Bernard Schoenburg Column

Courage and patience led to charges against Ryan

It may seem easy now to talk about all the bad things that former Gov.
GEORGE RYAN was alleged to have done, mostly while secretary of state.
But the fact that it has taken five years of intense investigation to get to
the point where he was indicted Wednesday, with prosecutors saying he
plotted and stole and lied about it, shows how hard such a case is to build.
And as I look over those years, I am most impressed by the people who spoke
out about what they perceived to be the wrongs done. With Ryan holding the
power first of the secretary of state’s office, and then of the governor’s
office, and with Ryan loyalists in positions of power, it’s not easy to go
public.
TAMMY RAYNOR and TONY BERLIN, license examiners who documented bribe-taking
that helped crack the case, had a tall mountain to climb. Their fight,
coupled with the tragic deaths of six children of the Willis family on a
Wisconsin highway and the Willis family’s determined lawyer, JOE POWER, has
yielded a torrent of charges against dozens of people who were involved in
bribe-taking or cheating the government to work on campaigns.
MARK LIPE has had a part in telling the story, and as I see it, he’s shown
courage. Lipe, 52, of Springfield, was a special agent in the secretary of
state’s inspector general’s office but left that office during the tenure of
DEAN BAUER - a Ryan buddy and former Kankakee police chief who ended up
going to prison for obstruction of justice.
It’s more than four years since I first spoke with Lipe, and I’ve found it
refreshing that he felt he could discuss what he knew about the case to help
get the word out about how bad things had been.
"I’m relieved that justice is going to have an opportunity to be served,"
Lipe said Wednesday when told Ryan was being indicted. "Quite frankly, I
have been waiting for this to happen. There is a level of accountability
that at the end of the day measures to the individual in charge, and it’s
time he be held accountable."
He recalled what he characterized as an almost unbelievable change in the
inspector general’s office from the time of former Gov. JIM EDGAR to when
Ryan took over in 1991.
"The office went from a very professional office with integrity at the
forefront of our mission to one that was run by incompetents, one that was
only concerned about protecting the interests of Ryan and the party," Lipe
said. "Allegations of malfeasance and misconduct were ... directed under
Dean Bauer only to him."
The number of cases handled was reduced dramatically to less than 100 a
year, he said, and those cases were generally minor, meant "to give the
illusion that we were doing something. ... It was obvious the integrity of
the office no longer had any meaning."
Lipe said that Bauer brought on "guys that had no background at all" with
investigations. "His right-hand man was a truck driver. And these guys made
a ... lot more money than I did, even with my years of time there and
education. ... It went from a vanguard of internal integrity to a political
hideaway."
"I’m not happy," Lipe said of the indictment. " I mean, I think it is an
embarrassment to our process.
"It’s an embarrassment to me. It’s an embarrassment to the employees of the
office of secretary of state, and it’s an embarrassment to the taxpayers
that we allowed ourselves to be hoodwinked by this back-alley politician who
thought that the world had not changed."
Lipe was involved in a 1993 raid of a Libertyville driver’s license
facility, and has said he was the one who found a briefcase containing cash
and receipts for contributions to Ryan’s campaign fund.
"The evidence of campaign tickets and cash on state property ... was
indicative of our suspicions that there was something behind the
driver’s-licenses-for-bribes thing," Lipe said, saying the briefcase had
been in the desk of a high-ranking official.
Lipe has said he turned over the evidence to Bauer, and never saw it again.
"We had numerous complaints (from across the state), and unfortunately, a
lot of those complaints went to Dean and were squelched," Lipe said. Those
complaints were from employees saying things like: "They give me $1,000 in
tickets this month and told me I have to sell them. And if I can’t sell
them, I have to buy them or I’ll be out grading motorcycle tests in February
or something."
Lipe said he quit the inspector general’s office out of frustration and
aggravation with unprofessionalism and a disregard for integrity of the
office by Ryan’s administration. He did work two more years on the Secretary
of State police - a separate department - and now is a consultant who also
teaches business courses at Lincoln Land Community College and Robert Morris
College.
"The biggest disappointment for me under this administration was the
overwhelming arrogance that these people displayed, that they were above and
beyond reproach," Lipe said of the Ryan years. "And my hat’s off to the
federal prosecutors, because myself and other agents had gone forward to
internal sources, to the state’s attorney’s office, to the attorney
general’s office for the state of Illinois, with no satisfaction and no
interest in our concerns.
"Obviously, the U.S. attorney did take an interest and pursued this and
stuck with it," said Lipe, who has testified before a federal grand jury,
"and I think the fruits of their labor are now on the table."
I’ve written a lot about the scandals surrounding Ryan in recent years.
Almost all of those stories have included the line that Ryan has not been
accused of wrongdoing.
As of Wednesday, that changed. The accusations now are there. But Ryan
intends to plead innocent, so the judgment is yet to come if those
accusations are true.