From the Chicago Tribune

RYAN INDICTED (editorial)
Indicting Gov. Ryan--and IllinoisPublished December 18, 2003
In the late 1990s, two young federal prosecutors in Chicago drafted a
two-page memorandum that described a galling case of political corruption.
Unqualified drivers were paying bribes to buy driver's licenses from
employees of George Ryan, Illinois' secretary of state. And someone in
Ryan's office, it appeared, had squelched an internal investigation of the
scam. The memo's implications were tantalizing but, upon first reading it,
the FBI didn't bite. Not enough resources, too many cases already, all of
that. Eventually, though, the FBI changed its tune and went to work.
Over time the investigation first proposed in that two-page memo erupted
into Operation Safe Road, the public corruption extravaganza that so far has
produced 59 convictions--and last year made it impossible for a sitting
governor to seek a second term. On Wednesday federal prosecutors took their
strongest swipe yet at Ryan's scum-caked office. A federal grand jury
alleged that during his years as secretary of state and as governor, Ryan
himself engaged in racketeering conspiracy, mail fraud and tax fraud, and
repeatedly lied to FBI agents who were investigating him. The indictment
alleges a decade of orchestrated betrayal in which contracts and leases were
awarded, and other state business conducted, in illicit ways that personally
and financially benefited Ryan, members of his family, his cronies and his
campaign apparatus. When Ryan was in office, U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald
said at a Wednesday press conference, "The State of Illinois was for sale."
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The 91-page indictment follows by nine months the conviction on corruption
charges of Ryan's campaign fund, Citizens for Ryan, and his one-time chief
of staff and campaign manager, Scott Fawell, who is now doing time in a
federal lockup. That case established beyond doubt that when Ryan was
secretary of state during the 1990s, his office and many of his employees
had one mission: to get him elected governor in 1998. Fawell was at the
center of a scheme to use state workers, on state time, as political
flunkies for the Ryan cause. Testimony had Fawell blocking a state
investigation of illegal behavior in order to protect Ryan from political
damage, and stealing supplies from the state to curb campaign costs--the
better to preserve funds for Ryan's pursuit of the governorship. Some
$170,000 of the bribe money paid to Ryan's employees for driver's licenses
wound up in his campaign coffers.
But what has truly stoked public revulsion over this scandal as it has
unfolded over the years is its death toll: the nine people--six of them
children in one family--who were killed in traffic accidents blamed on
drivers who got licenses by paying bribes to Ryan's office. On Wednesday,
Dieter Harper, a Chicago-based investigator for the U.S. Department of
Transportation, told the Tribune that the number of truckers who illegally
obtained Illinois licenses when Ryan was in office totals "between 1,000 and
2,000." That's a lot of danger to recklessly foist on unsuspecting
motorists.
With Wednesday's indictment, the feds have charged that Ryan was a central
player in a significant portion of the scandal that enveloped his office. He
is now free to press the argument he has made for years: that he is innocent
of any wrongdoing, and didn't know about the rampant criminal behavior that
surrounded him.
The sins long ago established by Operation Safe Road constitute an
especially egregious exploitation of the public trust. What prosecutors have
proven in prior cases is that many of Ryan's staffers sold out the safety of
their fellow citizens. They now allege that Ryan, no less diabolically, sold
out his state for personal profit. He is expected to plead not guilty.
But there is a broader prism through which to view the latest charges: They
are one more chapter in an ongoing indictment of politics and government in
Illinois. As Thomas Knier, the FBI's special agent in charge, put it:
Wednesday was "another dark day in Illinois politics." True enough.
Government in this state may or may not be more corrupt than it is
elsewhere. But the tolerance of Illinois citizens for the public corruption
that victimizes all of us has, too often, been too lenient. We've tended to
wink and nod.
That corruption corrodes a democracy. "When citizens believe the system is
corrupt, they drop out," says Ronald Safer, former chief of the criminal
division in the office Fitzgerald now heads. "They stop participating. They
stop caring. They stop working for change. If the card game is fixed, why
play?"
For too long, though, the extent of public corruption already proven in
Illinois has been this state's dirty little joke--a perverse point of pride
for those among us who smirk that, in the land where Lincoln spoke to
egalitarian ideals, political clout now trumps merit. The insiders rule.
When that cynicism becomes ingrained, some good people don't run for office.
And other good people don't vote. In short, public corruption steals
citizens' faith, steals their tax money, sometimes steals their government.
- - -
Through the years, that has happened too often in Illinois. The question now
is whether citizens are sufficiently angry to become intolerant. The recent
passage of new state ethics legislation--despite efforts by some legislators
to weaken it--signals at least a willingness to disrupt business as usual in
Illinois government and politics.
The primary cause for hope, though, is the independence of Fitzgerald and
other federal prosecutors in this state from the powerful Illinois political
class of interconnected influence-peddlers and schmoozers in both major
political parties. Fitzgerald's status as an outsider has helped inspire his
staff's pursuit of lawbreakers such as Fawell and others in the Safe Road
59. As a group those criminals are emblematic of what needs to be
exterminated: the Illinois culture of political sleaze. "The citizens of
this state deserve honest government," Fitzgerald said Wednesday, adding
later in response to a question about public corruption in Illinois, "We'll
just keep rolling out indictments where they're warranted."
Now a former governor stands in the dock. He is entitled to a full
presumption of innocence. The feds must prove their criminal case in court.
Whatever that outcome, though, George Ryan's administration was long ago
found guilty in the court of public opinion of putting his personal ambition
ahead of public service. That, by itself, isn't necessarily a crime. At
trial, though, we may at last learn what many Illinois citizens have
wondered for years: what role Ryan himself did or didn't play in disgracing
two of this state's highest offices.Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune