, who was half asleep while contemplating an early run. On the phone was Rob Grant, head of the FBI in Chicago, who was part of the arrest team outside. Grant had come because of the gravity of the situation and in case the troopers guarding the governor's home needed to be confronted with an authority figure. Also present were a pair of female agents, as the Bureau knew someone might need to sit with the governor's daughters and Patti. The idea had been to make the arrest as low-key as possible, under the circumstances.

Two agents were outside the house, Grant told the governor, and they had a warrant for his arrest. He needed to get ready to leave.

“Is this a joke?” a shocked Blagojevich answered, thinking maybe his pal Jimmy DeLeo was pulling his leg.

Of course it wasn't a prank. Grant and his team were really there, and the FBI boss put Blagojevich on the phone with the leader of his security detail, who confirmed the situation.

Blagojevich hung up and called his assistant, Mary Stewart. The governor was being placed under arrest, but the wiretap of his home phone was still running and caught the ensuing panic inside.

“Who do we call?” Blagojevich said. “They have agents outside.”

“Hello,” Stewart said, confused. “Hello. Hello.”

“Hey, get me Quinlan right away and Shelly right away,” asking for his lawyers.

“Oh my God,” Stewart answered.

“Right away,” the governor said again with urgency.

It would take a minute or two, but soon Quinlan, the governor's counsel, was on the phone with him.

“Hey, what's up?” Quinlan said.

“The FBI is here arresting me.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” said Blagojevich. “Here, they're at the house.”

“Honest to God?”

“I swear to God.”

“Who told you that?”

“They're here,” the governor said. “They're at the door. They called. Head of the FBI called.”

“And said we're here?”

Right, said Blagojevich, apparently turning to greet agents who were coming in. “Yeah. Hi. Yeah. Hi.” “Did you call Shelly?”

Blagojevich had but was still having trouble getting through.

“Yeah, call him. We got a call into him.”

Patti got Stewart back on the phone as her husband was being taken out. He had put on his running gear and was preparing to go with the agents.

“I've got to go right now,” one of the women on the arrest team could be heard saying in the background. “Door closed?”

“Uh, yeah, they just took my husband away,” Patti said desperately to Stewart. “I need to talk to
fucking
somebody.”

Outside the FBI vehicles could be seen moving around on the Blagojeviches' street. The governor was cuffed and led out the back door to the SUV, which had pulled around into the alley.

A few minutes later, it was Quinlan on the phone again. He had seen the
Tribune,
he said, which had run another story about the investigation. The paper was on the street with an article saying the investigation had spread to Blagojevich's selection of a new senator.

“They're saying—let me finish—they're saying that the investigation is about Rod and the Senate seat and somebody recorded him,” said Quinlan, who told Patti his first thought was Jackson Jr., the day before. Patti was upset. She had a subpoena for documents related to the Senate selection. What do we do now? she asked. “They took him in his running clothes.”

Patti finally reached Sorosky, who quickly drove to the FBI building near Ogden Avenue on the city's West Side. The sometimes late-rising Sorosky just happened to have had an early hearing at the DuPage County courthouse that morning, so he had been up and dressed when he got the call.

As he waited for his lawyer, Blagojevich was being held in a corridor just off the FBI building's sally port. The long hallway provides access to a series of secure rooms, but for most of his time there, Blagojevich was allowed to walk the hallway. At times he half jogged in the corridor and stopped to lean up against a wall and stretch, as if he were actually going to get that run in after all. But any running now would be a big problem, and Agent Daniel Cain, standing nearby, joked that he didn't want to have to make a tackle before the governor appeared before a judge.

When Sorosky arrived, agents had a few things to say to the stunned governor, hinting he might still be able to help himself. There were people above him he could possibly talk about, they said, people in higher offices than even he was in. Sorosky interjected that Blagojevich didn't even really know Mayor Daley, drawing a chuckle from agents who joked Sorosky was a provincial Chicagoan.

But they didn't clarify just whom they were talking about. There was no specific mention of Obama or his fund-raising with Rezko or the calls where Blagojevich mentioned Bruce Washington and the $25,000. In reality, investigators never viewed the governor as a potential witness against
anyone above him but were hoping to gather information about anyone on the calls or not captured on tape that he had dealt with. The FBI statement to him was more of an opener to what might have been a conversation if Sorosky had not shut things down. If Blagojevich had spontaneously admitted he had done something wrong, he could have at least described dealings with others that federal authorities were interested in making cases against. Never was Blagojevich seen as a credible threat to the incoming president.

Meanwhile,
Tribune
reporters who had been camped out at the governor's house for days saw the activity and were working to confirm the arrest. The paper was aware of the possible arrest date for the governor but had grown concerned that publishing the story about the taping days before could alter the FBI plan. After confirming that Blagojevich and also John Harris had been taken into custody, the paper sent out an e-mail bulletin that rocked the state. It had been little more than a month since Barack Obama had stood in Grant Park as the country's incoming president. It was possibly the all-time height of Illinois politics, only to be followed by an epic embarrassment.

What transpired next was one of the odder arraignments in the history of the Dirksen US Courthouse. There was the governor, standing in court in a dark blue track suit with a turtleneck underneath, his mop of hair shifting from side to side as he looked back at a crowded courtroom full of people who could hardly believe what they were seeing.

Harris was there, too, and was leaning toward helping the government immediately in a bid for leniency. He was talking with his attorney, Terry Ekl, about how he could help himself. Prosecutor Reid Schar had whispered to Ekl that they should talk right away to reach the best arrangement for Harris, who wasn't who the government was really after. Ekl knew the score immediately and was blunt with his client.

“John, if you're ever going to cooperate with the government, do it now,” he told him. The last thing Harris wanted to do was sit before a jury next to Blagojevich and go down with the ship, so the governor's chief of staff took his lawyer's advice, offering a proffer of his testimony within two weeks of his arrest. He would eventually meet with prosecutors more than thirty times. Ekl would go on to give a presentation of what he thought Harris could offer to US Attorney Fitzgerald, his first assistant Gary Shapiro, the Blagojevich investigation team, and other supervisors. The government made Harris a witness and told Ekl he was free to argue for whatever punishment a judge thought was fair, with a cap of thirty-five months in prison.

As for Blagojevich, he would leave court on his own recognizance. He was still the governor and still had the ability to name Obama's replacement, although it was quickly clear that was a far different prospect than it had been just twenty-four hours earlier. In Springfield, the war parties were forming. Legislators were quickly plotting impeachment proceedings in the event Blagojevich did not step down, and they considered what they could do to take away the governor's ability to name a senator.

In Chicago at the Thompson Center, where Blagojevich had met Jackson the day before, state employees joined others across the city huddling around televisions to watch Fitzgerald hold a press conference on the charges.

“Governor Blagojevich has been arrested in the middle of what we can only describe as a political corruption crime spree,” Fitzgerald told a room jammed with reporters and news cameras. “We acted to stop that crime spree.”

Thinking about the environment of eight weeks earlier would put things in context, the top prosecutor said.

“There was a known investigation of the Blagojevich administration that had been going on for years involving allegations of pay-to-play conduct and corruption,” Fitzgerald said. “There had been a recent trial of an associate of Governor Blagojevich in which allegations were aired.”

In addition, there was a new ethics law going into effect on January 1, 2009, that would bar contributions to the governor from those doing business with Illinois. Maybe that would be expected to slow pay to play in state government down, Fitzgerald said, but guess again. The opposite had happened. Blagojevich had tried to shake down a roadbuilding executive for $100,000 in contributions while a $1.8 billion tollway project was being announced. He had tried to get a $50,000 contribution from the chief executive of Children's Memorial Hospital while offering to boost state funding for the facility. He had tried to get money from a horse racing executive in exchange for signing a bill that still sat on his desk aiding the racing industry. And he had tried to extort the
Chicago Tribune
and force the paper to fire editorial writers in exchange for a state deal.