Golden (8 page)

Mell started a spring manufacturing company near Logan Square that quickly became successful. After a while, the business was running so smoothly Mell realized he didn't have to dedicate as much time there, so he decided to more fully engage in his love of politics.

He began where everyone in Chicago starts—he became a precinct captain in his neighborhood. The time-honored practice in Mayor Richard J.
Daley's Democratic organization called for spending years slowly rising through the ranks before making a jump for elected office. But Dick Mell was never a patient man. By 1972, he ran to be the Thirty-Third Ward's Democratic committeeman, a politically powerful post that controlled patronage and held the fate of ward candidates. Mell challenged the incumbent committeeman, John Brandt, who had previously been the area's alderman for two decades. Mell's bid was an affront to the organization, and he promptly lost. But he made a name for himself and three years later ran for alderman against the guy Brandt put up.

Alfred Ronan was a young assistant secretary for Illinois Democratic Governor Dan Walker's transportation department at the time. A mutual friend and Democratic political operative called Ronan to see if he would be interested in helping Mell run for alderman. The friend, Pat Quinn, said Mell was a hard worker and deserved a shot.

Mell had a half-dozen precinct captains and Ronan added another eighty men of his own to beef up the field operations. He was soon running Mell's campaign, and they eked out a victory. A year later, Mell became Democratic committeeman of the Thirty-Third Ward, and while Ronan lost for state representative that year, he won the seat in 1978, cementing a relationship between the two men.

When Blagojevich arrived at the ward headquarters to help him, Mell had grown to become one of the city's most powerful—and notorious—politicians. While known for being erratic and a nonstop chatterbox, he also had formed one of the strongest ward organizations on the Northwest Side, with scores of political soldiers (many who had government jobs thanks to Mell) who swore allegiance to him and would walk the streets and get his candidates elected.

He was also rich.

As Rod and his friends walked in to Mell's office, the alderman quickly gave them their orders. He pulled out a map of the Twenty-Sixth Ward and pointed out precincts in the Humboldt Park neighborhood where he wanted them to hand out materials promoting Torres's candidacy. In stark contrast to those Wilson Frost sticker days, the men spent the day jamming fliers inside the doors of homes, two-flats, and apartment buildings for the pro-machine candidate.

On the day of the special election, Blagojevich watched the results come in. It wasn't good for Vrdolyak. Gutierrez won. Not only that, but other races went in Washington's favor. By the time election night ended, the balance
of power on the council had swung enough in Washington's direction that it was a 25-25 tie, giving the mayor the tie-breaking vote.

A year into his job at the state's attorney's office, Blagojevich had received a small promotion. He was now prosecuting minor cases—gun offenses, domestic violence, and prostitution—at branch courts in police stations like Fifty-First and Wentworth on the South Side and Grand and Central on the Northwest Side. They were still petty, but at least it wasn't traffic anymore.

He was beginning to realize he didn't want to be spending most of his early thirties as a prosecutor. It took hundreds of hours of court time and years of work to get ahead—five years alone just to get to felony court. Blagojevich wasn't that patient or, some felt, that hard a worker. He soon began cutting out early to do real estate closings on the side, which, while technically allowed, sometimes left his partners with the extra workload. Some of his fellow prosecutors nicknamed him the Shadow for his frequent absences. But Blagojevich's goal remained becoming a politician, not a prosecutor.

He was beginning to think about switching jobs yet again when he was stunned to learn his only clout in the office, Michael Angarola, had died. Angarola had been heading home to suburban Lincolnwood when he was involved in a car crash on the Kennedy Expressway. A twenty-year-old woman had lost control of her Datsun 280Z sports car, which jumped over a massive curb that split the expressway at Van Buren Street and smashed head-on with Mike Angarola's car. An hour later, both drivers were dead.

A few months after that, in February 1988, tragedy struck someone even closer to Blagojevich.

Rade Blagojevich, now seventy-seven years old, was out of town visiting Robert when he was cut down by a massive stroke. Robert rushed him to a hospital, but by the time doctors got to him, significant damage to his brain and motor functions rendered him unable to speak. They were able to stabilize him enough to transfer him back home to Chicago, to a nursing home where Millie and Rod would visit him on a regular basis. Then sixty-six, Millie retired from the CTA ticket-taker job she had held for twenty years to spend as much time with Rade as possible, though Rade still couldn't speak or eat.

After Blagojevich got back to work, he ran into Judge Saul Perdomo. While working at Fifty-First and Wentworth, the two loved to talk politics and lunched in Chinatown or Hyde Park. Perdomo was an associate judge at the time, a lesser judicial position than a full circuit judge. Perdomo wanted to run for a full-circuit post himself and asked Rod for help. In some parts of the country, asking a prosecutor who tries cases before you for political help might seem to carry inherent conflicts of interest. But not in Chicago. Blagojevich gladly agreed and picked up the phone to talk to a friend of his, Paris Thompson.

Blagojevich had met Thompson while working at Fifty-First and Wentworth. A young man who grew up in the Robert Taylor public housing homes near the police station, Thompson had been shining shoes there when he got kicked out over a misunderstanding with the police. Blagojevich's history as a shoeshine boy instantly drew him to Thompson, and he had persuaded Perdomo to talk to the cops to let Thompson back in.

Now Blagojevich was wondering if Thompson had any ideas for where Perdomo could go on the South Side to get votes in the black community. Thompson suggested a church in Englewood, at Seventy-First and Halsted, the True Temple of Solomon. The temple's leader enjoyed allowing candidates to campaign from the pulpit. Perdomo loved the idea and wanted Blagojevich to join him. In fact, he wanted to see if Blagojevich would campaign with him all day on Sunday, March 6.

“Why don't you come with?” Perdomo asked.

Blagojevich had little going on that day, so he agreed.

Two more things, Perdomo added. He was going to a fundraiser for a Northwest Side alderman, Dick Mell. Perdomo explained he had known Mell for years. They were members of the Young Democrats together. Rod said he knew Mell a little. Not only had he met him a few years ago during the Torres race, but he also met him in court when Mell showed up with residents upset about graffiti proliferation in their neighborhood.

The other thing, Perdomo said, was about Mell's daughter, Patti. She was engaged to a guy in Italy, where she had studied for a time, but they broke up and now she was moping around the house, brokenhearted. Mell wanted to see his daughter happy again and was bringing her to the event.

I told Mell about you, Perdomo said. “I said, ‘I got this young assistant state's attorney.'”

Then thirty-one years old, Blagojevich had been dating around for years, meeting women around town or through work circles. A few relationships
had been serious, with some women even meeting his parents. But Blagojevich never thought of himself as the marrying type. All the same, he didn't mind being set up, especially with the daughter of a powerful alderman.

After visiting the True Temple of Solomon, the two men steered north toward Mell's fundraiser. It was being held at a famous Chicago German restaurant on Southport called Zum Deutschen Eck. It sat in the shadow of the historic, Gothic-style St. Alphonsus Catholic Church, its gray steeple hovering overhead.

Inside, the men passed under the wood-carved doorways that matched the solid oak, handmade bar and were instantly in the middle of the hundreds of people there for Mell's event. Perdomo scanned the crowd and spotted a brunette standing off in the distance, away from the throng. She was attractive and skinny and wore a red dress. She seemed disengaged with the festivities around her.

“That's Patti,” Perdomo said, grabbing Rod's hand and pulling him toward her. Before either of them knew it, they were face to face.

About to turn twenty-three years old, Patricia Mell was the eldest daughter of Dick and Marge Mell. Patti had grown up in a household where her father was always a powerful alderman and kingmaker, and she was the princess. She was popular in school, attending St. Scholastica, an all-girls Catholic high school in Rogers Park run by the Benedictine Sisters. Chicago's first female mayor, Jane Byrne, graduated from St. Scholastica and even spoke to the students in 1982 while she was mayor and Patti was a junior.

Intelligent, Patti had shown some interest in French and the theater, especially Shakespeare. In her senior yearbook, she even quoted Hamlet's soliloquy contemplating suicide, “That this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew!” She went to the University of Illinois and studied economics before coming back to Chicago, where she found herself looking at her future husband.

“Patti, this is Rod,” the judge said. “Rod, Patti.”

Mell watched from a slight distance before saying hello to the young assistant state's attorney and then leaving the two to talk. Rod was quickly attracted to Patti. She was eight years younger but seemed smart and mature for her age. Rod did most of the talking, yammering on about work and politics and books. Patti listened intently. He was engaging and charming. The
same way he was good at making friends and winning over judges, he was good at attracting women.

“If you go out with me, I'm going to show you the time of your life,” Blagojevich said, smiling. After accepting the offer, Patti later parroted the line to her father, recognizing it as much for its braggadocio as for its cheesiness.

Two weeks later, Rod picked up the phone and called her, and they made plans to meet the following Sunday—three weeks after they had first met. Rod continued to bungle things and showed up thirty minutes late.

But despite the false start, Rod and Patti quickly grew close. Throughout that spring and summer, Rod broke it off with the few other women he had been seeing and began an exclusive relationship with Patti. Rod was constantly struck by how smart and well read Patti was. Maybe she couldn't memorize lines from poems or books like he could, but she knew what she was talking about. In Italy, she had spent a great deal of time at the library, she told him. After that, she and Rod would head over to a local library from time to time for dates. Rod was so excited, he'd call up Lon Monk to tell him about their outings together.

Just as he met Patti, Blagojevich decided to leave the state's attorney's office, feeling he could no longer get much out of the job. He joined a law firm run by attorneys James Kaplan and Sheldon Sorosky that focused on worker's compensation cases. Sorosky, himself a former assistant state's attorney, had met Blagojevich in his clerking days and knew him as an intelligent and capable young man who seemed to be very well read, especially when it came to history.

While Rod's life changed around him, his father lay in a nursing home, still unable to communicate or walk. Rod would see his father several times a week, almost always running into his mother there. And Rade's condition wasn't improving. One night as Rod sat at his father's bedside, he realized it was time to grow up. He had fallen in love with Patti, and he thought he wanted to one day marry her. And as he was losing his father, he was gaining a father figure in Mell, who was overjoyed his daughter had found a new man.

By that summer, Mell approached Rod with a job offer. Mell knew Rod was interested in politics and government, so why not join his team as a staff member? It was a part-time job, but it was a good opportunity, and he could open a private practice to make ends meet.