CHICAGO — A federal jury on Thursday convicted a politically connected Chicago businessman of attempting to pay off two state legislators to pass a bill beneficial to his sweepstakes gaming company and then lying about it to the FBI.
After a weeklong trial, the jury of seven women and five men deliberated for about four hours before finding James T. Weiss, 44, guilty of bribery, wire fraud, mail fraud and lying to the FBI.
Weiss is the son-in-law of former Cook County Democratic boss Joseph Berrios. The most serious charges carry a maximum of 20 years in prison.
Weiss took a sip from a plastic cup as the first guilty verdict was read in court but showed no outward reaction.
Prosecutors alleged Weiss desperately wanted the state’s gambling expansion bill to include language explicitly legalizing sweepstakes machines, but it was left out of the proposal in the 2019 spring session. Weiss then agreed to pay monthly $2,500 bribes to get a deal done, first to state Rep. Luis Arroyo and later to state Sen. Terry Link, who was a chief sponsor of the gambling bill in the Senate, according to prosecutors.
Unbeknownst to both Arroyo and Weiss was that Link, a Vernon Hills Democrat, was cooperating with the FBI. Link, who is hoping for a break on his own federal tax conviction in exchange for his cooperation, testified over two days beginning last week about his undercover role.
Weiss’ attorneys have argued Weiss was paying Arroyo as a legitimate consultant for his business, and that trying to enlist another politician’s help is not a crime.
In her rebuttal argument Thursday, however, Assistant U.S. Attorney Christine O’Neill said “the corruption in this case was blatant and obvious.”
“The defendant tried to buy laws that were favorable to his business,” O’Neill said. “He did this not once, but with two sitting politicians.”
Weiss can try and call the purpose for the payments whatever he wants, but it’s just putting “lipstick on a pig,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean Franzblau told the jury in his argument Wednesday in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Steven Seeger.
“Lobbyist, consultant, dentist, therapist, it doesn’t matter,” Franzblau said. “When you pay a public official money in exchange for an official act, it is a bribe.”
Franzblau said the government didn’t put the bribery scheme in action — Weiss and Arroyo did. “The FBI simply walked up to a corrupt relationship that was already in place and they gave it a little nudge, and another bribery scheme came tumbling out,” he said.
He pointed to a conversation secretly recorded by Link outside a Wendy’s in Highland Park as the key moment where Arroyo laid out the true intent of the payments.
In asking Arroyo, “What’s in it for me,” Link left it open to interpretation, Franzblau said. But instead of advancing some kind of legitimate political agenda, “Arroyo switches immediately into corruption mode,” the prosecutor said.
“He thinks Link is sort of winking at him ... His response is, ‘You can get paid like I am,” Franzblau said.
Franzblau also noted that Weiss had no explanation for why he told the FBI he’d spoken to a purported consultant for Link named Katherine Hunter — a woman who’d been invented by investigators as part of the sting.
When the FBI “came knocking,” Franzblau said, Weiss “told a series of outlandish lies, culminating in a detailed, fictional, and absolutely impossible story that the defendant had spoken to Katherine Hunter, a person who did not exist.”
Attorneys for Weiss, though, said he made a legal effort to wade into the “dirty” politics of Springfield and counteract big-money video gaming competitors who already had the politicians in their pocket.
“This is a dirty place where the rules seem to be gray, where a contribution can be considered a bribe, a bribe a contribution,” defense attorney Ilia Usharovich told the jury in his closing remarks Wednesday. “It is all messed up.”
Usharovich also said Weiss was kept in the dark about the scheme and believed the payments were for legitimate consulting work. “If this was a bribe, it would have been done with a big bag of cash” to keep it off the books, he said.
In rebuttal, O’Neill called the “bag of cash” argument “insulting” to the jury’s intelligence. “I’m sure the defendant is sitting here wishing he did it that way,” she said. “But the judge did not instruct you that the bribe had to be paid with a bag of cash.”
Prosecutors rested their case Wednesday morning after three full days of testimony featuring some 14 witnesses, including Link, who secretly recorded phone calls and meetings with Weiss as well Arroyo, who later pleaded guilty to arranging the bribery scheme.
The trial centered on the largely uncharted world of sweepstakes machines, sometimes called “gray machines,” which allow customers to put in money, receive a coupon to redeem for merchandise online and then play electronic games like slot machines.
Since the machines can be played for free, they are not considered gambling devices. Critics, however, contend the unregulated devices, which operate in cities, including Chicago, that have banned video gambling, are designed to skirt the law.
Arroyo, meanwhile, pleaded guilty to bribery but did not agree to cooperate with prosecutors. Seeger sentenced Arroyo to nearly five years in prison last year, calling him a “corruption superspreader.”
The case is the latest in a string of public corruption trials involving state and local politics lined up at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse, and comes on the heels of the blockbuster “ComEd Four” bribery case involving a scheme to bribe then-House Speaker Michael Madigan, which ended with sweeping guilty verdicts last month.
Later this year, former Chicago Ald. Edward Burke is scheduled to go on trial on racketeering charges, followed in April by Madigan himself, who is also charged with racketeering conspiracy.
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
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