In 1969,
Sherman Skolnick, head of the Citizens' Committee to Clean Up the Courts, examined the stockholder records and discovered that both Solfisburg and Justice Klingbiel owned stock in the CCB. This made him suspicious since in
People v. Isaacs, the Supreme Court had upheld a dismissal of charges against Theodore J. Isaacs, the general counsel of the CCB and the records showed that the two justices acquired the stock shortly before their decision in
Isaacs. Skolnick contacted several members of the media, and the story was broken in the
Alton Evening-Telegraph before being picked up by all the major papers. After four expensive but inconclusive investigations The
Illinois House of Representatives unanimously voted to appoint a special committee to investigate the matter, but before it could act, the Supreme Court, acting on its "inherent powers", granted a motion filed by Skolnick to appoint a special commission to investigate. (Ironically, the regular commission that investigated judicial malfeasance was chaired by Associate Justice Klingbiel, who was also accused of wrongdoing by Skolnick.) The commission was co-chaired by the president of the Chicago Bar Association and the president of the Illinois Bar Association. They named
John Paul Stevens, a private practitioner with a thriving
antitrust practice, as their independent counsel, thus setting the stage for Stevens' meteoric rise to the
Supreme Court of the United States. In 1969, the Greenberg Commission, appointed by the Illinois Supreme Court to investigate Sherman Skolnick's corruption allegations leveled at former Chief Justice Ray Klingbiel and current Chief Justice Roy J. Solfisburg Jr., named Stevens as their counsel, meaning that he essentially served as the commission's special prosecutor.[4] The commission was widely thought to be a whitewash, but Stevens proved them wrong by vigorously prosecuting the justices, forcing them from office in the end.[11] As a result of the prominence he gained during the Greenberg Commission, Stevens became Second Vice President of the Chicago Bar Association in 1970. During the course of the investigation, the Special Prosecutor John Paul Stevens (who formerly relatively unknown, through these hearings gained notice and ended up replacing Solfisburg as a U.S. Supreme Court Justice candidate and ultimately gained the appointment. Stephens discovered that Solfisburg in fact held $14,000 worth of CCB stock. He uncovered many irregularities in which steps were taken to conceal the owners of the stock, most damningly that Solfisburg "appeared" to have established a
trust fund to hold the stock solely for the purpose of concealing his ownership from the public record. Much was made that Solfisburg a) owned this stock, and b) and held the stock in trust, which Stephens maintained was the only time Solfisburg had held assets in such a trust. Solfisburg in fact had often owned bank stock, and unlike Klingbiel paid for the stock. Further Solfisburg, the father of five including one with special needs had created such trusts at least as early as 1962 with the Old Second National Bank as trustee. There was also evidence that Solfisburg had known Isaacs prior to
People v. Isaacs. The special committee recommended that Solfisburg and Klingbiel (who became involved when Solfisburg suggested to one of Isaacs' associates that CCB should "do something nice" for Klingbiel and CCB subsequently gave stock to Klingbiel) should resign. For separate reasons this led to both the justices resigning from the Illinois Supreme Court. Klingbiel retired and Solfisburg returned to practice law and financially recover from the legal cost of his five successful defenses. ==Later years and family==