David Ellis is like a character in a good book. The more you find out about him, the more you realize how much you don’t know. Your first impression only skims the surface. You’re intrigued to know more, so you keep reading.
His day job is to serve as chief legal counsel for House Speaker Michael Madigan. In his “spare time,” or, rather, in the time that he hasn’t fallen asleep in front of the computer, Ellis writes mystery novels.
The dark subjects about which he writes — political corruption, adultery, pedophilia, murder — contrast with his even-tempered and down-to-earth demeanor depicted by his friends. He even relates his own upbringing in the Chicago suburb of Downers Grove as a “nice apple-pie, nuclear family: one sister, great parents who were just wonderful to me.”
“For a closet homicidal maniac, he’s a pretty good guy,” jokes Michael Kasper, a longtime friend and Chicago attorney. “He’s every bit as nice a guy as he seems.”
Kasper would know. He once stood in Ellis’ shoes, previously working as Madigan’s general counsel. They both graduated from Northwestern University’s law school, although at separate times. They worked together during Ellis’ years in private practice and on the speaker’s staff, analyzing complicated redistricting laws and writing endless legal briefs defending the 2001 legislative map.
“That’s when I first realized that his ability to write wasn’t like everybody else’s,” Kasper says. “I would struggle with mine, and they would take a long time. When it was his turn, he would turn out these beautiful briefs overnight. And it just drove me nuts.”
They stood in each other’s weddings. Most recently, they stood together as they tried and convicted then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich during the Illinois Senate impeachment hearings.
The attorneys had no precedent and no traditional witnesses. The emotionally and physically draining experience changed Ellis as a writer, he says. For starters, Blagojevich’s rise and fall, as well as his international media blitz, made Ellis’ latest book seem boring.
The author couldn’t ask for better fodder for creating an antagonist. In fact, Ellis’ next book, his sixth, is expected to draw from his Blagojevich experience. It’s scheduled to be published about the same time the ex-governor’s federal corruption trial starts in June 2010.
Ellis says the book won’t give readers what they expect.
On one hand, he says, the plot does include an FBI investigation into an allegedly corrupt governor. But although the novel might offer familiar schemes and secret wiretaps, the storyline is not Blagojevich’s, he says.
That would be too boring to Ellis and too predictable for readers. “That may be what everybody wants me to do, but that’s not what they’re going to be getting. … I can’t write something that doesn’t fascinate me.”
Yet the entire Blagojevich experience has inspired the creative side of his brain. His role, from turning a 76-page criminal complaint into his star witness to conceptualizing a catchy theme in his rebuttal to the governor’s last speech, opened new ways to give his characters more depth, to draw readers in and to force them to explore whether things really are as they seem.
House and Senate members describe Ellis as the right man to prosecute Blagojevich because he is, in their words, an even-keeled, whip-smart, down-to-earth, fair, analytical, approachable and methodical lawyer.
Madigan adds that Ellis joined his legal team during what is known as the rising action in Blagojevich’s narrative. He became the speaker’s chief legal counsel in February 2007, when tension between Madigan and Blagojevich escalated and led to the governor suing the speaker, as well as the House clerk. At the heart of those lawsuits, which Ellis handled in court, was the discrepancy over the governor’s executive powers and his attempts to skirt legislative approval. Those themes landed a major role in the articles of Blagojevich’s impeachment drafted by Ellis and presented to the Senate tribunal.
Illinois Senate President John Cullerton says rules for the impeachment trial were written to avoid the possibility of politicians carrying out grudges against the governor, which would have tainted the integrity of the precedent-setting process. “If [Ellis] didn’t do a good job in making the case, there would always be the question of whether or not we ramrodded somebody and gave him a kangaroo court. And to me, Ellis, like most good prosecutors, did an excellent job.”
It wasn’t easy. He did it with no precedent for the impeachment process and with no traditional witnesses. He was limited to the 76-page federal criminal complaint based on an affidavit by FBI Agent Daniel Cain. Cain testified but was under strict orders from U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald to only confirm the facts as presented in that document, nothing more. All other witnesses involved in Blagojevich’s ongoing federal criminal investigation were off limits.
Without testimony from those witnesses or from Blagojevich — who didn’t appear until the final hours of the trial — Ellis brought the document to life by using the governor’s own words, transcribed from secret federal recordings and super-sized onto large poster boards.
The U.S. Senate seat “is a f---ing valuable thing, you just don’t give it away for nothing,” was enlarged and displayed in front of the chamber.
“Every time a board flipped, 300 cameras went off. And 59 chins went up off of the affidavit and up to the board,” Ellis recalled during a national journalism conference in Indianapolis last summer. “You know that old saying, ‘You had to be there?’ You really had to be there.”
The governor wasn’t there until the very end. That disappointed Ellis. “I wanted a fight. I wanted them to challenge me every step of the way because I thought I could overcome that challenge.”
Rather, Blagojevich defended himself through a national media blitz. When he did appear on the last day of the trial, he never testified under oath. He spoke for about 50 minutes, declaring his innocence and repeatedly questioning how he could be impeached for expanding health care and importing cheaper prescription drugs and flu vaccine. Blagojevich said that in all of his work, the end was a moral imperative, justifying the means.
Ellis rebutted: When the camera is on, the governor’s “for the little guy.” When the camera is off, he’s for “legal, personal and political” gain, a statement mirroring Blagojevich’s own words as transcribed by the feds. “The governor knows what to say when he’s on camera, but this case is about what happens when he’s off camera,” Ellis said.
Senators describe Ellis’ rebuttal as unemotional and compelling, fair and persuasive.
“It was the most stark contrast between the governor as he presented himself and the governor as we’d heard him on the secretly recorded tapes,” says Sen. Don Harmon, an Oak Park Democrat. “As a lawyer, I was envious of [Ellis’] abilities but so glad that he was the one making that argument. He did everything in a very even-keel, non-sensational but effective way.”
It’s that contrast of Blagojevich’s character that most intrigued Ellis. It inspired him to ask questions when developing his next fictional protagonist and antagonist. How might a character become corrupt? Did he have enablers steering him in the wrong direction? Did he get bad advice? Was he overwhelmed or desperate?
“I always thought the story of corruption would be a very interesting one because I think people are obviously complicated,” Ellis says. “And most people are not all good or all bad. There are shades of gray everywhere.”
Ambivalence almost serves as a character in his mysteries. “I like complicated situations, where you’re a little ambivalent about whether the person is good or bad. I think that’s interesting. That’s how life is interesting.”
Ellis’ first novel, Line of Vision, for instance, is told through the eyes of the main character, Marty Kalish, who is charged with murdering his mistress’ husband. Readers are taken on a twisting plotline driven by court scenes that cast doubt over the facts as Kalish tells them.
Ellis says while working as a private attorney in Chicago, he carved out one hour here, two hours there, to write. It took him three years and four or five drafts, with the final version looking completely different from the first. He was, essentially, teaching himself to write. It worked. His creation won the prestigious 2002 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel by an American Author.
In his latest book, The Hidden Man, the main character is Jason Kolarich, a mid-30s lawyer who rose to the top after winning a high-profile political corruption case. Kolarich (pronounced cola-rich) is the character Ellis had been looking for. Kolarich wrestles with his past mistakes, his future purpose, his fate and his faith.
“This is the guy I want to spend time with,” Ellis said late one night after the House adjourned the last night of its fall veto session. “Probably in part because he’s probably the most like me of anybody I’ve ever written.”
Kolarich, however, is an exaggerated version of Ellis. The author says his character is smarter, funnier, better-looking, more athletic and more courageous. Like Ellis, he’s also a south side Catholic, but Kolarich has gone through tremendous distress in losing his wife and child. His life turns upside down again when he’s hired to defend his long-lost childhood friend who is charged with murdering a pedophile. When an anonymous benefactor tries to control the case and block Kolarich from discovering the truth, Kolarich embarks on a journey with no fear, nothing to lose.
“That’s an interesting emotion to feel,” Ellis says. “It’s a recklessness that gives you some freedom.”
Kolarich, whose ambivalence is similar to that of many of Ellis’ other characters, will stick around for the author’s upcoming sequel. He will, Ellis says, help the FBI investigate a governor.
The premise already has intrigued the House speaker, a political strategist and technician who says murder mysteries are not typically in his library. “When we embarked upon the impeachment inquiry here in the House, we knew that this would be an historic event,” Madigan says. “That’s why it got so much time and attention from me, and that’s why I’d be interested in wherever I might pick up from reading his book.”
But the speaker may be surprised, as could many readers who know Ellis as the House prosecutor. That side of Ellis differs from Ellis the author, Ellis says. But they influence each other, and they compete for his time.
“I don’t spend very much time being Dave the writer when I’m the lawyer in the House. I think that, sometimes, I miss that person,” he says. “If you took writing away from me, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. The days that I can’t write are days that I enjoy less. I won’t say they’re sad days, but they’re frustrating days.”
One of Ellis’ frequent challengers on parliamentary procedure in the House is Republican Rep. Bill Black of Danville, whose charismatic tirades have rallied the GOP against the majority Democrats. While Black says it’s fun to challenge parliamentarians, Ellis is an “agreeable person. And when an agreeable person disagrees with you, it’s hard to get too upset.”
Black goes as far as describing Ellis as a “kind of renaissance man of the General Assembly” because of his discipline, writing about an hour a night when he gets home from what’s often a 12- to 15-hour-a-day job for Madigan. “He’s a nice guy,” Black says. “And there’s an old saying in the chamber: The world’s full of nice gals and nice guys, but find someone who can do the damn job. He does his job, and he evidently is doing both — very well.”
The last week of the legislature’s veto session, for instance, was brutal. Ellis was integral in around-the-clock negotiations on three major bills, ranging from overhauling regulations for cemeteries to enacting first-of-a kind limits on political campaign contributions. In the midst of negotiations, Ellis found time to put his first daughter to bed and write about an hour before partaking in a two-hour conference call to seal the deal on new cemetery regulations.
He has kept his eyes wide open the entire time, collecting experiences, insights and characters along the way. That is to say, he continues to develop new ways to intrigue, lead and manipulate readers until the very last page.
Illinois Issues, December 2009
