Blagojevich Trial Ends Fitzgerald’s Successes

Blagojevich Trial Ends Fitzgerald’s Successes
By MONICA DAVEY
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: August 19, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/us/20fitzgerald.html?th&emc=th


CHICAGO — Around here, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Illinois and, lately, the overseer of the prosecution of former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich, has been called a modern-day Eliot Ness. His name has been tossed about, without his participation, as a future mayor or governor or something. A radio host once introduced him as “the biggest Chicago guy or gal there is,” aside, maybe, from Oprah Winfrey.

So much fawning grew out of Mr. Fitzgerald’s willingness to take on seemingly anyone, whatever his or her office, with his aggressive prosecutions of mob leaders, a former police commander long accused of abuse, officials with ties to City Hall and, so far, two governors. But this week, when a jury failed to reach verdicts on all but one of 24 charges pursued against Mr. Blagojevich by three of Mr. Fitzgerald’s assistants, the outcome was widely viewed as a rare setback for Mr. Fitzgerald’s office — the largest such disappointment in a high-profile corruption case here in recent memory, former prosecutors said.

The outcome led some — Mr. Blagojevich and his lawyers, among them — to accuse Mr. Fitzgerald, the district’s longest-serving prosecutor, of going too far this time. The critics questioned the cost of retrying Mr. Blagojevich, as Mr. Fitzgerald has pledged to do, and the wisdom of public comments Mr. Fitzgerald made immediately after Mr. Blagojevich’s arrest about the governor’s conduct being such to make “Lincoln roll over in his grave.”

“This guy Fitzgerald is a master at indicting people for noncriminal behavior,” Sam Adam Sr., one of Mr. Blagojevich’s lawyers, said moments after the jury’s decision was announced. “This guy is going wild.”

Half a dozen defense lawyers and former prosecutors here said the events would probably shift key elements of the prosecution strategy for a second Blagojevich trial, which could come in a matter of months. Perhaps a scaled-down, simplified case, focusing almost exclusively on charges that only a single holdout juror had opposed, would emerge.

Depending on the outcome of that, though, most here said it was far too soon to presume that the hung jury might permanently mar Mr. Fitzgerald’s status as, in the words of Cindi Canary, director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, “a savior.”

“No prosecutor — even the great ones — are immune from the potential for a hung jury in a high-profile case with as much extrajudicial noise and distractions as this case has,” said Patrick Collins, a former prosecutor in Mr. Fitzgerald’s office, who led the corruption prosecution of George Ryan, Mr. Blagojevich’s predecessor as governor, who remains in federal prison. “If they get a swift trial and prevail on most counts against the former governor, all but the most vociferous Fitzgerald critics will be quickly quieted.”

Mr. Fitzgerald, 49, arrived here nearly nine years ago from New York, where he had worked on high-profile terrorism cases, including trials of four defendants in connection with the 1998 bombings of United States Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

From the start, his appointment was a matter of controversy. For years, lawyers with roots in Illinois had been picked as United States attorneys, but Peter G. Fitzgerald, a Republican senator who served one term and is no relation to the prosecutor, pressed for the outsider. Some local politicians and lawyers were irked; was there not an Illinois lawyer qualified for the job?

Then began the prosecutions. The conviction in a C.I.A. leak case against I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, drew national attention to Mr. Fitzgerald.

But Chicagoans were struck by his office’s string of successful prosecutions of local defendants: Governor Ryan, a Republican, who was convicted of corruption; Conrad M. Black, a media mogul, whose conviction is now being re-examined because of a United States Supreme Court ruling; Jon Burge, a former police commander accused of torturing suspects, and convicted of perjury; high-ranking members of Chicago’s organized crime operations.

“He was getting viewed by some as the Eliot Ness of the modern age, coming in to clean up Illinois,” said Dick Simpson, a political scientist from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

(Oddly enough, given his bookish vibe, he was named to People magazine’s "sexiest men alive" list in 2005.)

In late 2008, Mr. Fitzgerald announced the arrest of Mr. Blagojevich, a Democrat whom he accused, among other things, of trying to sell or trade an appointment to the Senate seat that President Obama had vacated. Mr. Fitzgerald, who is not known for fiery news conferences or sharing personal thoughts (many people here do not even know that he is married to a schoolteacher or has a young son), seemed particularly outraged on the day of the arrest. He described Mr. Blagojevich’s acts as a “crime spree in progress” and a “new low.”

Mr. Fitzgerald received some criticism for those words at the time, and still more on Tuesday, when the jury returned with a conviction of Mr. Blagojevich on a single count of lying to federal agents, but no agreement on 23 more serious charges. With that, Mr. Fitzgerald made far briefer public remarks, saying that the jury should be respected for their efforts and that a retrial was in the works.

Through a spokesman, Mr. Fitzgerald declined to be interviewed for this article. Asked about the cost of the case against Mr. Blagojevich, Randall Samborn, the spokesman, said the office, which includes 170 lawyers, does not “maintain or provide” the cost of a single case and declined to respond to the criticisms of Mr. Adam and others, or discuss future strategy.

But other lawyers, including former prosecutors, said they imagined the prosecution was probably already studying the thoughts of jurors, some of whom spoke publicly after their decision. “There appears to have been confusion, and you have to listen carefully and pinpoint what it was,” said Jim Burns, a former United States attorney here.

Some suggested that the prosecutors may proceed with only the charges tied to the accusation that Mr. Blagojevich tried to sell the Senate seat, since some jurors said they favored conviction on those counts 11 to 1. Others said the racketeering charges — which include multiple elements and a confusing verdict form — might be eliminated. “RICO is a nightmare,” Ronald S. Safer, a former federal prosecutor said of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

As for Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr. Safer said, whatever his popularity ratings may be now carry little relevance. “Happily, he’s neither subject to public opinion nor public pressure,” he said. “He’s not elected; he’s appointed. And it doesn’t matter if he’s beloved, and it won’t matter if he’s hated.”

Emma Graves Fitzsimmons and Susan Saulny contributed reporting.