Whistle-blower gets national limelight

For weeks, the state's endured being a national and international punch line for jokes involving pay-to-play government, our disgraced governor and senate-seat shenanigans.

If there's one bright spot in the enduring shame, it's that the woman who blew the whistle on corruption involving Gov. Rod Blagojevich is also starting to get some national press along with stories about the scandal.

Edward Hospital CEO Pam Davis - named Naperville's Person of the Year by the Daily Herald in 2005 for her role in initiating the investigation that eventually has led to the governor's arrest - spoke Friday on ABC's "World News with Charlie Gibson," about wiretapping conversations with Blagojevich cronies trying to shake her organization down.

"I had my suspicions that it would go all the way up to the level of the governor," the Naperville executive said on the same day the Illinois House impeached Blagojevich, who was arrested in December.

"I was outraged that something as important to me as health care, something that was required, such an important service would have to fall under this type of terrible delay and expense and really just corruption."

Edward has been trying for years to build a second hospital in Plainfield but received repeated denials from the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board. In 2003 and 2004, Davis was pressured by a politically connected cabal including investment banker P. Nicholas Hurtgen, construction magnate Jacob Kiferbaum and Stuart Levine, a Blagojevich appointee to the health board. Both Levine and Kiferbaum have pleaded guilty on corruption charges but Hurtgen has denied wrongdoing.

The deal was - hire us to build and finance the Plainfield hospital and you'll get your project - federal prosecutors say.

But Davis resisted and called in the FBI.

"Evil thrives when good men do nothing. That's how I felt," she told the Daily Herald for the 2005 article. "I felt I was in the right place at the right time. I feel fortunate I had the opportunity to right a wrong."

The extortion started in late 2003 and culminated in April 2004 at a Deerfield diner, where Davis recorded a meeting with all three men. Afterward, her car was followed home.

"There were definitely moments of anxiousness," Pam's surgeon husband Zev Davis told the Daily Herald. "But she felt something was completely wrong and could not be tolerated."

Amid the unease of that time, Davis kept her sense of humor about being outfitted with a wire in her bra and having FBI agents pop in and out of her office at the Naperville hospital.

Once, her secretary walked in and found a G-man lurking under Davis' desk.

"It looked really odd, but she never asked me about it," Davis said in a September 2006 Daily Herald article.

Despite multiple appearances before the health board, the second hospital, which Edward and Plainfield officials say is necessary for a growing population in Will County hasn't been approved.

The facility goes up for another vote the last week in January.

The outcome is uncertain, but at least there's vindication that those trying to extort money are facing justice, Davis told ABC.

"They felt they were so smart and powerful that whatever they attempted to do was well within their control and they would never be stopped," she said.

As for Blagojevich, who maintains his innocence?

"I really think he should step down immediately so that the state of Illinois can begin to function more appropriately," Davis said Friday.