A former employee of an Illinois driver’s licensing facility charged Monday that her supervisors pressured her to give licenses to unqualified truck drivers in exchange for purchases of campaign fundraising tickets for then-Secretary of State George Ryan.
The employee, Andi Maddox, also said at a news conference organized by the Better Government Association that internal investigators began a probe of her allegations as early as 1992 that they later told her was quashed by their supervisors in the investigative unit.
Maddox, who worked at the state’s Elk Grove Village facility, said she decided to come forward because she is concerned that the license-selling scheme has unleashed hundreds of unqualified truck drivers on highways.
“This is something that tears at me,” she said at the BGA’s offices in downtown Chicago.
Maddox said she was pressured to provide phony local addresses for those seeking truck-driving licenses so applicants could qualify at the Elk Grove Village office. According to documents of truck-driving exam results presented to reporters by Maddox, the address of a number of driving school students was listed as 1601 Oakton St. in Elk Grove Village, a local hotel.
Maddox is the latest in a series of current or former secretary of state employees who have claimed in the past two years that their efforts to blow the whistle on driver’s license abuses were rebuffed by officials working for Ryan, who became governor in January.
Ryan’s office has denied pressuring any employees to sell campaign fundraising tickets, and officials said they have pursued vigorously any allegations of corruption. Dennis Culloton, a spokesman for the governor, on Monday said he could not address Maddox’s allegation that the secretary of state’s inspector general’s office halted an investigation in 1995.
But, Culloton noted, the secretary of state’s office did launch an undercover probe of the Elk Grove Village facility in cooperation with federal authorities–though the investigation was unsuccessful. Instead of seeking criminal charges or disciplining workers, the office transferred Maddox and five other employees who handled trucker testing to other facilities in 1996.
In October, the U.S. attorney’s office charged one of the former Elk Grove Village employees, Donna Carter, with accepting bribes in return for issuing licenses to unqualified truckers. The charges are part of a broader federal licenses-for-bribes investigation known as Operation Safe Road, which has resulted in 17 people charged and 13 convictions, several involving cash that prosecutors say ultimately wound up in Ryan’s campaign.
“The governor supports Operation Safe Road and hopes anyone with relevant information will come forward,” Culloton said Monday.
Dean Bauer, a longtime friend of Ryan’s who served as inspector general in the secretary of state’s office from 1992 through 1998, has said he never blocked any legitimate investigation. Maddox did not say who in the inspector general’s office ordered the investigation stopped. Bauer recently retired from state government.
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Questioned by reporters in Springfield, Ryan took issue with the Better Government Association’s decision to fly Maddox to Chicago. Maddox left her job as a license examiner in 1996 and moved out of state.
“Unless they’ve got some other agenda, I don’t know why they’d have a big public press conference and a dog-and-pony show other than to take a shot at me,” Ryan said. “I think that’s probably what it was about.”
Ryan also said he eventually will donate between $130,000 and $140,000 from his campaign fund to charities–an amount similar to what federal authorities have identified as allegedly tainted cash from the license-selling schemes. Ryan previously donated about $6,500 that he received in contributions from employees indicted in the federal probe.
“I’m going to kind of dribble it out as I get requests over the future,” Ryan said.
The news conference Monday was Maddox’s first public appearance as a whistleblower. In the past, she had granted a few TV interviews that concealed her identity. Maddox said she issued licenses to applicants from truck-driving schools that had a large number of foreign students who couldn’t speak English. Some of the applicants came to the Elk Grove Village office from as far away as the New York City metropolitan area, she said.
BGA executive director J. Terrence Brunner displayed an advertisement in a New York newspaper, in Polish, for a driving school, encouraging prospective truckers to come to Illinois to get their licenses.
Maddox said her managers told her she was flunking too many applicants, which decreased the number of fundraising tickets that could be sold to the driving schools sponsoring the applicants. “I didn’t want to sell the tickets,” she said.
For example, in a November 1995 report, Maddox failed 18 out of 81 candidates on a particular set of tests, according to documents she provided Monday. Another employee, according to the report, did not fail any applicants out of 44 candidates tested that month.
“They told me to lower my failure rate,” Maddox said.
Maddox then asked her superiors how she could just lower her rates without looking at the applicant’s test results. “They said look at some of the other examiners–maybe you could give (applicants) a break once in a while,” she said.
The practice, she said, was part of a broad scheme to give out licenses in exchange for the purchase of tickets for Ryan’s campaign.
In October, the U.S. attorney’s office said it expected to charge two employees of the Elk Grove facility. No other employees have been charged since Carter.
Naming one of her supervisors, Maddox said Monday that she was harassed for refusing to go along with the cash-for-licenses scheme. The harassment ranged from disciplinary action for the way she was dressed to a one-day suspension for a confrontation with a truck-driving school official, Maddox said.
The supervisor, who could not be reached for comment and has not been charged, resigned from the secretary of state’s office last month, according to a spokesman for Jesse White, who now heads the office.
Maddox, who began working at the Elk Grove Village facility in 1990, said she wrote a letter to Ryan a year later, complaining about the ticket-selling scheme and about the harassment she received on the job.
The secretary of state’s inspector general’s office then launched an investigation of her allegations, she said. Besides numerous meetings and interviews with officials, Maddox said, she provided investigators with a journal documenting how she passed and granted licenses to unqualified foreign drivers. But in 1995, Maddox said investigators informed her that they had been told to end their probe into her allegations.
In mid-1995, the inspector general’s office was disbanded and investigators were reassigned. The office was reorganized some months later as part of the secretary of state police department.
Frank Murphy, one investigator mentioned by Maddox, said Monday that he was only briefly involved in the case and that all his inspector general casework ceased when he was reassigned to the secretary of state police department. Murphy emphasized, however, that his bosses never blocked him from pursuing investigations.
Later in 1995, the secretary of state police department, in cooperation with the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service, conducted an undercover probe in Elk Grove Village, Culloton said. The investigation was called off after secretary of state employees apparently learned of the probe, Ryan officials said last year.