Free Golden by Jeff Coen

despite questions about how often she showed up at work.
    Blagojevich’s job never entailed him going to city hall or working out of anywhere except Mell’s ward office. But for a two-month period in 1989, his paychecks showed him being paid by four different City Council committees that did their work downtown, which indicated Blagojevich may have been paid for work he never did. Blagojevich later said that he never worked at city hall and never noticed he was being paid from the different City Council funds.
    It was an oversight that wasn’t going to be unnoticed forever.

    At least one friend does remember Blagojevich being at the Hall in 1989. Judge Perdomo was at city hall with Blagojevich in July 1989 on the day when the thirty-two-year-old Blagojevich walked a few blocks east to Marshall Field’s on State Street to buy an engagement ring for Patti. Blagojevich had already flown out to Washington, DC, to ask Monk about the idea, and Rod moved ahead with his plan.
    Blagojevich scoured the jewelry case for the perfect ring. Scanning the shelves he finally found it. It cost about $5,000. The next day, Blagojevich was back at city hall, this time visiting Mell and telling him—not asking for permission—he was going to ask Patti to marry him.
    â€œHe was ecstatic,” Perdomo recalled of the alderman’s reaction. “He truly liked Rod and thought he would be great for Patti.”
    Later that night, Rod asked and Patti said yes. They set a date for a year away—August 25, 1990.
    They married inside the Alice S. Millar Chapel at Northwestern University in Evanston, at the bend of the road leading into the heart of the campus. It was not a particularly political affair, especially for the wedding of a powerful city alderman’s daughter and the man who would twice be elected governor. Only a few of Cook County’s political class were invited, and Blagojevich invited Sorosky.
    About one hundred people gathered inside the large chapel. Robert Blagojevich, Mike Ascaridis, and Danny Angarola all stood up as groomsmen, and Lon Monk served as an usher.
    When father and daughter reached the end of the aisle, Mell looked at a smiling Rod Blagojevich. Rod took Patti by the hand and Mell walked back to his seat, where he watched the Reverend Thomas Parker take over the ceremony and marry the happy couple. During the ceremony, Monk read the Twenty-third Psalm: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”
    Like the ceremony, the reception was not grand, held in a side room next to the chapel. But Rod and Patti looked overjoyed. Always outgoing, Mell stepped back for a few moments to take in the scene. His daughter was married, launching a new stage of her life with a man who seemed to share the same passion for politics and government as he did.
    â€œHe’s made me a happy man,” Mell told one guest about Rod. “They’re an amazing couple.”

3
A Tap on the shoulder

    Rod and Patti walked through the front door of Mell’s Northwest Side bungalow and found the powerful alderman in the living room on his hands and knees.
    It was early January 1992, and Mell had scattered maps all over the floor. He was clearly in a quandary. “Ronan left me,” he told the couple, and they knew exactly what that meant. Every decade, the state deals with the results of the national census by redrawing Illinois’s political maps. The shapes of the state legislative and congressional districts change to reflect shifts in population, but they also have a major political element. The Republicans had redrawn the maps after the 1990 census, leaving Democrats to battle it out in several legislative districts in Chicago. The 1992 election would be the first under the new maps, and Mell and his longtime ally, Alfred Ronan, couldn’t agree on who should run where. Ronan wanted to run in a neighboring district and let his friend, incumbent Myron Kulas, take the seat in