Michael J. Madigan stepped onto Illinois’ public stage as a young man in the late 1960s, when he was elected as one of 118 delegates to the state constitutional convention in Springfield.
“I enjoyed it a great deal because it was like a tutorial on Illinois government and the constitutional organic structure that would support the functioning of the government,” Madigan testified in a federal courtroom earlier this year, telling the jury he was so moved by the experience that it motivated him to run for the Illinois House.
Few would have guessed that early immersion would lead one of the most remarkable political careers in the history of the country, with the Democrat Madigan serving a record run as House speaker and widely hailed as the most powerful elected official in the state.
On Friday, six decades after the constitutional convention, Madigan will appear for what likely will be his last public act. And it will play out in a forum that virtually no one — especially a shrewd political tactician such as himself — would have ever seen coming.
The stage will be a federal courtroom on 12th Floor of the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse, where Madigan, 83, is scheduled to be sentenced for his conviction in February on a wide range of corruption charges alleging he used his public office to increase his power, line his own pockets and enrich a small circle of his most loyal associates.
It’s the most highly anticipated sentencing in a Chicago public corruption case since former Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich more than a decade ago, and U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey has a wide range of options at his disposal.
Federal prosecutors have asked for a lengthy 12 1/2 year prison term and a $1.5 million fine, arguing in a filing earlier this month that the evidence showed “Madigan engaged in corrupt activity at the highest level of state government for nearly a decade.
“Time after time, Madigan exploited his immense power for his own personal benefit by trading his public office for private gain for himself and his associates, all the while carefully and deliberately concealing his conduct from detection,” the filing stated.
Madigan’s attorneys, meanwhile, are asking for just five years of probation, with the first year served on home confinement, citing his age and lifetime of public service, a good man whose name was dragged through the mud and will forever be branded as a felon.
The defense filed more than 200 letters of support from relatives, colleagues, former politicians and everyday people who said he touched their lives. They also submitted a videotaped statement from Madigan’s wife, Shirley, who, while seated on a sofa with family photos behind her, talked about their lifelong love for each other, his relationship with his children, and her growing need for him at home as her health deteriorates.
““I really don’t exist without him,” Shirley Madigan said in the six-minute video as a clip of Madigan helping her out of her seat was spliced over the audio. “I wish I could say that I do, but I don’t know what I would do without Michael. I would probably have to find some place to live, and I’d probably have to find care.”
The sentencing hearing is scheduled to start at 1 p.m. Friday and is expected to last two hours or more. With seating limited in Blakey’s courtroom, an overflow courtroom has been set up on the courthouse’s 17th floor.
Before hearing arguments, Blakey must first determine the sentencing guidelines in the case, though it’s no longer mandatory for him to follow them.
It’s unclear whether Madigan’s team intends to call live witnesses on his behalf, but before the judge imposes the sentence, the famously taciturn former speaker will be given a chance to make a statement of his own.
A lengthy trial
After a trial that stretched nearly four months, Madigan was convicted by a jury Feb. 12 on bribery conspiracy and other corruption charges The jury found him guilty on 10 of 23 counts, including one count of conspiracy related to a multipronged scheme to accept and solicit bribes from utility giant Commonwealth Edison.
Jurors also convicted him on two counts of bribery and one Travel Act violation related to payments funneled to Madigan associates for do-nothing ComEd subcontracts.
Madigan also was convicted on six out of seven counts — including wire fraud and Travel Act violations — regarding a plan to get ex-Ald. Daniel Solis, a key FBI mole who testified at length in the trial, appointed to a state board.
But after 11 days of deliberation, the jury’s final verdict was mixed, deadlocking on several counts — including the marquee racketeering conspiracy charge — and acquitting Madigan on numerous others. Jurors also deadlocked on all six counts related to Madigan’s co-defendant, Michael McClain.
The verdict capped one of the most significant political corruption investigations in Chicago’s sordid history. It also cemented an extraordinary personal fall for Madigan, the longest-serving state legislative leader in the nation’s history, who for decades held an iron-tight grip on the House as well as the state Democratic Party.
It was a case many thought would never be made. Madigan, a savvy lawyer and old-school practitioner of Democratic machine politics, famously eschewed cell phones and email, and stayed largely above the fray while dozens of his colleagues were hauled off to prison over the years.
Ultimately, it took Solis’s extraordinary cooperation, including wearing a hidden wire in meetings with Madigan, along with an FBI wiretap on Madigan’s longtime confidant, Michael McClain, to break the case open, leading to a series of indictments and pay-to-play allegations against two major utilities, Commonwealth Edison and AT&T Illinois, and rocked the Illinois political world.
Madigan’s defense team has long argued that prosecutors, in their zeal to reel in the ultimate fish, were trying to criminalize the kind of legal political horse trading, from job recommendations to board appointments, that occur in politics on a daily basis.
In their sentencing papers, Madigan’s team has portrayed the former speaker as a stalwart defender of Illinois taxpayers against greedy utilities like ComEd, despite efforts to get some of his close associates work with the utility.
They also emphasized the former speaker’s humanity. In arguing for leniency, they wrote the former speaker has already been severely punished, not only through the demise of his career and public humiliation over the charges, but also because “no criminal defendant in recent memory has endured the relentless, systematic public demolition that this prosecution unleashed upon Mike Madigan.”
“The media feeding frenzy did not just report the case — it created a cultural narrative where ‘Mike Madigan’ became shorthand for corruption itself,” the defense wrote. “These brutal collateral consequences will define every remaining day of Mike Madigan’s life. Beyond any sentence the government seeks, Mike faces the consequences already imposed — spending his final years in quiet service to his ailing wife, forever marked by a public humiliation so complete it has rewritten his legacy.”
In a response brief last week, Madigan’s attorneys flashed anger at the prosecution’s “draconian” request for a 12 1/2-year sentence, writing “the government seeks to condemn an 83-year-old man to die behind bars for crimes that enriched him not one penny.”
“They demand that Mike Madigan spend his final years in a cell, though he spent decades as the consumers’ shield against ComEd’s predations,” argued attorneys Dan Collins, Todd Pugh, Tom Breen and Lari Dierks.
The defense also bristled at prosecutors’ inclusion of Madigan’s net worth — pegged at more than $40 million — arguing successfully, albeit only symbolically, to have it stricken from the public record.
The sentence request from the U.S. attorney’s office is the longest in a public corruption case since the government asked for 15 to 20 years behind bars for Blagojevich. The prosecution’s request for Madigan is also longer than their recent ask of 10 years for former Ald. Edward Burke, who ultimately received only a two-year prison term.
If prosecutors were successful, Madigan would be around 94 years old when eligible for release given, federal convicts must serve 85% of their incarceration time.
Few expect Blakey to go that high, though a sentence of straight probation would also be a stretch considering the power Madigan wielded and the amount of money involved.
In their sentencing filings, however, prosecutors say a lengthy stint behind bars was richly deserved for Madigan, especially in light of what they say were a series of lies he told on the witness stand when he testified in his own defense in January.
“Madigan has expressed no remorse for his crimes, nor has he acknowledged the damage wrought by his conduct,” Assistant U.S. Attorneys Sarah Streicker, Diane MacArthur, and Julia Schwartz wrote. “Indeed, Madigan went so far as to commit perjury at trial in an effort to avoid accountability, and he persists in framing his actions as nothing more than helping people.”
Political history
Madigan held the speakership for all but two years from 1983 until 2021. Along with ruling the House, Madigan chaired the Illinois Democratic Party from 1998 until 2021, resigning both his House seat and the party post after he lost the speakership.
Madigan’s hold on the House Democratic caucus started loosening in the wake of a series of explosive sexual harassment cases involving misbehaving aides in 2018, including longtime chief of staff Tim Mapes.
But the momentum picked up speed in July 2020 when the U.S. attorney’s office reached a deferred prosecution agreement with ComEd, which acknowledged trying to influence Madigan by showering his pals and associates with do-nothing contracts, legal work and a seat on the ComEd board of directors.
While ComEd agreed to pay a $200 million fine, the biggest political marker in the agreement was that Madigan was referenced clearly when the court document called the speaker of the House “Public Official A.”
McClain and three others were indicted in the separate ComEd Four case four months later. Sentencings in that case, which have been delayed for more than a year due to fallout from a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the federal bribery statute, are now expected to unfold in July and August.
Much of the arguments in Friday’s hearing could center on a perjury enhancement that prosecutors say is warranted given Madigan’s allegedly false testimony.
The defense, meanwhile, has sought to counter each of the nine instances where prosecutors said Madigan lied, including about whether he expected those he helped get jobs to actually do work.
“Mike never denied that he had historically participated in the patronage system,” the defense wrote, noting that prosecutors relied on an oral history interview Madigan gave about the political machine under Mayor Richard J. Daley in the 1970s.
“Any conduct by Mike from 50 years before the charges in this case were brought could not be considered material,” the defense said.
Prosecutors, however, asked Blakey to consider Madigan’s testimony as a whole, which they said was a calculated effort” to deny each potentially damaging piece of evidence against him and “convince the jury that he did not mean the words that he said on tape.”
To bolster that point, prosecutors pointed to some of the very letters that Madigan submitted on his behalf that described him as a man who chose his words carefully and always said what he meant.
“Madigan would have this court believe that his characteristic trait of directness disappeared when he spoke to Daniel Solis,” the feds wrote. “Not so.”
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
rlong@chicagotribune.com
