CHICAGO - After eight years, two high-profile trials and scores of former officials and others sent off to prison, the investigation of scandals in the George Ryan era in Illinois politics is largely history.

The 72-year-old former governor, himself, once the most powerful politician in Illinois, is still fighting a rearguard battle in court, hoping to postpone the clang of the jailhouse door while he appeals his conviction.

And federal prosecutors will most likely be investigating serious offshoots of the case for years to come. But the phase involving Ryan and key members of his circle basically ended with his racketeering conviction.

Meanwhile, prosecutors push on, ferreting out fresh corruption cases at both the Statehouse in Springfield and City Hall in Chicago.

A millionaire campaign contributor linked to fraud on two state boards is planning to plead guilty to felony charges before the Nov. 7 election and there is intense speculation concerning how much he can tell prosecutors concerning corruption that took place after Ryan's administration gave way to that of Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

"I think a lot of people are walking around on eggshells right now,'' declared Jay Stewart, executive director of Chicago's Better Government Association. "If they're not worried, they've got to be delusional.''

The key figure in the spotlight at the moment is a smooth, dapper, 60-year-old Michigan Avenue businessman and attorney named Stuart Levine.

He quietly landed seats on the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board and the Illinois Teachers Retirement System board in the 1990s while pumping $64,500 into the scandal-plagued Citizens for Ryan campaign fund.

Prosecutors say Levine, a millionaire who lives in the affluent North Shore suburb of Highland Park, used his two board seats to enrich himself.

Levine is accused of masterminding a fraud and extortion plot aimed at a suburban hospital, bilking a medical school out of millions of dollars and pressuring an investment house to hire a do-nothing lobbyist.

His objective in each of the schemes he is charged with, prosecutors say, was to receive kickbacks, payoffs and fraudulent real estate profits.

Levine attorney Jeffrey Steinback told reporters last week that his client plans to plead guilty to at least some of the charges by Nov. 1.

One reason why people suspect that Levine can tell federal prosecutors plenty is that Chicago attorney Joseph Cari, a former finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee, suggested just that when he pleaded guilty, exactly one year ago. Major questions have been hanging ever since.

Cari signed a plea agreement with prosecutors saying that under pressure from Levine he called a suburban Washington investment house that wanted to do business with the teachers pension fund and said it would not get the business unless it signed an $850,000 contract with a consultant.

The consultant had done no work for the investment company. In fact, he was largely unknown to the executives of the company. But Cari admitted in his plea agreement that he told them to sign the contract or else.

"This is how things are done in Illinois,'' Cari told them.

The contract was faxed to the Washington company from the Turks and Caicos Islands, a palm-dotted paradise 575 miles south of Miami described by one accounting firm there as "the most stable tax haven in the world.''

The islands came up once before in the Ryan scandal when Royal Canadian Mounted Police traced drug money through the Turks and Caicos and into a Costa Rican investment house where former state Rep. Roger Stanley, R-Streamwood, convicted in a Ryan-related payoff case, kept his savings.

In his plea agreement, Cari said that Levine told him that he learned through two advisers to a high-ranking Public Official A that there was a plan to raise campaign contributions by controlling which lobbyists would be successful in getting deals from state boards for their clients.

The plea agreement carefully avoided saying exactly who Public Official A supposedly was. But people familiar with the case who spoke on condition of anonymity because the government wants grand jury matters kept secret said Cari told prosecutors it was Blagojevich.

Blagojevich denies that he or anyone around him has been tied to corruption on the board. He did reappoint Levine, who contributed $4,267 in in-kind air travel expenses to his campaign, to the health-care board.

But the Democratic governor says it was a Republican seat by law and that he automatically reappointed sitting Republicans in most instances.

That, however, isn't Blagojevich's only worry.

U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald has acknowledged that his office is investigating Blagojevich's hiring practices, including whether the process was manipulated to favor political clout and skirt laws giving veterans and others first crack at state jobs.

Blagojevich has long maintained his hiring process was "blind'' to the names of applicants, but a series of Associated Press articles showed that the governor's aides were approving hires by name as late as fall 2004.

Such patronage practices have already led to the conviction of four Chicago officials, including a former key aide to Mayor Richard M. Daley.

Robert Sorich, 43, and three other men were convicted by a federal court jury July 6 of taking part in a scheme under which fraud allegedly was used to cover up violations of a court order barring patronage hiring.

While the so-called Shakman Decree has been in place more than 30 years, the longstanding Chicago tradition of giving city jobs to those who get out the vote for the mayor and his friends on Election Day lives on.

Sorich, himself, was even known around City Hall as Daley's patronage chief, although his job was deputy director of intergovernmental affairs.

Witnesses testified that while seeming to follow the Shakman Decree he actually made sure that members of "patronage armies'' got city jobs while other applicants were turned away. Sorich also gave marching orders to the patronage armies, prosecution witnesses testified.

Sorich maintained that he sometimes intervened in hiring decisions only to make sure that the city work force remained diverse, in keeping with Daley's announced policy of making sure all groups were represented.

The jury didn't buy it and sentencing is set for Nov. 15.

But federal prosecutors aren't waiting until then to push ahead with their investigation. Sorich has been called before a federal grand jury to testify under immunity from prosecution at least twice since Aug. 24.

"He will appear every time he is subpoenaed and he will answer all of the questions put to him and that is all I'm going to say,'' defense attorney Thomas Anthony Durkin said in confirming the second session.

It is not uncommon for prosecutors to call someone convicted of corruption to the grand jury under a grant of immunity and compel him on pain of perjury to talk about those who are higher up the ladder.

Dean Bauer, Ryan's old inspector general in the secretary of state's office, made such an appearance after he pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and admitted that he spent seven years covering up the very wrongdoing that he was supposed to catch.

It's not clear that anything ever came of Bauer's testimony.

Instead, he faded into history. As Ryan is about to do.