From the Chicago Tribune

RYAN INDICTED
License scheme led to wider investigation

By Andrew Zajac and Flynn McRoberts. Tribune staff reporters Jane Fritsch
and Ray Long contributed to this report
Tribune staff reporters
Published December 18, 2003
More than a decade ago, Tammy Raynor and Tony Berlin, loyal Republican
patronage workers, seethed as they watched unqualified applicants collect
passing grades on driving tests and receive truck-driving licenses at the
Illinois Secretary of State facility in southwest suburban McCook.
Sometimes favored applicants skipped regular lines and entered the manager's
office to receive "specials."
Sometimes applicants who couldn't speak English breezed through a lengthy
oral test in a scant 20 minutes.
Sometimes hapless drivers would roll over orange traffic cones on the
driving portion of the exam, yet still leave McCook with a license.
Eventually, Raynor and Berlin tried blowing the whistle.
They began by complaining to the party bosses who got them their jobs.
Raynor recalled her sponsor offering pithy advice: "He said, basically,
`Look the other way. This is the way it is. Shut up.'"
Neither Raynor nor Berlin did, and as a result, federal authorities
eventually launched Operation Safe Road, an inquiry that began as a probe of
the bribes-for-licenses scheme and culminated Wednesday in the racketeering
indictment of former Gov. George Ryan for alleged corruption dating to 1990
when he first ran for secretary of state.
But it took Raynor and Berlin six years to find a way around a web of
crooked bosses and investigators in Ryan's secretary of state administration
who repeatedly covered up reports of wrongdoing.
In the interim, corruption under Ryan mushroomed into an epic tale of
lawbreaking that ranged far beyond the illegal sale of driver's licenses.
Almost from the moment he walked into the secretary of state's office in
early 1991, the indictment alleges, the back-slapping druggist-turned-career
politician hung a "For Sale" sign on contracts controlled by his
administration.
The alleged corruption was so vast that it touched on virtually every aspect
of the public's contact with the office--from driver's tests to the vehicle
stickers required on all license plates. Among the contracts for which Ryan
allegedly collected kickbacks were rigged deals to make stickers for the
plates as well as for vehicle titles.
Safe Road has encompassed Costa Rican prostitutes, a Jamaican vacation
villa, document-shredding, payola, money laundering, influence-peddling,
mysteriously missing evidence and a total of nine fatalities tied to drivers
with tainted licenses.
Six of those fatalities--the children of a Chicago minister and his
wife--occurred in a single gruesome accident on a Wisconsin highway in 1994
and was the catalyst for a Raynor and Berlin audience with federal
prosecutors, who launched Safe Road in early 1998.
Safe Road has been an equal-opportunity scandal, ensnaring a spectrum of
society, from humble immigrant truckers and low-paid government bureaucrats
to some of the best-connected politicos and lobbyists in the state--and now
its one-time leading elected official.
Precedent set
It's already made legal history: When Ryan's campaign fund was convicted in
March, it marked the first time a political organization in the U.S. was
found guilty on federal racketeering charges.
Over the years, more than 2,000 Illinois residents lost drivers licenses
after investigators determined they were tainted.
Illinois officials notified counterparts in 26 states that 600 other drivers
might have illicitly procured licenses.
Like Watergate and other classic scandals, the worst elements of Safe Road
involved not the initial lawbreaking but the coverup. Ryan's top corruption
watchdog, former Inspector General Dean Bauer, pleaded guilty to charges
that he aborted at least five inquiries into wrongdoing.
Ryan confidant and former chief of staff, Scott Fawell, was convicted of
multiple charges including obstruction of justice for shredding garbage bags
full of political material to hide illicit campaign fundraising.
But none of that could be imagined in the early 1990s at the McCook, Melrose
Park, Libertyville and other Chicago area drivers facilities. That is when
license examiners under newly installed Secretary of State Ryan augmented
their income and their boss's campaign coffers by giving licenses to
sometimes unqualified drivers in exchange for cash.
Employees described extraordinary demands to sell fundraising tickets.
Former Melrose Park Manager Mary Ann Mastrodomenico, the first person
convicted in Safe Road, testified that her bosses expected her to peddle
more than $20,000 annually in Ryan fundraising tickets, more than half her
$38,000 annual pay. Promotions, she said, were riding on her success.
In her 1998 guilty plea, Mastrodomenico admitted selling licenses to
unqualified truckers and using the money to buy more than $50,000 in
tickets.
Mastrodomenico was sentenced to 5 months in prison and 5 months of home
confinement. She could not be reached for comment.
Many of Mastrodomenico's illicit customers were Serbs who couldn't
understand English well enough to pass the written portion of the licensing
exam.
It was not an uncommon dilemma for Chicago-area immigrants. Truck driving
was an attractive employment option because it paid relatively well but
didn't require much skill--if one could get past the written section of the
test.
So many English-challenged newcomers bribed their way through the test that
the list of convictions in Safe Road has the flavor of a mini-UN, including
employees or students of driving schools catering to Poles, Mexicans,
Chinese, Asian Indians, Russians, Bulgarians, Bosnians and Serbs.
Many of those convicted had peddled licenses for years, thanks to Bauer, a
decades-long friend of Ryan's from Kankakee who repeatedly stepped in and
quashed investigations while assuring complainants such as Raynor and others
that he would take care of the problem.
In March 1993, for example, Lake County and secretary of state investigators
raided the Libertyville license facility in response to allegations of
illegal license selling.
Bauer's people still were securing the scene of a raid when their boss
strode in and walked off with the most incriminating evidence--envelopes
containing fundraising tickets and more than $2,500 in cash, both of which
disappeared.
"Dean took that money away from me, and I told him I haven't logged it into
evidence," said former Inspector General investigator Mark Lipe. "He [Bauer]
said, 'I'll take care of it.'"
Bauer never entered the envelope's contents into evidence, Lipe said in a
recent telephone interview. "As soon as he got the envelope, he ... called
George," Lipe said.
Bauer also choked off at least four other inquiries, and served 1 year and 1
day in federal custody for his role in the coverups.
While Ryan aides cranked up fundraising pressure on their subordinates, the
new secretary and his cronies also moved quickly to cash in on the lucrative
contracts overseen by the office, prosecutors allege.
With Ryan's alleged acquiescence, his longtime pal Larry Warner controlled a
series of secretary of state contracts for computers, consulting services,
photocopiers and other items from which he skimmed hundreds of thousands of
dollars. At Ryan's direction, he shared the bounty with another Ryan
associate, Donald Udstuen, a former Metra board member and lobbyist for the
Illinois State Medical Society, prosecutors say.
Ryan also allegedly collected illegal cash payments, gifts and vacations,
and channeled cash, loans and gifts to family members totaling about
$167,000, according to the indictment.
Money for Ryan family members--who in some instances did nothing to earn
it--was laundered through a firm controlled by Alan Drazek, a former CTA
board member, prosecutors said.
Vacations taken by Ryan include stays at the Jamaican villa of yet another
Ryan friend, businessman Harry Klein, who held a lucrative lease with the
secretary of state's office.
On Nov. 8, 1994, Ryan rolled to an unexpectedly easy second-term win and
began laying the groundwork for his ultimate prize, the governor's mansion.
Tragedy strikes
On the same day on Interstate Highway 94 near Milwaukee, the family of Rev.
Duane "Scott" Willis was heading to a high school wrestling tournament when
a 42-pound tail-light assembly fell off a truck and punctured the gas tank
of their van, causing an explosion and fire that killed six of the couple's
children.
Raynor said she and Berlin suspected that the truck driver, Ricardo Guzman,
had acquired his license illegally because he spoke English poorly and was
affiliated with a trucking firm whose safety directorwas a middle-man
between immigrants seeking licenses and crooked McCook officials.
Frustrated at the inaction of secretary of state investigators, Raynor and
Berlin reached out to the Willises, who had filed a civil suit over the
accident.
That led them to the couple's attorney, Joseph Power, who took Raynor's
deposition, putting her allegations front and center in a high-profile legal
proceeding.
Power also connected Raynor and Berlin with a Chicago television station,
which broadcast their allegations of license facility corruption in April
1998.
Shortly afterward, the pair was contacted by federal investigators, and
Operation Safe Road began.
Power eventually won a $100 million settlement from seven firms involved in
the manufacture or operation of the truck driven by Guzman.
The Willises declined to be interviewed. The couple now lives in a downtown
condominium and Scott Willis, a Baptist minister, counsels alcoholics.
Guzman was deported to his native Mexico last January following an unrelated
burglary conviction.
Raynor parlayed her early sleuthing in Safe Road into a job as an analyst in
the inspector general's office of Ryan's secretary of state successor, Jesse
White.
"No longer will our employees have to go to work in fear, have to make a
moral decision every time they punch in, or have to contribute money they
probably can't even afford just to keep their jobs," Raynor said after
Wednesday's indictment.
Berlin also remains a secretary of state employee, working as a customer
service representative at a drivers facility in Pontiac.
Power, a Democrat and former head of the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association,
was attacked for allegedly having political motives in pushing hard for an
investigation of Ryan. On Wednesday, Power said, "the bottom line is it
isn't a gloating issue. ... This fellow is a serial criminal."
Initially, Ryan benefited politically from the handling of the
investigation, which was gathering steam as he ran for governor in 1998.
Democratic opponent Glenn Poshard made Ryan's alleged corruption a campaign
issue, but a month before the election, then-U.S. Atty. Scott Lassar broke
the traditional code of silence enveloping federal probes and announced that
Ryan was not under investigation in Safe Road.
To some observers at the time, including Poshard, it seemed an unwarranted
exoneration of Ryan. "George Ryan got a pass," said Poshard, who contends if
Lassar had kept his mouth shut it might have helped change the election's
outcome.
Poshard, a Downstate congressman at the time of his candidacy, now runs the
Poshard Foundation for abused and neglected children at John A. Logan
College in Carterville. Ryan has stoutly maintained his ignorance of
misdeeds on his watch. "Look, I had no idea that this was going on if in
fact it did go on, OK?" he said following the influence-peddling indictment
of Warner in May 2002.
But Wednesday's indictment and earlier indictments of Fawell, Warner,
Drazek, Udstuen, Roger Stanley and other longtime Ryan associates describe
an elaborate network of cronyism geared to personal profit as well as
political gain with Ryan at its center.
Fawell, for example, joined Bauer in covering up investigations, deployed
state workers to do Ryan's political bidding on state time and repeatedly
steered business to Ryan favorites.
While in his Ryan-appointed position as head of the Metropolitan Pier and
Exposition Authority, Fawell steered business to Stanley's direct mail
company and other firms, in exchange for kickbacks and vacations in Costa
Rica that included the services of prostitutes, according to prosecutors.
The tropical locales mentioned in the indictment are a stark contrast to the
gritty McCook facility that was the most notorious early site of the
scandal.
Now a forlorn cinderblock island surrounded by a sea of broken asphalt, the
McCook office sits vacant.
It was closed in September 2000, a casualty of its reputation: Drivers
wouldn't go there out of fear others would assume they'd obtained their
license improperly.
The "welcome" sign and hours of operation painted on its glass front door
have nearly faded away.
Late Tuesday, a Village of McCook policeman slowly drove past the facility
and pulled to a stop. Told of Ryan's pending indictment, the patrolman
smirked.
"It's about time," he said.