A onetime chief of staff to former House Republican leader Lee Daniels was indicted on charges he directed state employees to work on numerous contested House campaigns in 1998 and 2000–all while on state time.
The federal indictment, made public Thursday, also charged that Michael Tristano forced a Chicago real estate partnership to put a Downstate GOP House candidate on its payroll even though the candidate was busy campaigning in southern Illinois.
In return, Tristano helped obtain more than $1 million in state funding for a project of the partnership’s in suburban Willow Springs, the indictment alleged.
Daniels, who stepped down in 2002 after two decades as House Republican leader amid reports of the federal investigation of GOP campaign practices under his leadership, wasn’t charged with wrongdoing in the indictment.
Tristano, 57, of Glenview held powerful dual positions under Daniels as head of both the minority leader’s office and the state House Republican political operation (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
Tristano’s lawyer, Terence Gillespie, said his client was devastated by news of the indictment but vowed to fight the fraud, theft and extortion charges.
The indictment comes as another blow for Illinois Republicans. Former Gov. George Ryan is awaiting trial on charges he took cash, gifts and vacations for himself and relatives in return for steering state contracts and leases to friends. Ryan’s former top aide, Scott Fawell, and Ryan’s campaign fund were convicted in 2003 on similar charges of diverting government resources to political campaigns.
In Springfield, Daniels (R-Elmhurst), still a House member, ducked reporters, declining repeated requests to leave his legislative seat in the back of the House chambers to comment on the charges against his former right-hand man.
But Daniels told WLS-Ch. 7 on Thursday that he didn’t direct Tristano to do what prosecutors allege. “I didn’t do anything wrong, and I don’t think that Mr. Tristano did,” Daniels said in Springfield.
Jeffrey Cole, who had been Daniels’ attorney until he took a seat on the federal bench last week as a U.S. magistrate judge, said Daniels is in the process of hiring a new lawyer
At a news conference to announce the charges, U.S. Atty. Patrick J. Fitzgerald conceded there can be gray areas between legitimate political activity and government work, but he contended the violations in this case weren’t minor like making a three-minute political call from a state office.
Asked by reporters if the allegations didn’t amount to business as usual in Illinois politics, Fitzgerald said, “If that’s business as usual, anyone who thinks they’re going to do that ought to understand they’re going to be prosecuted as usual.”
State Rep. Tom Cross (R-Oswego), who succeeded Daniels as House Republican leader, instituted new rules requiring time sheets and imposing strict rules about what kind of work could be done in the Capitol, aides say.
“One of the many reasons we have a new leader is that people were concerned about what they were reading in the newspaper,” Cross said Thursday.
In 1998, with the Democrats clinging to a 60-58 House majority, the Republicans made a concerted push to recapture control of the chambers.
As part of that effort, Tristano allegedly dispatched staffers from the minority leader’s office to work on numerous hotly contested campaigns while on state time, according to the charges.
At Tristano’s direction, the state staffers performed wide-ranging political activities, from knocking on doors of voters and analyzing telephone polling to even managing campaigns and preparing campaign plans, the charges alleged.
Tristano was charged with awarding days of comp time to the employees–not for legitimate overtime work but rather to conceal their campaign work on state time, the indictment charged.
After working on races in which Republican candidates weren’t incumbents, the staffers often falsified travel vouchers at Tristano’s direction to make it appear they had performed proper state work for sitting legislators, the charges alleged.
The political activity on state time was repeated for the House races in 2000 as well as local municipal campaigns in 1999 and 2001, authorities said.
While directing Daniel’s minority leader’s office, Tristano controlled a state budget of about $5 million and had about 100 full-time state employees at his disposal. He also headed the House Republican Campaign Committee that financially supported GOP candidates.
Rich Means, an attorney who reviewed a series of travel vouchers and time sheets of House Republican staffers and later turned them over to law enforcement, said he frequently noticed discrepancies between what staff claimed on the vouchers and what internal records showed.
“Their travel vouchers made it appear that it was constituent service or assisting one of the incumbents on some legislative program in the district,” Means said Thursday. “The reality appears to be that they didn’t go to that place at all or they went to a campaign headquarters for the same guy.”
The indictment also charged that for the 2000 election, Tristano extorted a real estate partnership to put a Downstate GOP House candidate in a ghost-payrolling job to provide him the necessary financial support while he campaigned. For his part, Tristano is alleged to have obtained $1.3 million in state funds for a $40 million residential and commercial project being developed in Willow Springs by Heritage Renaissance Partners.
The $1.3 million in state funds was used in part to rebuild Archer Avenue near the project.
Campaign finance reports show that Republicans, including the Daniels-controlled Illinois House Republican Campaign Committee, made a big push to help the Republican candidate in the 2000 House campaign, but the Democratic incumbent easily won re-election. Prosecutors didn’t name the Republican candidate.
Former state Rep. Roger Stanley aided Tristano in the scheme, the charges alleged. Stanley admitted helping obtain the ghost-payrolling job when he pleaded guilty in 2003 to wide-ranging corruption. Stanley, who was sentenced to 27 months in prison, was listed in public records as a part-owner of Heritage Renaissance.
Tristano had worked for the state for nearly two decades when he joined Daniels’ staff in late 1991. He left in the mid-1990s to take a high-ranking post with the University of Illinois at Chicago. He rejoined Daniels as chief of staff until he was appointed in late 2001 to the Illinois Pollution Control Board.
According to his lawyer, Tristano is currently unemployed, but his wife, Sandra, is a Cook County judge.
With lists of bills important to legislators, requests for pork-barrel proposals from Republican legislators and a budget analysis scattered about his desk, Tristano was a quick mind who looked for a GOP advantage behind every move, say those who know him.
“The guy was really bright, he was extremely detailed,” said a former House Republican staffer. “But he didn’t have a lot of personal skills with the staff, but he didn’t need to. We did what he wanted us to do. The job got done.”
At the news conference, Robert Grant, special agent in charge of the FBI office, noted that though the Chicago office is only the FBI’s fourth-largest in the country, it devotes more agents than any other to the fight against public corruption.
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