By Michael Miner
Crown: “What is your relationship with Grupo Financiero Bancomer?”
Fitzgerald: No answer.
Three months ago Crown submitted to Fitzgerald for comment a list of accusations that began: “1. The massive VIOLATION of the ILLINOIS GOVERNMENTAL ETHICS ACT which occurred in the Illinois State Senate with your ‘yes’ votes on SB 935, SB 232, SB 1397…”
To Crown’s regret, his published reporting on Fitzgerald’s banking interests is pretty much the only reporting. The case he and editor Karen Nagel have been making for months in Illinois Politics is twofold. The first charge involves conflict of interest. They report that while a state senator, Fitzgerald voted on eight banking bills despite being a bank director with a family fortune invested largely in bank stocks. Those votes, Crown and Nagel wrote, “provided a personal financial benefit to himself and members of his family” and also contradicted his 1997 declaration to the state senate that “generally, it is my intention to abstain from voting on banking legislation.”
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Illinois Politics asserted before last November’s general election that Fitzgerald’s voting record “has left him vulnerable to criticism on the issue of ethics, and may give U.S. Senator Carol Moseley-Braun a heavy advantage in the closing stage of the campaign.” It didn’t. Either there wasn’t a ton of votes to be won with the materials Crown had dug up, or Moseley-Braun missed a golden opportunity. At any rate, she made little use of Crown’s data and she lost.
It was no secret to the voters who put Fitzgerald in office last November that he’d made his money in banking, so the fact that now he’s not voting on banking bills strikes Crown as more a betrayal of his office than it might strike you or me. Fitzgerald has told other reporters that Crown had confused unrelated state financial bills with banking bills. Furthermore, he’s accused Crown of running sort of a racket by using damning stories on candidates to sell bundles of Illinois Politics to their opponents. Crown and Nagel flatly deny this, though they acknowledge the occasional bulk sale. Back in 1994, they say, Fitzgerald, who was challenging Phil Crane for renomination, bought 200 copies of an issue that examined Crane’s voting record in Congress.
