Golden by Jeff Coen Read Free Book Online Page B

starts. By then, though, the office was being run by Richard M. Daley, son of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, and Vrdolyak and the Daleys didn’t get along.
    â€œYou’ve got to understand something about the Irish, the Daley Irish,” Vrdolyak once remarked. “It’s the Irish first, and everybody else is a Polack.”
    As Blagojevich killed time with Vrdolyak, he lived at home and studied for the bar exam. The first time he took it, he flunked. He studied more the second time, ensconcing himself at the august Harper Library at the University of Chicago even though it was miles away from his home. To him, the library, with its wood-paneled walls,
felt
like a law library and motivated him. Blagojevich passed the second time.
    Done waiting for Vrdolyak, Blagojevich took a job with a firm in suburban Elk Grove Village in the shadows of O’Hare Airport, where he did mostly real estate work. Rod was quietly bitter about Vrdolyak not following through on his promise but also knew burning bridges with the alderman wasn’t necessarily the smartest move for an upstart politician.
    â€œHe had promised the job in his firm, but apparently it never came through,” Rod later said in an interview. “I sort of felt I was exiled in Elk Grove…. I just felt like I was Napoleon at Elba.”
    Blagojevich joined social groups and clubs in Elk Grove and discovered he was good at selling himself to clients. But he quickly tired of the suburbs and found a general practice to join run by well-respected Chicago attorney Marshall Moltz. Moltz’s office was at Ashland and Addison, less than a mile west of Wrigley Field and just blocks from the gym where Rod had been pummeled as a senior in high school in the Golden Gloves.
    While working for Moltz, Blagojevich’s charming personality and ability to spin yarns were good for more than making friends or picking up girls. One of Blagojevich’s first clients was a “little old lady” fighting her adopted daughter and sonin-law who were seeking conservatorship of the woman’s estate because they felt she was squandering it.
    In court, Blagojevich soon found himself in the middle of a jury trial. Blagojevich hadn’t even participated in a moot court at law school and didn’t know the rules of evidence or how to properly make an opening statement. But that didn’t stop him. He decided to wing it.
    While the daughter’s attorneys introduced two dozen pieces of evidence and got doctors to testify against his client, Blagojevich had trouble introducing any evidence in court and had no witnesses. All he could do was establish that the daughter and sonin-law hadn’t seen his client in over a year. But he made up for his poor performance with an hour-long closing argument where he paced the courtroom floor and yelled about evidence being kept from the jury due to “technicalities.”
    â€œPlease don’t hold her accountable for the rookie mistakes of her lawyer,” Blagojevich recalled telling the jury. A little more than hour later, the jury came back in favor of Blagojevich’s client.
    Excited, Blagojevich ran back to Moltz’s office and told his boss the story. Moltz smiled but weeks later fired Blagojevich, saying he was good at getting clients and he should go out on his own. Moltz didn’t think Rod was focused enough on his work.

    Dismissed but undaunted, Blagojevich began his own private practice. He did a little bit of everything—real estate closings, traffic cases, and criminal misdemeanor work. When neighborhood guys got into trouble, they hired Blagojevich.
    He also got more involved in running, which he still talked to Monk about. On the witness stand years later, Blagojevich would say he ran the 1984 Chicago Marathon in a blistering time of two hours, fifty minutes, and thirty seconds. He said he did it wearing a T-shirt with the image of boxer Roberto Duran on the front, inspired