Former Illinois governor leaves legacy of distrust
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. - Illinois voters knew George Ryan was no angel when they elected him governor in 1998.
They knew he was an old-school politician who rewarded friends and punished enemies. They knew federal investigators were sniffing around the secretary of state’s office he had been running for eight years.
Still, they chose him over a squeaky-clean Democrat who promised to be a reformer.
Ryan, 73, now is in federal prison for graft and could spend the rest of his life behind bars for a scandal that, if nothing else, reminded the public that misusing government can have real consequences, in this case, the deaths of six children.
It was a fiery 1994 highway wreck that exposed a scheme in the secretary of state’s office in which licenses were issued to truck drivers in exchange for bribes.
“Prior to George Ryan’s conviction, some people dismissed all the allegations and finger-pointing as partisan politics,” said former Republican state Sen. Steve Rauschenberger. “The U.S. Attorney’s activism has changed attitudes from ‘These are just shenanigans’ to ‘I don’t trust any of these guys anymore.’ ”
Ryan accomplished some big things while governor.
He became the first U.S. governor to visit Cuba since Fidel Castro seized power. He passed a major construction program to rebuild Illinois roads and bridges. The Republican drew national attention to problems with capital punishment and suspended all executions in Illinois and emptied death row by commuting the sentences of all 167 inmates to life in prison. He cited the risk of the criminal-justice system making a grave and irreversible error.
“Why would anybody take any great satisfaction that this man is going to prison?” asked GOP state Rep. Bill Black. “He had decades of, I think, noble service.”
But even Black acknowledged that after the Ryan scandal, Illinois politicians are more likely to find that “people are looking at you askance. It gets kind of tiring and upsetting.”
Ryan turned the secretary of state’s office into an arm of his campaign organization, pressuring employees for contributions. Some of those employees came up with the money by taking bribes to issue driver’s licenses to unqualified people.
The evidence suggests one of those unqualified drivers was behind the wheel of a truck that lost a taillight and mud flap on a busy Wisconsin interstate. A van hit the part and burst into flames. Six children burned to death.
Once in the governor’s office, Ryan steered millions of dollars in state leases and contracts to political insiders who showered him with gifts, including trips to a Jamaican resort, a free golf bag and $145,000 in loans to his brother’s foundering business.
Ryan was convicted in April 2006 of fraud, conspiracy and other charges. His request to stay out on bail pending further appeals was rejected Tuesday, and at noon Wednesday he entered the federal correctional center in Oxford, Wis., to begin serving a 6 ½-year sentence.
Inside, his typical work day will begin at 7:30 a.m. and include duties such as mopping floors, cleaning toilets, raking leaves, cutting grass, painting and shoveling snow, said Mike Truman, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Washington, D.C.
He drove there with his wife and his attorney, former Gov. James Thompson.
“I don’t think anyone is ever ready for this because you don’t know what it’s like until you walk through the door,” Thompson said Tuesday. “He sounds as ready as anybody can sound.”
A misty-eyed Ryan stood outside his home in Kankakee on Tuesday, surrounded by family and friends, maintaining his innocence and saying he would report to prison with a “clear conscience.”
Cynics saw the clearing out of death row as an effort to divert attention from the scandal. Even people who shared his concerns about capital punishment wondered if Ryan had grown more sensitive to the issue because of his legal jeopardy.
Still, the sight of a law-and-order Republican governor of a major state standing up to condemn capital punishment was powerful. Death-penalty opponents embraced Ryan, and he helped change the debate from morality to practicality: Can the public ever be sure the right person is being executed?
“His actions with respect to the death penalty, regardless of what motives people might put behind them, changed the landscape on the issue locally, nationally and internationally,” said Democratic state Rep. John Fritchey of Chicago.
When Ryan took office in 1999, Republicans held five statewide offices, had a majority in the state Senate and were down 62-56 in the House. Today, they have lost all statewide offices and the Senate majority and have seen their House numbers shrink.
Trends far bigger than Ryan are driving that change, but the stain from his tenure contributed.
Democrat Rod Blagojevich was elected governor by campaigning as the antidote to Ryan and won a second term by portraying his opponent as George Ryan Lite. The Illinois GOP no longer could portray itself as a clean alternative to the Democrats and their long history of dirty Chicago politics.
The Ryan scandal also contributed to passage of state ethics laws creating independent inspectors to fight corruption and restricting the use of government resources for political purposes. Some officials went further and stopped taking donations from people with state contracts.
Material from the Chicago Tribune is included in this report.