The nostalgic odor of corruption

“I can smell the meat a-cookin’,” Illinois Secretary of State Paul Powell liked to say when he was working one of his political deals. When he died in 1970 , authorities found $800,000 in cash squirreled away in a shoe box in his closet. I don’t think they ever figured out exactly where the money came from, but as a journalist who worked with a corruption-fighting organization on a Paul Powell enterprise, I have a pretty good idea.


In its lip-smacking euphoria over the contemplated unspeakable acts of Rod Blagojevich, the media and its blogging parasites are recalling Illinois’ rich, as in lots of money, history of corruption. What it is ignoring are the efforts in that state to fight corruption. Before Lincoln ascended to prominence, the state maintained some of the busiest branch lines of the Underground Railroad. Its citizens fought the predations of a group of associates called the Banditti of the Prairies, which utilized the Mormon city-state of Nauvoo to peddle its stolen gains. A citizens group was formed to resist and overthrow the mob rule of the Capone era and later.

One of the corruption-fighters was a mentor of mine, George Thiem of the Chicago Daily News. An unassuming man of small physical stature, George won two Pulitzers for his investigative reporting. The first came when he and an associate from the St.Louis Post Dispatch uncovered the fact that Gov.Dwight Green was maintaining 37 newspaper editors on his payroll to write laudatory editorials about him. George won another Pulitzer when his patient, methodical searching flushed out $2.5 million from a kick-back scheme run by the Illinois state auditor. The Daily News was an early casualty of the shifting market for journalism, and ceased publication in 1978.

The Better Government Association works with members of the media to expose and correct problems it finds in Illinois. My newspaper received a call one hot July day asking if we would care to participate in an investigation of something that Paul Powell’s department seemed to be involved in.

I worked in Moline, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi River. At that time, two bridges crossed the Quad-Cities area between Iowa and Illinois. The Secretary of State’s office, which is in charge of regulating motor vehicles and their drivers, has its own police department to enforce the regulations. The Better Government Association had found out that Powell’s police had set up a check point in Rock Island at the foot of the bridge that came over from Davenport. They were stopping trucks that were not licensed to operate in Illinois. They would not let the trucks proceed into Illinois, but made them fill out applications on the spot and pay for the license needed for interstate commerce trucks to travel through Illinois. This practice seemed to circumvent more routine procedures for obtaining and issuing licenses, and the BGA was suspicious of it.

I spent a long hot day at the foot of the bridge with a BGA representative monitoring the business being conducted. A number of trucks did not have the required license and the drivers were filling out application forms and writing checks or paying in cash for permits that would allow them to proceed through Illinois. The transportation police were amiable and even let us sit in their air-conditioned cars, and, although the circumstance was unusual, we found nothing that was illegal.

However, we knew that the money being collected would have to be traced through to its deposit in a state account. That is where the investigation faltered. This kind of tracking of paper work was something George Thiem was an expert at doing. But by this time he had retired, had served a term in the state legislature, and was involved with a farm he owned in a neighboring county to where I lived. No journalists were available to go to Springfield and trace down the money being collected from truckers for their permits. We thought that money was not finding its way into appropriate state accounts, but we could take time off from our duties to do the necessary checking and no one else was available.

I think that at least part of the $800,000 in Paul Powell’s shoe box came from the collection for the trucking permits. In the 1990s, when George Ryan, who is a former Illinois governor now serving prison time, was secretary of state in Illinois, his office was selling driver’s licenses to truckers, rather than making them take the necessary tests to qualify.

Another man who did much to clean up and keep business clean in Illinois was the late Senator Paul Simon. He recognized the unusual talents demonstrated by Barack Obama in the state legislature and urged him to run for the U.S. Senate. Paul Simon also was a journalist who used his profession and his newspapers to make things right in Illinois.

George Thiem and Paul Simon represent the other tradition in Illinois.

Folks in South Dakota might have a tendency to feel superior, but at least Illinois has people and organizations who worked to get at the facts and hold people accountable for what they did. A few years back, South Dakota officials were putting funds from arrangements they had with bank card officials into secret accounts and would not tell the state treasurer where the money was or how much it was. When some legislators and other government officials probed into the matter, the governor got the legislature to pass a law (the infamous "gag law") that made it a crime for any state official to make public any investigations involving the state and its private dealings with corporations.

Just as we never found for sure what Paul Powell was doing with the money he was collecting, South Dakotans never found out what was in the secret banks accounts, where it came from, or what it was being used for.