A slightly reworded but not rethought version of the piece that ran in the newspaper in 2012. When it came out, Bill was awaiting sentencing after being convicted of the crime of being an Illinois politician. Significantly, the judge would give him only a year and a day—the minimum sentence that federal guidelines allowed.

 

The feds want Bill Cellini to get at least six and a half years in a steel box when he is sentenced in October in Chicago in spite of his having been convicted only of the two minor crimes they charged him with. Whatever Springfieldians think of the jury’s opinion, most probably endorse his attorneys’ request that the judge give Cellini a Get Out of Jail card—he’s old and sick—and sentence him to probation instead.

Officially, the man who is Springfield’s Horatio-Alger-story-come-to-life was guilty of conspiring to commit extortion and aiding and abetting the solicitation of a bribe. These are serious matters, every bit as serious as, say, prosecutors conspiring to convict a man on scant evidence or aiding and abetting the aggrandizement of the U.S. attorney’s office. What Cellini was really convicted of doing was talking about maybe committing a crime and of being who he is.

Patrick Fitzgerald, the recently resigned U.S. attorney in Chicago who was Cellini’s nemesis, made his name in cases involving people with names like Levine and Rezko and Blagojevich and Rahman and Calabrese. (Yes, Fitzgerald also nailed Conrad Black for looting his company, but as an Anglo-Canadian, Black is an establishment outsider like the others.) Fitzgerald thus followed in the grand tradition of prudish prosecutors who are as uneasy in Illinois as a Baptist in a bordello.

 

Among Fitzpatrick’s predecessors was James R. Thompson, who brought a similar case against former Illinois governor Otto Kerner. Kerner—Army major general, federal judge, and the pride of the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago—was a good governor who was best known to the wider world for chairing the U.S. Commission on Civil Disorders (more widely known as the Kerner Commission) which investigated the 1968 urban riots and dared to speak honestly about what it found.

Kerner’s principal failure in office was exercising poor judgment in the choice of associates who tangled him in a race track stock scheme. That left him vulnerable to Thompson’s ambition for headlines and to a legal gimmick, the famous “theft of service” statute by which state officials could be convicted for depriving the public of its right to their honest services if they fail to disclose material information. Of course, the non-disclosure of material information is the very essence of politics and business and the statute that embodied the doctrine was properly declared invalid by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987. A rewritten law still reeked so much that even today’s Supreme Court, which is always eager to indulge power, limited its application in 2010.

Kerner’s conviction left some of us condemning the theft of honest services that occurs when ambitious U.S. attorneys remove capable judges such as Kerner from the bench for peccadilloes committed in a previous life by their staffs. Those who wish to know more, or who wish to get angry about it all over again, might read Kerner: The Conflict Of Intangible Rights by Bill Barnhart and Gene Schlickman, which the University of Illinois Press published in 1999.

Patrick Fitzgerald is no James Thompson. When Thompson said he wanted Kerner to endure the humiliation of jail time because it would deter future public corruption in Illinois, you knew he was grandstanding. Whether the puritanical Fitzgerald actually believes that jail time for Cellini will redeem the reputation of Illinois politics I do not know, but giving Cellini hard time would help redeem Fitzgerald’s reputation after bringing such a weak case to trial. In their written objection to the feds’ pre-sentence report to the judge, Cellini’s lawyers reminded the judge—and a watching world—that the trial had shown that Cellini didn’t know of the extortion plots that others in the case were up to and did not extort money himself.

Now, a smart guy knows when not to know things and Bill Cellini is a smart guy but people who followed the trial in the daily press who wanted to come to their own conclusions what he knew probably found it as confusing as I did. The prosecutor’s case seemed to rely, appropriately enough, on a laugh. They played for the court a tape of a telephone chat between Cellini and businessman Stuart Levine, a guy who would be flattered by being called “shady.” The two shared a chuckle about how they would squeeze Hollywood movie producer Thomas Rosenberg by stiffing him on state contracts if he didn’t donate to Rod Blagojevich’s campaign. “The defendant is laughing,” one of the prosecutors told the jury. “That is what corruption sounds like.”

Oh, we all are wicked boys when we’re cracking wise with friends, and I confess here and now that I have committed many a crime in jest. Bill Cellini was not being charged with making improper jokes, however, he was being charged with attempting to extort Rosenberg although Rosenburg testified that Cellini had never in thirty years hustled him for a political contribution. Whatever the actual words spoken by the jury foreman when he returned the verdicts, what he said in effect was “Not guilty of anything really bad.” That is what prosecutorial incompetence sounds like. ●