From the Chicago Tribune

Hiring law? What hiring law?

How Blagojevich aides bypassed state rules for favored job applicants

By Ray Long, John Chase and David Kidwell
Tribune staff reporters

September 17, 2006

Skirting state hiring rules, Gov. Rod Blagojevich's administration gave jobs to at least 360 people whose applications were sent through back channels by the governor's office and other political heavyweights, a Tribune investigation has found.

More than 70 workers with political pedigrees were hired through internships meant for college students--even though all were older than 35 and a few were in their 60s.In addition, Blagojevich's administration nearly doubled--to more than 740--the number of high-level state jobs he can fill without following hiring rules.

In a broad examination of hiring across state agencies, the Tribune found that these maneuvers and others were used to systematically subvert a process that is supposed to be free from political influence.

That wide-ranging pattern of hiring abuses has also caught the attention of federal investigators involved since 2005 in a probe of the Blagojevich administration, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

Many of the people interviewed by the Tribune have also talked to federal investigators.

Blagojevich has defended his top administrators, and his office has blamed most of the problems on a few "bad apples" in mid-level positions. The administration in recent months also has moved to end the practices that allowed the abuses.

"State hiring has always included provisions for things like reclassifying job titles, geographic transfers and hiring interns--none of those are new practices," Blagojevich spokeswoman Abby Ottenhoff said in a statement Friday. "But those are among the personnel practices that have been improved during this administration."

The governor's office did not address most of the questions the Tribune submitted in writing Friday.

"We don't base our actions on innuendo from anonymous sources reported in a newspaper," Ottenhoff said. "We base our actions on facts."

The Tribune findings emerged from an examination of internal memorandums, confidential state investigative reports and hiring records. The newspaper also interviewed dozens of current and former state employees, including agency heads and personnel officials throughout the administration, and people hired under questionable circumstances.

The records and interviews cast serious doubt on Blagojevich's assertions that two fired bureaucrats are to blame for a wide-ranging scheme to rig state hiring.

The governor's top aides ignored early warnings from within the administration that the hirings were improper and pressured agency heads to appoint favored applicants anyway, the Tribune found.

The maneuvers often came at the expense of ordinary citizens applying for state jobs and military veterans, guaranteed under the law to be first in line for most state job openings.

The broadening investigation poses a re-election challenge for Blagojevich, who rode into office four years ago as a reformer vowing to end old-style politics.

But within months of his November 2002 election, Blagojevich lieutenants were pushing hard to appease the job-hungry demands of Democrats, who had been shut out of the governor's office over the previous quarter-century.

The administration's hiring efforts were spearheaded by Joe Cini, the director of the governor's Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. Cini is now under federal scrutiny.

Eight administration officials who have been involved in hiring told the Tribune they had personally been pressured by Cini or his deputies to hire job candidates with political sponsors into positions where clout shouldn't count.

All spoke on the condition their names not be used.

"He swore up and down at me, and it was the most unprofessional meeting I've ever been at for somebody at that level," one of the officials said about Cini's insistence on hiring politically favored applicants who lacked the proper qualifications.

Cini, contacted by telephone at his home, declined to be interviewed.

Sources in the administration said they participated in conference calls in which Cini deputies John Gianulis and Sam Flood exerted pressure to bypass rules and hire politically connected candidates. Gianulis and Flood, who is now acting director of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, did not return telephone calls for comment.

In one case, an internship went to a longtime Springfield lobbyist who acknowledged the help of Gianulis and Blagojevich's chief lobbyist Joseph Handley.

"I probably had my resume out to every legislator in town," said Rebecca Owens, 59, a United Way lobbyist for 18 years. "I knew Joe Handley from before. So I met with him, and I think he helped. I met with Gianulis too."

Owens said she was hired to be a lobbyist for the Department of Human Services but was surprised when she got her first check and discovered she was an intern.

"It didn't make any sense to me when they did that," she said. "I asked them but never really got a straight answer."

Records show Owens was paid $45,000 per year as an intern but now makes $55,400 for doing the same job. She said she thought the administration might have been trying to save money by using lower-paid internships.

She said she didn't believe it was to skirt a law giving preference to veterans in hiring.

"I probably set the record as the oldest intern in Springfield."

A day after her interview, Owens asked that her comments not be printed because she was worried about her standing at work.

Handley did not return a telephone message left at his office.

The governor's executive inspector general has identified the internship program as a way the administration squeezed favored candidates into jobs without competition from other applicants.

Among other examples of interns found by the Tribune: A 63-year-old relative of a congressman, a 59-year-old Springfield Democratic official, and a 56-year-old woman who got to spend the night in the Lincoln bedroom at the Clinton White House.

The Tribune also found examples of politically connected people being hired into jobs in rural counties more than 100 miles from their homes, then allowed to work closer to home. The inspector general found that such maneuvers were used to help favored applicants get jobs ahead of veterans living in more populous counties.

One example is the August 2003 hiring of Beverly Ascaridis, the wife of Blagojevich's former campaign treasurer.

Ascaridis' application was among those given special treatment at the state's hiring agency and she was given a break when she initially failed to meet job qualifications, the governor's own executive inspector general found. Seven months after Blagojevich was elected, she was hired by the state Department of Natural Resources as a manager in an office near the Iowa border.

Ascaridis, a Chicago resident, acknowledged in an interview that she never reported to the Whiteside County office and instead worked in suburban DuPage County.

Ascaridis told the Tribune earlier this month that she reached out to the FBI with her suspicions that her job may have come in exchange for a $1,500 check her husband wrote to Blagojevich's daughter, who was 7 at the time.

Sources familiar with the federal hiring investigation confirm Blagojevich's personal finances are now under scrutiny. The governor has said he did not help Ascaridis get her job and the check was a birthday gift from her husband, his lifelong friend.

Others with political connections who were hired in one county and allowed to work closer to home were the head of an Arab Democratic club who gave more than $10,000 to the governor's campaign, a campaign contributor to a Democratic state senator and a Riverdale alderman who was an early Blagojevich supporter.

While the county transfers and internships provided a path to a job that was supposed to be protected from political influence, another way to hire favored applicants was to create more positions the governor's office could fill as it saw fit.

Blagojevich's spokeswoman, Ottenhoff, said the increase in those jobs was aimed at reducing the number of protected positions that Republican governors had for years used to stash their political friends.

A former hiring official under Blagojevich's GOP predecessor George Ryan said the hiring tactics used by the Democratic administration are nothing new.

"To the victors go the spoils. That's just political reality," said Antoinette Crossgrove, a Ryan loyalist ousted within months after Blagojevich took office.

Crossgrove said it wasn't the tactics but the speed at which the Democrats moved to muscle so many people into jobs that caused complaints.

"They were just so blatant about it," she said of the Blagojevich administration. "If there were candidates with political juice, there were always ways to get them on. County transfers, internships--we used them, sure, but we used discretion."

Blagojevich said he was moving to correct the excesses of his Republican predecessor when he ordered a hiring freeze the day after he took office in January 2003. The move allowed him to hold down the size of state government, but also concentrated hiring authority in the hands of a select group of top aides that included Chief of Staff Lon Monk and Cini.

By September 2004, the office of executive inspector general issued two confidential reports identifying improper hiring maneuvers, including county transfers and abuse of the intern program.

One report detailed how two connected Democrats sought jobs in the waning days of the Ryan administration and ultimately got the jobs they wanted under Blagojevich. Both moves were approved by Monk and Cini.

In the other, more scathing, report the inspector general said, "The governor's office improperly exercised a great deal, if not all, control over hiring" in another state agency and showed "complete and utter contempt for the law."

That report recommended that Cini and his deputies receive training on state hiring law.

Eighteen months later, a March 2006 report by the inspector general noted the governor's office still used its influence in hiring, this time at the state's main personnel agency.

In interviews with state investigators, employees at the Department of Central Management Services said applications of clouted candidates from the governor's office and other political sponsors were routed through Room 503 in the agency's Springfield offices. The inspector general found an agency log documenting "special" applications for more than 1,200 favored job-seekers that went through that room, in violation of hiring procedures.

The Tribune compared that list with state records and identified more than 360 people who got state jobs, most of which were supposed to be free from political influence.

The governor's office followed the inspector general's recommendations to fire two officials blamed in the report. Blagojevich has repeatedly contended that the ongoing state and federal investigations will vindicate his administration.

In recent months, the administration has tightened the rules for interns and county transfers. Interns now must have graduated from college within the past 18 months, and newly hired employees cannot move to a job in another county for at least two years, Ottenhoff said.

"You can't build Rome overnight. It's a long process," Blagojevich said recently. "We're undoing 26 years of a wrong way. And I think we do most of it right. Every so often, some people make some mistakes, and you correct those, and you move forward."

The two fired employees, Dawn DeFraties and Mike Casey, disagree. They are contesting their firings and contend they were made scapegoats for a widespread scheme orchestrated by the governor's office. Both are cooperating in the federal probe.

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rlong@tribune.com

jchase@tribune.com

dkidwell@tribune.com