Paul Powell's Nest Egg

Illinois Secretary of State Paul Powell had a simple definition, expressed in the negative, of a successful politician: "There's only one thing worse than a defeated politician, and that's a broke one." For 42 years, Powell was an undefeated politician. Now, three months after his death, at age 68, his executor, the Illinois attorney general and the Illinois Bureau of Investigation are taking the true measure of his success. Powell, who in his lifetime of public service never earned more than $30,000 a year, left an estate worth more than $2 million--$800,000 of it in bills packed into shoe boxes, briefcases and strongboxes in the closet of his hotel suite in Springfield.

The cache has set off a flurry of investigations into the career of Illinois' Mr. Downstate Democrat. Powell served 30 years in the state legislature before becoming secretary of state, including three terms as speaker of the house and four terms as minority leader of the assembly. He was an orator given to ungrammatical homespun anecdotes and a campaigner whose baby-kissing forays through county fairs belied his statehouse reputation as a master of patronage. His annual "flower fund" was required charity for all Powell appointees, and with 2,000 patronage jobs at his disposal during his five-year term as secretary of state, he was able to enforce his oft-stated fondness for doling out jobs and commanding loyalty. "I can smell the meat acookin'," Powell said whenever the subject of state jobs was raised. He also had a certain charm, summed up by a boyhood friend: "Paul was just a big old country boy--he could shake you down and make you like him."

Unscathed. There were several brushes with scandal during his political career, usually centering on his love for horse racing, but each time Powell emerged unscathed. After a grand jury investigation into a stock purchase in a harness-racing corporation whose legislative cause he had championed, the exonerated Powell commented: "It wound up with the grand jurors wanting to know from me where they could buy racetrack stock."

When he died of a heart attack Oct. 10 in the Rochester, Minn., hotel room where he was staying as an outpatient of the Mayo Clinic, a bizarre chain of events began to unfold. His death was kept from the press and public for more than 24 hours while top aides searched through his office at the state capital, ostensibly to remove personal papers that Powell would not have wished to be made public.

Bemused Beneficiary. John S. Rendleman, chancellor of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and executor of the estate of the twice-widowed, childless Powell, discovered the money in the Springfield hotel room the day after funeral services had been held in the capitol rotunda. "The closet was full of money," Rendleman said. It took three bank tellers more than four hours to count the money. Rendleman did not make the find public until nearly three months later, while he searched neighboring banks for additional funds.

As Illinois Attorney General William Scott began an investigation into how Powell got the money and how much of it the state could collect in taxes, the chief beneficiary of Powell's estate was as bemused by the booty as the investigators. The Johnson County Historical Society Museum, newly endowed with $1.5 million of Powell's money, was unsure just how to spend the funds on its two-room display of historic farm tools, whose previous maintenance was $200 per year.

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