Ex-Gov. Walker on Ryan clemency bid: He needs to show remorse

Despite all the jabbering, only three sources really know anything relevant about whether former Illinois Gov. George Ryan deserves to be sprung from prison.

Of the three, Ryan, is occupied cleaning toilets, and God is busy too.

But I had the third guy on the phone and wanted to talk to him about whether Ryan should be presented with a get-out-of-jail-free card for Christmas.

His name is Dan Walker. He was the governor of Illinois a few years before Ryan. He knows something about prison because he was also locked up in one. And he had some personal experience with pardon requests and clemency.

"Governor Walker, what do you think about George Ryan possibly being released early from prison?" I asked.

There was silence on Walker's end of the phone in Baja California, Mexico. You could almost hear the Pacific Ocean breaking in the background.

"You had to ask about that, didn't you?" Walker finally said.

At age 86 and recovering from a "header to a tile floor" a few days ago, Walker was reluctant to dissect the trial and tribulations of Ryan.

"I have mixed feelings, having gone through it myself," he said.

Unlike Ryan, who was prosecuted and imprisoned for criminal misconduct while in office, Walker's trouble began 10 years after he left the governor's mansion. The feds charged him with concocting fraudulent business loans and he pleaded guilty, figuring he'd get probation. Walker's timing couldn't have been worse. The savings and loan scandal was brewing, and he was caught on that hook.

The sentencing judge in Chicago gave him seven years in prison. "My sentence was longer than Ryan's (who got 6½ years)," says Walker, reminding me several times that his crime did not violate any public trust and took no victims. Yet, "I couldn't even apply for parole for two years," he said.

"Nobody came to my defense," he says. "There was no mercy for Dan Walker."

At first, Walker did not want me to report any of this conversation because he felt it would make him appear to be a "P-L-O-M."

"What is that?" I asked.

"P-L-O-M. Poor Little Old Me," he explains.

Walker is right about this: His private-sector wrongdoing was nothing compared to Ryan's public deviousness and campaign conniving. Ryan's misconduct ended with people dead, killed by a trucker who had illegally bought an Illinois driver's license in exchange for bribes deposited in Ryan campaign accounts.

"What Ryan did was so bad and deliberate and so sad. For God's sake, there were over 130 felony indictments (from his administration)," Walker said. "There had never been that in the history of the United States."

Walker, an "independent Democrat" who had so irked party bosses that they refused to endorse him, ran a pedestrian campaign for governor in 1971 and '72. Literally. He walked 1,200 miles across the state wearing a work shirt and a bandanna to cultivate votes.

While in office, Walker trampled on the Daley machine that had worked so hard to prevent his election. He was a master of confrontation and a civil rights champion.

"I am very sensitive about the constant reiteration that 'Dan Walker went to jail along with those other governors like Ryan,'" he says. "I have very deep feelings about honesty in government and somewhat resentful that the executive orders that I signed bringing a whole new emphasis on ethics in government were, at the time and have since been, largely ignored."

It was Walker's good works that ended up setting him free from his bad deeds. After 18 months behind bars at the federal penitentiary in Duluth, Minn., the Chicago district court judge who originally sentenced him reduced his term to time served.

Walker later found out that a group of black professionals had gone to Judge Ann Williams, who is also black, to recommend his release because of the work he had done on behalf of civil rights.

"I never learned the identity of those wonderful friends," Walker wrote in his recent autobiography, "but my gratitude is boundless."

In 2001, Walker also asked for a pardon from outgoing President Bill Clinton. He didn't get it.

That may be the real message from one felon ex-governor to another: Don't depend on the president for freedom. Appeal to your trial judge for mercy based on the good things you did.

"I have great sympathy for Lura Lynn," Walker says of Ryan's wife. "I also understand the statement fully that former Gov. Ryan has paid a tremendous price and has been punished terribly already."

"But it was the sentencing judge who reduced my sentence," says Walker. "If Ryan would issue a statement saying that the pay-to-play practices he constantly followed in three important state offices were wrong and urging other officeholders to stop those practices, I would support clemency. I would also listen closely if the sentencing judge urged clemency."

If President Bush wants to give Ryan a present for the holidays, perhaps he ought to just send Ryan some reading material. I suggest sending "The Maverick and the Machine," Walker's autobiography. It provides the details of how Ryan might more effectively get of prison.

"In the nitty-gritty workings of city hall, in the fiefdoms of the aldermen and ward committeemen, the wheels of the new machine grind on, as the numerous federal investigations have amply demonstrated," Walker writes in the book.

Come to think of it, Gov. Blagojevich would enjoy a copy too.

• 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.