Milorad moments add up to Illinois' great disgrace

The world's most despicable villains always start small.

In the burgeoning category of killers, Jeffrey Dahmer tortured squirrels and rabbits before moving up the food chain.

The wide world of business connivers saw the addition of Bernard Madoff over the weekend. Mr. Madoff didn't just take a wrong turn on Wall Street one day and commence a $50 billion Ponzi scheme that targeted the wealthiest of the wealthy. Guys like Madoff shook down lemonade stands as kids.

Disgraced NFL star Michael Vick wasn't volunteering at the Humane Society when he decided it would make sense to get into the ultimate dog-fighting business.

And Osama bin Laden didn't roll out of bed on 9/11 and dream up the worst terrorist attack in history.

That brings us to Milorad the Miscreant, who is now the icon for all things selfish, stupid and scheming.

But like the notable and notorious in other categories of deviant behavior, federal investigators say Gov. Milorad "Rod" Blagojevich wasn't simply struck by an evil lightning bolt one day while jogging around his Sunnyside Avenue bungalow.

The governor's alleged "political corruption crime spree" was preceded by numerous, more benign binges.

Maybe it began in the early 1980s when Blagojevich attended Pepperdine University Law School in Malibu. There was increased seismic activity in Southern California at the time. Perhaps it scrambled his brain lobe responsible for judgment.

Regardless, when Mr. Blagojevich, whose blood relatives called him Milorad as a young boy and many still do, graduated from Pepperdine in 1983, he went to work as a clerk for Chicago Alderman Edward Vrdolyak.

Let history record that the Vrdolyak job was the first known sign that M-Rad was off-kilter.

Later came the unforgivable maltreatment of his father-in-law Richard Mell, the grand and powerful alderman who was singly responsible for Blagojevich's many election victories up to and including his first win as governor. Milorad fractured an entire family in a petty political squabble over a garbage dump.

Even in that first term, Milorad was known to pull the wings off of small insects that got in his way. There were the tollway food contracts for his campaign donors - the $1,500 from a personal friend, shortly after the friend's wife had been given a job at the Illinois Department of Natural Resources - the board appointments and the doling out of grants and gifts to the favored.

Even when Mr. Blagojevich was positively identified as "Public Official A," the beneficiary of a pay-for-play scheme, he was rewarded with re-election in 2006.

Why don't we require that mayors, governors and presidents pass psychiatric examinations before they are allowed to take office? Truck drivers, store security guards and fry cooks have to jump through more mental hoops.

When Illinois makes it past these current unpleasantries, everybody will have their favorite Milorad moment. I remember mine.

It was at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. I was standing outside the hotel where members of the Illinois delegation were arriving.

"The I-Team was curious why the governor's bodyguards needed to drive Illinois State Police SUVs all the way out east - especially since all the governors had been provided with Massachusetts state troopers and squad cars," I reported that year on ABC 7.

"Though they wouldn't talk, some DNC delegates described it as a security spectacle, with state policeman even acting as bellhops for the first family, carrying in luggage and a baby stroller."

At first the governor said it involved just a couple of vehicles. That was a lie.

"After being presented with our facts, the governor's office admitted that there were actually twelve bodyguards ... who rang up nearly $23,000 in hotel bills - more than twice the amount they first claimed ... there were actually six cars driven to the DNC ... and some troopers did fly."

We spent months secretly following the Milorad motorcades across Illinois and the U.S. and found that he considered it a necessary accouterment of a king.

I concluded in our 2004 report that "nobody appears to travel like Blagojevich of Illinois. He has state police vehicles driven thousands of miles across the country by his bodyguards, so they can pick him up at the airport, and, critics say, so he can be driven in vehicles equipped with flashing lights and sirens."

Once, when Milorad had his security teams accompany him to Washington, he had a platoon of earpiece-equipped state police guards in dark suits and sunglasses swarm him while in public. Bystanders thought it must've been the president or a foreign head of state. When they saw the perfectly shellacked stranger who was being provided such treatment, they would ask, "Who is that guy?"

At the time, Gov. Blagojevich made his state bodyguards sign a confidentiality agreement that threatened discipline if they ever revealed any inside information about the governor.

What was the purpose of it all? A top state police officer who supervised the bodyguard detail in 2004 said they were to protect Gov. Blagojevich from "any type of embarrassment."

Had that Milorad mission actually been successful - or even possible - perhaps the entire state wouldn't be so embarrassed today.

• Chuck Goudie, whose column appears each Monday, is the chief investigative reporter at ABC 7 News in Chicago. The views in this column are his own and not those of WLS-TV. He can be reached by e-mail at chuckgoudie@gmail.com.