From the Associated Press

Boss pushed property owned by Ryan's pal for state lease, witness says
By Mike Robinson
The Associated Press
Published October 31, 2005, 5:59 PM CST
A retired state official testified Monday he got orders from a
higher-up in the secretary of state's office to consider locating a
commercial drivers licensing center on a site owned by George Ryan's
host on vacations at a Jamaican estate.
James Esslinger said that getting orders from a high-ranking official
to look at a property ran counter to the standard procedure that was
followed when the secretary of state's office was searching for a
suitable site for a drivers licensing center.
Esslinger, a retired property manager in the secretary of state's
office, told the former governor's racketeering and fraud trial it was
usually up to lower-ranking staff members to come up with three
possible locations for new drivers licensing centers.
``Is it fair to say that this was a very unusual procedure?''
Assistant U.S. Attorney Joel R. Levin asked Esslinger, a longtime
Springfield resident who was a state employee for 18 years.
``Yes, it was,'' Esslinger said.
The decision to lease currency exchange owner Harry Klein's property
is a key component of the racketeering and mail fraud indictment
against 71-year-old Ryan and his longtime lobbyist friend, Larry
Warner. They say nothing they did was illegal.
According to the indictment, when Ryan was secretary of state he
arranged to lease the site in suburban South Holland from Klein and
agreed to raise the maximum fee currency exchanges charge for getting
license stickers.
Ryan raised the maximum fee after Klein requested the increase while
they were on one of several annual January vacations at the oceanfront
estate Klein rented outside Montego Bay, Jamaica, according to Scott
Fawell, Ryan's longtime chief of staff and now a witness for the
prosecution.
Fawell testified he would sometimes hand Klein a check for $1,000 as
proof for state records that he had paid his way but that Klein would
then give him back 10 $100 bills in cash.
Fawell also told the jury how Klein had Ryan and his entourage as
guests at his Palm Springs, Calif. home and ferried the group to and
from Las Vegas aboard a chartered plane for a night at the casinos.
Esslinger said he never would have picked the South Holland property
as the site of a licensing center because it was away from any main
highway and thus lacked the accessibility that was one of the criteria
when locating a licensing center.
But he said Michael Chamness, then head of drivers services in the
secretary of state's office, told him to check it out and gave him a
photograph of the property.
Chamness, who is head of the terrorism task force in the Illinois
Emergency Management Agency, is expected to be a prosecution witness
at the trial later this week.