We always walk tall! We’re Jets!

9:04 am, 4/26/05

We always walk tall! We're Jets!
Stefanski's family says he's innocent:

Relatives of top state transportation worker Daniel Stefanski insist the former union official, a friend of Gov. Rod Blagojevich's since childhood, is clean despite a published report that a Teamsters faction investigated him and found he had ties to organized crime.

The report by Teamsters Union anti-corruption investigators contained allegations that Stefanski, who ran Teamsters Local 726 before he worked for the state, has ties to reputed organized crime figures and once was a bookie, according to Monday editions of the Chicago Sun-Times.

"He never was a bookie," Daniel Stefanski's mother, Lorraine, told The Associated Press. "When he went into the union, he was one of them that got in on his own. He was not connected in no way, shape or form with the mob."

His older brother, Ed Stefanski, told the AP that Daniel Stefanski fought against the influence of alleged organized crime within the union.

"He ran against that faction when he was working for the union," Ed Stefanski said. "This bookmaking and all that stuff is totally out of left field ... He's in no way involved with any mob action or any of this other stuff."

The Teamsters say he was importing corruption into the Teamsters Union. Epic.

Stories have been around about Stefanski's, and even Blago's, role in the bookmaking gig for years. There's plenty of mobsterism to go around in Illinois, enough to put a double helping on your cereal in the morning, and Blagojevich was supposedly an outgoing, observant, fairly clever kid from a blue-collar neighborhood with a streak that could either be called opportunistic, conveniently dramatic, even a bit entrepreneurial, depending on how you look at it. If Rod were caught up running with bookies even into the late 80's, I don't think that revelation should exactly rock anybody's world, although he would probably have been prosecuting Chicago traffic tickets at the time.

Unfortunately, it seems like every one of these stories is reported with the same sort of breathlessness one might expect were they reporting on an alien landing. The shocking, unprecedented story is quickly replaced until they blur together into a bad soap opera with no coherent storyline. A good percentage of people in Illinois are thoroughly embracing denial or simply getting exhausted at this point. Ryan practically had to eat a baby live on C-SPAN before people snapped, and the blowback fell almost exclusively on him, and on anyone else unlucky enough to carry the surname "Ryan" when the 2002 ballots were printed. No outrage at the machine as a whole came, nor does it seem to be coming. That's how they stay in power. That, and the vote fraud.

Without more organized citizen action from the people of Illinois, this is not just an uphill battle, it's a virtually undetectable one. Fortunately, the same tide of rage at Ryan that Blagojevich rode in on should wash him back out to sea again, though the legislators and bureaucracy will remain, and I'm not looking forward to the prospect of a Governor Topinka.

Update: By the way, if you have any Blagojevich memorabilia, keep it. It'll be worth money someday: Al Capone's mugshot appraised at $8,000.