Whistle-blower
by Nina Burleigh January 5, 2009
The New Yorker
Pamela Davis, blond suburban mother of three, was told that her bra would be the best place to wear the wire that kick-started a long investigation into Chicago graft and that ultimately caught the governor of Illinois trying to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat. Davis is the president and C.E.O. of Edward Hospital, in Naperville, Illinois. She is proud of the fact that on her twenty-year watch the hospital has grown from a hundred-and-sixty-two-bed community facility to a four-hundred-and-twenty-seven-bed regional medical center that leads the county in babies delivered.
Back in 2003, Davis was trying to get approval for a new medical office building from the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board. A night or two before a hearing was to be held, Davis recalled, something strange happened. A business acquaintance of hers, Nicholas Hurtgen, then a managing director of the Chicago office of Bear Stearns, called her at home and told her that unless she agreed to use a certain contractor she should pull her building request, because it wasn’t going to be approved.
She ignored the warning and went off to the board hearing, where she was surprised to find that her request was denied. “I was humiliated,” she said. “They were mean. So I walk off, and then a different guy comes up to me and he says, ‘We told you to pull your project. Call me.’ And right then I decided to call the F.B.I.”
At first, the agents she contacted thought she was a crank. “I could tell they were laughing at me. Most people who call the F.B.I. are crazies. So they sort of humored me and said, ‘O.K., we will come out and listen once.’ ”
A few days later, three F.B.I. agents met her at her office, bugged her phone, and outfitted her with the wire to put in her bra. Then they set up camp in a van in the parking garage and waited. “They said, ‘You tell nobody anything, not even your husband.’ They were laughing at me and I was laughing at them.”
(More here.)
The New Yorker
Pamela Davis, blond suburban mother of three, was told that her bra would be the best place to wear the wire that kick-started a long investigation into Chicago graft and that ultimately caught the governor of Illinois trying to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat. Davis is the president and C.E.O. of Edward Hospital, in Naperville, Illinois. She is proud of the fact that on her twenty-year watch the hospital has grown from a hundred-and-sixty-two-bed community facility to a four-hundred-and-twenty-seven-bed regional medical center that leads the county in babies delivered.
Back in 2003, Davis was trying to get approval for a new medical office building from the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board. A night or two before a hearing was to be held, Davis recalled, something strange happened. A business acquaintance of hers, Nicholas Hurtgen, then a managing director of the Chicago office of Bear Stearns, called her at home and told her that unless she agreed to use a certain contractor she should pull her building request, because it wasn’t going to be approved.
She ignored the warning and went off to the board hearing, where she was surprised to find that her request was denied. “I was humiliated,” she said. “They were mean. So I walk off, and then a different guy comes up to me and he says, ‘We told you to pull your project. Call me.’ And right then I decided to call the F.B.I.”
At first, the agents she contacted thought she was a crank. “I could tell they were laughing at me. Most people who call the F.B.I. are crazies. So they sort of humored me and said, ‘O.K., we will come out and listen once.’ ”
A few days later, three F.B.I. agents met her at her office, bugged her phone, and outfitted her with the wire to put in her bra. Then they set up camp in a van in the parking garage and waited. “They said, ‘You tell nobody anything, not even your husband.’ They were laughing at me and I was laughing at them.”
(More here.)
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