By HANNAH MEISEL
Capitol News Illinois
hmeisel@capitolnewsillinois.com
CHICAGO – Federal prosecutors continued their closing arguments Wednesday in the trial of former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, accusing the longtime Democratic powerbroker of using Chicago Ald. Danny Solis’ positions of power “to gain private benefits.”
It was Madigan’s out-of-the-blue phone call to Solis in June 2017 – a year into Solis’ cooperation with the FBI after he’d been caught accepting bribes and abusing his campaign funds – that turned the feds’ attention to the speaker. In that call, Madigan asked Solis to introduce him to a real estate developer so that the speaker and his law partner could pitch their firm’s property tax appeals services.
The developer was in the preliminary stages of building an apartment complex in Chicago’s booming West Loop neighborhood, which happened to be in Solis’ 23rd Ward. In his dual roles as both alderman and as chair of the city council’s powerful zoning committee, Solis had the power to either move the development forward or stop it in its tracks.
That kind of power was a mirror to Madigan’s own authority as speaker of the Illinois House, where, for decades, he controlled the flow of legislation through his chamber and could block a bill from ever coming to a vote – or fast-track it for passage.
And because Madigan understood how to wield power, prosecutors allege he had no qualms about attempting to use Solis’ power to enrich himself. Beginning with the June 2017 call, and on several more occasions in the next year or so, Solis introduced Madigan to real estate developers who agreed to sit down for pitch meetings in the speaker’s law office.
“He (Madigan) wanted Solis to reach out the developers because the developers weren’t going to say no to Danny Solis – not when Solis held those cards in his hand as alderman and zoning board chair,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Diane MacArthur told the jury in her closing arguments Thursday.
Madigan didn’t request all of the meetings the alderman facilitated; Solis testified in November that at least one developer had actually initiated the introduction. But even so, Solis brought the developers to the speaker’s law office each time, sat in on the meetings and secretly recorded them for the FBI.
‘You know why I’m interested’
Just last week, Madigan’s surprise turn on the witness stand wrapped with his candid comment that he regretted “that I ever had any time spent with Danny Solis.”
MacArthur pointed to a January 2018 call in which Madigan asked Solis about the status of another proposed West Loop development after reading about it in Crain’s Chicago Business. Solis confirmed that he believed the project was going to go forward but promised to call back after checking for a more definitive answer.
“And you know why I’m interested,” Madigan said, to which Solis responded “yes, yes.”
“You know why I’m interested,” MacArthur echoed on Thursday, making the point that the powerful speaker didn’t even need to make a direct ask. “That was all that was needed.”
In revisiting selected moments from the meetings, MacArthur stopped to point out a recurring joke Madigan and Solis had developed over the course of 2017 and 2018 where the speaker would marvel at yet another real estate development that was also somehow in the alderman’s ward.
In a September 2018 meeting with a New York-based real estate developer who had taken over Chicago’s Old Post Office, the developer said his firm was in the early stages of developing another property in the city’s South Loop, another rapidly growing neighborhood at the time. Madigan, who’d been quiet as his law partner gave his spiel, laughed while asking Solis if that was in the 23rd ward too.
“I’m only laughing because he was describing his ward to me one day,” the speaker said. “So, I went and ordered a map. You can get a map and it was very artfully drawn.”
“You name a nice neighborhood in the city and I got a little piece of it,” Solis replied.
MacArthur pointed to that potential for business growth as motivation for Madigan to have “questioned Solis multiple times about the boundaries of his ward.”
“Why would he do that unless he was interested in finding out just how far Solis’ reach was?” she asked the jury.
‘The Make Mike Madigan Money Plan’
MacArthur alleged Madigan chose to ignore Solis’ flagrantly illegal suggestions because he was more concerned with his “desire for private gain,” which she dubbed the “Make Mike Madigan Money Plan.”
That plan, the prosecutor said, stretched to all 23 counts Madigan is charged with, including alleged bribery schemes involving electric utility Commonwealth Edison and telecom giant AT&T Illinois.
Both companies indirectly hired Madigan allies who performed little to no work for their monthly paychecks, actions the feds claim were bribes to the speaker in order to grease the wheels for easier passage of their preferred legislation in Springfield. ComEd also hired and contracted with other Madigan-connected people, though prosecutors spent time Wednesday and Thursday once again painting those hires as bribes.
Throughout the last three months of trial – including the former speaker’s time on the witness stand – defense attorneys have hammered on the theme that Madigan did nothing in Springfield without seeing a consensus behind major legislation. Usually, the attorneys pointed out, consensus couldn’t be achieved without agreement from organized labor, one of Madigan’s strongest political allies.
But MacArthur attempted to swat away that repeated reasoning as merely cover for ComEd- and AT&T-related decisions Madigan made after the companies offered their bribes in the form of jobs and contracts.
“The ‘Make Mike Madigan Money Plan’ had nothing to do with unions, with labor, with consensus, with community support, with constituent services or even consumer protection,” MacArthur said. “This was about Mike Madigan, what he wanted and what he got.”
The feds also sought to rip apart the former speaker’s testimony about his exchanges with Solis, especially his delayed reaction to Solis’ explicit use of the phrase “quid pro quo” in a July 2017 phone call before the meeting with the developers Madigan had reached out to Solis about a few weeks prior.
At the FBI’s direction, Solis tried to relay to Madigan that the developer was under the impression that it would not get the zoning approvals it needed to go forward with the project unless it hired the speaker’s law firm. It wasn’t true, however; Solis had already committed to the passage of the zoning changes but was waiting on the completion of city guidelines for development in the West Loop – something he’d also told Madigan on the initial call.
But Solis bungled the exchange, inartfully saying “I think they understand how this works, you know, the quid pro quo,” which he admitted on the witness stand in November was “dumb.” When Madigan took the stand earlier this month, he said the comment caused him “a great deal of surprise and concern,” despite his milquetoast verbal reply of “yeah, okay.”
The former speaker testified that he’d continued to mull Solis’ use of the term, deciding to have a face-to-face meeting to address it. The day before Solis was scheduled to bring the developer to Madigan’s law office for the meeting, the speaker asked Solis if they could talk privately beforehand.
In that confrontation, which Solis secretly videotaped along with the wider meeting with the developer, Madigan admonished the alderman for using the term “quid pro quo,” and Solis immediately apologized. The former speaker testified that he believed from the look on Solis’ face that he understood he’d made an error – though glimpses of Madigan’s face and hands are the only thing visible in the video.
“You shouldn’t be talking like that,” the speaker continued. “You’re just recommending our law firm because if they don’t get a good result on the real estate taxes, the whole project would be in trouble. Which is not good for your ward. So you want high-quality representation.”
‘Wrong way’ sign
Prosecutors maintain Madigan was inventing a cover story for why Solis would be recommending the speaker’s law firm to the developer, though Madigan testified that property taxes are one of the biggest expenses for a large apartment complex like the one proposed in the West Loop.
In fact, the developer ended up contracting with Madigan’s firm for a property tax estimate for the project, which was built on land that had previously been used by a nonprofit, meaning it was exempt from property taxes. But the feds allege the developer did so as a result of Madigan’s attempted extortion.
MacArthur also took issue with Madigan’s explanation for his delayed confrontation with Solis given the “great deal of surprise and concern” the former speaker testified that Solis’ “quid pro quo” comment had caused him.
“Danny Solis was not subtle when he was talking to Madigan about this arrangement,” she said. “Madigan could’ve said, ‘Danny, stop. I don’t do business this way.’”
Instead, MacArthur told the jury, Madigan said, “Yeah, okay.”
“Your common sense tells you that ‘quid pro quo’ for public officials (should be) the equivalent of one of those ‘wrong way’ signs on highway offramp that tells you to turn around,” she said. “Madigan didn’t turn around. He kept moving forward.”
MacArthur said the former speaker didn’t turn around when Solis asked Madigan after that July 2017 meeting to help him with an effort to transfer state-owned land in Chicago’s Chinatown neighborhood to the city in order to be sold to a developer.
Although Solis didn’t explicitly tell Madigan that the developer would give Madigan’s firm its property tax appeals business until nine months later, MacArthur said it was implied. She also pointed to a December 2017 meeting in which Solis told Madigan’s co-defendant, longtime Springfield lobbyist Mike McClain, that he would “steer” the business to the speaker after the land transfer made the development possible.
Despite more than a year’s worth of work on the land transfer effort, the deal never went through and the land remains a parking lot to this day. But MacArthur said only Madigan’s and McClain’s efforts matter as the jury considers those bribery and wire fraud charges.
‘It is about money’
Similarly, MacArthur also told the jury to disregard Madigan’s testimony – and that of his law partner and former top speaker’s office attorneys – about strict conflict of interest rules the firm followed that would have precluded it from taking on business that stemmed from state land transfers.
MacArthur suggested that the speaker may have been looking for a way around it or was otherwise more interested in getting future business from the developer.
The prosecutor said McClain put it best in a wiretapped call between him and Madigan in late 2018 when the two were discussing why the deal ultimately fell apart after local Chinatown business owners circulated petitions against the development project.
“I know it’s hard to believe that at the end of the day, it’s about money,” McClain told Madigan as they both laughed.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, at the end of the day, it’s not probably about money, it is about money,” MacArthur said.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
