From the Daily Herald:

Fawell case now in hands of jury
Daily Herald Reports
Posted March 12, 2003

A federal court jury in Chicago began deliberations Tuesday afternoon in the racketeering trial of former Gov. George Ryan's longtime top aide after hearing a prosecutor accuse him of masterminding a ruthless rip-off of Illinois taxpayers motivated by "good old-fashioned greed."

"Jesse James said he robbed banks because that's where the money is," Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Collins told jurors. "Mr. Fawell stole from the secretary of state's office because he could."

"It was screw you, taxpayers of the state of Illinois," Collins said, a blunt spoken phrase he repeated numerous times in his hourlong rebuttal argument at the close of the eight-week trial of Ryan aide Scott Fawell.

Fawell, 45, is charged along with the Citizens for Ryan campaign committee in a nine-count indictment with using state employees working on state time and taxpayer dollars to fuel Ryan's campaigns.

He is also charged with taking free vacations from a contractor who got a lucrative state contract and presiding over the shredding of political documents to keep them out of the hands of government agents.

The bulk of the allegations of wrongdoing focus on the eight years that Ryan was secretary of state before his 1998 election as governor.

Fawell was Ryan's chief of staff in the secretary of state's office and his 1998 campaign manager. He is the highest ranking official charged in the five-year operation Safe Road investigation of corruption under Ryan.

Ryan has not been charged with criminal wrongdoing in the investigation, which prosecutors said would be ongoing.

"We will continue to take this investigation to its logical end," Collins said. "We're not moving on to other matters. We are continuing this investigation."

Defense attorneys have been saying all along that Fawell was merely conducting business as usual in the rough and tumble of Illinois politics.

If overeager campaign workers went too far and broke the law, he couldn't have known about it, defense attorneys contend.

Jurors heard a fresh version of that argument Tuesday, with Citizens for Ryan attorney Thomas Breen saying the alleged wrongdoing really represented the inevitable mistakes that creep into political life.

"If there was an accounting mistake, if the records weren't perfectly kept, I'm sorry," Breen said. "It was a mistake. It was not an intent to defraud."

"I can't help but think the purpose here is just to peel open some political organization called Citizens for Ryan and look at every blemish and every mistake and everything that we would have done differently and throw it into a criminal charge of racketeering," Breen said.

Breen also echoed remarks on Monday by Fawell's chief defense counsel, Edward Genson, who said Fawell was a fall guy for co-workers who were frightened by prosecutors into cooking up evidence against him.

Collins denied that in emotional terms. He said that if jurors believed such a claim "you should go back into that jury room and sign not guilty to everything you can get your hands on right away."

Collins focused some of his choicest scorn on a claim Monday by Genson that prosecutors had sent Fawell's friend-turned-federal informant Larry Hall to see state Sen. James "Pate" Philip, a Wood Dale Republican, to "bully" Philip into making incriminating statements while secretly taping their talk.

Philip was a defense witness who denied Hall's testimony that Philip had once fixed a state lease in exchange for a campaign contribution.

Collins said Hall was a political small fry in comparison to Philip, the former president of the Illinois Senate.

"The notion of someone like Larry Hall bullying Pate Philip is ludicrous," Collins said. He also warned jurors not to be put off by government testimony from someone like Hall, who began to help prosecutors after getting caught fixing a state contract and helping drunken drivers get bogus licenses.

"A play cast in Hell does not have angels for its actors," Collins said. "There is a lot of dirty stuff happening here."