Illinois nurtured the nation’s greatest president in Abraham Lincoln. It is the birthplace of iconic Republican President Ronald Reagan and the state where Democrat Barack Obama, the country’s first Black president, developed his political chops. But Illinois is far better known for a more notorious political legacy: constant and persistent corruption.
Four of its last 11 governors went to prison. Chicago, its largest city, is home to sweeping federal sting operations that put busloads of judges , aldermen , state lawmakers and other officials behind bars . Even the state auditor — Illinois government’s financial watchdog — was once caught looting and squandering $2.
5 million in public funds. One secretary of state famously amassed more than $750,000, including a shoebox stuffed with cash, that was found stashed in a hotel room after his death. The largest municipal fraud in U.
S. history is credited to a small-town treasurer in Illinois who embezzled $54 million. It is a list that goes on and on , with no end in sight.
This fall, former House Speaker Michael Madigan — long the state’s most powerful politician — faces trial on racketeering and bribery charges. And the dean of the Chicago City Council, Ed Burke, is due to report to prison for shaking down business owners and developers. Undoubtedly corruption isn’t unique to just Illinois or Chicago.
But the depth of it, and its consistency, are. As Democrats this past week wrapped up their national presidential nominating convention in Chicago, perhaps no place was more appropriate than Illinois to witness the launching of a presidential contest between a former prosecutor and a convicted felon. What makes Illinois so corrupt? In the coming weeks and months, the Tribune will explore and attempt to explain why corruption continues to poison virtually every level of government in our state, draining off tax dollars and robbing public service of its meaning.
The reasons are many, the Tribune found, beginning with the ambition and greed brought here by many of Illinois’ first European settlers. In reporting a series we’re calling “Culture of Corruption,” the Tribune found numerous other factors contributing to Illinois’ shameful record: Loosely regulated big-money campaigns. Domineering mayors letting shifty aldermen run amok.
Cozy interactions between lobbyists and public officials. A ballot process power brokers often use to exclude newcomers. The largest number of governmental bodies in the nation, offering endless opportunities for graft amid little oversight.
Of course, not all of the state’s politicians have been crooks, with many seeing government service as an honorable profession and a way to address society’s problems. But even they are tarnished by the misdeeds of those who view corruption as the end to their personal means. Federal prosecutors have kept busy for decades putting Illinois officials on trial, sometimes after lengthy investigations with names like “Operation Haunted Hall,” “Operation Silver Shovel,” “Operation Board Games” and “Operation Greylord.
” A federal prison in nearby Oxford, Wisconsin, has become such a regular destination for convicted Illinois politicians that, at one point, it housed four Chicago aldermen, a Metropolitan Water Reclamation District board member and a state representative. When they bumped into one another, the six men would jokingly yell “quorum call!” But prosecuting public corruption just got much more difficult. In June, the U.
S. Supreme Court ruled in a case from neighboring northwest Indiana that a federal bribery statute used regularly to prosecute Chicago-area public officials was overly broad. Former House Speaker Michael Madigan, long the state’s most powerful politician, faces trial this fall on corruption charges.
(Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune) Madigan made a similar argument going into his federal corruption trial, arguing a portion of the U.S. attorney’s racketeering and bribery case against him is predicated on Illinois laws so broad they should be declared “void for vagueness” under the U.
S. Constitution. Living in a state perennially ranked as among the most corrupt in the nation, Illinois residents bear the title with a mix of shame and perverse pride, even when the state serves as a national laughingstock.
“You’re an Illinois politician and you’re not in jail,” mused “Jeopardy” host Ken Jennings on July 17 to laughter from a Culver City, California, studio audience. Jennings was discussing contestant Jay Fisher’s brief two-day stint as an appointed Illinois state senator from suburban Lisle. “Jay, you did it,” Jennings said.
Perhaps nothing says more about how tightly public corruption is woven into the fabric of Illinois than the number of public workers found to have fraudulently obtained money through the federal Paycheck Protection Program during the pandemic — often by falsely claiming they had a beauty salon or a car wash or other side business that deserved help. Through April, the state’s executive inspector general’s office had identified at least 275 workers who pocketed a total of $7.2 million from fraudulent loans.
They worked at a variety of state agencies, with 175 of them at the Department of Human Services. There also were 31 state prison workers and even three people employed by the Illinois State Police. “Regardless of the ease of procuring these PPP funds, this was not free money for the taking,” the executive inspector general’s office said.
“The State of Illinois Code of Personal Conduct requires state employees to conduct themselves ‘with integrity and in a manner that reflects favorably upon the state.’” Instead, they behaved in a manner that arguably better reflected the state, in all of its tawdry glory. From the 19th century to the present day, Illinois has been stuck in a perpetual cycle of voters putting politicians in office and judges putting them in jail.
And the city of Chicago has never fully shaken off the unofficial slogan uttered decades ago by Ald. Mathias “Paddy” Bauler, a North Side saloonkeeper: “Chicago ain’t ready for reform.” One of the main reasons is Illinois’ particular political culture, coded into the state’s DNA from its earliest days.
Many of the settlers who journeyed here had a lawless, get-it-while-you-can mindset that has persisted through the following generations. As a result, Illinoisans tend to view government as an economic marketplace and politicians as entrepreneurs seeking power, influence — and money. The late political scientist Daniel Elazar posited in his 1966 book “American Federalism: A View from the States” that there are three dominant political subcultures in the United States: moralistic, in which government is viewed as pursuing a common good; traditionalistic, in which a hierarchy of elites serves the masses; and individualistic, where individuals believe in operating in their own self-interest with little respect for the institution of government.
Guess where Illinois fits in? “You expect high corruption in individualistic states because you know who settled there. They see politics as a marketplace. They see a politician as a person who is in politics because they want to enrich himself,” said Oguzhan Dincer, a professor of economics and the director of the Institute for Corruption Studies at Illinois State University.
“It does explain the continuous corruption in Illinois, New Jersey and Louisiana and all these states where there’s this deeply rooted culture,” Dincer said. No wonder that under such a culture Illinois has few regulations governing the financially cozy relationship between government officials and the lobbyists paid by powerful interests to influence them. Lobbying plays a key role in the allegations against Madigan.
Prosecutors allege two of the state’s largest utilities, Commonwealth Edison and AT&T Illinois, used paid lobbyists and consultants to try to influence the state’s ultimate power broker. Madigan’s co-defendant, Michael McClain, is a former lawmaker turned ComEd lobbyist and consultant who already was convicted on federal corruption charges alongside three other utility executives and lobbyists. In contrast to many other states, Illinois until last year did not have a required waiting period between the time lawmakers left office and when they could start lobbying their former colleagues.
And advocates for lobbying reform say the new six-month requirement is too short and riddled with loopholes. Other efforts to further tighten the rules often have been met with stiff resistance from politicians who may not be eager to place restrictions on an industry where they could seek future employment. Even a bill pushed by Democratic Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias to force more public disclosure of how much lobbyists are paid was given little more than a perfunctory hearing in the legislature.
“That’s a huge loophole,” Craig Holman, who lobbies on Capitol Hill for the Washington-based consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said of lack of compensation disclosure in Illinois law. “That’s the money that really matters.” The history of Illinois’ money-minded politics also features many governors, lawmakers and aldermen caught in scandals related to campaign finance funds.
Loose rules and feeble enforcement allow Illinois politicians to find loopholes in campaign finance laws already bent to their advantage. And then there’s the influence of big money on politics, which some fear is turning Illinois from a democracy into a “cashocracy.” Billionaire Democrat JB Pritzker spent freely to win two terms as governor, fending off billionaire Republicans.
Legislative leaders blow past campaign contribution limits. Super PAC spending runs wild. Former Ald.
Edward Burke, shown in 2019, was the undisputed leader of the City Council for decades before being charged and convicted. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune) In recent years, politicians have flung the term “corrupt” at their opponents so frequently that the term has lost some of its sting, becoming a generic insult rather than a reference to specific illegal acts. But the examples of Burke and Madigan — two of the most successful acolytes of the Democratic machine run by longtime Chicago Mayor Richard J.
Daley — show how deeply serious corruption allegations are embedded in the state’s power structure. Burke, the former alderman of the 14th Ward on the city’s Southwest Side and undisputed leader of the City Council for decades, received a prison sentence in June for old-style shakedowns that sought business for his law firm in exchange for favorable treatment at City Hall. Madigan, the former state House speaker and the ex-chair of the state Democratic Party, is headed to trial in October on allegations that he ran his public office and political operations like a criminal enterprise.
Madigan has denied the charges. Commonwealth Edison has paid a $200 million fine, a record for the Chicago federal courthouse, for trying to secure Madigan’s favor. In 1996, Burke and Madigan served as local kingpins in Chicago’s previous Democratic National Convention, hosted by Hizzoner’s son, Mayor Richard M.
Daley, and run smoothly enough to exorcise many of the ghosts from the elder Daley’s 1968 debacle, when billy club-wielding police rampaged against protesters. Burke and Madigan were absent from this year’s convention, part of a select class of nine Illinois delegates and alternate delegates in 1996 who later wound up charged, implicated or convicted of crimes. One of the convention speakers in 1996 was Rod Blagojevich, a backbench Northwest Side state representative seeking to move up to Congress.
He would serve three terms in the U.S. House, holding the same seat as political powerhouse Dan Rostenkowski, whom voters had ejected after his indictment on corruption charges.
Blagojevich — backed by his influential father-in-law, 33rd Ward Ald. Dick Mell — later ran for governor as a reformer, looking to succeed Republican Gov. George Ryan, who went to federal prison for corruption.
In that case, underlings from Ryan’s tenure as secretary of state were found to have sold driver’s licenses for bribes, with some of that money being funneled into Ryan’s campaign fund. The fund became the first in American history to be indicted for racketeering. But Blagojevich would be joining Rostenkowski and Ryan on the list of corrupt Illinois politicians.
Following a lengthy federal investigation, he was charged with trying to shake down a children’s hospital and a horse-racing track for campaign funds as well as attempting to sell the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Obama after he was elected president.
Blagojevich became the first Illinois governor to be impeached and convicted by the state legislature, and he was barred from ever seeking a future state office. Robert Grant, then the FBI’s special agent in charge of its Chicago field office, gave his view of Illinois after Blagojevich’s arrest: “If it isn’t the most corrupt state in the United States, it’s certainly one hell of a competitor.” Blagojevich was convicted in federal court and sentenced to 14 years in prison.
Never fully expressing remorse or acknowledging the consequences of his crime, Blagojevich now calls himself a “Trumpocrat” after Republican President Donald Trump in 2020 commuted Blagojevich’s sentence to time served after nearly eight years. Former Gov. Rod Blagojevich waves during an evening run in 2019 while in federal custody in Colorado.
(Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune) Blagojevich and Ryan, who received a 61⁄2-year sentence, gave Illinois the rare distinction of having two ex-governors behind bars at the same time. Before them came Democrats Dan Walker, who pleaded guilty in 1987 to bank fraud not related to his time as governor, and Otto Kerner, convicted in 1973 of trading official acts as governor for horse-racing stock. Kerner was serving as a federal appellate court judge when he was indicted.
Two other former governors, Republicans Len Small and William Stratton, were acquitted in criminal trials. The state’s 10th governor, Joel Aldrich Matteson, the namesake of the south suburb, was accused of defrauding the state of nearly $400,000, but the investigation was dropped when he agreed to reimburse the state — even though he maintained his innocence. The ranks of scoundrels elected statewide and then sentenced to prison encompass officials in the positions of attorney general, treasurer and auditor — a job eliminated and divided into separate posts to keep better track of money coming in and money going out because of former Auditor Orville Hodge.
Orville Hodge, former state auditor, center, shown in 1957, embezzled public money that he used to buy aircraft and luxury cars. (Chicago Tribune) Hodge, a former GOP state representative viewed as an up-and-comer, was elected auditor in 1952 and shortly after taking office claimed his office was underfunded. He got lawmakers to approve a $525,000 additional appropriation for the office, and he then embezzled “more than $1 million from phony state warrants; misappropriated another half million of liquidating funds of closed banks and robbed the taxpayers of another million by padding illegal expense accounts, illicit expenditures, fraudulent contracts and waste,” according to an account on the Illinois state comptroller’s own website.
Hodge used the illegal gains to purchase private aircraft and luxury cars. He served about 61⁄2 years in prison. Hodge hailed from downstate Granite City — helping show that Illinois’ corruption is not limited to Chicago.
Indeed, the most notorious story of Illinois political graft involves a now-disgraced politician from far southern Vienna. And he was never even indicted. Paul Powell, a former Illinois House speaker, was elected Democratic secretary of state in 1964 and reelected in 1968.
In 1970, he died on an out-of-state trip with his secretary. Inside his regular hotel suite at the St. Nicholas Hotel in Springfield, $750,000 was found strewn around in whiskey crates, strongboxes, old clothes and perhaps the ultimate and most infamous emblem of Illinois politics: a shoebox stuffed with cash.
Another $50,000 was found in his state office. Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, left, attends a 1968 dinner in honor of Illinois Secretary of State Paul Powell, right.
When Powell died in 1970, authorities found $750,000 in cash in his hotel suite. (Don Casper/Chicago Tribune) Even though his annual salary never topped $30,000, Powell’s estate in 1978 amounted to more than $3.5 million, plus an additional $1 million in racetrack stock, accrued largely thanks to his alleged propensity to take bribes in exchange for contracts.
“There’s only one thing worse than a defeated politician, and that’s a broke politician,” was one of Powell’s more famous utterances. Just a few years before Powell’s death, a young Democratic state senator sporting bow ties and horn-rimmed glasses with a background in crusading small-town journalism lashed out at the unspoken flow of cash and favors between politicians and lobbyists in the General Assembly. The 1964 publication of his “The Illinois Legislature.
A Study In Corruption” in Harper’s Magazine made Paul Simon a political pariah in Springfield for several years, earning him a “Benedict Arnold award” from colleagues. But it also made him a rising liberal star and the state’s lieutenant governor, though Simon lost a primary bid for governor in an ill-suited alliance with the Daley machine he had fought in Springfield. He later was elected to the U.
S. House, then the U.S.
Senate, ran an unsuccessful 1988 presidential bid and finished his tenure in public office in 1996, untainted by impropriety. Illinois’ delegation of federal lawmakers who disgraced themselves in Washington — some of them nationally known figures — were charged with or convicted of an array of crimes, from scheming to rob a train to smuggling booze into the country during Prohibition. There’s Rostenkowski, the Democrat who spent 18 terms in Congress and was the architect for much of the nation’s tax policy in the 1980s.
His power was evident when he helped save St. Stanislaus Kostka Church and several of its parish buildings from the wrecking ball by ensuring today’s Kennedy Expressway was routed around them. Former Rep.
Dan Rostenkowski, center, walks along Madison Street in Chicago in 1997. He was out of federal prison and in a work-release program at the time. (Chuck Berman/Chicago Tribune) Then Rostenkowski was named in a 13-count indictment that included charges he had embezzled from the House post office, used his official expense account to buy cars for personal use and obstructed justice.
“I always said I violated House rules, but was not in violation of the law,” Rostenkowski said. “But my lawyers later explained to me that a jury could conclude that I had violated the law.” He pleaded guilty to two counts of mail fraud and was imprisoned for 15 months.
In 2000, President Bill Clinton pardoned him, but even Rostenkowski knew the conviction would stain his legacy forever. “You know, with all the legislation that I passed, with all the history that I’ve written with respect to the economics of the country, they’re always going to say, ‘There’s a felon named Danny Rostenkowski,’” the former congressman said in a 1998 interview with WBBM-AM. Another prominent Illinois politician — the nation’s longest-serving Republican U.
S. House speaker, Dennis Hastert of Plano — went to prison in a hush-money case that revealed allegations he sexually abused teenagers decades earlier while coaching high school wrestling. “Nothing is more disturbing than having ‘serial child molester’ and ‘Speaker of the House’ in the same sentence,” U.
S. District Judge Thomas Durkin said at Hastert’s 2016 sentencing. Back on the Democratic side, U.
S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.
of Chicago went to prison for spending wildly from his campaign fund — fumbling an opportunity to capitalize fully on his namesake father’s civil rights record and groundbreaking runs for president. Jesse Jackson Jr. and his wife, Sandi, arrive for their sentencing hearing in 2013 in Washington, D.
C. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune) The younger Jackson’s then-wife, 7th Ward Ald. Sandi Jackson, also went to prison for failing to report on the couple’s income taxes the roughly $750,000 he took from his campaign treasury to pay for vacations, luxury goods, celebrity memorabilia and two mounted elk heads.
One major nationwide reform for which Illinois can actually claim a measure of credit is the country’s decision to hold the direct election of U.S. senators and abandon the original practice of leaving the selection up to lawmakers in statehouses throughout America — the adoption of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution.
Illinois’ role, however, was less than noble. Momentum to make the change followed a bribery scandal among state lawmakers in Springfield who took payoffs in exchange for their votes to send Republican William Lorimer to the U.S.
Senate. In 1912, senators expelled Lorimer and ruled his election was invalid because he attained the post through corrupt methods. When Illinois lawmakers took payoffs to put William Lorimer, second from right, into the U.
S. Senate, the scandal led to a constitutional amendment establishing the direct election of senators. (Chicago Tribune historical photo) Lorimer’s removal underscored Illinois’ growing reputation for entrenched corruption.
The nationwide slapdown of Illinois’ rogue state officials came only a few years after state representatives took umbrage in 1905 when a rookie colleague suggested during a college lecture that the Illinois General Assembly was up for sale like a “public auction.” That representative, Frank D. Comerford of Chicago, soon found himself defending his right to speak out before fellow House lawmakers who sought to expel him from office.
“Comerford shook his fist in the faces of his enemies and called them liars, and his enemies shook their fists in his face and called him a liar,” according to reports in the Chicago Daily Tribune. After a four-hour debate, the Illinois House voted 121-13 to expel Comerford. Perhaps no one government entity better illustrates Illinois’ intractable graft than the Chicago City Council, whose members often prioritize self-dealing over public service.
In the half-century since the first Mayor Daley presided over Chicago’s notorious Democratic machine at the height of its power, nearly 40 aldermen have ended up behind bars. The roll call includes a father and son charged nearly 30 years apart, the two most powerful aldermen over the last five decades and a self-styled good government champion who was known to some as the “conscience of the council.” In Chicago, there are two core reasons for corruption — one cultural and the other structural.
There’s a deeply ingrained culture where corrupt acts are often overlooked in order to keep the status quo, and an unwritten power-sharing agreement between the mayor and the council that has neutered the usual checks and balances. John Lausch, the local U.S.
attorney until last year, once said he hoped an alderman’s prison sentence would discourage Chicago’s “’Where’s mine?’ culture.” But the assembly line of convicted aldermen keeps rolling. The stage for corruption isn’t reserved only for politicians in Chicago, Springfield and Washington.
For nearly 30 years, Rita Crundwell served as the comptroller and treasurer of Dixon, where Ronald Reagan spent his youth, and was known to just about everyone in the town of 16,000. In 2012, she was arrested for embezzling $54 million from the town in the previous 22 years, using it to fund a lavish lifestyle of hundreds of quarter horses, flashy jewelry, five properties, a luxury motorhome and other vehicles, all while city services deteriorated. Rita Crundwell, former comptroller of Dixon, was arrested in 2012 for embezzling $54 million that she used to fund a lavish lifestyle, including hundreds of quarter horses.
(Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune) After Crundwell pleaded guilty in 2012, a federal judge in Rockford sentenced her to nearly 20 years in prison and ordered Crundwell to pay restitution; the federal government sold off her assets. The woman behind the nation’s largest municipal embezzlement, she was given a compassionate release by the federal Bureau of Prisons in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nick Blase was known for 45 years as the affable and effective mayor overseeing the growth of northwest suburban Niles.
That was until his 2006 arrest on federal corruption charges that for at least 17 years he had steered businesses in the village to a friend’s insurance company in return for hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks. Then Blase would do favors for the businesses who bought the insurance. Nick Blase, shown at his Niles home in 2011, steered businesses in the village to a friend’s insurance company in return for kickbacks.
(William DeShazer/ Chicago Tribune) At the age of 81, Blase pleaded guilty. Prosecutors recommended a four-year imprisonment, but he was sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison in 2010 by a federal judge who said he didn’t want to see Blase die in prison. Blase died in 2019 at age 91.
In Rockford, the city’s former energy director — the person in charge of a taxpayer-paid weatherization program to assist low-income residents in northwest Winnebago and Boone counties — pleaded guilty in 2013 to federal charges of forcing a heating contractor and window contractor to pay him kickbacks. According to his plea agreements, Mark Bixby’s illegal gains included a new 2007 red, two-door convertible Pontiac Solstice, $18,440 in alleged charitable donations that were actually deposited into bank accounts he and a family member controlled, a $2,000 loan that was never repaid and $2,980 for cemetery plots he sold to the heating contractor without ever turning over the titles or deeds. Bixby was sentenced in 2014 to 14 months in federal prison and another three years of supervised release.
He was also ordered to pay more than $41,000 in restitution to the two contractors. The corruption percolating throughout the state underscores the fact that Illinois has far more units of government than any state in the nation — more than 8,500 of them, from villages and townships to sanitary districts. That helps enable corrupt behavior as multitudinous local officials operate with little oversight.
About half of the state’s 2,826 general municipal governments are townships — a 17th century form of government that initially dealt with land sales to farmers but has evolved in Illinois to become responsible for maintaining roads, assisting low-income households and helping homeowners with their property taxes. Critics contend these functions can now be easily handled at the city and county level. But efforts to reduce the number of township governments have gone nowhere even as some townships have made headlines for their officials’ jaw-dropping behavior.
One prime example is the state’s biggest township, Thornton Township in the south suburbs, where Dolton is located. For decades, Thornton Township was a Democratic vote-delivering powerhouse under its supervisor, Frank Zuccarelli, who died in 2021. His replacement, Dolton Mayor Tiffany Henyard, now finds herself under federal scrutiny over her aggressive spending of taxpayer dollars and other actions while holding both jobs.
Her combined government salaries pay $277,000 a year. Once Illinoisans gain power, they tend to keep it. The state’s election laws make it harder than most places for candidates to get on the ballot and easier than most places for rivals to kick them off — or at least tie them up in quasi-judicial proceedings that drain fledgling candidates of energy and money for legal fees.
It’s a subjective process that often results in the signatures of legitimate voters being invalidated. Most candidates survive the challenges but are so politically bruised that long-shot bids become much longer shots. And some candidacies don’t survive at all.
In essence, power brokers — especially the Democrats who rule in Chicago and Cook County — have allowed paperwork challenges to become a messy, expensive political bloodsport in ways that kneecap newcomers, cost taxpayers and limit voter choice. At the core, it all comes back to controlling the political marketplace — and then cashing in. In 1997, Chicago Ald.
Ray Frias faced charges that as a state representative he pocketed a bribe and attempted to extort $25,000 to help finance a potential run for Congress. On tape, Frias was asked by an FBI mole what he was in the legislature for. “Mmmm, making money,” Frias replied.
“That’s what, that’s what life’s about.” Frias was acquitted. Tribune intern Malavika Ramakrishnan contributed.
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