Sept. 10
ILLINOIS:
George Ryan's final campaign----Facing his corruption trial, ex-governor
tries to shape his legacy
George Ryan waits on a sidewalk downtown, wife Lura Lynn beside him, both
of them looking for their van and a ride home.
Behind him is the DePaul University law school, where, to great praise and
applause, he has just told the improbable story of how he - a small-town
pharmacist by training, a politician by trade - came to reckon with the
death penalty.
Just down the street is the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse building, where, come
Sept. 19, he will go on trial on federal corruption charges.
Passersby stare. Some stop and wish him well. A woman asks, "Didn't you
used to be Governor George Ryan?" drawing a laugh from the former
governor. Then a man approaches. "Didn't you get busted?"
Blinking behind large eyeglasses on this mild day, Ryan briefly stammers
and says, no, he has not been arrested. He glances down Jackson Street,
searching for the van and looking more than a little like someone eager
for an escape.
Ryan gathers himself, then looks the man in the eyes and offers a slight
clarification: He was indicted, that is true, but his trial has not yet
started.
"Well, if you didn't do it, I hope you beat it," the man says. "If you
did, well ..." He then disappears into the thick pedestrian traffic.
This is George Ryan's world: heady afternoons and evenings in which he is
greeted as a hero for his historic actions to stop the death penalty,
mornings when he wakes to the frightening prospect that, at age 71, he may
go to prison.
Ryan passes this time not like a man under siege, but almost as if federal
prosecutors never obtained the massive federal indictment that accuses him
of selling his office to cronies for cash and favors for him and his
family.
Instead, Ryan presses ahead with what he calls his "mission," speaking
publicly against the death penalty.
On that issue, Ryan has been in demand since he left office in January
2003, speaking at colleges and law schools across the nation, to activist
groups and other organizations, from the American Civil Liberties Union in
Peoria to a Rotary Club in Dallas.
On those stages, Ryan finds himself embraced by people who do not care or
do not know about the indictment or the scandal that tarnished his tenure
as governor.
In Austin, Texas, people ask for his autograph. In Champaign, they marvel
at how he did what no other politician would do. And in Mobile, Ala., they
tell him that only God could have sent him.
"You've just got to go on," Ryan says during one of a series of interviews
during the last seven months, conducted as he traveled to and from the
speaking engagements and at his longtime home in Kankakee.
Without a doubt, what happens at the trial will color the legacy of a
politician who rose through the ranks over the course of 3 decades to
become governor of the state of Illinois. It may not, however, answer the
fundamental questions that continue to trail him.
Is George Ryan a hero of the anti-death penalty movement, an elected
official who, by simply following his conscience and emptying Illinois'
death row, helped change the debate on one of this country's more
contentious issues?
Or is he a corrupt politician who adopted capital punishment as an issue
to steer attention away from a growing scandal and save his own skin?
Or is he both?
Embracing a new routine
Ryan is in his element: standing at the podium, bathed in the lights of a
hotel ballroom. The scene is Austin, the annual conference of the Texas
Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. Ryan is the keynote speaker.
The speech Ryan gives now is little different from the one he has given
for the last 2 1/2 years, since the day he stood in Northwestern
University law school's ornate Lincoln Hall and commuted the sentences of
the 167 inmates then on death row to life in prison without parole.
As he often does, Ryan jumbles a few of the facts. As he always does, he
mispronounces the last name of Andrew Kokoraleis, who was convicted of the
1982 mutilation and murder of an Elmhurst woman and whose death sentence
was the only one Ryan allowed carried out as governor.
These days, however, he gives a more forceful, more articulate defense of
his actions and a better explanation of his views on the death penalty.
He describes how, as a state legislator in 1977, he voted to reinstate the
death penalty, though he gave the issue little thought. Then, he simply
accepted that some convicted murderers - the worst of the worst, he calls
them - should be executed.
But, he says, as he learned more about how the death penalty is applied,
he came to question it. So in 2000, citing the exoneration of 13 Illinois
death row inmates, Ryan declared a moratorium on executions.
Then, 3 years later, frustrated that the General Assembly did not act on a
slate of proposals to reform the state's death penalty system, Ryan
pardoned 4 death row prisoners and granted commutations to the rest.
Now, he says, he wants to abolish capital punishment altogether. He tells
audiences he has "come full circle for a guy who used to be a strong
believer to a guy who doesn't see any reason to have it."
Ryan finishes to a rousing standing ovation. Afterward, people surround
him in front of the stage, get his autograph and ask to have their picture
taken with him. He obliges every request.
Emptying death row made Ryan a hero of capital punishment opponents all
over the world. Offers to speak about the death penalty began to come in.
But leaving the governor's office also left Ryan adrift. His power was
gone. The comforts of office were gone. Instead of traveling with his
state police security detail and aides, Ryan now travels mostly alone,
which he says he does not mind though friends and others say he dislikes
it.
He pulls his own suitcase through airports. He sits at small tables in
airport restaurants and eats by himself. He waits alone for his flights.
Other travelers recognize his florid face and corrugated brow, his great
mass of shoulders, the dusting of snowy white hair, always neatly combed.
And the voice - the baritone. When Ryan speaks, any uncertainty other
travelers have of who he is immediately disappears.
They approach him, say hello, pump his hand up and down. For a moment,
Ryan is on the campaign trail again. One morning, a man with his young son
riding on his shoulders introduced himself to Ryan, and Ryan chatted him
up, asking where he was going. Ryan tugged gently at the boy's feet.
Not everyone considers him benignly. Some travelers shake their heads when
they see him or, out of earshot, mutter, "His next flight will be on the
prison plane" or "Hey, how about getting me a free job."
He knows people say things like that. He does not much care.
"The people who say I'm going to be on the next prison plane," he says,
"well, they haven't got the balls to come up to me and say it."
The indictment has changed everything for Ryan, including the company he
keeps. Now, he counts radicals, activists and students among his friends.
He even agreed to be honorary chairman for an international anti-death
penalty group, Hands Off Cain, "a radical, left-wing group I probably
shouldn't be involved with," he says.
The Northwestern University law school's Center on Wrongful Convictions
offered Ryan the warmest embrace, essentially becoming his staff after he
left office and needed to sort through speaking requests. Lawrence
Marshall, who had grown close to Ryan as the center's legal director,
offered to help him.
Marshall, now a Stanford University law school professor, says he set
aside an hour to talk with Ryan. "He said, 'Why do you want to talk about
it? I trust you. Just decide which ones are best,'" Marshall says. "He
decided that I was an OK guy who he could trust."
Marshall never considered turning his back on the embattled Ryan.
"Look. This guy had stuck his neck out and sacrificed a lot," Marshall
says. "The last thing we're going to do is leave him high and dry."
But some friends and former aides, feeling betrayed by the scandal that
helped persuade Ryan not to seek re-election, abandoned him.
"Some friends we used to have, we don't hear from them so much anymore,"
Ryan says. "But you know, I'm not governor anymore, and I don't have
anything to give anyone. People call when they want something."
Says Joe Hannon, who headed the state's trade office when Ryan was
governor and remains one of his closest friends: "There's an awkwardness.
It's a little like going to the hospital to see someone who you know isn't
going home."
But in Ryan's new world this awkwardness seldom intrudes, in part because
it is not allowed to. Through all of the travel, all of the speeches, all
of the awards, the federal indictment is almost never spoken of. It is as
if it were a family secret.
At the DePaul law school, professor Andrea Lyon - who invited Ryan and
whose client Madison Hobley was one of the death row prisoners Ryan
pardoned - asked her students not to bring up the indictment.
Lyon, who has since joined Ryan's defense team, did not want to embarrass
him.
In Champaign, at the screening of a documentary that focuses on Ryan and
the commutations, he was again protected from difficult questions.
As the movie ended, Ryan walked to the front of the theater to a huge
ovation. He was prepared to answer questions from the audience. The
event's organizer, Rachael Dietkus, issued the audience a stern warning,
saying that she would cut off any questioner who went "off topic."
No one did.
Where it all started
It is a Sunday morning. Ryan, just returned from Austin, is speeding south
across the state he governed for 4 years.
At the wheel is Champ Witoski, a retired tool and die maker, a bullet of a
man whose mother was so fond of the Hollywood singing cowboy Gene Autry
that she named her son after his movie horse, Champion.
Witoski often drives Ryan to his speaking engagements. Ryan sits in the
back of his 1991 Ford custom van, in one of the captain's chairs. Witoski
calls him "sir."
>From his seat - the faux-wood paneling giving the van the look of an
office, a syrupy sun flooding in - landmarks and highway signs trigger a
stream of memories.
At Kankakee, he asks Witoski to pull off the road for a short tour. Here,
he points proudly, is a children's water park named for Ryan and his wife.
There is an ice rink under construction, a product of Ryan's $12 billion
Illinois FIRST public works program. Here is the George H. Ryan Activities
Center at the Kankakee Community College.
In all, Ryan estimates, he delivered more than $150 million in roads,
bridges, schools, jails, firetrucks and other projects to Kankakee and the
surrounding communities throughout his career.
"I feel pretty good about the 30 years I was in government," he says,
ticking off a list of other projects. "We got a lot of things done."
The son of a pharmacist, Ryan was a child when his mother and father came
to Illinois from Iowa, first to the South Side of Chicago, then to
Kankakee, where the Walgreen's drug store chain transferred his father.
Ryan became a pharmacist, too, helping to run what eventually became the
family's chain of four drug stores around Kankakee.
Ryan got his start in politics on the Kankakee County Board. He had helped
his brother Tom win election as mayor of Kankakee, and when a spot on the
County Board opened, Republican Party officials approached him.
"It was a chance to serve in government without leaving home," Ryan
recalled. "It was a chance to get involved."
After 6 years on the board, the last as chairman, Ryan won a seat in the
General Assembly. In time, he became the Republican leader, then speaker
of the House, the post in which he began to develop his reputation as a
deal-maker who could work across party lines.
He then moved into statewide offices. He served two terms as in the
largely ceremonial post of lieutenant governor under Gov. James Thompson,
then 2 terms in the job-heavy secretary of state's office.
Ryan reached the governor's office without any guiding political
philosophy, a moderate Republican who governed viscerally, by instinct. He
felt free to change his mind and often did, something that he prided
himself on but that aides sometimes found frustrating. He could be swayed
by an emotional appeal, by the last person who had his ear.
He was a hands-off manager with little interest in the fine details, a
governor who preferred bold moves to the tinkering that occupies some
chief executives. And he enjoyed the business of politics, especially the
job of governor.
"I didn't want to go to bed at night. I couldn't wait to get up in the
morning," he says.
Even before his actions on the death penalty, Ryan found ways to anger and
alienate his party, especially its more conservative wing.
He opposed abortion, yet supported the use of Medicaid funds for abortions
for poor women whose health was in jeopardy. He was a hunter and generally
opposed gun control, but favored several gun-control packages. In spite of
the U.S. travel restrictions, he visited Cuba twice and met with its
leader Fidel Castro.
On no issue, however, did Ryan alienate the Republican faithful more than
on the issue of capital punishment.
For most of his political career, Ryan gave it little thought. Then, in a
matter of 6 weeks in 1999, Ryan watched 1 death row inmate go free after
university journalism students and a private investigator proved that he
was not guilty, and he had to decide if another should be put to death.
Scott Fawell, Ryan's former chief of staff, remembers that Ryan agonized
over Kokoraleis' execution, even though there was little doubt as to his
guilt.
Now in federal prison for his role in the corruption scandal, Fawell is
set to testify against Ryan in exchange for leniency for his girlfriend,
who also was swept up in the federal investigation. Fawell, contacted by
the Tribune, provided written responses to questions about Ryan, who once
treated him as a son.
As Kokoraleis' execution date drew near, Fawell wrote, Ryan "kept saying
'I can't put someone to death' and I kept arguing, 'You're not, the legal
system has determined his fate. You just have to get out of the way."
After much thought, Ryan allowed Kokoraleis to be put to death.
"I have no doubt that while he let that one execution be carried out that
he knew that was it," Fawell wrote.
Less than a year later, Ryan declared a moratorium on executions and
appointed a commission to study the state's death penalty system and to
make recommendations for reform. The panel returned with 85 proposals.
After the legislature did not enact his reforms, Ryan faced leaving the
governor's office with a death penalty system that was, in his words,
"broken."
In his final days as governor, Ryan announced the pardons and the blanket
commutation. They were his last significant acts as Illinois' governor.
'Absolutely not guilty'
It was Dec. 23, 2003, and Ryan was sitting in a conference room in his
lawyers' downtown offices, surrounded by attorneys, his wife, his friends.
His big hands were clasped together. The mood was dark.
"There were two things that I never thought would happen," he told his
closest friends that day. "That I'd be governor, and then this."
Days earlier, U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald had announced Ryan's
indictment, saying that "what we're alleging in the indictment is that
basically the State of Illinois was for sale, for [Ryan's] friends and
family at times."
In response, Ryan defiantly told the judge that he was "absolutely not
guilty."
Ryan will not discuss specifics of the allegations against him, but he
does offer a blanket denial: "I've got nothing to be ashamed of for all
the years I spent in government. Those are allegations, and we'll prove
they're wrong."
Ryan's indictment was a product of the Operation Safe Road investigation,
which has netted 6 dozen convictions. Launched as an investigation of
truck drivers paying bribes to Ryan's secretary of state's office to get
licenses, it soon was expanded to encompass broader political corruption.
Federal prosecutors claim that the corruption defined Ryan's tenure as
secretary of state and governor and that he took money and favors for
himself and for his family in exchange for steering lucrative state
contracts to his friends and cronies. He also is charged with lying to
federal agents.
Ryan is scheduled to go to trial with Lawrence Warner, a longtime friend
and a member of Ryan's so-called "kitchen cabinet" of his closest
advisers, in front of U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer. Prosecutors
allege that Warner provided cash, loans, gifts and services to Ryan family
members totaling $167,000.
Warner also has pleaded not guilty.
Ryan's harshest critics draw a line from the financial corruption to the
deaths of six children in a highway crash involving a trucker who paid a
bribe to get his license - the event that sparked the investigation and
ultimately led to Ryan's indictment.
"His office was a cesspool of corruption," says Joe Power, the attorney
who represented the parents of the children killed in the highway crash
and who pushed hard for Ryan to be held accountable. "When there's the
death of six innocent children, you can understand why public sentiment
would call for accountability."
Ryan's supporters suggest Warner and others took advantage of Ryan's good
nature and hands-off management style, of a governor who never read the
full text of a bill and rarely studied details.
These friends of Ryan's, aides say, had such a run of the office that it
sometimes was difficult to get work done.
"If I'd had my druthers I'd have kicked them all out," says Robert
Newtson, Ryan's former chief of staff. "These are people who knew George's
management style, how he was as a person. I think that they simply took
advantage of it."
"Did he do things that were violations of the law? Probably," says former
Budget Bureau Director Stephen Schnorf, adding that federal prosecutors
twice have interviewed him in their investigation. "Did he do them
knowingly, intentionally? I can't imagine that."
Power says Ryan had to know about the wrongdoing in his office.
"Either he was aware of everything going on in the office ... or he's the
village idiot," he says. "I will leave that up to others to be judge of."
Prosecutors have suggested Ryan's death penalty actions were corrupt as
well, taken only after Ryan knew federal agents were investigating him and
intended to deflect attention away from the scandal.
They say, too, that Ryan is trying to use his death penalty actions to
construct an image of someone who never would have taken part in
corruption.
They point to a Web site, the Friends of George Ryan Fund at
http://www.georgeryanfund.com, that extols Ryan's accomplishments on
capital punishment and solicits contributions.
Those close to Ryan's decisions on the death penalty say the federal
investigation was never a factor. They say Ryan acted, as he did on other
issues, because he believed that it was right.
"There was no upside at all for us in that issue," Newtson says. "The
people we needed on other issues all were mad at us. And all of the death
penalty people, well, they'd never be with us on other issues."
Even Scott Fawell, the prosecutors' star witness, contradicts the
government's suggestion that Ryan used the death penalty to deflect
attention away from the investigation or to curry support with potential
jurors.
He wrote, "The death penalty issue was a moral decision he made. Period."
Either way, Pallmeyer ruled recently that Ryan's lawyers cannot tell
jurors about his actions on the death penalty as part of his defense.
Finding order, purpose
"If I didn't have that issue," Ryan says, "I'd just be retired."
He is sitting in the family room of his Kankakee home, talking about the
death penalty, trying to explain how it fills his days, informs his life.
He is clad in what passes for casual for a man who has worn a suit nearly
every day for the last 30 years: gray slacks, a dress shirt, a blue
blazer. A portrait done when he was speaker of the Illinois House gazes
down at him from over the mantle.
When he's not on the road, life revolves around the modest brick home he
has lived in for 40 years, near the Kankakee River and just a block from
the house in which he was raised, where his sister still lives.
He runs to the grocery store for his wife. He visits relatives and
friends, an increasing number of whom are becoming ill or even dying, he
says.
He has been sorting through years of clutter in the basement and the
attic, a history of his campaigns, elections and political offices.
He drives a few blocks for donuts, then comes home and climbs the back
steps into the kitchen, joking to his wife that maybe he saved 2 glazed
for her.
Last weekend, they drove to Niagara Falls.
If the trial weighs on his mind, it does not show. Although friends say
Ryan is fearful of being convicted and sent to prison - and of losing his
pension - he speaks of the trial with supreme confidence, as if it is
merely a nuisance to be dispatched with as quickly as possible.
When he leaves home it usually is because he is speaking on the death
penalty. The issue - reading the latest articles and books, talking with
advocates, proselytizing - has given his life a sense of order, purpose.
Recently, he has been speaking Sundays at area churches.
For Ryan there are the crowds that support him, crowds that he hopes to
win over and crowds he has no chance of winning, although he appears to
relish the chance to try.
One warm and humid morning late in the spring, Ryan strides into a private
club on the outskirts of Dallas for a local Rotary meeting. The Dallas
skyline is in the distance.
Unlike the majority of Ryan's other audiences, this one is almost
exclusively male and almost all white. It is well-to-do, mostly
Dallas-area business people. They also are ardent death penalty
supporters.
This is the 1st time Ryan has encountered a crowd that is not on his side
from the start and likely will not be converted easily.
As the club members push away their breakfast plates and turn their chairs
to listen to Ryan, they appear respectful but skeptical.
Because Ryan does not tailor his speech for each new audience, there
sometimes are odd moments. When he asks whether anyone in the suit-and-tie
crowd knows anyone on death row, the crowd appears puzzled.
Then, after talking about how racism has infected the system, he asks the
crowd, "How would you like to sit before an all-white jury?"
Again, puzzled.
Then he heads into the body of his speech and, as he always does, he gains
a head of steam. He tells his story, from the man who pushed the green
button as a legislator to reinstate the death penalty in Illinois, to the
man who ended it.
"Who the hell am I," he says, "to say that a man should die?"
At the end, Ryan agrees to take questions. One man asks about abortion,
seeming to confuse Ryan briefly. Ryan gives the question a brusque
dismissal. "I'm here," he says, "for the death penalty."
When Ryan dodges a question, someone from the back of the room says,
"You're not answering the question, governor." No one on the lecture
circuit has said something like that before. But when a member tries to
come to Ryan's rescue, Ryan shrugs it off and asks for more questions.
"Come on," Ryan says. "Bring them on."
When no one raises a hand, he gives the audience a satisfied look.
"Any more?" Ryan asks, almost baiting the audience. "No? You guys are
easy."
(source: Chicago Tribune)
