Fair-haired, crisply suited and unflappably polite–even with his five apple-cheeked tykes in tow– Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Al Salvi seems a walking, talking poster child for the wholesome, conservative family-based movement he trumpets.
He even takes milk with his meals.
But behind the choirboy aura lies the soul of a riverboat gambler, a man who stakes his financial fortune on his political one and whose blistering ambition to be a player in Washington was formed before he had the foggiest idea what he believed in.
“I love politics; it’s in my blood,” explained Salvi, whose father once ran for Congress himself from Lake County–as a Democrat. “When other kids were watching `Hogan’s Heroes’ and `Gilligan’s Island,’ I was watching the Watergate hearings.”
Salvi entered the University of Illinois law school a liberal Democrat, but he emerged a rock-ribbed Republican, and within a few months fulfilled a childhood vow to run for Congress the moment he turned old enough.
He got his law license on a Thursday and launched his campaign the next Monday. He was a brassy suburban kid seeking a Downstate U.S. House seat centered in Champaign County, ready to take on the world even though he had barely worked in it.
Salvi poured $1,000 into his campaign, almost half of what he had earned the year before, ran unopposed in the Republican primary and got walloped in the general election. Two months later, he split town.
Youthful folly, perhaps. But it happened barely 10 years ago.
Now Salvi is back on an even loftier Capitol quest, a little older, certainly more worldly after two terms in the Illinois House and flush from a seven-figure income derived from the personal-injury law firm that bears his name.
But Salvi the go-for-broke gambler remains, this time mortgaging his home for political seed money and then fueling his hopes with settlements from legal work.
And there are other parallels between that quixotic 1986 effort and the well-oiled, hard-charging Senate drive of 1996. Both campaigns generated questions about Salvi’s judgment.
In 1986, there were charges that Salvi was an opportunistic “carpetbagger,” an allegation that produced more than a few I-told-you-so’s after his abrupt post-election exit.
This time around, he has starkly altered some positions to pursue campaign donations from special interest groups opposed to each other.
As a lawmaker, he has been accused by his Republican brethren of shopping votes on the controversial issue of tort reform.
In embracing his extensive family as a major campaign asset, he has allowed his father-in-law, Nick Keller, to play a behind-the-scenes role as a strategist and emissary to the Christian Right, despite Keller’s criminal record as a mob-linked loan shark.
Salvi bucked the party establishment and campaigned as a maverick in his upset win over Lt. Gov. Bob Kustra in the March primary. Since then, he’s sought to close ranks and repackage himself as what he calls a “mainstream conservative.” But he remains a favorite of the religious Right, opposed to gun control, abortion, contraception and many social programs.
Oddly, Democrats often give Salvi higher marks for sincerity than Republicans.
“I disagree with Al on a whole bunch of things, but he was someone who was down in the legislature pursuing the issues he believes in and was willing to break with some of the leaders of his party,” said state Rep. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat who is running for Congress on Chicago’s North Side.
Republicans, most of them loath to criticize Salvi publicly as the election nears, tinged their private assessments with disdain.
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“He’s an ambitious guy, ideological, focused and determined,” said a west suburban lawmaker. “But Al didn’t have a lot of support in our caucus because his issues weren’t very mainstream and because sometimes he just rubbed people the wrong way.”
Thirty-six-year-old Albert J. Salvi comes from a long line of high achievers. His Italian immigrant grandfather, Alberto Salvi, was a world-renowned harpist, and relatives in the old country still manufacture harps under the family name.
But Salvi’s dad, Albert S., took up the law and politics, settling in Lake Zurich and raising nine children in the devout traditions of the Roman Catholic Church. Five of them took up the law.
The senior Salvi idolized President John F. Kennedy. Young Al carried that liberal Democratic tradition with him to the University of Notre Dame, where he was once tapped by a local TV station to provide the rebuttal to a speech by President Ronald Reagan.
But as a law student at the University of Illinois, Salvi transformed into a passionate Reaganite.
Classmates remember Salvi the student, unlike Salvi the politician, as one of those unremarkable people who sit in the back of the room and say little. But he was befriended by a couple of the class conservatives, Michael Fumento and Paul Demott. They talked politics endlessly. And as time passed, according to Salvi and Fumento, Salvi swung to the right.
“One day I said to Paul, `My God, this guy is more conservative than we are,’ ” Fumento said.
Salvi graduated in August 1985, logged his first campaign contribution from a brother in September, and formally launched his congressional campaign Nov. 11. He lost badly and took a law job in Los Angeles, complaining that Champaign was too glutted with lawyers to earn a living.
Months later, he met Kathleen Keller, an associate in his older brother Pat’s Waukegan law firm who had been sent to the coast for a deposition. They fell in love, and Salvi moved back to Lake County to work for his brother as well.
Eventually, Salvi opened his own Waukegan law firm specializing in personal-injury cases.
In 1992, Salvi was elected to his first of two terms in the Illinois House, representing the Wauconda area.
The story of Al Salvi is really one of two large and extremely close-knit Lake County clans, the Salvis and the Kellers. Kathy, like Al, grew up in a family of nine kids that was devoutly Catholic and politically connected.
Her grandfather had been a Republican state legislator. Her father, Nick Keller Jr., a Waukegan real estate broker, also ran for the legislature but lost.
There was another side to Keller. In 1980, he was convicted of being a juice loan collector for high-ranking Cicero mobster James Inendino. FBI wiretaps had caught Keller conspiring with Inendino over several loans, with rates up to 5 percent a week. The two also were recorded plotting a mob takeover of a financially troubled ice cream maker.
Keller was sentenced to 3 years in a federal prison and was out in 1. He says he has had no contact with Inendino since. The whole episode occurred years before Al and Kathy met.
In a recent interview, Salvi said Keller’s primary campaign involvement is to baby-sit the grandchildren. But last month, Keller told a caucus of Christian Coalition members in Washington that one of his roles is to establish contacts with Republican committeemen in Illinois.
“I’m involved with the candidate on a daily basis,” he said, promising coalition members that their calls to him would be quickly channeled to the proper campaign officials.
In an interview Friday, Keller, 61, said he is not a part of the formal campaign structure but acknowledged making phone calls to test the waters for his son-in-law’s candidacy. “I tend to be a cheerleader,” Keller said. “I don’t give Al advice.”
Salvi said Friday of Keller: “I know he’s done little things (for the campaign). But what do you expect? He’s my father-in-law.”
Hoping to capture moderate voters, Salvi’s campaign has downplayed ties to the religious Right while stressing his image as a hard-as-nails fiscal conservative.
But the ties are tight, bound largely by Kathy Salvi, the campaign’s ideological center. She has been active in several conservative groups and lists herself as the Chicago-area representative of the little-known National Institute of Womanhood, under whose auspices she attended a United Nations conference on women in China last year. Salvi himself has attended a UN population-control conference at the behest of the institute.
The Washington-based organization opposes all forms of contraception, and it contends that population programs of the UN and other groups have been hijacked by radical feminists who seek to limit growth through the promotion of abortion, sterilization and homosexuality.
In the legislature, Salvi has been an outspoken advocate of the agenda of the religious Right, sponsoring legislation to curb abortion and what conservatives contend is government intrusion in family life.
He also has been at the forefront of legislative efforts to toughen criminal sentencing and eliminate bureaucratic impediments to transracial adoptions. Colleagues give Salvi high marks for legislative passion and vigor, but some grade him less favorably when it comes to candor.
A case in point is a controversy over how Salvi bankrolled his primary campaign with more than $1 million in personal loans, a critical cash infusion that fueled his long-shot victory. Salvi says the money was derived from a $1.1 million fee his firm received in January for a settlement.
This could put Salvi in an ethical dilemma. In speeches, in a printed announcement and on his law firm’s letterhead, Salvi and his wife have represented themselves as partners in the firm. If that were so, a good chunk of any legal settlement would belong to Kathy Salvi, who is barred by federal election law from contributing more than $1,000 to her husband’s campaign. There are no limits on what a candidate can contribute to his own campaign.
Salvi says he is entitled to spend all the settlement proceeds on his campaign because his wife is an employee of the firm, not a partner in a “legal” sense. But then Salvi appears to be in violation of the state ethics code for lawyers, which prohibits a firm from representing itself as a partnership if it is not.
Asked why his firm sent out the February 1993 partnership announcement if his wife wasn’t a partner, Salvi said: “I don’t know why we did that.”
Some of Salvi’s fellow lawyers and legislators also have accused him of unethical behavior over the volatile issue of tort reform, a 1995 GOP initiative to cap lawsuit awards. Republicans and big business pushed hard for the bill, which Democrats and trial lawyers opposed.
But Salvi and Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Wheaton) opposed the bill. They formed a special political committee and solicited trial lawyers for more than $70,000 in donations, about half collected within 48 hours of the February 1995 tort-reform vote.
Lawyers contacted by the pair, as well as some legislators, say Salvi and Roskam sought political donations by suggesting that they could deliver the votes of three other Republicans willing to bolt the party line.
Reps. Thomas Lachner of Lake Bluff and Patricia Reid-Lindner of Aurora said they had no idea then that Salvi was dangling their names. The third, Rep. Rosemary Mulligan of Park Ridge, said she had been approached but rebuffed Salvi, telling him the scheme was “unethical and possibly illegal.” Salvi used her name anyway, Mulligan said, and when she found out she hit the roof.
“Everyone thinks the reason I’m not backing Al is over the (abortion) choice issue, but it has nothing to do with that,” she said. “It has to do with his ethics.”
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Terrence Lavin, a Chicago lawyer and Illinois State Bar Association board member, said Salvi and Roskam asked him for $25,000. He said they told him, “We will never, ever vote for tort reform.”
In the end, Roskam did vote for it. But Salvi has acknowledged that at his prompting, Roskam extracted a promise from House Speaker Lee Daniels not to punish Salvi by running a challenger against him in the next primary. The tort-reform bill passed, with every Republican but Salvi voting “aye.” Salvi voted “present.”
After the vote, Salvi and Roskam reimbursed much of the money they had collected. Later, four tort-reform sponsors in the state Senate, all Republicans, sent Salvi a letter strongly suggesting that the affair smacked of votes for sale.
Unchastened, Salvi has tried to play his “present” vote both ways in his run for the Senate.
He has told business interests that he firmly supports the concept of tort reform but that he had qualms with parts of the specific bill. At the same time, he distributed campaign solicitations to fellow trial lawyers, emphasizing that he didn’t vote for tort reform.
In response, Lavin shot back a letter saying he was amazed that Salvi would dare seek contributions from the “victims of you and your back-stabbing, double-dealing, disingenuous Republican colleagues who had protested to be true believers on the unfairness of tort reform.”
As for a contribution, Lavin attached a penny to the bottom of the page.