3/27/2008

Political consultant Rod McCullough could serve up to 5 years for perjury

Political consultant Rod McCulloch has a well-known list of names on his resume. Dennis Hastert, Peter Roskam. He's slightly noteworthy for having run Gen. John Borling's 2004 GOP campaign for the US Senate nomination. Boring canned McCulloch for shopping around salacious details of fellow GOP candidate Jack Ryan's divorce papers. And we all know how that turned out.

McCulloch has also worked for numerous little-known politicians. And his 2005 work collecting petition signatures for Milton (DuPage) Township Assessor Jim Gumm that could land him as much as 5 years in the pokey:

Rodney McCulloch, 43, of 203 S. Hudson St. in Westmont, faces up to five years in prison for the perjury conviction alone. A DuPage County judge also found him not guilty of related forgery charges.

The charges stem from nominating petition signatures McCulloch collected for former Milton Township Assessor Jim Gumm in an aborted 2005 re-election bid.

Gumm eventually dropped the reelection bid.

Even if McCulloch's defense was true, it's laughable that he would stake his future on guys named "Jimmy", "Danny", and most of all, "Scooter":

McCulloch's defense strategy focused on the idea that four homeless men he hired to help collect about 600 signatures for Gumm got greedy and forged dozens of names without McCulloch knowing.

In court, McCulloch could only recall the first names of three of men, "Jimmy," "Danny" and "Scooter," but none of their last names. McCulloch said he promised the homeless men $1.50 for each signature. That's the same amount McCulloch himself expected to receive for the work, leaving him with no expectation of profit from the job.

McCulloch also trusted the homeless men to take the petitions home with them after each day of work. In the case of "Scooter," that meant to a sleeping bag under a bridge near the Fox River in Oswego.

Lara said the homeless men took advantage of McCulloch's kindness.

Imagine that. The "political huckster with a big heart" defense failed.

Note to self: never place much faith in anyone named "Scooter".

Where McCulloch got himself into trouble was in changing his story, hence the perjury:

Burke said there's no doubt some of the signatures McCulloch collected were forged. However, the fact that McCulloch used a crew to collect the signatures creates doubt about who committed the forgeries. But the crew created another problem.

"The defendant, in no way, with any certainty, can say with reasonable belief that the signatures were signed in his presence," Burke said.

McCulloch had testified that he watched the four homeless men collect the signatures while sitting in a van watching them go door-to-door.

Whoops.

Perhaps rather than closing a wing of Joliet's Statesville prison, Gov. Blagojevich should just dedicated it as the new "Illinois politics" wing. It would certainly get enough use.

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Filed Under: Illinois Politics

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