The list of money man Bruce Rauner’s gubernatorial exploratory committee is filled with the rich and influential.
Even so, Rauner is being modest.
Rahm’s not on it even though he is a Rauner BFF.
Neither is Tony Rezko and Stuart Levine.
Remember Rezko and Levine?
They were tied to the deals that sent Blago to jail.
And they were connected to shady deals involving the Teacher Retirement System.
And there lies the connection to GOP gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner.
Which leads to a tale of Mr. Rauner’s involvement—perhaps unintentional, perhaps not—with Stuart Levine, the notorious political fixer, federal felon and corrupt Springfield insider who helped bring down Rod Blagojevich, whose old job Mr. Rauner is eyeing.
In testimony during the 2008 trial of Blagojevich pal Tony Rezko, Mr. Levine and others said Mr. Levine had had a $25,000-a-month contract “consulting” for CompBenefits Corp., an Atlanta-based dental and vision benefits company once known as CompDent. According to its website, CompBenefits at the time of Mr. Levine’s contract principally was owned by four private-equity firms, including GTCR LLC. Mr. Rauner, a founder of GTCR, is the “R” in the acronym.
Mr. Levine said his job was to get work for CompBenefits through whatever means were needed, including payoffs. A 2005 Sun-Times article says the firm then held contracts covering tens of thousands of workers at Chicago Public Schools and with the state.
Mr. Levine testified that he’d paid a bribe to obtain the CPS work, worked with insiders Bill Cellini and Ed Vrdolyak on other deals (both men later were convicted in unrelated federal cases) and plotted with Mr. Rezko to get work with Cook County via Orlando Jones, a key insider who later committed suicide.
Messrs. Levine and Rezko eventually went to prison on other matters, and prosecutors never took any action on CompBenefits. Perhaps that’s because they could not corroborate Mr. Levine’s testimony, or perhaps it’s because some major figures were going to prison anyway. I don’t know. Neither do I know whether Mr. Rauner or GTCR knew the details of what the firm was up to prior to the federal probe.
But I do know that Mr. Rauner, GTCR and Stu Levine had another interaction. That came in 2003, when the board of the Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System—on which Mr. Levine served—first tabled and then approved GTCR’s bid to get a $50 million investment from the giant pension fund.
According to a Sun-Times account, the bid stalled at the board’s February 2003 meeting after Mr. Levine objected but then was zipped through in May, when Mr. Rauner attended the board session. Now-retired TRS Executive Director Jon Bauman corroborates the gist of the newspaper report. He adds that he believes the February flop mostly was because of a bad presentation by GTCR but also says he does not know the particulars of Mr. Levine’s motives.
CompBenefits was acquired by Humana Corp. in 2007 for $360 million. In a statement, Humana says only that it “has never” employed Mr. Levine and “takes compliance and ethics very seriously.”
GTCR has had no comment but notes that CompBenefits said at the time of the TRS story that it would cooperate with any investigation.
Mr. Rauner, who might be able to answer questions about when he knew what, how long Mr. Levine was on the payroll and what kind of corrective actions GTCR might have ordered, hasn’t been available to comment himself. A spokesman, Chip Englander, did release a statement saying GTCR began to do business with TRS “long before Mr. Levine entered the picture.”
Uh huh.
Fred Klonsky 
So contrast this well-reported article with the silly nonsense that John Kass wrote saying Rauner’s millons, schmillions meant he was “too big to buy.”
Doesn’t John have research assistants?