YORKVILLE, ILLINOIS — The Silver Dollars Restaurant sits near the crossroads of State Routes 47 and 71, which is just another way of saying it occupies the closest thing to a city center in this proud municipality.
The Silver Dollars is one of the few businesses that survived Yorkville’s transformation from farming community to diffuse exurb of Chicago. It serves watery coffee and a buttery Monte Cristo, but no alcohol. This is because, as proprietor Eddie Iljazi puts it, people here drink so little that liquor sales wouldn’t be enough to cover the cost of a license. “But everyone here is a Republican, if you know what I mean," he explained.
Today, 17,000 people live in Yorkville. It's a recent population boom. Old Yorkville, as people wistfully call it, consisted of 4,000 people and a single traffic light. It was in those days that John Dennis Hastert, a young educator from nearby Aurora, became something like the town's First Citizen.
Hastert went on to become one of the most powerful men in the United States, the speaker of the House of Representatives. These days, at the Silver Dollars, people don’t call him Congressman or Speaker, but rather Mr. Hastert — as if he had never ceased to be the social studies teacher he was from 1965 to 1981.
The people who really knew him, though, call him Coach. And when they say that word, it sounds like the most honorable title in the world.
Hastert led Yorkville High School’s wrestling team to state championships in 1969 and 1976, bringing glory to the town and earning himself a place in the local pantheon. He also mentored countless young people, instilling in them the importance of honesty and hard work.
"That is what this town was all about — wrestling,” said Shawn Schumacher, a 1985 graduate of Yorkville High who spent his summers going to Hastert’s wrestling camp. “His team was more than a team — it was a community."
It is hard to emphasize how big of a deal Hastert is in Yorkville. People who knew him here told BuzzFeed News he was "motivational," "a positive influence," "a wonderful man," and "the foundation of many families."
In their telling, the coach was an almost mythological figure: Yorkville’s own Cincinnatus, a farmer gone to Washington to bring a dose of simple virtue to a city corrupted by money and deceit.
All of which helps explain why everyone in Yorkville was so shocked on Thursday, when the Department of Justice charged Hastert with illegally structuring a $3.5 million payment to a person for "prior bad acts" he committed. Hastert reportedly sexually abused the person, one of his teenage wrestlers.
Hastert was born in 1942 to a family who raised sheep and cattle in Aurora, Illinois, according to his autobiography. In his own telling, he became a teacher in order to become a coach — and he became a coach because he had failed at becoming a soldier.
“When I washed out of ROTC, I thought I’d give five years to coaching because some of the people I admired most — my old coach at Wheaton, George Olson, and Ken Pickerill, for example‚ had been coaches, and I really enjoyed it,” the former congressman wrote in Speaker, his 2004 memoir. “But if you were going to coach, you also had to teach and that meant earning an advanced degree.”
He began teaching at Yorkville in 1965, almost by accident. He showed up at the local high school in jeans and a flannel shirt, not expecting a job interview because he hadn’t finished his teaching degree, according to his book. The superintendent, however, needed “a living body,” and was willing to overlook Hastert’s lack of qualifications. The future speaker of the House walked out of the school with a job and a commitment to coach the football and wrestling teams. He was 24 years old.
Hastert appears to have thrown himself into his coaching duties. He didn’t just conduct practice; he drove the school bus and even redesigned the wrestling team’s uniforms, according to his autobiography. His emphasis on athletics might even have come at the expense of his academic duties.
“He was just the kind of teacher that would drive me crazy,” Maria Steiner, who taught French and Spanish at Yorkville High from 1976 to 1980, told BuzzFeed News. “He would show movies in his class while he worked on wrestling stuff. He was kind of a slacker teacher. He was big in wrestling and that was big in Yorkville, Illinois.”
The yearbooks from Hastert’s early years at Yorkville High show him as a handsome young man in a dark suit, proudly standing in the back row of group photos full of muscular boys. The later yearbooks show an ever-heavier, ever-older Hastert wearing ever-less-formal clothes.
The boys, however, remain the same age. Their haircuts change, but they retain the quiet pride of teenagers who know they are a big deal among their peers. Judging from Hastert’s autobiography, nearly every boy at the school wanted to be on the wrestling team.
In the mid-1960s, he led YMCA trips to Colombia, Venezuela, and Japan, according to his biographical blurbs in several yearbooks. He organized canoeing trips to Canada and coordinated the Yorkville Explorers, a scouting club that once went as far as the Bahamas. During the summers, he ran a wrestling summer camp from the high school. He took his students on road trips to Virginia and Colorado.
Dave Millen, a wrestler who went on several of the outings, told BuzzFeed News that he “never witnessed any inappropriate behavior, or heard rumors of any.”
The coach came to care deeply about his students. “I felt a special bond with our wrestlers, and I think they felt one with me,” Hastert wrote in his memoir. “In my talks with them, I stressed how important it was that they learned to do a few things well. That was better than trying to do everything halfway. 'It’s work and not talk that wins championships,' I kept telling them. 'Perseverance is the key in whatever you do.'”
The team must have persevered, because they won the state championship twice, in 1969 and 1976. Yorkville rejoiced. The yearbooks for those years devote several pages to photographs of the victorious boys — and, in the case of 1976, a poem immortalizing them, by a junior varsity wrestler called John Demetralis:
So there you are, out on the mat,
The time has all run out.
As the referee walks up to you
You can’t believe your eyes,
For he takes your weary hand
And raises it to the skies.
Hastert never forgot that day. He dedicated his autobiography to the 1976 wrestling team, calling the championship victory “one of the finest moments of my life.” He wrote that he was pleased to know that many of the members of that team had gone on to become coaches themselves.
Six years after that championship, Hastert resigned his position at Yorkville High to join the Illinois state legislature. And six years after that, he was voted into the U.S. House of Representatives. His former students became his most ardent political supporters.
"Nobody thought he would become a politician," said Iljazi at the Silver Dollars. "He was too honest for that."
"Some of us backed him politically," said Schumacher, the 1985 graduate of Yorkville High. "We didn't just vote for him — we made contributions to his campaigns."
"I was never a very good liar," Hastert wrote in his autobiography.
And Millen, the former wrestler, said, "Despite being on the opposite side of the political spectrum, I have had nothing but respect for Speaker Hastert." He added, "He has actually been one of the few Republicans who have received my vote."
As an elected official, Hastert promoted the values of Yorkville. In the wake of the Lewinsky sex scandal, he voted to impeach President Bill Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice. He pushed for legislation to ban early social networking sites from school computers to protect children from pedophiles lurking online.
All the while, he prided himself in his honesty. “I was never a very good liar,” he wrote in his autobiography, describing an episode in which he tried to hide a medical bill from his parents after a friend broke his nose in a fight. “Maybe I wasn’t smart enough. I could never get away with it, so I made up my mind as a kid to tell the truth and pay the consequences.”
The speaker retired in 2007, trading politics for the contemporary equivalent of Cincinnatus’ return to the farm after his term expired: a fabulously profitable appointment as a lobbyist for Dickstein Shapiro, one of the country’s largest law firms.
He maintained a taxpayer-funded office in Yorkville, where he paid six-figure salaries to several staffers — at least one of whom had once wrestled for him. Legally, the office was only supposed to help Hastert with unfinished congressional business, but an ongoing lawsuit alleges that the former speaker improperly misused those funds.
In December 2014, the FBI questioned the former coach about a suspicious series of cash withdrawals from his bank accounts. The former speaker defended the transactions, saying he made the withdrawals because he didn't trust the banking system.
The FBI was unconvinced. On Thursday, the Department of Justice announced that it was charging Hastert with lying to the FBI and of "structuring" his financial activity in an attempt to hide large cash withdrawals from the Internal Revenue Service.
The charges were serious. But the most shocking part of the case was not the charges themselves, but a vague allusion to the way Hastert allegedly used the money he withdrew.
According to a federal indictment, Hastert planned to pay $3.5 million to a person identified only as "Individual A." The indictment further alleged that Hastert made the payments in order to conceal his "prior bad acts."
The document did not go into details — in part, a source told BuzzFeed News, because Hastert's lawyers requested the U.S. attorney keep the details of the allegations out of the indictment — but it did mention Hastert's career as a wrestling coach.
A day after the charges were made public, the Los Angeles Times reported that Hastert had sexually abused a man during his time as a wrestling coach and then paid him to keep quiet. Later that day, sources told BuzzFeed News that there had been at least one more victim — an Individual B — whom prosecutors had decided not to include in the indictment.
On Friday, as news of the accusations hit cable shows and spread like wildfire over the Internet, the mood at the Silver Dollars and elsewhere in town was one of shock. Reached by phone and email, seven of Hastert’s wrestlers said they had never heard or witnessed anything that would have led them to suspect the coach was doing anything wrong.
“Nobody saw this coming,” said Iljazi, the restaurant’s proprietor. “With these things, sometimes there’s rumors, but here everyone is in shock.”
Anthony Houle, who was an assistant coach with Hastert, called him "a straight arrow — nothing was hidden." He added that "nothing ever happened"; if it did, the people in the small town would have found out.
Some acknowledged that the allegations had made them rethink their image of Hastert.
“If it’s true, it would be very disappointing,” said Schumacher, the 1985 graduate of Yorkville High, who also teaches at DeVry University and coaches the football team at Yorkville High School. “As an educator, you know there are boundaries, and you simply don’t cross them.”
Everyone that BuzzFeed News asked said they didn't know who Individual A is. Some even took offense at the suggestion they would ever speculate about such matters. But some people at the Silver Dollars suggested that, behind closed doors, that is the only thing anyone in Yorkville is talking about.
“The thing is, this used to be a really small town,” Iljazi said. “If Individual A is local, then all of Old Yorkville probably knows him.”
Evan McMorris-Santoro, Christopher Massie, Ilan Ben-Meir, and Molly Ward contributed reporting.