If hindsight is 20-20, even for this vision-challenged septuagenarian, a barstool conversation that led to the collapse and long-term enfeeblement of the Illinois Republican Party is still crystal clear more than a quarter century later.
And it came to mind, writ large, following the recent intraparty turmoil that prompted the resignation of state GOP Chairman Don Tracy.
My chat over beers, in the fall of 1997, was with Joe Power, an old friend and prominent personal injury attorney who was taking depositions in a tragic case that, unbeknownst to us back then, would have seismic political implications.
Power wondered if ABC affiliate WLS-Ch. 7, where I was covering politics, might be interested in what whistleblowers in then-Secretary of State George Ryan’s office were telling him about alleged corruption that may have contributed to a fiery 1994 explosion on a Milwaukee expressway that injured his clients — Duane “Scott” Willis and his wife, Janet — and killed their young children, who were riding in the back seat.
Interested? Absolutely.
So we interviewed the same whistleblowers, who were supervisors in Ryan’s suburban McCook office, and they identified a handful of employees, under the direction of Ryan’s chief of staff, who were issuing commercial driver’s licenses to minimally qualified truckers in exchange for cash bribes that went into their pockets and Ryan’s campaign coffers.
One of the licensees, as Power’s depositions and our ABC 7 investigation revealed, was a trucker who spoke little English. A poorly secured metal fastener on his truck’s flatbed broke loose, fell onto the highway and punctured the gas tank under the Willis car in an adjacent lane, causing the massive explosion and horrific tragedy.
Our story about the crash, and the alleged corruption that contributed to it, led a 10 p.m. newscast in early 1998, and we aired multiple follow-ups, but the affable and avuncular Ryan, a popular political veteran who was then running for governor, denied any knowledge of the alleged corruption in his office.
That helped him survive a GOP primary challenge and defeat a weak Democratic challenger in the November election, even as storm clouds of a sweeping federal investigation that began after our stories aired were swirling around him.
That investigation, dubbed “Operation Safe Road” by the feds, eventually led to the conviction of Ryan and others, many of them powerful Republican Party funders, operatives and insiders, leaving the Illinois GOP in shambles and paving the way for the gubernatorial election of Democrat Rod Blagojevich in 2002, ending 26 years of GOP control of the governor’s office in Springfield.
The decimation of the Republican Party’s infrastructure also enabled then-Illinois House Speaker and state Democratic Party Chairman Michael Madigan to engineer the election of Democrats to all but one statewide office, super-majorities in both legislative chambers and control of the Illinois Supreme Court.
Editorial: Exit lllinois Republican leader Don Tracy, pushed from stage right
Corruption eventually brought down Blagojevich and weakened his successor, then-Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn, which facilitated multimillionaire Republican businessman Bruce Rauner’s surprise election as governor in 2014.
But Rauner lost his reelection bid to Democrat J.B. Pritzker in 2018, reestablishing total Democratic control of a state government that, thanks in large part to partisan gerrymandering and the ongoing ineptitude of an ineffectual Republican Party, continues unabated to this day, despite the massive corruption case that eventually ended Madigan’s long and storied career.
Tracy’s recent resignation as state GOP chairman is just the latest chapter in the party’s long slog through the backwater and wasteland of Illinois politics — a slog exacerbated by internecine warfare between old guard moderates and Trump loyalists — and there is no apparent Moses poised to lead Republicans back to the electoral Promised Land in the near future.
But, to borrow another shopworn cliche, time will tell.
As for Scott and Janet Willis, their surviving children have large families of their own, and that — along with their strong faith and the benefits of the $100 million wrongful death settlement Power negotiated for them — has eased some of the pain. Power still heads his prominent law firm and raises millions for local and national Democratic candidates.
And Power’s beer buddy on that fateful evening — the ABC 7 reporter who covered the federal Safe Road investigation and its fallout? Well, he still marvels at the impact of the fickle finger of fate as he enjoys his semi-retirement.
Andy Shaw has been a Chicago journalist and good government watchdog for almost half a century.
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