CHICAGO – After watching prosecutors spend more than 10 hours over three days dissecting every element of the racketeering and bribery case against former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, the defense on Friday acknowledged the government’s presentation seemed “very polished.”
“But it’s incomplete,” Madigan attorney Dan Collins said as he began his own closing arguments summarizing the last three months of trial. “It’s misleading. And on the most important points, it’s false.”
Collins told the jury that despite the “confident” way prosecutors portrayed Madigan as having abused his various positions of power for private gain, the government was relying on their own theories based on a false persona applied to Madigan by his detractors over decades.
“In this case, ladies and gentlemen, the government sees the myth,” Collins said after hearkening back to a nickname the jury heard earlier in trial when a witness acknowledged colleagues called Madigan “sphinx” after the mythical creature. “They do not see the man.”
And just as the feds depended on their own incomplete picture of the longtime Democratic powerbroker, Collins claimed, they also “depend on your cynicism,” he told the jury, referring to “the cynicism we have around our public officials.”
Madigan had been the nation’s longest-serving legislative leader before the feds’ swirling investigation helped force him into retirement in 2021. He had served in the General Assembly for five decades, and reigned as House speaker for 36 years. Along the way, Madigan amassed power through running his local political organization in his native 13th Ward on Chicago’s Southwest Side and chairing the state’s Democratic Party for nearly half of his political career.
Outside of public office, Madigan was also the co-founder of a law firm that specialized in property tax appeals for large commercial real estate, including some of Chicago’s most recognizable high rises. Under questioning from a government lawyer last week on the witness stand, the former speaker’s longtime law partner agreed with the contention that Madigan was the “rainmaker” for the firm, focused on bringing in new clients.
Prosecutors allege Madigan abused those three power bases twisting them into a “criminal enterprise” that served to preserve and enhance his power as well as enrich both him and his allies.
The feds allege Madigan solicited and accepted bribes in the form of jobs and contracts for his political allies at electric utility Commonwealth Edison in exchange for helping several major ComEd-backed laws along in Springfield from 2011 to 2019. Prosecutors also allege a similar, albeit smaller scheme involving telecom giant AT&T Illinois in 2017 and 2018.
The feds also allege Madigan both solicited bribes from and offered bribes to powerful Chicago Ald. Danny Solis’ in an effort to recruit more real estate developers as clients to his law firm. That scheme ran from 2017 until Solis was outed as an FBI cooperator by the Chicago Sun-Times in 2019, the feds allege.
But Madigan didn’t run the alleged racketeering conspiracy by himself, according to the feds. Prosecutors indicted Madigan’s longtime friend, retired Springfield lobbyist Mike McClain, saying he acted as Madigan’s agent and also helped facilitate certain acts of bribery charged in the case.
“For Madigan and McClain, the corrupt way was the way it was – the way it continued to be,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Diane MacArthur said as she wrapped up her marathon closing arguments Friday morning.
“But that is not the way the law says it can be,” she continued, urging the jury to return guilty verdicts on each of the counts the pair are charged with.
‘Misshapen puzzle pieces’
Before trial broke for the weekend, Collins left the jury with a parting thought on Solis, whom MacArthur had characterized as a “walking microphone” during her presentation – a reference to the hundreds of hours of secretly recorded conversations he gave feds access to during his 2 ½ years as an FBI mole. Solis began cooperating with the government in June 2016 after he was caught accepting bribes and abusing his campaign funds.
After an out-of-the-blue call to Solis the following summer, the FBI’s attention turned to Madigan, and the alderman began acting on agents’ orders when interacting with Madigan, Collins pointed out, acknowledging the government is allowed to use deceptive techniques as part of an investigation.
“He’s not a walking microphone,” Collins said. “He’s an actor in a stage production. And he’s getting direction from the government so he can, in turn, direct others.”
In that way, Collins said, Solis was a “walking crime wave,” and asked the jury to picture the alderman-turned-FBI mole as “that small little crack in your windshield that just keeps spreading and spreading and spreading and won’t go away.”
Collins spent most of Friday afternoon attempting to poke holes in the government’s presentation, beginning with the alleged AT&T bribery conspiracy. A related trial that charged the company’s former president with bribing Madigan ended in a hung jury in September, just weeks before jury selection in the former speaker’s trial began.
The judge in that case refused to acquit former AT&T Illinois president Paul La Schiazza and scheduled a retrial for June. But the single AT&T-related charge – added to the indictment against Madigan and McClain more than six months after they were initially charged in March 2022 – is still seen as the most vulnerable to defense arguments.
The feds allege that after three failed attempts over six years, AT&T in 2017 was finally able to get relief from a 1930s-era law that required it to spend millions each year to maintain its aging copper landline network. Decades earlier in the age of regulated telecom monopolies, AT&T’s predecessor had been designated the “carrier of last resort,” obligating the company to provide landline service everywhere.
But by the early 2010s, landline customers began dropping precipitously while maintaining the old copper line phone system kept getting more expensive, which AT&T argued put the company at a disadvantage compared with competitors who could focus on new technologies.
Three former top attorneys in the speaker’s office testified that they’d blocked AT&T’s COLR relief legislation in 2011, 2013 and 2015 due to concerns over elderly Illinoisans, those in rural areas and facilities like power plants and hospitals that relied on landline service.
But in 2017, AT&T had a breakthrough. Though Madigan’s office ultimately forced a slowdown in the rollback of the company’s COLR obligations and insisted on combining the bill with a less popular increase on 911 fees statewide, internal AT&T emails show company execs celebrated after lawmakers overrode then-Gov. Bruce Rauner’s veto on the bill in July of that year.
The feds credited the company’s indirect contract with newly retired Democratic state Rep. Eddie Acevedo – who was brought on for a nine-month $22,500 arrangement after Madigan referred him to McClain – as the reason for the bill’s passage. According to prosecutors, the fact that Acevedo never did any work for his monthly checks should be an indication that the contract was meant as a bribe to the speaker.
Over and over in his presentation, Collins accused prosecutors of “shoving” cherry-picked evidence together like “misshapen puzzle pieces” in order to prove their case.
Collins also said Acevedo’s choice to not do any work under that arrangement had nothing to do with Madigan, claiming the former speaker wasn’t even aware of the internal machinations that resulted in Acevedo’s contract.
“Don’t hold Mike Madigan responsible for Eddie Acevedo not getting things done,” Collins said.
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