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Bags of cash to save gov's home described in Rezko case
By Mike Robinson
AP Legal Affairs Writer
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CHICAGO -- Political fundraiser Antoin “Tony” Rezko got a former state official to deliver “black plastic bags” of cash through “narrow streets” to pay contractors threatening to slap an embarrassing lien on the governor’s home, prosecutors told a federal judge Tuesday.

Rezko’s attorney immediately dubbed the story a fantasy as the two sides bickered over the last scraps of prosecution testimony before the government rests its case at Rezko’s political fraud trial.

Ali Ata, the former executive director of the Illinois Finance Authority who pleaded guilty to tax and other charges last week, is expected to take the witness stand when the trial resumes on Thursday.

Prosecutors plan to lead him through an account of how he dug $125,000 out of a safe and delivered it to Rezko.

Ata will testify he accompanied Rezko when he delivered $50,000 of the money to the head of Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s campaign fund, suburban roofing contractor Christopher Kelly, Judge Amy J. St. Eve was told.

Prosecutors say Ata will testify he gave Rezko $25,000 to prevent a lien on the governor’s Chicago home, which Rezko allegedly said would prove embarrassing to Blagojevich.

The governor is not charged with wrongdoing. His spokeswoman said Blagojevich and his wife paid for renovation work on the house themselves.

“We can’t comment on alleged conversations that the governor was not a party to,” Abby Ottenhoff said in a statement. “But as we said last year, the Blagojeviches personally paid for the work to renovate their ... family room out of their checking account.”

Rezko’s chief defense counsel, Joseph J. Duffy, asked St. Eve to bar prosecutors from asking Ata about the cash. The story had nothing to do with the charges against Rezko and was therefore irrelevant, he said.

But St. Eve said such testimony was relevant because it showed the relations between Ata, Rezko and Kelly.

She did bar the prosecutors, however, from bringing in such atmospheric embellishments as “black plastic bags” and “narrow streets.”

Rezko, 52, is charged with scheming to split a $1.5 million bribe from a contractor who wanted state permission to build a hospital in the McHenry County suburb of Crystal Lake. He also is charged with scheming to pressure kickbacks out of money management firms that wanted allocations of money to invest from the $40 billion state teachers pension fund.

Prosecutors say Rezko’s fundraising for Blagojevich’s campaign gave him the clout to manipulate the state boards that operate the pension fund and decide which new hospitals may be built in Illinois.

Rezko denies he had anything to do with such schemes.

Ata could take the stand as early as Thursday and the government is tentatively planning to rest its case Monday or Tuesday.

It was not clear that any contractors ever threatened to place a lien on the governor’s home, even if the story prosecutors claim Ata is telling is truthful.

St. Eve said she would allow the testimony not because it was necessarily factual but because it showed Ata’s “state of mind,” a common procedure in complicated white-collar or official corruption trials.

Ata says he got his job at the Illinois Finance Authority, which provides financing for new business, because he made campaign donations.

He said in his signed plea agreement with federal prosecutors last week that he was afraid he would lose the job and delivered the $125,000 to Rezko to appease someone he saw as very close to Blagojevich.

When Ata entered his guilty plea last week prosecutors first raised the possibility that Springfield lobbyist Robert Kjellander and former White House political director Karl Rove might have worked to have the U.S. attorney in Chicago, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, fired.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Carrie E. Hamilton said Ata and Rezko had conversations about “the fact that Mr. Kjellander was working with Karl Rove to have (Fitzgerald) removed.”

Kjellander immediately denied that and Rove’s attorney, Robert Luskin, said Rove remembered nothing about such an episode.

This week, former Rezko employee Elie Maloof testified that Rezko told him Fitzgerald would be fired and then U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert would appoint a new chief federal prosecutor who would drop the investigation. An aide to Hastert said his boss never heard anything about a plan to dismiss Fitzgerald and said the testimony was puzzling.

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Reader comments on this story - 4 total

Note: All views and opinions expressed in reader comments are solely those of the individual submitting the comment, and not those of the Pantagraph or its staff.

Gov't oppressed Mule wrote on Apr 30, 2008 11:19 AM:

" TO: ZEVA AND PSEUDO:

Both of you ask what we did to deserve this and whether they are all corrupt or just the ones we elect. This is what happens when we elect anyone from Chicago (dem or repub.) When the Unions started solidifying themselves and our gov't allowed them to use tactics that were illegal for the mob to do (racketeering and extortion i.e. strikes) The mafia then incorporated themselves to slowly take over the Unions. Now our unions (who are the majority of state level politically contributions) are run by the mob, and they cozy themselves up to people like Blago, Rezko, and Obama in the hopes they will become a powerful ally, then use them for their own benefits. In order to get out of this loop of destructive corruption we need to elect someone NOT from Chicago (Jim Edgar where are you???) "

pseudo-intellectual wrote on Apr 30, 2008 9:47 AM:

" Great story, even if part of it is not true. What else is going on of which we have only the faintest notion? I think if things are ever cleaned up in Springfield (and Chicago)-- and I'm not sure at all that I will live to see the day- several books could be written about the depths to which we have sunk in Illinois in the last 10 years, and particularly the last few years under Blagojevich. What did we ever do to deserve such a wretched man and his evil cohorts? "

ApH wrote on Apr 30, 2008 8:40 AM:

" Next Blo-go, then Obama??? "

Zeva wrote on Apr 30, 2008 1:00 AM:

" Are we shakin yet Blo-go? They keep saying our gov. has not been charged with any wrongdoing. Is this a build up for when they say he is charged? I hope he is innocent, but from what they are telling it doesn't look like it. Someone said to me today that every gov. we get seems to be corrupt. Is this a pattern or are we just electing the ones that are? I know this state needs help and the prez. needs to get it together for the country. We are all falling apart and it all sinking down a large dark black hole and no one is trying to stop it. "
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