Rod Blagojevich
speaker
701 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 26 Mar
Rod Blagojevich’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So I walked in there and I had immediate street cred with those guys. And they were nice to me. They actually gathered together what little beans they had and went to the commissary to get me necessities for my first week, toothbrush, toothpaste, shower shoes, just a very nice, kind thing to me. These were drug dealers and bank robbers and tough guys, all tatted up, tough guys.
Their gangs would be tatted on their heads and stuff or on their biceps. Did you have to join a gang? I write about how the correctional officers wanted me to actually join the white group, the Aryan Brotherhood guys. The correctional officers?
So in one of the chapters, the early chapters, I wasn't in prison for 27 hours before I broke my first prison rule. And they called me, inmate Blagojevich, report to the lieutenant's office. And they explained to me, this was my first full day. My second day there was after my first full day when I walked in. And I got a chance to see the prison yard.
And I walked around the yard with a couple of black guys. one of, both from Illinois, one from the south side of Chicago, gangbanger drug dealer. Name was Slim. And another guy named Walter Hill from East St. Louis, Illinois. And I was their governor. And they were really nice to me. And we walked around the track and we were talking about, and I was interested in the facilities, you know.
One of the things I was determined to do in prison was to work out a lot and to read a lot. And eventually I read the Bible a lot, like if you want to talk about that at some point, because that was so meaningful to me. But They called me in the next day because the word got out that I was walking the track with black guys.
And it was explained to me by the authorities there that prison is a very segregated place, that the unwritten policy in order to keep order is that people need to be part of their own cars. They called it – the euphemism for gangs in prison is cars. What car do you ride in? and that they thought that for my own safety, that number one, I shouldn't be walking around with black guys.
I need to be part of a car and I need to join the white car and go see these two guys, Cole and Sadness. Sadness. His name was, I thought it was Sadness too. Exactly. Because I'm looking around, who's Sadness? I'm looking for Sadness, right? His name was Sandness and Cole was the leader. I think he was from Texas. And they told me that I should go see them.
And so out of respect for the police officers, the correctional officers, I said, okay, I'll go see them. But I made it clear to them, listen, I don't give a fuck. Because they told me, look, when you get into a conflict with somebody, and it's inevitable, because you're in prison with a bunch of guys for a long time, there's going to be all kinds of disputes.
You want the window open, the other guy wants it closed. You didn't put the weight back in the weight room like he would have wanted. There's all kinds of shit that's going to happen, conflicts that develop between guys living close like that. The way we keep order is we keep the races and the different ethnic groups separated. They all become part of their individual cars.
You sit with them in a commissary. I mean, at the cafeteria, they call it the chow hall. You work out with them. You walk the track with them. You're polite to the other groups, but you don't really get friendly with them. Because if you have a conflict with somebody, your car will protect you, especially if it becomes a conflict with somebody from another race or another group of people.
In the prison I was in, there were a lot of black guys, a lot of Latinos, a lot of guys from Mexico, seen a lot of drug cartel people, a lot of Native Americans, there were Pacific Islanders, and of course white guys, and sex offenders, they were their own group. And so they all pretty much rode in their own cars, their separate cars. But I told them, look, I don't fear anybody.
If somebody wants to fucking kill me here, in some ways they're putting me out of my misery. I'm not going to be doing some kind of thing like that. It's racist. I'm not doing that. Whoever's nice to me, I'm going to be nice to them. And I'll respect your rules. I won't sit with the black guys or with any Latino guys. I'll sit with the white guys.
But I'm not going to unless you're ordering me to tell me and telling me I can't walk with those guys or talk to these guys. I'm going to keep doing it. And they say, well, we can't do that because this is an unwritten way that we operate and keep order in prison. And then they told me something which I respected. They said, look, you're not in the real world here anymore.
This is not a place where you could be a civil rights advocate or an activist, a civil rights activist. This is prison. You don't have the same rights here that you have out there. We can't order you not to have relationships or conversations with people from another race. But we can't order you to stop doing stuff that could be counterproductive to us keeping safety.
So if you're going to sit with somebody outside your race in the chow hall, that's a direct affront to us. And there are measures that we can take to make sure that you don't do those sorts of things. And I respected the fact that they said it was to keep order, and it was the culture, and pretty much everybody in the prison system accepts it anyway.
Eventually, I sat with some of the black guys as time went by, and we actually made a little An elder black guy by the name of Mr. B. He was originally from Chicago and from Detroit. He was like the most respected inmate. He got a 25-year sentence. He looked like Morgan Freeman, the actor. He was a lot like him, actually. Very mature, responsible.
He was the guy a lot of the guys went to for their legal questions because he knew everything. and a real nice man and a gentle man. And by the time I got there, he had already done like 20 something years. So he was close to going home. I'd stay up late at night with him talking in the dormitory portion of the prison where I was first before I got my cell.
But it was important to him that before he left, after 20 something years, that he could actually sit at the child hall with a white guy. And he liked me because I was from Chicago. And so we did that one day. I was there probably a year and a half by the time we did that. And I sat there and everybody looked at us. We're sitting there. I'm sitting with the black table.
And then this great movement for civil disobedience and civil rights petered out. No one gave a fuck.
Yeah. Yeah, it didn't matter at all.
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