At the Chicago Tribune Jason Meisner, Megan Crepeau, and Ray Long report that the jury in the trial of former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan on corruption charges has reached a partial verdict:
A federal jury Wednesday convicted former House Speaker Michael Madigan, once the most powerful person in Illinois politics, of 10 charges including bribery conspiracy — but jurors deadlocked on several other charges in the wide-ranging indictment, including the marquee racketeering conspiracy count.
The panel also deadlocked on all six counts against Madigan co-defendant Michael McClain.
The split verdict does not avert the possibility of a significant sentence for Madigan. Several of the guilty counts carry a maximum of 20 years in prison, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
Madigan departed the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse just before noon Wednesday, holding hands with his daughters. He walked out into the falling snow toward his attorneys’ offices followed by a horde of news cameras.
The jury was deadlocked on 12 charges, reportedly with two holdouts. Sadly, racketeering was one of the charges on which the jury was deadlocked. The judge declared a mistrial on the 12 counts on which the jury was deadlocked.
Mr. Madigan was also acquitted on some charges:
Madigan was acquitted of two counts related to a purported scheme to get onetime political nemesis Juan Ochoa appointed to the ComEd board, and acquitted of all four counts related to an alleged plan to use his public power to get private law firm business from developers of a West Loop high-rise.
The four-month trial was the culmination of a decade-long corruption investigation that has already felled several of Madigan’s associates – but a guilty verdict for Madigan is easily the most significant victory for federal prosecutors.
The reporters comment on the political fallout:
Regardless of the ultimate verdict, jurors in the Madigan trial saw irrevocable proof of Springfield’s messy overlap of money, special interests, power politics and extraordinarily cozy relationships between lawmakers and lobbyists.
Toppling Madigan from his throne showed the power of federal prosecutors to damage the career of a singular political figure, but a verdict alone ignores the question of whether Pritzker and the Democrats who rule Illinois will take on the less-than-stellar system that consistently puts Illinois public officials in front of a judge.
The Madigan trial has amplified the findings of the Tribune’s “Culture of Corruption” series last year that documented how weak laws on campaign finance, ballot access, lobbying, ethics and oversight, and the byzantine structure of local government have all but encouraged politicians to stretch–and sometimes cross–the lines between what is legal and illegal.
Four of the state’s last 11 governors and nearly 40 Chicago aldermen in the last half century have served time in prison. State lawmakers and local officials from around Illinois also have worn out the paths to prison cells over the decades.
Even now, state Sen. Emil Jones III, the Chicago Democrat whose father once served as Illinois Senate president, has a federal corruption case still pending in Chicago. He has pleaded not guilty.
The father of Emil Jones, III to whom they refer was Emil Jones, Jr., the patron of young Barack Obama. That the corruption cases continue to be filed is significant evidence that the “culture of corruption” in Illinois and, in particular, Chicago politics contains to run things. There is a chain of corruption that leads all the way to the top of the party.
In my opinion a lot more than that is at stake. Mike Madigan chaired the Illinois Democratic Party for all but two years between 1998 and 2021 when he lost the chairmanship as the FBI case began to pick up steam and Illinois is one of the largest reliably “blue” states. More than any other living person the fiscal mess in which Illinois is, largely caused by the state and Chicago governments failing to make payments into the public employee and teacher pension funds while increasing the the size of those pensions and refusing to change the pension system into something the people of Illinois might reasonably be able to pay. IMO it strains credulity to believe that important Democrats in and out of Illinois including JB Pritzker, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, and lots of other Democrats were not aware of Madigan’s corruption. They may or may not have had legal responsibilities to do something about it but they certainly had ethical and moral responsibilities.
The next shoes in this sordid story will drop at sentencing and if the charges on which the jury failed to reach a verdict are refiled. If Michael Madigan at 82 does not wish to spend the rest of his life in prison he potentially has a lot to trade for a light sentence. And a lot at risk if he doesn’t.
I’m pretty sure Madigan was behind a local scandal in which the state legislature passed a law allowing teacher’s union employees to have their time working for the union treated as working for a public school if they (essentially) worked one day as a substitute teacher before the effective date. Two or three union lobbyists exploited the provision, obtaining public pensions worth more than $3 Million for a day’s work. Given the short window, they had inside knowledge that allowed them to qualify in time and even participated in slowing down the legislative process to that end.
In the backroom of Madigan’s House, elected officials and lobbyists were making deals to pay each other at the public expense. The local newspaper assured readers that the amount of money skimmed was not significant in the context of the State’s overwhelming debt. Which was probably true, just as these no-show jobs Madigan got his allies in exchange for political support were drops in the bucket. But outsiders can’t know once the bucket fills how much of it was for crooks and friends getting their beaks wet.