Catastrophe - Dick Morris [110]
Did Burris pay for his seat? Many times over. Roland Burris, a former Illinois attorney general, has been on the giving and receiving end of dubious favors for more than a decade.
One thing about Burris is for certain: he gave as good as he got!
He gave: When he was attorney general, Burris doled out no-bid contracts like any good Chicago pol. In 1992, his office signed about $4 million in such deals for outside legal help.378 More than half that amount—$2.25 million—went to lawyers and firms that had anted up and donated to Burris’s attorney general campaign or the main Democratic fund-raising committee.379 After leaving his seat as state attorney general, Burris kept his position as a top money source for Governor Blagojevich, hosting a fund-raiser for him and donating, through various companies, at least $20,000 to his campaigns.380
He gave, but he also made sure he got. As a private citizen (and generous campaign donor), Burris received more than $1 million in no-bid consulting contracts from Illinois state government agencies controlled by the governor.381 The cushiest one was a $290,000 contract to scour the state looking for firms that might qualify for state Department of Transportation contracts under the affirmative action program.382
Companies from all over the United States hired Burris to arrange state business for them. A Philadelphia firm, Loop Capital Markets, received more than $750,000 in pension bond business after it hired Burris for $5,000 per month to steer projects its way.383
Another company, ACS Healthcare Solutions, hired Burris for $240,000 and landed an $18 million contract with the Cook County public health system to help collect unpaid bills. But ACS ran into big trouble in Las Vegas, where it was named in the indictment of a public hospital official. That led the county to pull the contract.384
More fortunate was Central DuPage Hospital, which hired Burris and his partner, Fred Lebed, to win “approval from state hospital regulators to build a $140 million cutting-edge cancer treatment center, even though the board had initially opposed the idea and approved building a similar facility just a few miles away.”385 But Central DuPage got the approval it sought by arguing that there “was room for more than one proton center in the Chicago region [even though] there are only five such facilities operating in the United States.”386
Probably Burris’s most suspect transaction came as he left private life to become state attorney general. His old law firm, which had no history of working for the state, gave him a “buyout” of $100,000, allegedly for work he had done before he became attorney general.387 Once in office, Burris turned around and gave his old firm $436,000 of no-bid state legal work!388
Nothing like a nice clean quid pro quo!
Most governors try to appoint men and women who mirror their philosophy of government. Blagojevich sure found his man.
FORMER GOVERNOR ROD BLAGOJEVICH (D-IL)
Of course, Burris’s activities are only the tip of the iceberg called Rod Blagojevich, whose name has become a national synonym for political corruption. Blagojevich had been a colorful regional figure for years, but he really achieved national prominence late in 2008, when FBI wiretap tapes were released that revealed him crassly evaluating how much he should get paid for appointing someone to President-elect Obama’s Senate seat.
But why were the feds tapping Blago’s phone in the first place? Why had they bugged his office? The