Golden (6 page)

To Powell and the rest of Blagojevich's buddies, Rod wasn't just trying to show off. He believed the words he was reciting. What's more, Blagojevich was collecting his odd stable of political heroes: Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Nixon. He'd soon add a fourth: Ronald Reagan, for whom he'd vote for president in 1980.

But as much as Rod was maturing in his political beliefs, he was still immature in many other ways. Blagojevich, Ascaridis, and other friends
crank-called Chicago radio talk shows on WIND with Ascaridis trying to sound Latino and identifying himself as Rico La Verga.

“We would all dissolve in laughter. Mike had just gotten on the air calling himself Rico the Dick,” wrote Powell, who became a foreign correspondent for
Newsweek
and
Time
and wrote an article about his times with Blagojevich in
Men's Journal.
Rod called another time, on St. Patrick's Day, when listeners were invited to talk about what they loved about the Irish.

“I think they're a bunch of sloths,” Blagojevich said before hanging up.

The friends recorded the pranks and put them on a tape they called the Classics. Blagojevich also just liked screwing with people for sport, a character trait that continued well into his adulthood and political career.

At a Chicago Bulls game one night, Blagojevich and Powell brought along a nerdy friend named Rob, whom Blagojevich spent the entire first half trying to convince that a player had a fake nose because he was wearing a protective facemask.

“Seriously, Rob, this guy has no nose,” Rod deadpanned. “Can you believe that? That's an artificial nose the guy's playing with.”

By the time he received his degree from Northwestern, Blagojevich had decided politics was in his future and his best bet was to detach himself from the neighborhood. He would first have to go to law school, but he knew eventually he was going to run for public office. “I can't stand the sight of blood,” he once said. “So I couldn't be a doctor.”

Before his legal studies began, though, he wanted to make money to help pay the tuition. He continued to deliver pizzas for Abondanza on Wednesdays through Sundays and worked with Ascaridis doing construction work at Helene Curtis on the West Side. Among the perks there: an unlimited supply of free, fruity Suave shampoo.

“The stuff that smells like strawberries,” Blagojevich wistfully told the jury in federal court. “You can have strawberry and watermelon. Remember that in the ‘70s? Maybe you don't.”

Blagojevich loved his hair and enjoyed the perk, but he thought making connections in government probably helped his future plans more. He first got a job in the county recorder's office through a high school friend. Later, Blagojevich worked for the county's court interpreters program after his father found out about the job through a Serbian social organization he
was active in. The county was looking for a Serbo-Croatian interpreter, and Rade thought his bilingual son was perfect for it.

One of his first cases, though, wasn't interpreting a fellow Serb or even a Croat. Instead, he was translating for a Bulgarian defendant at a courthouse in the South Loop at Thirteenth and Michigan. Blagojevich liked to say that his language skills were the next best thing to Bulgarian. Well, not quite.

During the testimony, two senior citizens said they were held up by a guy with a gun. But Blagojevich kept translating “gun” as “cannon.”

Between all the jobs and getting ready for law school, Blagojevich took acting classes at the Goodman School, lessons he would use years later, as Reagan used his acting skills, at press conferences and on television commercials. Unfortunately, those classes wouldn't help him on his law school entrance exam, the LSAT. As he had with nearly every standardized test he'd taken in his life, he did terribly, scoring in the lower half. He took it again and didn't do much better. It didn't matter. He still applied to several top-notch law schools, including Harvard. He thought it would be inspiring to learn law in Boston, a city so vital to the nation's founding. It was clearly a long shot, Blagojevich would remember later in court. But he relied on his essay.

“I tried to emphasize my background and diversity…. You can't have a lot of people with a name like mine in Harvard,” Blagojevich testified. “It didn't work. And I like to say I applied on a Monday and I got my letter of rejection back on a Tuesday. I'm not literally saying that, I'm under oath, but it came back pretty quick.”

He also was denied by the University of Chicago and even Northwestern, a snub he took personally because it dredged up his feelings of inadequacy and lacking the proper pedigree.

Blagojevich eventually got accepted to John Marshall Law School, a commuter law school in Chicago, and Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. Having spent the last three years living at home, he liked the idea of going west, even if it meant leaving his parents, who were going to be footing most of the law school tuition bills. As a kid growing up, he had always envisioned that one sign of making it in life was getting to California.

But before heading out, Blagojevich and Ascaridis took a trip to New York City. Beyond the expected tourist spots, Rod had one place he definitely wanted to go—Nixon's townhouse on the Upper East Side.

Blagojevich had read a magazine article that detailed Nixon's daily routine, including when he took his walks around the neighborhood. Rod insisted they show up and try to catch Nixon outside. Although they showed up plenty early, they both were still amazed to see him on the sidewalk. Wearing a wide grin and a white soccer-like shirt fashionable at the time with thick, dark stripes down the sleeves, Blagojevich cautiously approached Nixon and introduced himself and asked Nixon if he could take a picture with him. The thirty-seventh president had his hands filled with papers and a black binder, but he didn't mind at all. As the camera clicked, Blagojevich smiled while Nixon looked down, signing an autograph for the young men, his papers jammed between his chest and left arm.

It was nothing more than a brief interruption in an otherwise average day for Nixon. But for Blagojevich it was a highlight of a lifetime. Years later he would tell the story, acting out the parts of all three characters: himself, Ascaridis, and Nixon.

In the fall of 1980, with Ronald Reagan months from being elected president, Rod Blagojevich packed up his bags and moved west. He found himself blown away by the beauty of Pepperdine's campus overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and he was just as stunned by the women.

Blagojevich was once again easily distracted from his studies, choosing to read Charles Dickens novels and hang out on the beach over going to the law library. Later, he even got paid eighty dollars to be an extra in a TV movie,
Malibu,
in which he sat and watched a Chad Everett tennis match. It was a bit of a brain shift for Blagojevich.

“I had a job at a place called Malibu Nautilus,” Blagojevich told the jury in 2011 before launching into one of his trademark rambles. “That was interesting because I'd clean up there and I'd help out, and, you know, they're working out there—I remember someone making a lot of noise, he was bench pressing, it was the late Michael Landon who played [on]
Little House on the Prairie,
and he was there. And Dyan Cannon, who was Cary Grant's fifth wife, she worked out once there. Olivia Newton-John, she would work out there. You'd see these movie stars. Farah Fawcett-Majors, you know, you'd see her. You know, it was completely different from Cicero and Armitage.”

The first year of law school, which is traditionally the most difficult, ended up nearly catastrophic. Blagojevich found almost any excuse not
to study. He got lost when professors tested students' logic and fashioned a legal debate in class, which was different from his undergrad lectures, where he had taken copious notes and memorized them for tests. By the end of his first year, he was on academic probation.

Blagojevich spent the summer painting porches back home but headed to England in August. Pepperdine offered law students the chance of spending a semester in London, and Rod seized on the opportunity. He later remembered thinking the “ambience of London” might make it easier for him to get in a legal mindset and concentrate on his studies.

Blagojevich was touring the city on a double-decker bus headed toward the Tower of London when he met Alonzo Monk.

Blagojevich recognized Monk as another student at Pepperdine, and the two started talking. Lon, as everyone called him, grew up in California. Monk's father was a rich, well-respected gynecologist who in 1962 delivered future tennis phenom Tracy Austin, an odd piece of trivia that somehow impressed Blagojevich. Later, the first time Rod visited the Monk family home, he was amazed to see peacocks patrolling the front lawn.

Despite their disparate backgrounds, Rod and Lon loved sports. Monk had played tennis in college while Rod talked about his mediocre boxing career. The following month, they watched the biggest match of the year—the “Showdown” welterweight championship fight between Sugar Ray Leonard and Tommy “Hit Man” Hearns—on a large screen in a movie theater at Piccadilly Circus. After being down at the start, Sugar Ray won a thrilling victory.

The two men bonded over the experience and forged a strong friendship throughout the semester. Despite being a year younger, Lon became a big-brother figure to Rod, who thought his friend was more mature and worth emulating.

After returning to Pepperdine, Monk and Blagojevich stayed close. But as they considered rooming together for their third year, an embarrassed Rod confided in Lon that he was close to flunking out. While Rod was back in Chicago between his second and third years, and Vrdolyak was arranging his clerk job with the city, Lon drove from his parents' home to Malibu to check Rod's final scores and see whether he had made it to his third year.

“I was on the phone and he was getting the grades, and I had tremendous relief when he told me that I survived. And I remember how he kinda yelled a little bit out of—you know, let out a yelp, you know, of cheerfulness for me,” Blagojevich recalled for the jury.