Michael Demetrio says that when his wife ran for office, there was one place, and only one place, she turned for money: their own bank.
“We have a fairly firm philosophy,” Demetrio says. “We do not take funds from anyplace else besides us.”
The Chicago attorney pitched in about $125,000 for his wife’s judicial campaign last year. Mary Katherine Rochford won one of three vacancies in the 1st District of the Illinois Appellate Court — taking the concept of judicial independence to a financial extreme.
Demetrio is one of many Illinois donors who tied his financial fortunes with a loved one’s political ambitions last year. The Current scoured the state’s financial records to find Illinois’ top 10 individual political donors in 2009, and while the list includes several titans of industry, at least half of the top 10 made the list thanks to their support for a family member.
Three of the top five, according to the Current’s analysis, came from one family alone.
The family of state Rep. Jack Franks (D—Woodstock) contributed $900,000 to his campaign committee. The family owns a law firm and bank in rural Marengo, population 7,900. Rep. Franks has managed to keep the district blue since 1998.
He says that when he ran for the statehouse that year, for a seat long held by Republicans, Democratic Party leaders actually discouraged people from donating to him, since they considered his campaign a sure loss.
So Franks sent requests for donations to the people invited to his wedding.
“When I won, it gave me a modicum of independence that no one else had,” Franks says. “I was able to self fund from family and friends.”
Since then, he’s been re-elected five times. When he decided to explore a run for governor last year, his family was there for him again.
Mom gave $450,000. Dad, $250,000. His wife, Debbie, gave $200,000.
“He didn’t actually come up and say, ‘Can you write me a check?’” Debbie Franks says. “I’m gonna sound like a wife from the ‘50s, but I just said, ‘Whatever you do, I’m going to support you.’”
Franks ended up dropping his bid for governor, saying he and his family weren’t ready to move to Springfield. He says he paid back some of the money to his family and will return the rest when it matures in a certificate of deposit.
But Franks says he was glad he had the money early on, just in case.
“If I was going to do this, I had to be competitive from the beginning,” he says. “I wanted to start at the 50 yard line, not at zero. It makes it a heck of a lot easier to raise money when you’ve already got more than everybody else.”
Sometimes, there’s a philosophical motivation for tapping family members for campaign dough, as in the case of Judge Rochford and her husband, Demetrio.
Demetrio, the No. 7 individual donor and former president of the Chicago Bar Association, says that, especially on the bench, the act of taking money can lead to questions of favoritism, hardly a welcome issue in the justice system.
“Why put yourself in a position to go out and solicit funds when you don’t have to?” Demetrio says. “It’s sort of a judicial, independent type of philosophy.”
Yet few donors would readily admit that they expect political favors in return for their money.
“I don’t want a damn thing out of all this politics, except good government,” says Jack Roeser, who gave $119,000 to various groups and candidates last year. “I’ve lived the American Dream.”
Roeser, No. 9 on the Current’s list, is 86 and a longtime voice in the state’s GOP. He founded Otto Engineering, a parts manufacturer and supplier, in 1961, and he’s built and sold a variety of other businesses.
Roeser says he donates for only one reason.
“It’s entirely on principle, nothing else,” he says. “I don’t need any political favors, don’t want one.”
Yet Roeser doesn’t go easy on those who disappoint him.
In the 1990s, after donating to Gov. Jim Edgar’s first gubernatorial campaign, Roeser ran against him four years later. Edgar, Roeser says, threw too much money at a broken education system, so he lost his support.
But Roeser’s money didn’t help him take the governor’s seat.
“I got beat real good,” Roeser says. He picked up only about a quarter of the ‘94 primary vote, and Edgar went on to re-election.
Despite losing the race, Roeser remains a godfather of sorts for Illinois Republican candidates.
In 2009, he loaned Edgar protégé Kirk Dillard $250,000 in campaign cash, an infusion that helped him rise to second place in the GOP gubernatorial primary.
Dillard narrowly lost to Bill Brady after a month of waiting for official election results.
Roeser says there are no “sour grapes.”
“I think we ended up with a good guy in Brady,” he says. “We’re all going to work together. We’re not going to just elect Brady. We’re going to get him a mandate.”