Golden: How Rod Blagojevich Talked Himself out of the Governor's Office and into Prison

Jeff Coen · John Chase

Sep. 2012 · Chicago Review Press

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No one did political corruption quite like Rod Blagojevich. The 40th governor of Illinois made international headlines in 2008 when he was roused from his bed and arrested by the FBI at his Chicago home. He was accused of running the state government as a criminal racket and, most shockingly, caught on tape trying to barter away President-elect Barack Obama’s US Senate seat. Most politicians would hunker down, stay quiet, and fight the federal case against them. But as he had done for years, Rod Blagojevich proved he was no ordinary politician. Instead, he fueled the headlines, proclaiming his innocence on seemingly every national talk show and street corner he could find.Revealing evidence from the investigation never before made public, Golden is the most complete telling yet of the Blagojevich story, written by two Chicago reporters who covered every step of his rise and fall and spent years sifting through evidence, compiling documents, and conducting more than a hundred interviews with those who have known Blagojevich from his childhood to his time in the governor’s office. Dispensing with sensationalism to present the facts about one of the nation’s most notorious politicians, the authors detail the mechanics of the corruption that brought the governor down and profile a fascinating and frustrating character who embodies much of what is wrong with modern politics. With Blagojevich now serving 14 years in prison, the time has come for the last word on who Blagojevich was, how he was elected, how he got himself into trouble, and how the feds took him down.

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Jeff Coen and John Chase each have spent more than a decade on the staff of the Chicago Tribune. Coen was a beat reporter at the city’s criminal courts building and its federal courthouse and now works with the paper’s political team. Chase covered Blagojevich from the start of his first campaign for governor and helped push the Tribune’s investigations of his questionable fund-raising practices and oddball political style. Jeff Coen is the author of Family Secrets: The Case That Crippled the Chicago Mob.