Michael Madigan’s lawyers began their final effort to convince jurors of his innocence by recalling a memorable nickname for the former House speaker: the Sphinx.
“The Sphinx, of course, is a mythical creature,” he said as lawyer Dan Collins presented his closing argument to a packed federal courthouse on Friday. “Quiet, mysterious. A myth. In this case, ladies and gentlemen, the government looks at the myth. They don’t look at the person.”
The defense during Madigan’s marathon public corruption trial has long attempted to portray the political giant as a hardworking and humble Southwest Sider who wanted to help people through his role at the top of Illinois’ political power structure.
To reinforce the normal-guy image, Collins on Friday repeatedly referred to his client not as “the speaker,” not as “Mr. Madigan,” but as “Mike.”
“The government relies on your cynicism, the cynicism you have toward our public officials,” Collins said. “The presentation the government has made appears at first glance to be very sophisticated, but it is incomplete. It is misleading. And at the most important points, it is false.” Collins addressed jurors after prosecutors’ exceptionally long closing arguments, which ended Friday morning after more than 10 hours over three days. That meant Collins’ closing arguments were interrupted after about 2 1/2 hours, and the remainder of the arguments will take place Monday.
Lawyers for Madigan’s co-defendant Michael McClain will then move on to the government’s rebuttal and then finally jury deliberations.
Before concluding his remarks Friday, Collins gave a foreshadowing of what’s to come, including some harsh words for Daniel Solis, the former alderman who became the FBI’s lead spy on multiple charges. Collins called Solis “a little crack in your windshield that just won’t go away and keeps on spreading,” and scoffed at prosecutors’ description of Solis as a “walking microphone.”
“He’s not a walking microphone. He’s an actor in a stage production and he’s getting instructions from the government,” Collins said. “He’s not just a walking microphone, he’s a walking crime.” During his lawyer’s remarks, Madigan, dressed in a light gray suit, remained seated at the defense table with his chair turned so that he faced directly into the jury box. At the end of the day, as Collins was talking about Solis, Madigan glanced at the jurors and furrowed his eyebrows.
Collins’ turn at the lectern was a stark contrast to what jurors heard earlier in the day from Assistant U.S. Attorney Diane McArthur, who ended her argument by calling Madigan a “decisive man,” an extremely powerful politician who for years used his roles as an elected official, state Democratic Party leader and private attorney to advance a criminal enterprise focused on private profit.
MacArthur told the jury that Madigan and McClain worked together, “using and abusing their positions” to “maintain Madigan’s power and to accrue benefits for their own personal gain.”
“For Madigan and McClain, the corrupt way was what it was, the way it continued,” MacArthur said. “But according to the law it cannot be that way.” Madigan, 82, a Southwest Side Democrat, and McClain, 77, a longtime lobbyist from downstate Quincy, are charged in a 23-count indictment that Madigan’s vaunted state and political operations were run like a criminal enterprise to increase his power and enrich himself and his associates. In addition to alleging schemes to pressure developers to hire Madigan’s law firm, the indictment accuses Madigan and McClain of bribery schemes involving ComEd and AT&T Illinois.
The trial, which began on October 8, is finally heading towards its conclusion, the culmination of a lengthy federal corruption investigation that has resulted in the convictions of several other people connected to Madigan over the years. However, Madigan is undoubtedly the biggest target.
Meanwhile on Friday, anticipation for Madigan’s closing argument continued to grow, as prosecutors’ closing remarks stretched into a third day. Collins initially indicated he would prefer to wait until Monday to start afresh with the jury, but relented after the judge suggested they not waste their precious time.
Collins repeatedly accused the government of cherry-picking facts to create a narrative that doesn’t really exist, and urged the jury to look at all the evidence in context, “not as pieces of a puzzle to fit together.”
And in a complex case that often became bogged down in legal jargon, Collins adopted a populist tone, repeatedly dismissing some of the government’s allegations as lacking common sense, often ending a point with a “nuh-uh.”
However, Collins did highlight some of the key jury instructions in the case, including one that said Madigan’s “association with persons involved in a crime” is not enough to convict him unless prosecutors prove he had knowledge of the illegal activity. Another instruction said job recommendations made by a public official “without any additional” are not illegal.
Perhaps most importantly, Collins said, is that the jury must find that Madigan acted “corruptly,” meaning there was an agreement to exchange something of value for official action.
“The definition of corruption, you guys should take it out of the instructions,” he told jurors. “Look at it, read it, understand it. It’s very important to this case.”
Collins used the appointment of Juan Ochoa to ComEd’s board as an example. He said when board member Jesse Ruiz decided to run for office and a slot became vacant, a routine part of ComEd’s business was to find a replacement. Ochoa was chosen after receiving recommendations from not only Madigan, but then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel and then-U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez. Collins said Ochoa did the work and got paid for it.
“It’s a real position,” Collins said. “It’s not a bribe.”
Collins also said the law says “vague expectations of some future benefit” are not enough to prove bribery.
“It has to be a so-and-so for that,” he said, using the English version of the Latin “quid pro quo.”
“If you’re a public official and you know somebody did something for you and you believe they’re doing it to build good will with you, that’s not a crime,” Collins said. “You plead not guilty and we go home.” Collins spent much of Friday afternoon telling jurors about the only charge in the indictment involving AT&T Illinois, a single bribery conspiracy allegation that, unlike other alleged schemes in the indictment, relies mostly on emails rather than wiretapped conversations or secretly recorded meetings.
Prosecutors have alleged that Madigan and McClain schemed for former state Rep. Eddie Acevedo to get an AT&T subcontract for no work in exchange for Madigan helping pass a bill favorable to AT&T, known as COLR relief.
But, Collins said, a broader look at the timeline shows there’s no real connection. AT&T had already gotten some of its other favored legislation passed before any notion of Acevedo getting the contract, he said.
By weighing in with early arguments about the Acevedo case, Collins also hoped to signal that it didn’t make sense for a seasoned politician like Madigan to get behind legislation so valuable to AT&T based on something as trivial as a low-level contract.
And while McClain contacted AT&T officials about the contract for Acevedo, it took more than a month for AT&T officials to act on that request, Collins said.
“According to the government’s theory, AT&T saw this as an opportunity to eliminate COLR … and they sat on it for a month and a half?” he said. “No. No-no. That makes no sense.”
And while AT&T was negotiating a contract with Acevedo and struggling to keep it secret from Capitol Republicans, Madigan “didn’t know this was going on,” Collins said, walking to stand beside Madigan at the defense table.
“None of that,” Collins said. “They have absolutely no idea what AT&T internals don’t want Republicans to know … Talking about a cover-up and suggesting that Mike Madigan took bribes because of it, you’re wrong. (They) don’t even know what’s going on.”
Collins also pointed to an internal AT&T email that said, when discussing the offer, Acevedo asked if he would need to travel to the Capitol.
“The government’s theory is that it was a no-show job. Eddie asking if he needed to travel to Springfield, he’s considering doing the job — it was not a no-show offer,” Collins said.
In the end there were several interrelated factors that influenced whether the COLR law passed, Collins said.
For his part, MacArthur focused the prosecution’s argument Friday on the marquee count in the indictment: racketeering conspiracy. Using a slide labeled “The Enterprise,” he said it involved two people, Madigan and McClain, and three entities: the speaker’s office, the 13th Ward Democratic Organization, and Madigan and Getzendanner.
Later, MacArthur showed another slide that placed Madigan at the top of the enterprise, calling him “the person in charge. The person making the decisions.”
MacArthur said Madigan and McClain in the enterprise were “doing a variety of things, some legal and a lot illegal.”
“We’re not saying everything he did was corrupt,” he said. “The legal part of it was knocking on people’s doors, trying to get their vote. The illegal part was taking bribes.”
McArthur said the indictment focused on three goals: increasing Madigan’s power, rewarding allies for loyalty and generating income through illegal activities.
McArthur said it was Madigan’s power over the law that prompted companies like ComEd to hire his allies, many of whom were do-nothing consultants.
“Providing that kind of bounty to his political workers encouraged and rewarded loyalty and it compensated those workers for little or no work,” he said.
McArthur said that during all of this, McClain was acting as Madigan’s self-proclaimed “agent,” keeping him informed on the progress of assignments and doing the dirty work the speaker didn’t want to do himself.
McArthur said Madigan’s testimony earlier this month that he only “sometimes” relied on McClain was misleading. “You know from the evidence that McClain was not a ‘sometimes’ person, he was an ‘always’ person when it came to sensitive tasks, tough calls, ‘bad news’ calls that had to be made,” he said.
MacArthur said the best example of McClain working as Madigan’s agent was the case involving then-state Rep. Lou Lang, where the speaker appointed his confidant to “cushion the boom” by forcing Lang’s resignation amid the threat of sexual harassment allegations becoming public.
MacArthur asked jurors to consider the “extraordinary power” given to McClain by the speaker.
“That shows McClain was not acting independently here, he was not going rogue,” MacArthur said. “It was coordinated. … Madigan had the power, he could do whatever he wanted, and he used McClain to accomplish it.”
MacArthur also asked the jury to consider the “sense of entitlement” Madigan and McClain had when it came to companies like ComEd that acted at their behest.
To illustrate his point, MacArthur played a wiretapped recording between McClain and the speaker’s son, Andrew Madigan, in which McClain complained about a Peoples Gas executive who was complaining about a political appointee.
“They’re on a regulatory body, right?” McClain said, while Andrew Madigan laughed. “And they get offended if people ask for favors. Hello? Stupid sh-s.”
MacArthur said Madigan and McClain’s “sense of entitlement” “pervades this case,” arguing that they view utilities like ComEd as “profit fulfillment centers” that should give them what they want, because they’re required by law in Springfield.
McArthur also played a May 16, 2018, call that he said fully reflects the venture’s activities. It began with Madigan and McClain strategizing on gaming legislation and whether Madigan should “move a brick” on it, which McArthur said was “perfectly legal.”
But then they moved on to ComEd, talking about resistance from the utility to keeping Ochoa on the board of directors and how incoming CEO Joe Dominguez couldn’t be trusted.
Madigan said Gutierrez had requested to meet with him and he thought it might be about Ochoa. “Mike, my recommendation is to go ahead with Ochoa,” Madigan said. “So if the only complaint about Ochoa is that he’s been through bankruptcy twice, so was Harry Truman.”
“I’ve offered to meet with Chris Crane myself,” McClain said, referring to a utility executive. They then moved on to AT&T’s small cell bills and the Chinatown land transfer.
“It’s still going on,” McClain said of Chinatown. McArthur said the call covered all the illegal racketeering operations going on at the time, which he listed on a PowerPoint slide. “One day, one call, and all the topics listed on the screen were covered,” he said.