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Ryan case just latest in long line of Illinois corruption scandals

Monday, August 22, 2005 12:19 AM CDT

CHICAGO (AP) - About the time former Gov. George Ryan was getting his feet wet in politics as a member of the Kankakee County Board, a former Illinois secretary of state was making headlines for the $750,000 in cash stuffed in shoeboxes found in his home when he died.

A few years later, as Ryan was starting his climb up the political ladder in Springfield, a former governor was heading off to

federal prison after a conviction of conspiracy, income tax evasion and other charges.

And while Ryan was getting comfortable as House Republican leader, the feds were taking on Statehouse "fetcher bills," the name given to legislation introduced simply to "fetch" payoffs to kill the bill.

Illinois politics got its reputation as a murky business long before Ryan was charged with using his office for the gain of family, friends and himself. And while he has declared his innocence, some say the allegations against him set for trial next month in federal court simply spell out how the political game has long been played in Illinois.

In the governor's office alone, the state has seen two men who had held the seat go to prison and a sitting governor who didn't - perhaps with the help of four jurors who later landed state jobs. And that's not counting the governor whose greatest achievement, one historian wrote, was staying out of prison back in the '50s. The 1850s.

"We just assume politics is corrupt and a little bit of corruption is the cost of doing business," said Kent Redfield, a political scientist at the University of Illinois at Springfield.

That was certainly the attitude toward former Secretary of State Paul Powell, owner of the mysterious cash-stuffed shoeboxes.

"Paul did a lot of good things for southern Illinois, including helping to build the university I work at," said Mike Lawrence, the director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.

So when those shoeboxes were found in Powell's home when he died in 1970, it raised some eyebrows but not much ire.

"People were surprised about the amount of money," Lawrence said of the cache that neither Powell nor anyone else ever explained. "But there was sort of a sense if he gave us our share, what's wrong with him getting his share."

Illinois isn't alone. In states such as New Jersey and Louisiana, politicians have also historically been willing to help themselves and their friends as they went about helping their constituents, said Charles Wheeler, head of the Public Affairs Reporting program at the University of Illinois at Springfield.

"Government is seen as another way for one to advance one's own interest," he said. "There's a sense of, 'OK, I'm pursuing this for the greater good of society, but it also benefits economic interests for which I believe or it helps my friends.' "

But Illinois has a way of putting its own stamp on political chicanery.

Stuffed ballot boxes may be de rigueur in other places. Chicago, though, took to stuffing them with stiffs - with widespread stories of the dead voting in the 1960 presidential election.

Walk into any statehouse or the halls of Congress and there are special interest groups spending mountains of money to push for and against legislation.

Illinois lawmakers, though, found an interesting way to squeeze even more cash out of those lobbyists - fetcher bills, which Redfield called "nuisance legislation" that would stimulate campaign contributions and payoffs from interest groups hoping to kill the hurtful bills.

Federal prosecutors ended that fun in the 1970s when they won convictions against a few former state representatives on extortion charges related to the practice.

There's a deja vu quality about Illinois scandals, simply because the game has been played the same way for so long, Redfield said.

"You get a scandal and put the rascals out but we still have the old Illinois politics," he said. "Then we forget the scandal and we are back to the same old system again."

More than a century before Powell apparently squirreled away all that money, for example, Gov. Joel Matteson took custody of a trunk and, yes, a shoebox containing old records of the state canal board and some old government scrip.

The scrip had already been exchanged for money. But because of shoddy recordkeeping, Matteson was able to cash it in again.

"He avoided prosecution by paying back part of the money he said he hadn't stolen," wrote the late Robert P. Howard in his book about Illinois governors, "Mostly Good and Competent Men."

In the 1950s, Orville Hodge pleaded guilty to embezzling more than $1.5 million in state funds while he was state auditor, money he used to help finance a lifestyle that included two planes, four automobiles and homes in Illinois and Florida.

A quarter century later, prosecutors won a conviction against former Attorney General William Scott after telling a similar story about how Scott took campaign money to pay for a secret life in which he "traveled around the world like a sheik."

"It's like nothing ever changes," Redfield said.

Ryan's case also served to remind newspapers, historians and others about a long-forgotten governor named Lennington Small.

Like Ryan, Small was a Republican from Kankakee who found himself in legal hot water. As Ryan can trace his legal troubles back to a lesser statewide office, secretary of state, Small was charged for crimes prosecutors alleged he committed while he was state treasurer.

In 1922, Small was acquitted of conspiracy and embezzling state funds with the help, some suspect, of some jurors who subsequently got state jobs. He was later re-elected.

"We seem to love our scoundrels," said State Historian Thomas Schultz.

That appears to be changing, though.

As the scandal that ultimately led to his indictment kept dogging Ryan, he announced he would not run for re-election - a move many saw as an acknowledgment that he knew his career was dead.

But even if Ryan could have weathered the battle and won re-election the way Small did, Wheeler and others say Ryan remains a victim of time as much as anything else.

"George is charged with using secretary of state resources to further his political agenda, which has gone on in Illinois forever," Wheeler said. "Now we're at a stage where if the citizenry isn't upset by it, the federal prosecutor is."