From the Daily Southtown

Witnesses: Nothing done after tragic highway accident

Friday, January 13, 2006

By Mike Robinson
The Associated Press
George Ryan's handpicked inspector general claimed he investigated a highway tragedy that killed six children but really did nothing, and he even refused to provide federal agents with the skimpy materials he collected in the case, police witnesses testified Thursday.

John Strom, who succeeded Dean Bauer as inspector general in the secretary of state's office, said that when he started the job in February 1999 there was no case file on the November 1994 highway tragedy that killed six children of the Rev. Scott Willis of Chicago.

Strom said Bauer, one of Ryan's closest friends, apparently hadn't even opened a case file on the Willis tragedy, which launched the corruption investigation that led to the former governor's trial.

Strom, now chief of the police department at Washington University in St. Louis, said he did find a manila folder marked "Milwaukee case" in the inspector general's Joliet office. But he said it was not a formal case file and contained little more than news clippings and one memo.

Ryan, 71, and longtime friend Larry Warner, 67, are charged in a 22-count indictment with racketeering, mail fraud and other offenses. Prosecutors say the secretary of state's office and later the governor's office under Ryan were operated for his own corrupt political gain.

Ryan and Warner deny that anything they did was against the law.

The memo found in the "Milwaukee case" folder proved pivotal in the government's seven-year Operation Safe Road investigation, which began as an inquiry into bribes paid in exchange for driver's licenses and gradually expanded into a full-scale examination of corruption in the Ryan era.

Willie H. Thompson, who was chief deputy director of the secretary of state's police under Ryan, testified Thursday that the memo was typed up by his secretary based on a phone call from Dean Bauer shortly after the Willis accident.

In the accident, a heavy steel part fell off a truck on an expressway outside Milwaukee and slid under the Willis van, slashing open the gas tank and setting it afire.

Thompson testified that after receiving Bauer's phone call he sent the memo to Giacomo A. Pecoraro, director of the secretary of state's police, based on what the inspector general said.

It said the driver of the truck was under investigation by Bauer.

"Director Bauer requests that any information regarding this information be forwarded to him immediately," it said. It said Bauer thought the driver used a bribe to get his driver's license.

The driver, Ricardo Guzman, later took the Fifth Amendment when asked in a civil lawsuit filed on behalf of the Willis family how he had obtained his drivers license.

But Strom said there was no evidence Bauer had done anything to investigate the driver and that he plainly had not complied with a federal subpoena for information about the case.

The memo proved to be Bauer's undoing. After he retired to Florida, a secretary of state's employee called him and said the memo had been found and asked what to do about it.

Bauer advised her to get rid of it, unaware that federal agents were listening in and recording his words. He pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and went to federal prison.