December 18, 2008

Was Blagojevich a Mobbed-Up Bookie Before He Was a Governor?

The ABC station in Chicago reports:

The ABC7 I-Team has learned that an attorney who went undercover for the FBI in the late 1980's says he told federal authorities years ago about wrongdoing by Blagojevich.

His name is Robert Cooley.

Cooley was a criminal defense lawyer in Chicago in the late 1980's who became one of the most potent witnesses against Chicago corruption, testifying for federal prosecutors in cases that resulted in dozens of convictions.

Cooley says that before Rod Blagojevich got into politics he was a bookmaker on the North Side who regularly paid the Chicago mob to operate.

"When I was working with government wearing wire, I reported, I observed Rod, the present governor, who was running a gambling operation out in the western suburbs. He was paying street tax to the mob out there," said Robert Cooley, federal informant.

On a web-based interview show last week, Cooley said he reported to federal authorities nearly two decades ago that Rod Blagojevich had been operating an illegal sports gambling business.

During Operation Gambat in the late 1980's and early 1990's, Cooley's undercover work and testimony put away 24 crooked politicians, judges, lawyers and cops.

Several years ago, when Mr. Blagojevich was running for re-election, Cooley provided the same information to the ABC7 I-Team. Because Cooley did not want to be identified at the time and the governor denied it, ABC7 did not report the story.

On Tuesday, Cooley spoke on the record.

He told ABC7 that Mr. Blagojevich regularly paid a so-called street tax to Robert "Bobby the Boxer" Abbinanti, a convicted outfit gambling collector. In the early 1980's, Abbinanti was working for convicted West Side mob boss Marco D'amico. Bookies pay street taxes to the crime syndicate in exchange for being allowed to operate such a racket.

"I predicted five years ago when he ran the first time that he was a hands on person who would be selling every position in the state of Illinois and that it exactly what happened," said Cooley.

This is the caliber of human being who becomes a successful Illinois politician. And, therefore, this is the type of man that Barack Obama, with every option in the world open to him, chose to spend his days in alliance with, so burning was Obama's hunger for power.

I moved to Chicago three years before Obama and had a lovely time there. But never once did I ever consider becoming a Chicago politician. I can't recall ever meeting anybody in Chicago who grew up elsewhere who said they had ever thought of becoming a Chicago politician. It no more occurred to us than to apply for membership in the Chicago Outfit. But Obama spent three years at Harvard Law School telling everybody that he was going back to Chicago to become mayor.

It's not as if Obama wanted to be a reformer, like his predecessor in the U.S. Senate, Peter Fitzgerald, who brought Patrick Fitzgerald to town to be Eliot Ness. Obama didn't want to change the rules of Illinois politics; he wanted to win at Illinois politics.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Steve, did you not fix the tech issue on the isteve.com domain for some good reason? Or are you running a deep cover SPLC honey trap here?

Because obviously blogspot.com is part of the google intelligence collection octopus. And comments here and on every other blogspot website are being databased according to IP address and matched with the mothership, the google search term database.

So we can assume complete dossiers are being created on supposedly anon individuals according to IP addresses. And even if anonymous surfers are using proxies there is a good chance that the proxy itself has been penetrated as per the latest War On Terror initiatives.

Not that this should be a surprise. Intelligent people must know by now that we are being forcefully transitioned into an overt Thought Police State.

I hope they also know that the only way to defeat this process is for a very public resistance movement to appear soon. Anonymous resistance in certain areas might be appropriate but widespread anonymous resistance plays into their hands.

The Thought Police must be rejected forcefully and publicly. Their neo-Bolshevik culture must be ridiculed, assaulted and mercilessly cracked -- exactly as they are attempting to do to Western Civilization, the US Constitution and the traditional America.

Anonymous said...

This makes one wonder whether Obama knew more before he moved to Chicago. It’s not the usual mode to say you're going to such and such a town and then just drop into the main street and ask the ice-cream man where the crooks are. Obama must have had prior connections in Chicago. Whilst he was studying in Harvard and when he made those remarks he was probably thinking of his connections in a real sense and in the context of what they presumably could bring him. Surely he was serious about his remarks? Otherwise his remarks were rather childish.


Btw, you have a little typo in your first sentence:

“This is the caliber of human become that becomes a successful Illinois politician.”

Your US English is usually comfortable to the eyes and typos don’t bother me, but some more critical people may pick that out and ignore the issue at stake.

Anonymous said...

When Blago was a rising star in politics I had always heard that he had been a pizza delivery guy until he met Alderman Dick Mell's daughter. Dick Mell is a long time Chicago alderman, which means he knows who holds the strings of power in the city and state. Dick Mell certainly helped start Blago's career in politics, helped move it along, and helped bring him down. It would make sense that if Blago was a bookie that he would work out of a pizza joint. Many of them are known fronts for the mob in the Chicago area (ironically the best pizza in any neighborhood or suburb is usually from the mob fronted pizza joints). In fact, if he were a bookie he was probably placed in a pizza joint by the mob and given a region to work. My speculation is that he may have been invited or brought along to parties or rallys that brought out both mob officals and local poiticians and it is there that Blago met Ald. Mell's daughter and the rest is history.

Anonymous said...

Libertarianism is looking better all the time. Anarchy too.

Anonymous said...

How do you know that Obama told his fellow Harvard Law School students that he wanted to be mayor of Chicago?

In your Obama book, "Half Blood Prince," you said it *seemed* like Obama was trying to retrace the career of Harold Washington. You didn't say that he had told a bunch of people that that was what he was doing; that that was his aim in life.

Anonymous said...

Remember Obama's old NPR interview? He wanted to become an Illinois politician so he could institute "redistributive change".

Anonymous said...

My speculation is that he may have been invited or brought along to parties or rallys that brought out both mob officials and local politicians

Its that good old 'who sent ya' meme!

Anonymous said...

"Sic Semper, you are a paranoid crackpot."

google has pretty much stated that that's what they are doing. they say it's only for "marketing purposes."

AmericanGoy said...

"This is the caliber of human being who becomes a successful Illinois politician."

Hmmm does not sound right.

This is the caliber of human being who becomes a successful AMERICAN politician.