A dozen jurors who heard from more than 60 witnesses over three months and listened to a full week of closing arguments are finally deliberating the feds’ sweeping racketeering conspiracy case against former Illinois House Speaker Michael J. Madigan.
Jurors retired to begin their talks at 3:13 p.m. Wednesday. They did so after hearing final instructions from U.S. District Judge John Blakey, and after Assistant U.S. Attorney Amarjeet Bhachu rejected arguments from Madigan’s attorneys that the feds see a “myth.”
“The charges in the indictment before you, ladies and gentlemen, are not the product of myth,” Bhachu said. ”They’re not the product of the imagination. Those charges are based upon matters of undeniable fact.”
However, the prosecutor acknowledged jurors did hear “things of a mythical nature.” He said they heard lies “right from the witness stand.” Then, Bhachu stepped closer to where Madigan was seated in the courtroom on the 12th floor of the Dirksen Federal Courthouse.
Bhachu pointed at the once-powerful Southwest Side Democrat, and he told jurors they’d heard lies “from this man right here.”
Bhachu, the lead prosecutor in the case against Madigan, sits on a decade’s worth of evidence against the former speaker. His argument Wednesday was years in the making. The investigation that led to Madigan’s indictment changed the course of Chicago history. And it prompted a historic trial at Dirksen that began in October and gave jurors a front-row seat to raw Illinois politics as it was practiced in the previous decade.
Madigan is accused of leading a criminal enterprise over eight years, designed to enhance his political power and reward his associates. Prosecutors say Madigan’s longtime ally, Michael McClain, acted as his agent.
A 117-page indictment against the two men alleges five schemes. In two of them, the feds say Madigan and McClain conspired to have ComEd and AT&T Illinois pay thousands of dollars to Madigan allies so Madigan would look favorably at the utilities’ legislation.
In three others, prosecutors say Madigan used then-Ald. Danny Solis, who served as chair of the City Council’s zoning committee, to steer business to Madigan’s private tax appeals law firm.
The deliberations in Madigan’s trial began exactly six years after the Sun-Times broke the news that the FBI had secretly recorded Madigan in his private law office. That recording became one of the first seen by jurors who now hold Madigan’s fate in their hands.
Former ComEd executive Fidel Marquez wore a wire against McClain and other ComEd officials in 2019. The feds in 2016 also recruited Solis, who recorded politicians like Madigan until the Chicago Sun-Times unmasked him in January 2019.
Both men helped the FBI in a bid to avoid prison for their own alleged wrongdoing.
Jurors heard that five Madigan allies were paid $1.3 million by ComEd over eight years. The money was paid through intermediaries, and the men allegedly did little or no work for ComEd. The recipients were former Alds. Frank Olivo and Michael R. Zalewski, former Cook County Recorder of Deeds Edward Moody, former state Rep. Edward “Eddie” Acevedo and longtime Madigan campaign worker Raymond Nice.
AT&T paid another $22,500 to Acevedo in 2017.
“Here we have ghost workers, hired at Mr. Madigan’s request, that got paid a ton of money,” Bhachu said. “A ton of money. We’re talking about $1.3 million. If you’re thinking about a bribe, you could not find an envelope big enough to contain that amount of money.”
The prosecutor also pointed to efforts to keep the payments a secret. “If they are legitimate lobbying and goodwill payments, why do they have to be hidden,” Bhachu asked.
Though Bhachu focused most of his argument on Madigan, he noted that McClain is charged in six of the indictment’s 23 counts. Bhachu reminded jurors of McClain’s recorded comment that “you’ve never read about me in a newspaper,” pointing to it as another example of the shroud of secrecy revolving around the payments.
“What did it take to get Mr. McClain’s name in the indictment before you?” Bhachu asked. “It took a wiretap on his telephone.”
Bhachu also reminded jurors that, when Madigan took the witness stand earlier this month, they heard little from him about his relationship with McClain.
“You would have thought Mr. McClain was just the postman,” Bhachu said. “Or akin to an Uber Eats driver.”
Bhachu noted that McClain was known to use a conference room inside Madigan’s suite of offices at the Capitol, pointing out on a map how it was found right between the offices of Madigan and Madigan’s longtime chief of staff, Tim Mapes.
Madigan testified that others were allowed to use it too — that “we had an open-door policy.”
But Bhachu asked jurors, “You really think the conference room right outside Mr. Madigan’s office was like a public toilet where people could go park themselves? Does that sound true?”
To make the point that Madigan was in on the ComEd scheme, Bhachu pointed to comments from former ComEd officials like John Hooker and Anne Pramaggiore, who were recorded by Marquez and convicted along with McClain in May 2023 for their roles.
“This is not a collective hallucination,” Bhachu said.
The three alleged schemes involving Solis revolved around an apartment project in Solis’ ward at Sangamon Street and Washington Boulevard, a Chinatown parking lot at Cermak Road and Wentworth Avenue, and the Old Post Office that sits over the Eisenhower Expressway.
Prosecutors say that Madigan sought help connecting with the Old Post Office developer in exchange for agreeing to recommend Solis for a paid seat on a government board. But they’ve also pointed to a moment when, after discussing Solis’ board seat request, Madigan asked Solis to help his son connect with a Pilsen not-for-profit.
Madigan’s son is in the insurance business, and the feds have connected $43,000 he made to that chat between Madigan and Solis.
Bhachu pointed out how, in that conversation, Madigan repeatedly used the word “give.”
“Give, give, give, give, give,” Bhachu said. “To his son.”
Bhachu called it a “private benefit for [Madigan’s] son.
“And you know that he privately benefitted,” Bhachu said. “That’s why he was asking. And he did that in connection with Mr. Solis’ request and in exchange for that appointment.”