Robert Pastrick, the 80-year-old man who sat at the helm of Lake County's most potent political force for decades, says he never realized he was running a political machine.

Robert Pastrick, the 80-year-old man who sat at the helm of Lake County's most potent political force for decades, says he never realized he was running a political machine.

The former East Chicago mayor says he didn't know the city's $24 million sidewalk improvement program, destined to send a dozen people to prison, had even begun until the day he saw workers digging and hauling.

Pastrick says he didn't realize the city was in financial crisis until his own paycheck bounced just after his seventh reelection as mayor in May 1999.

In six hours of sworn interviews earlier this year, the man who spent 50 years as a mayor, city controller, councilman, party boss and delegate to the state and national Democratic parties describes himself as only dimly aware of how money moved through his city and his own campaign fund.

The 250-page record of his depositions on Sept. 20 and Oct. 2 was made public last month as part of the voluminous court record for Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter's racketeering lawsuit against Pastrick and his lieutenants.

The transcript contains items that might strike some as a surprise. For example, Pastrick says it was never mandatory that his employees sell political tickets for his campaign or give up two percent of their salaries to his political action committee.

Under questioning by former Illinois-based federal prosecutor Patrick Collins, Pastrick denies he ever ran a political machine that did things like set quotas for absentee ballots or hand out municipal jobs on the basis of clout.

"Are you familiar with the term political machine?" Collins asked.

"I'm familiar with that term. We didn't have a machine. We have a political team that worked together," Pastrick said.

Carter's attorneys are looking for evidence to prove during a civil trial next spring that Pastrick knowingly presided over an organized effort to use ill-gotten taxpayer money to keep himself in office and his cronies in political power. If he loses the lawsuit, the former mayor could be responsible to repay millions siphoned into unbid concrete and tree-trimming work in 1999.

Pastrick first attained political power in 1955, when he was elected to one of his three terms on city council. He was appointed city controller by Mayor John Nicosia in 1964, and won his first term as mayor in 1971. He came to place deep trust in his own controller, James Knight.

As Pastrick tells it, the beginning of the end came with Knight's death on Mother's Day in 1998.

In place of Knight, Pastrick appointed his 28-year-old deputy controller Edwardo Maldonado, a young accountant who eventually proved that he could not refuse the untoward influences of others.

Maldonado took over a program first proposed by Knight to use the newly tapped revenue stream of casino taxes to repair city infrastructure -- a program that morphed into what prosecutors now call the Sidewalks-For-Votes scandal in the spring of 1999 that sent more than a dozen to prison for handing out public works projects in exchange for votes.

"I knew that Mr. Knight was going to do it properly," Pastrick said. "Had Mr. Knight not died, we would not be sitting here today. ... Because it would have been done right. He knew how to say no."

"So you had nothing to do with the program getting out of control?" Collins said.

"No, I didn't," Pastrick said.